Sounds like our volumes are comparable. And they are older machines. We're currently upgrading to virtualized servers running on newer Sun Opteron/Linux boxes, but the web servers moved first, as they were way, way out of lifecycle (one was 15 years old).
It's a hell of a lot more expensive then free. I have no idea how big this school is, but my school has 6k undergrads, 10k grad+undergrad, and 25k overall (including the medical center). To provide spam filtering for our users, virus scanning, and mail delivery, it requires something on the order of 50 servers -- well over half running open source tools on Solaris boxes, the remaining 30% or so Win2k3/Exchange. Educational e-mail is very high volume: we deliver well over three million messages per month, and spam filter out another 30 million. We do provide IMAP access, but we only provide 100MB of quota space, and our webmail, quite frankly, sucks.
I wish that we had outsourced to someone who knew what they were doing. Even outsourcing to Google would provide us with decent webmail and POP access. The idea here is to move over to Exchange for all of our accounts eventually, which no one objects to -- Exchange supports all the standard protocols for those who don't want to use Microsoft, and Outlook Web Access is a pretty nice web client (even in standard mode in Firefox).
Woah, Comcast is capped at 100GB per month? You sure about that?
A quick look at my logs shows 400GB, 600GB, 800GB, 600GB, and 500GB for the last five months. And nary a letter. I do pay for the 10 meg option, however, so maybe that has something to do with it.
At my school, we have two optional classes that cover this. CS278 is called Software Engineering, and it covers both the classical and object-oriented software engineering process, from requirements elicitation to post-delivery maintenance. The follow-up class, held in the Spring semester, is CS279 - Software Engineering Project. The class divides into teams of 3 or 4, and implements the same project in the same language seperately. This year, that's likely to be a simple transactional program in java. We are provided with a copy of a CASE tool (IBM's Rational Rose, in our case) and we go at it. The teacher wrote a software engineering book and accompanying slides, and he is pretty decent at this: Steven R. Schach and Object Oriented and Classical Software Engineering. This class or classes is/are taken as an optional 3 or 6 hours of advanced CS credit (we require 18 total), and has a prerequisite of Programming Languages or senior standing. I quote from the CS catalog:
CS 278. Principles of Software Engineering. The nature of software. The object-oriented paradigm. Software life-cycle models. Requirements, specification, design, implementation, documentation, and testing of software. Object-oriented analysis and design. Software maintenance. Prerequisite: CS 270 or senior standing in Computer Science or Computer Engineering. FALL. [3]
CS 279. Software Engineering Project. Students work in teams to specify, design, implement, document, and test a nontrivial software project. The use of CASE (Computer-Assisted Software Engineering) tools is stressed. Prerequisite: CS 278. SPRING. [3]
The low-end cards are actually in the -300 series now. Why are manufacturers doing this? ATI had to release their new card as the X1650XT even though it is substantially different from the X1600XT because of this inflation of numbers. When the 9700 came out (as a top-end card), the other two were the 9500 and the 9000. They should go back to that naming and give themselves some headroom (heck, I'd even make the 9500 a 9400).
As a point of comparison, my university leaves everything open, except the common peer-to-peer file trading applications (gnutella, fasttrack, ares). They also rate limit bittorrent to about 10K/s. The rest is fair game. There are packet shapers in place for individual users of enormous (>25GB) amounts of bandwidth, and uploading more then 10GB will get you a kicked off until you call so we can warn you not to do that again.
As I understand it, our policy is generous, but not overly so, and in line with most other top 20 universities.
"Only two LANs mention how big they are. And even if you're right, the size of your LAN gaming infrastructure is only one consideration they look at."
OK, but why wasn't I contacted to even ask a question about our gaming community? The point was they didn't look very hard. If they can't even cover the tier 1 universities (those ranked 1-25) or universities with more then 5000 students, their list is obviously not very accurate.
"Game servers aren't that hard to come by and they don't require anything along the lines of a Athlon 64 to operate efficiently."
Well, gee, if I had known that, we wouldn't have had to spend all that money on our server. We must just be idiots, then. No, actually, modern game servers require quite a bit of server hardware. Running a 64-player, 66-tick Counter-strike Source server requires at minimum a 2.4Ghz dedicated Athlon 64 or 3.6Ghz dedicated Pentium 4. There isn't a processor out there that can run a 64-man, 100-tick server. Even with our 2.6Ghz Athlon 64, we would occasionally get hiccups, and our load averages were constant at around 0.8.
