That would be exceptionally dumb. It's already blown up once and you've spent a ton of time fixing it by installing new drivers (and re-activating, probably).... so by copying an image back you'll just do it AGAIN. And God only knows what kind of registry damage you'll be doing. The machine might never really run right again, at least until it has a fresh OS install.
Instead, restore the original networked image and just copy the newer, changed files over from the loaner. You still have go through the reconfiguration pain, but only once, and there's no lasting damage to the original running image.
You just end up in money-laundering schemes. In WoW, for instance, there's the auction house. If I want to buy a bunch of gold, I list an item for an unusually high amount of money, and they buy it. If someone else buys it first, then I really made out! I just list another item at the same stupidly high price.
Any time you try to automate this kind of detection, people will find their way around it, and you will punish innocent people by trying to catch the guilty ones. Remember, the Chinese are just as smart as we are, and they have a great deal of cheap time to invest in thinking about how to beat any system we come up with.
The REAL problem is real-life income disparities, and that problem will probably never go away.
The only way to stop people buying commodities is to ensure they have no value. In other words, to prevent people from trading them, they have to be useless. If they're useless, why are they in the game at all?
When there are such enormous disparities in income in the real world, and all characters can generate resources at about the same rate, the 'cheap' people will sell things to the 'expensive' people. That is just how things work.
Ultimately, it's not about commodities. Instead, it's about time. All of the MMORPGs are designed to be time sinks. That is, you spend a lot of time doing things that are 'less fun' (in theory at least) to gain the ability to do things that are 'more fun'. So people buy their way out of the 'less fun' time using real money.
The only way the Chinese people will not be able to find a way to sell their cheap time is if the game experience and items have no value. If time you have previously invested has no real bearing on time you spend later, there's nothing to trade for.
As long as the games continue to be designed as time sinks, then some method of selling the cheap Chinese time will be present. Even if you can't trade items, they could trade time helping you level up your characters. The only way to avoid it is to remove all value from time invested. Given the current design of MMORPGS, that means to make the game no fun.
Personally, I'll take a game that's fun and has gold farmers.
There's a game you should check out, called Trespasser. If you spent an hour throwing bottles at a lady in a train station.... this is your DREAM GAME, man!
Well, if I'm an astroturfer, I think I wasted a bit too much time establishing my credentials. This will be my 646th counted post, and I was here before they started archiving (and counting) stuff.:-) Heck, I remember when they started the newfangled User IDs, and didn't bother signing up for one for months. Stupid me.:-)
I don't think Introversion is exactly swimming in money to hire turfers anyway, they got stiffed badly by their old distributor. If this were Sony, and I was pushing Katamari Damacy as God's Own Game, it'd be a lot more likely.:-)
Anyway, (to Rest Of World) take this from a grizzled and veteran gamer... Darwinia is unique, and you should definitely try the demo if you have access to a Windows machine. Like Uplink, its predecessor, it is almost completely original and extremely creative, unlike anything else I've seen.
As Ford notes, however, it does not run on the Protologic 68000. I don't think it will run on the Tandy Color Computer, the PCJr, or the Amiga either, and no Vectrex cart is planned.
You know, mentioning the Amiga.... Darwinia has the crazy, whacked out feel of many of the games of that era, the intense creativity. If anyone out there but me actually remembers MindWalker... in a way it's kind of reminiscent. Compared to Mindwalker, it suffers from something of a coherent plot and far fewer psychedelic colors, but... you may see the vague resemblance. Not the spiritual successor, but perhaps the spiritual third cousin, twice removed.
[astroturf]Oh, and by the way, Katamari Damacy is also really cool, very cheap, and nearly as unique as Darwinia. No demo, sorry, you'll just have to run out and buy one. It's only $20, you can afford it!:-) [/astroturf]
Introversion, the folks that made Uplink, have just started shipping Darwinia. It seems really good so far. It's really hard to describe... it's one of the strangest games I've ever seen, but is really interesting.
You're in a 3-d world that has been overrun by viruses, and your goal seems to be to defeat the viruses and make the virtual world safe for Darwinians, which are little 2-d sprite thingies that move around in the 3-d world. The Darwinians are actually somewhat useful, in that they can operate machinery for you. They may be able to do more but I haven't gotten that far with it yet. (only got the game yesterday).
The whole metaphor of the game is that you are logged in and running programs and interacting with the world, and at first you can't run very many programs, and the programs you CAN run aren't terribly interesting.... so far I have Squad, which makes a troop of little soldiers you can blast the bad guys with, Engineer, which makes little guys that can activate buildings and collect the souls of dead things to spawn new Darwinians, and Officer, which converts a normal Darwinian into one you can control and use to give orders to the mobs of Darwinians that stand around the spawn machine. I don't know how many program types there will eventually be.
The graphic look reminds me a bit of that 3D Sentinel game from a few years ago. Monsters are fairly varied... so far I've seen (and fought) little crawly virus things, spiders, centipedes, floating egg laying thingies, and monster-spawning flowers.
It's very different, and very weird, and very fun, at least so far. These are the guys who made Uplink, which was fantastic, so it's likely to be good. You can get a demo at www.introversion.co.uk.
There's a Linux version in the works, but at the moment it's Windows-only. And if you haven't played Uplink, check out the demo for that too. It's really good, and has a Linux version.
They will make the decision based on what's best for Microsoft. I don't think the customer has mattered to Microsoft much since about Windows 95. In fact, 10 years later, I'd argue that customer welfare is near the bottom of their priority list.
Offhand, I can't think of a single move they've made in the last 10 years that really and truly had customers in mind. Being in a monopoly position, their mindset has shifted away from 'what services can we offer in exchange for money' to 'how many feathers can we pluck from the goose with the minimum amount of squawking'.
They've always been nasty, hardball competitors, but at one time they shipped some pretty kickass software, too. Word for Windows was particularly good. Even that horrible flop, Bob, was at least well-intended. But now that they are in a position of real power... if you'll notice, they never, ever ship anything that's really disruptive of or threatening to their main monopoly.