Like I said before, you aren't understanding the scope. A 12- or 24-man server is easy. But a 64-man server consumes 6Mbps of bandwidth and requires a dedicated, top-of-the-line box. No schools I know of are willing to invest those resources.
"Those other schools on the list may not have the university paying for their gaming server but I'll wager they have a leg up in overall connetivity and gaming culture."
I highly doubt they have a leg up on connectivity. We have two OC-12s from Qwest (one to Atlanta and one to Chicago), plus a partial OC-12 for reduandancy and Internet 2 connectivity from AT&T. There isn't a place on this continent that I can't ping under 40ms to. As for gaming culture, I can't compare directly, and we may be behind in that area. But with seven student organizations affilated with game play of some sort, and big LANs with university funding, I imagine we're not too far back.
Fair enough, but looking through the article, only two LANs are mentioned that are bigger. The majority seem to be smaller then our LAN. I've also -never- seen another school officially sponsor (e.g. provide free bandwidth, hosting, and administration) for a dedicated gaming server before. This isn't a 12 man server put up on a left-over box sitting in a closet somewhere. This is a dedicated box, with an Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of RAM, and dual hard disks and power supplies, rack mounted in the same location as the main servers of the university. We're provided a gigabit link one hop from two OC-12 connections with no restrictions on bandwidth.
There are plenty of kids (e.g. people like you) who run servers in their dorm rooms and universities let them get away with it, but it takes a lot more work for official sponsorship and support. Try building a consensus at higher education sometime, if it doesn't take too much out of your getting wasted and partying schedule. You'll then know what I'm talking about.
They obviously didn't try very hard to get their results. I'm president of a Student Organization at Vanderbilt University. We have a gaming culture on campus, including 1 large (120+) person LAN per semester and weekly gaming nights. We're just about to bring a 64-man Counter-strike server on campus that the university is officially sponsoring. But I wasn't even CONTACTED by the people who wrote the article.
DS9 was the best one in the series. It's the only one with continued, integrated plots, and people who could actually exist -- they had flaws, but they were heros anyway. Regular Star Trek only has heros and demons, and heros winning every week makes for pretty boring TV, IMO.
And, of course, neither of you are right. The the number of electors is partially based on population, and partially based on a constant per state (it's the number of Congressmen you have + 2 [the number of Senators you have]). Today, that "+2" means much less then it did when Congress had fewer then 100 Congressmen. As always, Wikipedia is your friend.
The original idea isn't what you expressed, either, by the way. The original design of the electoral college was that the masses were too stupid to understand Federal-level politics. They were to elect a local person, presumably intelligent enough to understand the issues and vote well. It never worked that way in practice, but it's a good theory. Sometimes I wish we could go back to that...
Well, actually, eMusic is the #2 online music store. Granted, it's rocked hard by iTMS, but the fact that it's captured 13% of the market without advertising campaigns, music player integration, or operating at a loss certainly makes an argument that _somebody_ cares about DRM.
eMusic. $0.25 per song (or less!), over a million songs to choose from in many different genres. And what they send you is unencumbered MP3s. No DRM, universal compatibility. Try it out for free by downloading a recent Winamp -- 50 free songs are included. (or sign up for a 14-day, 25 song trial via their website). Support good non-RIAA music!
Note: I have no affiliation with eMusic, other then being a satisfied customer.
Why is it too much? Games sell for $60 now new. They typically offer 15-20 hours of gameplay. Sounds to be the ratio is exactly right. People are saying "Well, I can go get Half-Life 2 for $25"... well, you can NOW. I'm sure in a year, Episode 1 will be $5 or $10. If you don't want to pay new, just wait as you always have. If you wait until Episode 3 is released, I bet you can get a sweet deal on the three of them.
And with that statement, you just justified the entire episodic content business model.
Maybe for Valve, but Valve is trying to change what happens with the INDUSTRY here, not just with their games. You have a few iDs and Valves out there for whom this is true, but you have a thousand times more Rituals for whom it's not so true. I won't be buying Sin Episode 2 if it's not delivered in a timely manner. Remember: video games are a $7 BILLION industry [PDF Alert!]. Valve has multi-million dollar games[1], but they're just a big fish in an enormous pond.
[1] I'm having trouble finding numbers for this, since Valve isn't publically traded, but I did find confirmation of 1.7 million units sold in late 2005. That's well over $30 million even at half the retail price on average, but well shy of the $7 billion mark.
Let me tell you the little story of the K6-2 that could: It was a dark a stormy night in 1999, and a new computer was being wraught forth in the dark dungeon which, by day, served a bedroom for a young kid who liked to play with hardware. Upon flipping the switch, the entire world sprung to life with colors! One power supply supply later, the creation was complete, and served admirably under brutal working conditions for the next several years.
Upon being handed down to the previous generation of users, the computer developed a terrible flaw: The CPU fan that had been cooling the device all these years lay fallow at the bottom of the case. In those days, heatsinks weren't standard equipment, so the little K6-2 that could lay naked for the world to see. Yet, it continued to run with full stability until 2 years later the kindly transformed master who had once brought it to life found it's condition and nurtured it back to health.
Any processor that can put up with that sort of abuse deserves no less then your respect, sir. And it will have it!
Except the highest corporate profits of any company EVER was Exxon's profits last year, totaling $44 BILLION (on $332 billion in revenues)[1]. That's not revenues, that's PROFITS. I think they're doing well enough in the oil business, thankyaverymuch.
Had you read my comment, you saw that that is exactly what I said I'd do. Let me put it in quotes so you can comprehend: "What her decision would force me to do is become an absentee student from her class."
Perhaps you should've gone to a few more English classes, hmm?
The profession in question is most likely completely uninteresting, and teaching a boring subject in a boring way. This tends to prompt students to do other stuff. What her decision would force me to do is become an absentee student from her class. I'm paying the college for my education. I go to lecture for clarification of the parts of the subject material I don't understand. During the rest (~80%) of the time, I make myself available for my employees to ask me questions, read on subject material that isn't assigned in class and is interesting to me, or monitor websites that I'm responsible for (case-in-point: school elections for Student Government runs through my software).
The teacher has no right to ban me from an activity that isn't distracting to other students. When they start paying me to come to their school, I'll follow their rules. Until then, I'll bring all the cell phones, laptops, newspapers, journals, and PDAs I want to class.
Google didn't contest the information they were required to hand over. It was a random sampling of 50,000 webpages from their database of billions, not tied to any particular search term. That's the reason the judge had no problem in letting the government have it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I forgot to mention, that number includes three datacenters, any one of which can (theoretically) handle the entire load. I have my doubts, but...
Sounds like our volumes are comparable. And they are older machines. We're currently upgrading to virtualized servers running on newer Sun Opteron/Linux boxes, but the web servers moved first, as they were way, way out of lifecycle (one was 15 years old).
It's a hell of a lot more expensive then free. I have no idea how big this school is, but my school has 6k undergrads, 10k grad+undergrad, and 25k overall (including the medical center). To provide spam filtering for our users, virus scanning, and mail delivery, it requires something on the order of 50 servers -- well over half running open source tools on Solaris boxes, the remaining 30% or so Win2k3/Exchange. Educational e-mail is very high volume: we deliver well over three million messages per month, and spam filter out another 30 million. We do provide IMAP access, but we only provide 100MB of quota space, and our webmail, quite frankly, sucks.
I wish that we had outsourced to someone who knew what they were doing. Even outsourcing to Google would provide us with decent webmail and POP access. The idea here is to move over to Exchange for all of our accounts eventually, which no one objects to -- Exchange supports all the standard protocols for those who don't want to use Microsoft, and Outlook Web Access is a pretty nice web client (even in standard mode in Firefox).
Woah, Comcast is capped at 100GB per month? You sure about that?
A quick look at my logs shows 400GB, 600GB, 800GB, 600GB, and 500GB for the last five months. And nary a letter. I do pay for the 10 meg option, however, so maybe that has something to do with it.