Most likely, their internal studies will be focused around how much money they can make and how much customer lock-in they can manage. Will giving it away free give them enough power to be worth losing the cash from selling it? Should they sell it at a low price, to generate some cash but get it into fairly widespread circulation? Should they sell it at a high price to corporations, to gather lots of cash but gain little leverage over filesystem standards? Should they bundle it only into Longhorn to help 'encourage' upgrades? You can rest assured, thoughts like "Is this technology something that every Microsoft customer should be able to use?" will never even occur to them.
Whatever their actual thought process ends up being, actual customer welfare will not enter into it.
Personally, I disliked DE2, but I thought Thief 3 was excellent. The cramped level design was all wrong for DE, but it really worked in Thief. When it may take you several minutes to cross one room, small levels aren't that big a deal. The atmosphere and tension were excellent. Yes, it would have been cool if the game supported the PC way of thinking more than the console way, but T3 worked well in that context anyway. It was a worthy conclusion to Garrett's story.
I agree with you, though, that DE2 was a disaster. What a horrid mess that was.
Then they need a longer release-candidate cycle. What they REALLY need is a big bank of machines on which they can run automated test cycles. I would happily contribute both money and hardware to such a cause. Linux is complex enough that it needs QA now. I don't mind testing when I know it's testing. I resent very much being FORCED to test.
Once a kernel line is declared stable, it should be STABLE... you stop screwing with it! You fix the problems, perhaps backport support for new hardware, and mostly leave it alone. 2.4 still isn't all that robust on some hardware even now. Shoveling new features into 2.6 every 30 days is pretty much a guarantee that it's NEVER going to be really stable.
Yes, it's a lot of work maintaining the two trees. No, it's not a lot of fun. But the alternative is inflicting exponentially greater amounts of pain on the rest of the world. At the moment, the most current stable tree in Linux IS NOT STABLE.
How much more damning an indictment of an operating system could one possibly make?
Debian Stable is, indeed, very stable. It is also very difficult to use in real life, because virtually anything that's non-Debian-provided won't work on such old versions of libraries, and many developers simply refuse to work on such old versions of software. Every time I have tried to stick with Debian Stable, that decision has been overruled by management because the developers hate it.
All I'm fundamentally asking for is this: I want security fixes to Linux WITHOUT NEW FEATURES. I don't have time to study the new features with every kernel rev. I need drop-in-and-forget kernels. But I often don't trust the distributions to do it either, they're constantly adding all sorts of crap I don't want or need in my kernels.
Running a fairly secure Linux box means, among many other things, disabling all modules, but there are no vendor-supplied kernels I know of that don't use modules. If you want a monolithic kernel, you have to compile it yourself. And for that reason, I have tracked the 'stable' tree for years. And I am FURIOUS that the stable tree is no longer stable, that I'm getting new features with my security patches, like it or not. If I want new features with my service packs, why not run friggin' Windows again? Someone MAY backport the bug fixes, but then again, they may not. They're sure gonna have a damn hard time of it when Linus is silently fixing security problems WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE.
2.4 did add small things... new device drivers, that sort of thing. But they weren't doing the huge monkeying around with things that they continue to do with 2.6. They only put bugfixes in the core: the only things added were ancillary, optional, and easy to turn off. (well, since about 2.4.11, when Linus finally got sane and went off to 2.5)
2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete disaster from a security and administration viewpoint. Silent, unannounced security fixes to the kernel, new features rolled out constantly in a 'stable' series, instability on even small servers. (see my post above for how 2.6 sort of cost me $800.) One kernel dev said that it is acceptable for 1 kernel out of 3 in the 'stable' series to actually be stable!! This is not how to run a railroad.
People are saying 'you should be using 2.4', but 2.6 is STABLE, remember? I should be able to use it freely. People telling me not to use 2.6 yet are PROVING THE POINT, that it's NOT STABLE. I don't think it's going to get there until they stop adding features and branch off to 2.7.
Yes, I did. Just last week, actually. I'm running Debian Unstable on my home server, with kernel 2.6.8-2-k7. I'm using very high quality components on this machine, albeit older now...Athlon XP 1900+, ASUS motherboard, ICP Vortex SCSI RAID controller, 3Ware IDE controller, PC Power and Cooling power supply, good ventilation everywhere.
I upgraded to 2.6 awhile ago when I was experimenting with Xen. (which, btw, is very promising, but needs too much work still.) I gave up on Xen, but 2.6 seemed okay on my workload here at home, so I left it.
About two weeks ago, I started noticing error messages on my IDE RAID... sde was coming back with errors. (it's sd instead of hd because it's on the 3ware controller in JBOD mode). Those drives haven't been beaten to death or anything, but they're a couple years old, so one failing was hardly unthinkable. The RAID was still up, but I didn't trust it.
I'd been thinking about more space anyway, so I decided to upgrade, rather than just replace the failing drive. I went out and bought five new, larger drives. Transferred all my data off, yanked the old drives, replaced, rebuilt... the usual drill. Started all my data copying back in and went to bed. When I got up and checked status, one of the new drives -- sde -- had failed.
Hmmm..... I knew it wasn't likely to be the drive. I didn't think it was likely to be the cable, as it had been fine for two years. Thought it might be the controller, but then I really started wondering about a message I'd been ignoring for awhile, APIC errors. Specifically, I was getting: "APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)". I had previously looked those up when I first saw them, and at the time there was no consensus... it didn't seem like anyone had any clue what the heck they were or meant, or if they were even a problem. I looked them up again, and there's STILL no consensus as of a couple of weeks ago, but (02) errors seemed to be related to server crashes.
On the off chance, I disabled APIC and ACPI, rebooted, and hot-added sde back into the array. It has been perfectly fine ever since.