The low-end cards are actually in the -300 series now. Why are manufacturers doing this? ATI had to release their new card as the X1650XT even though it is substantially different from the X1600XT because of this inflation of numbers. When the 9700 came out (as a top-end card), the other two were the 9500 and the 9000. They should go back to that naming and give themselves some headroom (heck, I'd even make the 9500 a 9400).
As a point of comparison, my university leaves everything open, except the common peer-to-peer file trading applications (gnutella, fasttrack, ares). They also rate limit bittorrent to about 10K/s. The rest is fair game. There are packet shapers in place for individual users of enormous (>25GB) amounts of bandwidth, and uploading more then 10GB will get you a kicked off until you call so we can warn you not to do that again.
As I understand it, our policy is generous, but not overly so, and in line with most other top 20 universities.
and, of course, my linking skills suck. Here is the actual link
Maxtor was recently purchased by Seagate, just FYI.
10 episodes of BSG Season 1 aired in the UK before the first episode aired here.
"Only two LANs mention how big they are. And even if you're right, the size of your LAN gaming infrastructure is only one consideration they look at."
OK, but why wasn't I contacted to even ask a question about our gaming community? The point was they didn't look very hard. If they can't even cover the tier 1 universities (those ranked 1-25) or universities with more then 5000 students, their list is obviously not very accurate.
"Game servers aren't that hard to come by and they don't require anything along the lines of a Athlon 64 to operate efficiently."
Well, gee, if I had known that, we wouldn't have had to spend all that money on our server. We must just be idiots, then. No, actually, modern game servers require quite a bit of server hardware. Running a 64-player, 66-tick Counter-strike Source server requires at minimum a 2.4Ghz dedicated Athlon 64 or 3.6Ghz dedicated Pentium 4. There isn't a processor out there that can run a 64-man, 100-tick server. Even with our 2.6Ghz Athlon 64, we would occasionally get hiccups, and our load averages were constant at around 0.8.
Like I said before, you aren't understanding the scope. A 12- or 24-man server is easy. But a 64-man server consumes 6Mbps of bandwidth and requires a dedicated, top-of-the-line box. No schools I know of are willing to invest those resources.
"Those other schools on the list may not have the university paying for their gaming server but I'll wager they have a leg up in overall connetivity and gaming culture."
I highly doubt they have a leg up on connectivity. We have two OC-12s from Qwest (one to Atlanta and one to Chicago), plus a partial OC-12 for reduandancy and Internet 2 connectivity from AT&T. There isn't a place on this continent that I can't ping under 40ms to. As for gaming culture, I can't compare directly, and we may be behind in that area. But with seven student organizations affilated with game play of some sort, and big LANs with university funding, I imagine we're not too far back.
Fair enough, but looking through the article, only two LANs are mentioned that are bigger. The majority seem to be smaller then our LAN. I've also -never- seen another school officially sponsor (e.g. provide free bandwidth, hosting, and administration) for a dedicated gaming server before. This isn't a 12 man server put up on a left-over box sitting in a closet somewhere. This is a dedicated box, with an Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of RAM, and dual hard disks and power supplies, rack mounted in the same location as the main servers of the university. We're provided a gigabit link one hop from two OC-12 connections with no restrictions on bandwidth.
There are plenty of kids (e.g. people like you) who run servers in their dorm rooms and universities let them get away with it, but it takes a lot more work for official sponsorship and support. Try building a consensus at higher education sometime, if it doesn't take too much out of your getting wasted and partying schedule. You'll then know what I'm talking about.
They obviously didn't try very hard to get their results. I'm president of a Student Organization at Vanderbilt University. We have a gaming culture on campus, including 1 large (120+) person LAN per semester and weekly gaming nights. We're just about to bring a 64-man Counter-strike server on campus that the university is officially sponsoring. But I wasn't even CONTACTED by the people who wrote the article.
DS9 was the best one in the series. It's the only one with continued, integrated plots, and people who could actually exist -- they had flaws, but they were heros anyway. Regular Star Trek only has heros and demons, and heros winning every week makes for pretty boring TV, IMO.
And, of course, neither of you are right. The the number of electors is partially based on population, and partially based on a constant per state (it's the number of Congressmen you have + 2 [the number of Senators you have]). Today, that "+2" means much less then it did when Congress had fewer then 100 Congressmen. As always, Wikipedia is your friend.