So, yes, I'd say I've seen some instability. In a way, you could argue that it cost me about $800 in drives, since I probably wouldn't have done the upgrade if not for the bogus errors. I came fairly close to losing a great deal of data... I assume that it was only a matter of time until another drive failed because of the APIC bug. Obviously, I had backups, but data loss is BAD anyway.
And this is on a light-duty, massively overbuilt, home machine. On a real, medium-duty machine, like an office fileserver, that bug would probably have been forced to the surface faster. Presumably, the chances of a second drive failing would also have been much higher. It cost me "only" $800, but could have cost a business many, many thousands in downtime and, probably, unecessary hardware replacements.
So, no, I don't think too much of the 2.6 kernel. It broke on my little toy server. Why on earth would I trust it with stuff that *really* mattered?
In my book, instability is unplanned downtime. If you know you're going to have to reboot your servers when you patch them, you can schedule around it -- it becomes planned downtime.
Admittedly, NO downtime is best, but with the kernel patches flying thick and fast of late, well-maintained Linux boxes probably aren't showing the best uptimes either, just now.
As I have said in other posts I'm too lazy to go dig up, that means that there's no more One True Linux. The one in the center needs to be extremely robust, as bug-free as possible. Then the distros can take that core and expand on it.
Otherwise, you end up with multiple separate kernel maintainers fixing the same bugs in slightly incompatible ways. You end up with no more central point, no more One True Linux that everyone can test against.
In other words, Linus is essentially waving his hand in the air, decreeing that other people will have to make it actually work.
In my experience, expecting other people to just magically do things is not a good way to be sure they're actually going to happen.
I've only ever had one comment modded down as Flamebait.... this may be #2.
As near as I can tell from reading recent comments on this particular decision, the single biggest reason they don't want to do 2.7 is because not enough people will test it. Only by calling it 'stable' can they get enough testers. Of course, the fact that it will now never really BE stable, seems to have been lost on them.
This is better than what they have been doing, but only slightly. What Linus seems to really want is for everyone in the whole world to be using the very most recent kernel. He wants, in essence, everyone in the world to be beta testers. By putting out new code and calling it 'stable', he gets hundreds of thousands of testers, and is able to shake out bugs much faster.
Apparently, the possibility that it might be banks and hospitals that are discovering these bugs didn't occur to them. Discovering a bug is an EXTREMELY PAINFUL PROCESS for someone who isn't expecting one. So instead of doing the nasty hard work of maintaining separate stable and development branches, they push that pain onto everyone else in the world.
Personally, I want software that works more than I want the latest whizbang feature. That's why I got onto Linux in the first place, a decade ago... I was frustrated with Windows. It was such a delight to run software that never, ever crashed. It was crude, it was simple, but it was *incredibly* reliable, and that more than any other single thing is why I switched.
I find it quite ironic that Windows 2003, in the hands of capable admins, with all its design flaws and warts, is substantially more stable than is Linux. There's a reason Ars Technica switched from Linux to Windows, and stayed there. If anyone on the planet is competent, it's those guys. And from the sound of it, they're very happy with the results.
At this point, I'm so disgusted with this state of affairs that I'm running a test installation of FreeBSD. Their development cycle is much saner. They don't have as many features, but the ones they DO have, seem to work. Maybe they should add a new motto: "Software by Adults, for Folks Who Could Lose Their Job if it Breaks".
I do NOT understnnd why he won't just fork off 2.7. 2.6 is unstable and untrustworthy, and it's not going to GET stable until they STOP SCREWING WITH IT.
Linux 2.4, the last stable kernel, has had 29 versions as of this post. Admittedly, the chaos of the first 10 or 11 releases were from exactly the same kind of stupidity we're seeing now, development continuing in the 'stable' branch.
Since 2.4.11, there have been EIGHTEEN PATCHES to get 2.4 to the relative stability it's at now, and even so, it's still not as good as 2.2 on a lot of hardware. A single release is NOT ENOUGH to get things stable. 2.4 is still not that robust, on many configurations, after eighteen patches. There's no way that one patch is gonna do it.
Linux, PLEASE go play in 2.7 and let everyone else get 2.6 stable. It's not trustworthy now, and I will not use 2.6 kernels in any kind of serious production environment because of it. A single release is NOT going to be stable. If you freeze it right this second and branch off to 2.7, the kernel should actually be fairly stable by 2.6.25. With all the extra code in the 2.6 tree, it wouldn't surprise me if it got to 2.6.60 before it was really and truly 'finished'.
Claiming that 'distributions will make it stable' is basically waving your hand in the air and hoping that other people will fix it, while you madly add new problems by dumping untested code into the 'stable' tree.
It's not working, and it's not ever going to work. The longer you keep trying to call a development branch 'stable', the more damage you do to Linux.
To put as nice a face on this as I can.... you, sir, are an idiot.
Of COURSE the losslessly compressed files are different on disk... they take half as much space! When you uncompress them, you get back exactly what you started with. That's why it's lossless compression. Bits are bits are bits... as long as the bits that go to the DAC are the same, how they're stored doesn't really matter.
THERE IS NOTHING LOST WITH LOSSLESS COMPRESSION. That's why it is 'lossless' compression. The files just take less space. You route the compressed bits through an uncompression program and you get a bit-for-bit identical copy to what you started with.
And I love your 'don't give me the math' line. "Don't confuse me with facts!"
If XP works the same way 2000 did, when you upgrade to a dual-core from a single-core, you will have to reinstall the OS for the second core to be activated.
2000 had two entirely separate sets of system files, one each for uni- and multi-processor. Even if you added a second CPU, if you didn't have the multiproc HAL to begin with, it simply wouldn't work.
Because XP is just 2000 with a facelift, I suspect this won't have changed. You are correct that if your initial install was on a P4, which 'looks like' two physical processors, XP would have installed its multi-cpu core.
If, however, you are installing a dual-core Athlon in, chances are quite high that you didn't do your initial install on a P4. So you won't have the multiproc system files, and you'll probably have to reinstall to get the second proc going. (A 'repair' installation may be adequate, and would be much less painful.)