The original idea isn't what you expressed, either, by the way. The original design of the electoral college was that the masses were too stupid to understand Federal-level politics. They were to elect a local person, presumably intelligent enough to understand the issues and vote well. It never worked that way in practice, but it's a good theory. Sometimes I wish we could go back to that...
Worth almost 1.5 USD for very small values of 1.5.
Well, actually, eMusic is the #2 online music store. Granted, it's rocked hard by iTMS, but the fact that it's captured 13% of the market without advertising campaigns, music player integration, or operating at a loss certainly makes an argument that _somebody_ cares about DRM.
eMusic. $0.25 per song (or less!), over a million songs to choose from in many different genres. And what they send you is unencumbered MP3s. No DRM, universal compatibility. Try it out for free by downloading a recent Winamp -- 50 free songs are included. (or sign up for a 14-day, 25 song trial via their website). Support good non-RIAA music!
Note: I have no affiliation with eMusic, other then being a satisfied customer.
Why is it too much? Games sell for $60 now new. They typically offer 15-20 hours of gameplay. Sounds to be the ratio is exactly right. People are saying "Well, I can go get Half-Life 2 for $25"... well, you can NOW. I'm sure in a year, Episode 1 will be $5 or $10. If you don't want to pay new, just wait as you always have. If you wait until Episode 3 is released, I bet you can get a sweet deal on the three of them.
Maybe for Valve, but Valve is trying to change what happens with the INDUSTRY here, not just with their games. You have a few iDs and Valves out there for whom this is true, but you have a thousand times more Rituals for whom it's not so true. I won't be buying Sin Episode 2 if it's not delivered in a timely manner. Remember: video games are a $7 BILLION industry [PDF Alert!]. Valve has multi-million dollar games[1], but they're just a big fish in an enormous pond.
[1] I'm having trouble finding numbers for this, since Valve isn't publically traded, but I did find confirmation of 1.7 million units sold in late 2005. That's well over $30 million even at half the retail price on average, but well shy of the $7 billion mark.
What?! K6-2, evil! NEVAR!
Let me tell you the little story of the K6-2 that could: It was a dark a stormy night in 1999, and a new computer was being wraught forth in the dark dungeon which, by day, served a bedroom for a young kid who liked to play with hardware. Upon flipping the switch, the entire world sprung to life with colors! One power supply supply later, the creation was complete, and served admirably under brutal working conditions for the next several years.
Upon being handed down to the previous generation of users, the computer developed a terrible flaw: The CPU fan that had been cooling the device all these years lay fallow at the bottom of the case. In those days, heatsinks weren't standard equipment, so the little K6-2 that could lay naked for the world to see. Yet, it continued to run with full stability until 2 years later the kindly transformed master who had once brought it to life found it's condition and nurtured it back to health.
Any processor that can put up with that sort of abuse deserves no less then your respect, sir. And it will have it!
Except the highest corporate profits of any company EVER was Exxon's profits last year, totaling $44 BILLION (on $332 billion in revenues)[1]. That's not revenues, that's PROFITS. I think they're doing well enough in the oil business, thankyaverymuch.
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=XOM
Had you read my comment, you saw that that is exactly what I said I'd do. Let me put it in quotes so you can comprehend: "What her decision would force me to do is become an absentee student from her class."
Perhaps you should've gone to a few more English classes, hmm?
The profession in question is most likely completely uninteresting, and teaching a boring subject in a boring way. This tends to prompt students to do other stuff. What her decision would force me to do is become an absentee student from her class. I'm paying the college for my education. I go to lecture for clarification of the parts of the subject material I don't understand. During the rest (~80%) of the time, I make myself available for my employees to ask me questions, read on subject material that isn't assigned in class and is interesting to me, or monitor websites that I'm responsible for (case-in-point: school elections for Student Government runs through my software).
The teacher has no right to ban me from an activity that isn't distracting to other students. When they start paying me to come to their school, I'll follow their rules. Until then, I'll bring all the cell phones, laptops, newspapers, journals, and PDAs I want to class.
Google didn't contest the information they were required to hand over. It was a random sampling of 50,000 webpages from their database of billions, not tied to any particular search term. That's the reason the judge had no problem in letting the government have it.