Linux works somewhat similarly, but fortunately you can replace just the kernel, rather than the entire OS.
When I last used Arcserve, it was the biggest pile of crap ever. I struggled with that software for MONTHS, talking with them every few weeks, until I finally found out the problem was poorly designed software.
We had a rather odd setup(which I inherited), in which we had a network of about 30 (later 50, and then 70) development workstations, all of which were backed up . It was roughly similar to backing up 30 separate servers, though of course the individual data stores weren't that large. But it was a great number of small files.
Problem was, Arcserve at the time didn't support that many files, but this was not documented ANYWHERE. I don't remember the exact limit, but when you exceeded X files (32,000, possibly? it was surprisingly low), the namespace got corrupted. The files were copied out to data stores, but the database that tracked where the files WERE, was hopelessly corrupted. Over and over and over I dodged bullets, manually restoring whole tapes to spare servers and hunting for the files I needed to restore. I struggled and struggled, and called Arcserve and called Arcserve, until FINALLY they admitted to me (after MONTHS) that I was trying to do something the software wasn't capable of doing. It simply couldn't handle the number of files I was trying to save, and this WAS NOT DOCUMENTED and they DID NOT TELL ME THIS until after probably twenty phone calls.
We ended up spending a lot of money on Legato Networker, which was quite good in comparison. At the time (this was about 4 years ago), the Windows client had a nasty habit of locking up when it encountered specific files in the Internet Explorer cache directory. So I still had to watch the system very closely, because inevitably 1 or 2 machines each night wouldn't backup. I'd have to visit those machines, restart the Networker service, and purge the IE cache. That always fixed it, but I don't think I ever once got a perfect backup of every machine on the network at the same time.
Upshot: this is very old experience, but I really doubt that the fundamental nature of the people selling Arcserve has changed. They stonewalled me and put me through hell for months because their product was inadequate. I don't think I'd take solid gold bars from CA if they gave them to me for free.
You know, a thought occurred to me the other day. Remember that huge explosion in NK last year? Some sources have claimed that it was a failed assassination attempt. Since that time, as far as I know, we haven't seen ANYTHING of KJI. There have been multiple signs of his hold on power weakening, like portraits being taken down for awhile. Further, his 'appearances' have been video-only, wearing clothes that are at least two years old.
So what if he's dead, killed in that explosion, and they've been covering it up? NK is exactly the kind of place to try to do something like that.
Once you had that kind of restart working well enough to not corrupt your filesystems, (very hard!!, I would think the OS would become more resistant to things like partial memory failures. In theory, atleast, the OS might be able to detect that parts of the RAM were bad, and be able to restart services that had been loaded in the bad segments. Of course, if the kernel itself was loaded into bad RAM, you'd still be screwed. A memory failure in user space, however, should be a correctable problem.
Ideally, of course, you want working hardware, but it would be cool if the freeware OSes were resilient enough to handle at least some hardware failures.
Oh, I definitely never intended to imply that the HURD is stupid, not at all.
I was speaking specifcally about stopping development on the current Linux and starting over, which I think would be very dumb. Usually, rewriting a big software project from the ground up kills it. Mozilla, for instance, ceased to be a viable commercial force because of its rewrite; Microsoft ate it alive. Firefox is doing pretty well now, but no commercial entity could have made that mistake and survived, if selling browsers was its major source of revenue.
There's a huge amount of embecded knowledge on how PC hardware works buried in the Linux code, and rewriting that whole thing from scratch would be a gargantuan project. They've been working on it for, what, 11 years now? A total rewrite would take at least 3 or 4, during which all forward progress would stop. Just not a very good idea.
But I think it's great that the HURD is finally moving, at least a little bit. I will admit, I was a bit shocked that after roughly 15 years, they're just now able to load a program. But, hey, it's not like I needed it done last week or anything.:-) And they are, from what I can see, treading very new ground, and that's always slow.
Reiterating: the more OSes, the better. I just don't think they should start over on Linux itself.
If the system is able to stay up without further drive access, that could potentially allow you to copy data still in RAM. If the OS simply instantly failed when the HD controller went, then any data in RAM would absolutely be lost.
Software failure is more common than hardware. In many cases, drivers can be restarted. Your specific example is probably the toughest one I can think of offhand... you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD:)). But most drivers wouldn't be that hard to restart... video and network are two very good examples. I have seen many 2.4 kernel crashes from what appeared to be network-driver failures. Presumably, a microkernel might have survived whatever the problem was.
You also, of course, have the advantage of each driver/process running in its own address apace, which would probably make very complex code, like the 2.6 Linux kernel, more manageable.
Just as an offhand observation, I kind of wonder if the 2.6 Linux kernel isn't approaching the level of diminishing returns... it's gotten so complex that it's getting pretty tough to cleanly improve without blowing a lot of stuff up. A microkernel design would probably have made maintenance easier, and *probably* would have given us more stable systems now.
But they didn't go that way, and restarting Linux kernel development would be pretty stupid, IMO.:-)
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
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Top 10 Apple Flops
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Um, putting a declarative statement in bold print is about as strong an assertion of fact, in a short space, as one can make online. Particularly with an italicized "I swear to God!' right above it. (yes, I realize only God was italic, but that makes it a stronger assertion, not a weaker one.)
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple used II in their documentation, they weren't yet the branding and control freaks that they became in later years. I didn't even think about the docs, I was just looking at the ROMs (via emulator) and the logos.
The goooooogle on the bottom isn't a logo, it's a cutesy navigation tool. The logo is up top, and it's usually just Google, although of course they have fun with that on holidays.
You may not like the use of Apple ][, but it is correct. I strongly suspect that you're not going to find ANY cases in the real world of using the product's actual logo to refer to the product as being demonstrably 'wrong'. Basically, you're trying to support a completely unsupportable assertion. You should just give up, admit defeat, and pay more attention next time around.:)
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That would be exceptionally dumb. It's already blown up once and you've spent a ton of time fixing it by installing new drivers (and re-activating, probably).... so by copying an image back you'll just do it AGAIN. And God only knows what kind of registry damage you'll be doing. The machine might never really run right again, at least until it has a fresh OS install.
Instead, restore the original networked image and just copy the newer, changed files over from the loaner. You still have go through the reconfiguration pain, but only once, and there's no lasting damage to the original running image.
You just end up in money-laundering schemes. In WoW, for instance, there's the auction house. If I want to buy a bunch of gold, I list an item for an unusually high amount of money, and they buy it. If someone else buys it first, then I really made out! I just list another item at the same stupidly high price.
Any time you try to automate this kind of detection, people will find their way around it, and you will punish innocent people by trying to catch the guilty ones. Remember, the Chinese are just as smart as we are, and they have a great deal of cheap time to invest in thinking about how to beat any system we come up with.
The REAL problem is real-life income disparities, and that problem will probably never go away.
The only way to stop people buying commodities is to ensure they have no value. In other words, to prevent people from trading them, they have to be useless. If they're useless, why are they in the game at all?
When there are such enormous disparities in income in the real world, and all characters can generate resources at about the same rate, the 'cheap' people will sell things to the 'expensive' people. That is just how things work.
Ultimately, it's not about commodities. Instead, it's about time. All of the MMORPGs are designed to be time sinks. That is, you spend a lot of time doing things that are 'less fun' (in theory at least) to gain the ability to do things that are 'more fun'. So people buy their way out of the 'less fun' time using real money.
The only way the Chinese people will not be able to find a way to sell their cheap time is if the game experience and items have no value. If time you have previously invested has no real bearing on time you spend later, there's nothing to trade for.
As long as the games continue to be designed as time sinks, then some method of selling the cheap Chinese time will be present. Even if you can't trade items, they could trade time helping you level up your characters. The only way to avoid it is to remove all value from time invested. Given the current design of MMORPGS, that means to make the game no fun.
Personally, I'll take a game that's fun and has gold farmers.
There's a game you should check out, called Trespasser. If you spent an hour throwing bottles at a lady in a train station.... this is your DREAM GAME, man!
Well, if I'm an astroturfer, I think I wasted a bit too much time establishing my credentials. This will be my 646th counted post, and I was here before they started archiving (and counting) stuff. :-) Heck, I remember when they started the newfangled User IDs, and didn't bother signing up for one for months. Stupid me. :-)
:-)
... you may see the vague resemblance. Not the spiritual successor, but perhaps the spiritual third cousin, twice removed.
:-) [/astroturf]
I don't think Introversion is exactly swimming in money to hire turfers anyway, they got stiffed badly by their old distributor. If this were Sony, and I was pushing Katamari Damacy as God's Own Game, it'd be a lot more likely.
Anyway, (to Rest Of World) take this from a grizzled and veteran gamer... Darwinia is unique, and you should definitely try the demo if you have access to a Windows machine. Like Uplink, its predecessor, it is almost completely original and extremely creative, unlike anything else I've seen.
As Ford notes, however, it does not run on the Protologic 68000. I don't think it will run on the Tandy Color Computer, the PCJr, or the Amiga either, and no Vectrex cart is planned.
You know, mentioning the Amiga.... Darwinia has the crazy, whacked out feel of many of the games of that era, the intense creativity. If anyone out there but me actually remembers MindWalker... in a way it's kind of reminiscent. Compared to Mindwalker, it suffers from something of a coherent plot and far fewer psychedelic colors, but
[astroturf]Oh, and by the way, Katamari Damacy is also really cool, very cheap, and nearly as unique as Darwinia. No demo, sorry, you'll just have to run out and buy one. It's only $20, you can afford it!
Introversion, the folks that made Uplink, have just started shipping Darwinia. It seems really good so far. It's really hard to describe... it's one of the strangest games I've ever seen, but is really interesting.
You're in a 3-d world that has been overrun by viruses, and your goal seems to be to defeat the viruses and make the virtual world safe for Darwinians, which are little 2-d sprite thingies that move around in the 3-d world. The Darwinians are actually somewhat useful, in that they can operate machinery for you. They may be able to do more but I haven't gotten that far with it yet. (only got the game yesterday).
The whole metaphor of the game is that you are logged in and running programs and interacting with the world, and at first you can't run very many programs, and the programs you CAN run aren't terribly interesting.... so far I have Squad, which makes a troop of little soldiers you can blast the bad guys with, Engineer, which makes little guys that can activate buildings and collect the souls of dead things to spawn new Darwinians, and Officer, which converts a normal Darwinian into one you can control and use to give orders to the mobs of Darwinians that stand around the spawn machine. I don't know how many program types there will eventually be.
The graphic look reminds me a bit of that 3D Sentinel game from a few years ago. Monsters are fairly varied... so far I've seen (and fought) little crawly virus things, spiders, centipedes, floating egg laying thingies, and monster-spawning flowers.
It's very different, and very weird, and very fun, at least so far. These are the guys who made Uplink, which was fantastic, so it's likely to be good. You can get a demo at www.introversion.co.uk.
There's a Linux version in the works, but at the moment it's Windows-only. And if you haven't played Uplink, check out the demo for that too. It's really good, and has a Linux version.
Based on what is best for customers, my butt.
They will make the decision based on what's best for Microsoft. I don't think the customer has mattered to Microsoft much since about Windows 95. In fact, 10 years later, I'd argue that customer welfare is near the bottom of their priority list.
Offhand, I can't think of a single move they've made in the last 10 years that really and truly had customers in mind. Being in a monopoly position, their mindset has shifted away from 'what services can we offer in exchange for money' to 'how many feathers can we pluck from the goose with the minimum amount of squawking'.
They've always been nasty, hardball competitors, but at one time they shipped some pretty kickass software, too. Word for Windows was particularly good. Even that horrible flop, Bob, was at least well-intended. But now that they are in a position of real power... if you'll notice, they never, ever ship anything that's really disruptive of or threatening to their main monopoly.
Most likely, their internal studies will be focused around how much money they can make and how much customer lock-in they can manage. Will giving it away free give them enough power to be worth losing the cash from selling it? Should they sell it at a low price, to generate some cash but get it into fairly widespread circulation? Should they sell it at a high price to corporations, to gather lots of cash but gain little leverage over filesystem standards? Should they bundle it only into Longhorn to help 'encourage' upgrades? You can rest assured, thoughts like "Is this technology something that every Microsoft customer should be able to use?" will never even occur to them.
Whatever their actual thought process ends up being, actual customer welfare will not enter into it.
Personally, I disliked DE2, but I thought Thief 3 was excellent. The cramped level design was all wrong for DE, but it really worked in Thief. When it may take you several minutes to cross one room, small levels aren't that big a deal. The atmosphere and tension were excellent. Yes, it would have been cool if the game supported the PC way of thinking more than the console way, but T3 worked well in that context anyway. It was a worthy conclusion to Garrett's story.
I agree with you, though, that DE2 was a disaster. What a horrid mess that was.
Then they need a longer release-candidate cycle. What they REALLY need is a big bank of machines on which they can run automated test cycles. I would happily contribute both money and hardware to such a cause. Linux is complex enough that it needs QA now. I don't mind testing when I know it's testing. I resent very much being FORCED to test.
Once a kernel line is declared stable, it should be STABLE... you stop screwing with it! You fix the problems, perhaps backport support for new hardware, and mostly leave it alone. 2.4 still isn't all that robust on some hardware even now. Shoveling new features into 2.6 every 30 days is pretty much a guarantee that it's NEVER going to be really stable.
Yes, it's a lot of work maintaining the two trees. No, it's not a lot of fun. But the alternative is inflicting exponentially greater amounts of pain on the rest of the world. At the moment, the most current stable tree in Linux IS NOT STABLE.
How much more damning an indictment of an operating system could one possibly make?
Debian Stable is, indeed, very stable. It is also very difficult to use in real life, because virtually anything that's non-Debian-provided won't work on such old versions of libraries, and many developers simply refuse to work on such old versions of software. Every time I have tried to stick with Debian Stable, that decision has been overruled by management because the developers hate it.
All I'm fundamentally asking for is this: I want security fixes to Linux WITHOUT NEW FEATURES. I don't have time to study the new features with every kernel rev. I need drop-in-and-forget kernels. But I often don't trust the distributions to do it either, they're constantly adding all sorts of crap I don't want or need in my kernels.
Running a fairly secure Linux box means, among many other things, disabling all modules, but there are no vendor-supplied kernels I know of that don't use modules. If you want a monolithic kernel, you have to compile it yourself. And for that reason, I have tracked the 'stable' tree for years. And I am FURIOUS that the stable tree is no longer stable, that I'm getting new features with my security patches, like it or not. If I want new features with my service packs, why not run friggin' Windows again? Someone MAY backport the bug fixes, but then again, they may not. They're sure gonna have a damn hard time of it when Linus is silently fixing security problems WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE.
2.4 did add small things... new device drivers, that sort of thing. But they weren't doing the huge monkeying around with things that they continue to do with 2.6. They only put bugfixes in the core: the only things added were ancillary, optional, and easy to turn off. (well, since about 2.4.11, when Linus finally got sane and went off to 2.5)
2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete disaster from a security and administration viewpoint. Silent, unannounced security fixes to the kernel, new features rolled out constantly in a 'stable' series, instability on even small servers. (see my post above for how 2.6 sort of cost me $800.) One kernel dev said that it is acceptable for 1 kernel out of 3 in the 'stable' series to actually be stable!! This is not how to run a railroad.
People are saying 'you should be using 2.4', but 2.6 is STABLE, remember? I should be able to use it freely. People telling me not to use 2.6 yet are PROVING THE POINT, that it's NOT STABLE. I don't think it's going to get there until they stop adding features and branch off to 2.7.
Yes, I did. Just last week, actually. I'm running Debian Unstable on my home server, with kernel 2.6.8-2-k7. I'm using very high quality components on this machine, albeit older now...Athlon XP 1900+, ASUS motherboard, ICP Vortex SCSI RAID controller, 3Ware IDE controller, PC Power and Cooling power supply, good ventilation everywhere.
I upgraded to 2.6 awhile ago when I was experimenting with Xen. (which, btw, is very promising, but needs too much work still.) I gave up on Xen, but 2.6 seemed okay on my workload here at home, so I left it.
About two weeks ago, I started noticing error messages on my IDE RAID... sde was coming back with errors. (it's sd instead of hd because it's on the 3ware controller in JBOD mode). Those drives haven't been beaten to death or anything, but they're a couple years old, so one failing was hardly unthinkable. The RAID was still up, but I didn't trust it.
I'd been thinking about more space anyway, so I decided to upgrade, rather than just replace the failing drive. I went out and bought five new, larger drives. Transferred all my data off, yanked the old drives, replaced, rebuilt... the usual drill. Started all my data copying back in and went to bed. When I got up and checked status, one of the new drives -- sde -- had failed.
Hmmm..... I knew it wasn't likely to be the drive. I didn't think it was likely to be the cable, as it had been fine for two years. Thought it might be the controller, but then I really started wondering about a message I'd been ignoring for awhile, APIC errors. Specifically, I was getting: "APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)". I had previously looked those up when I first saw them, and at the time there was no consensus... it didn't seem like anyone had any clue what the heck they were or meant, or if they were even a problem. I looked them up again, and there's STILL no consensus as of a couple of weeks ago, but (02) errors seemed to be related to server crashes.
On the off chance, I disabled APIC and ACPI, rebooted, and hot-added sde back into the array. It has been perfectly fine ever since.
So, yes, I'd say I've seen some instability. In a way, you could argue that it cost me about $800 in drives, since I probably wouldn't have done the upgrade if not for the bogus errors. I came fairly close to losing a great deal of data... I assume that it was only a matter of time until another drive failed because of the APIC bug. Obviously, I had backups, but data loss is BAD anyway.
And this is on a light-duty, massively overbuilt, home machine. On a real, medium-duty machine, like an office fileserver, that bug would probably have been forced to the surface faster. Presumably, the chances of a second drive failing would also have been much higher. It cost me "only" $800, but could have cost a business many, many thousands in downtime and, probably, unecessary hardware replacements.
So, no, I don't think too much of the 2.6 kernel. It broke on my little toy server. Why on earth would I trust it with stuff that *really* mattered?
This is a great post, unfortunately ACed. Can someone bump it to +1?
In my book, instability is unplanned downtime. If you know you're going to have to reboot your servers when you patch them, you can schedule around it -- it becomes planned downtime.
Admittedly, NO downtime is best, but with the kernel patches flying thick and fast of late, well-maintained Linux boxes probably aren't showing the best uptimes either, just now.
As I have said in other posts I'm too lazy to go dig up, that means that there's no more One True Linux. The one in the center needs to be extremely robust, as bug-free as possible. Then the distros can take that core and expand on it.
Otherwise, you end up with multiple separate kernel maintainers fixing the same bugs in slightly incompatible ways. You end up with no more central point, no more One True Linux that everyone can test against.
In other words, Linus is essentially waving his hand in the air, decreeing that other people will have to make it actually work.
In my experience, expecting other people to just magically do things is not a good way to be sure they're actually going to happen.
I've only ever had one comment modded down as Flamebait.... this may be #2.
As near as I can tell from reading recent comments on this particular decision, the single biggest reason they don't want to do 2.7 is because not enough people will test it. Only by calling it 'stable' can they get enough testers. Of course, the fact that it will now never really BE stable, seems to have been lost on them.
This is better than what they have been doing, but only slightly. What Linus seems to really want is for everyone in the whole world to be using the very most recent kernel. He wants, in essence, everyone in the world to be beta testers. By putting out new code and calling it 'stable', he gets hundreds of thousands of testers, and is able to shake out bugs much faster.
Apparently, the possibility that it might be banks and hospitals that are discovering these bugs didn't occur to them. Discovering a bug is an EXTREMELY PAINFUL PROCESS for someone who isn't expecting one. So instead of doing the nasty hard work of maintaining separate stable and development branches, they push that pain onto everyone else in the world.
Personally, I want software that works more than I want the latest whizbang feature. That's why I got onto Linux in the first place, a decade ago... I was frustrated with Windows. It was such a delight to run software that never, ever crashed. It was crude, it was simple, but it was *incredibly* reliable, and that more than any other single thing is why I switched.
I find it quite ironic that Windows 2003, in the hands of capable admins, with all its design flaws and warts, is substantially more stable than is Linux. There's a reason Ars Technica switched from Linux to Windows, and stayed there. If anyone on the planet is competent, it's those guys. And from the sound of it, they're very happy with the results.
At this point, I'm so disgusted with this state of affairs that I'm running a test installation of FreeBSD. Their development cycle is much saner. They don't have as many features, but the ones they DO have, seem to work. Maybe they should add a new motto: "Software by Adults, for Folks Who Could Lose Their Job if it Breaks".
*sigh*
I do NOT understnnd why he won't just fork off 2.7. 2.6 is unstable and untrustworthy, and it's not going to GET stable until they STOP SCREWING WITH IT.
Linux 2.4, the last stable kernel, has had 29 versions as of this post. Admittedly, the chaos of the first 10 or 11 releases were from exactly the same kind of stupidity we're seeing now, development continuing in the 'stable' branch.
Since 2.4.11, there have been EIGHTEEN PATCHES to get 2.4 to the relative stability it's at now, and even so, it's still not as good as 2.2 on a lot of hardware. A single release is NOT ENOUGH to get things stable. 2.4 is still not that robust, on many configurations, after eighteen patches. There's no way that one patch is gonna do it.
Linux, PLEASE go play in 2.7 and let everyone else get 2.6 stable. It's not trustworthy now, and I will not use 2.6 kernels in any kind of serious production environment because of it. A single release is NOT going to be stable. If you freeze it right this second and branch off to 2.7, the kernel should actually be fairly stable by 2.6.25. With all the extra code in the 2.6 tree, it wouldn't surprise me if it got to 2.6.60 before it was really and truly 'finished'.
Claiming that 'distributions will make it stable' is basically waving your hand in the air and hoping that other people will fix it, while you madly add new problems by dumping untested code into the 'stable' tree.
It's not working, and it's not ever going to work. The longer you keep trying to call a development branch 'stable', the more damage you do to Linux.
To put as nice a face on this as I can.... you, sir, are an idiot.
Of COURSE the losslessly compressed files are different on disk... they take half as much space! When you uncompress them, you get back exactly what you started with. That's why it's lossless compression. Bits are bits are bits... as long as the bits that go to the DAC are the same, how they're stored doesn't really matter.
THERE IS NOTHING LOST WITH LOSSLESS COMPRESSION. That's why it is 'lossless' compression. The files just take less space. You route the compressed bits through an uncompression program and you get a bit-for-bit identical copy to what you started with.
And I love your 'don't give me the math' line. "Don't confuse me with facts!"
Argh, hit submit too soon..... "if you are installing a dual-core Athlon", no 'in'. Argh.
If XP works the same way 2000 did, when you upgrade to a dual-core from a single-core, you will have to reinstall the OS for the second core to be activated.
2000 had two entirely separate sets of system files, one each for uni- and multi-processor. Even if you added a second CPU, if you didn't have the multiproc HAL to begin with, it simply wouldn't work.
Because XP is just 2000 with a facelift, I suspect this won't have changed. You are correct that if your initial install was on a P4, which 'looks like' two physical processors, XP would have installed its multi-cpu core.
If, however, you are installing a dual-core Athlon in, chances are quite high that you didn't do your initial install on a P4. So you won't have the multiproc system files, and you'll probably have to reinstall to get the second proc going. (A 'repair' installation may be adequate, and would be much less painful.)
Linux works somewhat similarly, but fortunately you can replace just the kernel, rather than the entire OS.
When I last used Arcserve, it was the biggest pile of crap ever. I struggled with that software for MONTHS, talking with them every few weeks, until I finally found out the problem was poorly designed software.
We had a rather odd setup(which I inherited), in which we had a network of about 30 (later 50, and then 70) development workstations, all of which were backed up . It was roughly similar to backing up 30 separate servers, though of course the individual data stores weren't that large. But it was a great number of small files.
Problem was, Arcserve at the time didn't support that many files, but this was not documented ANYWHERE. I don't remember the exact limit, but when you exceeded X files (32,000, possibly? it was surprisingly low), the namespace got corrupted. The files were copied out to data stores, but the database that tracked where the files WERE, was hopelessly corrupted. Over and over and over I dodged bullets, manually restoring whole tapes to spare servers and hunting for the files I needed to restore. I struggled and struggled, and called Arcserve and called Arcserve, until FINALLY they admitted to me (after MONTHS) that I was trying to do something the software wasn't capable of doing. It simply couldn't handle the number of files I was trying to save, and this WAS NOT DOCUMENTED and they DID NOT TELL ME THIS until after probably twenty phone calls.
We ended up spending a lot of money on Legato Networker, which was quite good in comparison. At the time (this was about 4 years ago), the Windows client had a nasty habit of locking up when it encountered specific files in the Internet Explorer cache directory. So I still had to watch the system very closely, because inevitably 1 or 2 machines each night wouldn't backup. I'd have to visit those machines, restart the Networker service, and purge the IE cache. That always fixed it, but I don't think I ever once got a perfect backup of every machine on the network at the same time.
Upshot: this is very old experience, but I really doubt that the fundamental nature of the people selling Arcserve has changed. They stonewalled me and put me through hell for months because their product was inadequate. I don't think I'd take solid gold bars from CA if they gave them to me for free.
So what if he's dead, killed in that explosion, and they've been covering it up? NK is exactly the kind of place to try to do something like that.
Just a thought....
Once you had that kind of restart working well enough to not corrupt your filesystems, (very hard!!, I would think the OS would become more resistant to things like partial memory failures. In theory, atleast, the OS might be able to detect that parts of the RAM were bad, and be able to restart services that had been loaded in the bad segments. Of course, if the kernel itself was loaded into bad RAM, you'd still be screwed. A memory failure in user space, however, should be a correctable problem.
Ideally, of course, you want working hardware, but it would be cool if the freeware OSes were resilient enough to handle at least some hardware failures.
Oh, I definitely never intended to imply that the HURD is stupid, not at all.
:-) And they are, from what I can see, treading very new ground, and that's always slow.
I was speaking specifcally about stopping development on the current Linux and starting over, which I think would be very dumb. Usually, rewriting a big software project from the ground up kills it. Mozilla, for instance, ceased to be a viable commercial force because of its rewrite; Microsoft ate it alive. Firefox is doing pretty well now, but no commercial entity could have made that mistake and survived, if selling browsers was its major source of revenue.
There's a huge amount of embecded knowledge on how PC hardware works buried in the Linux code, and rewriting that whole thing from scratch would be a gargantuan project. They've been working on it for, what, 11 years now? A total rewrite would take at least 3 or 4, during which all forward progress would stop. Just not a very good idea.
But I think it's great that the HURD is finally moving, at least a little bit. I will admit, I was a bit shocked that after roughly 15 years, they're just now able to load a program. But, hey, it's not like I needed it done last week or anything.
Reiterating: the more OSes, the better. I just don't think they should start over on Linux itself.
If the system is able to stay up without further drive access, that could potentially allow you to copy data still in RAM. If the OS simply instantly failed when the HD controller went, then any data in RAM would absolutely be lost.
:)). But most drivers wouldn't be that hard to restart... video and network are two very good examples. I have seen many 2.4 kernel crashes from what appeared to be network-driver failures. Presumably, a microkernel might have survived whatever the problem was.
:-)
Software failure is more common than hardware. In many cases, drivers can be restarted. Your specific example is probably the toughest one I can think of offhand... you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD
You also, of course, have the advantage of each driver/process running in its own address apace, which would probably make very complex code, like the 2.6 Linux kernel, more manageable.
Just as an offhand observation, I kind of wonder if the 2.6 Linux kernel isn't approaching the level of diminishing returns... it's gotten so complex that it's getting pretty tough to cleanly improve without blowing a lot of stuff up. A microkernel design would probably have made maintenance easier, and *probably* would have given us more stable systems now.
But they didn't go that way, and restarting Linux kernel development would be pretty stupid, IMO.
Um, putting a declarative statement in bold print is about as strong an assertion of fact, in a short space, as one can make online. Particularly with an italicized "I swear to God!' right above it. (yes, I realize only God was italic, but that makes it a stronger assertion, not a weaker one.)
:)
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple used II in their documentation, they weren't yet the branding and control freaks that they became in later years. I didn't even think about the docs, I was just looking at the ROMs (via emulator) and the logos.
The goooooogle on the bottom isn't a logo, it's a cutesy navigation tool. The logo is up top, and it's usually just Google, although of course they have fun with that on holidays.
You may not like the use of Apple ][, but it is correct. I strongly suspect that you're not going to find ANY cases in the real world of using the product's actual logo to refer to the product as being demonstrably 'wrong'. Basically, you're trying to support a completely unsupportable assertion. You should just give up, admit defeat, and pay more attention next time around.