If you want to see new content, you cannot do so as a casual player. I was far beyond a casual player (2 RAIDs a week, several hours of farming) and still noticed, that i was falling behind on the content scale.
New instances were added faster i could complete them. Going through SSC and TK literally took months. The RAID had several crisis meetings, weaker players were encouraged to seek their fortune somewhere else. In the end, we made progress and were inside the black temple, but the fun was left behind. In April i quit after playing my Rogue for more then 2.500 hours.
Quitting hurts... as intended. But there was no choice. You can either do the easy instances again and again or try new content. There you need two things: equip and error-free playing. I loved the game, but it was becoming a second job. No need for that:-(.
The desertion rate is currently high. In the month after i quit, the RAID lost 4 more players with 3+ years under their epic belt. There are still new players coming in (still got 330$ for my Rogue), but WoW is loosing a lot of experienced players currently.
All the things done for casual players considered, the R&D of Bliizzard is still focussed on the power gamer (Nihilum&Co). 90% of all instanced content (SSC and higher) will only be seen by a small minoritry of all players (~15%).
Please don't missunderstand me: The game was fun till the last minute. But to continue and make progress it would have required more time of me, that i was prepared to give. The content for the casual player (daily quests, small isntances, etc) didn't appeal to me.
i'm owning an IRexx Iliad for nearly 12 months now and i'm still very happy with it. I have purchased about 5 "dead tree" books since then and 50+ eBooks (Mobipocket). It's a completely new feeling being able to travel while being unable to run out of new books to read. Usually i have about 1GB of eBooks with me.
Battery life is shorter than advertised but still enough for most uses. When i pull it out, usually i have several people asking me about it.
i just order an Iliad iRex and the next days coloured ePaper is announced;-).
I think ePaper will do a huge jump ahead the next years. For me it is very practical. Usually i take 1kg of books per 3 days
of vacation with me. With an eBook reader this will free up a lot of travel luggage.
> Would mirrored drives be a more effective solution?
Yes and No:
Mirrored drives are a good protection against drive failures and (usually) offer an easy restore process. If you mirror a drive and put the copy away (e.g. into a safe) this is a real and widely used backup method. As always you should at least try once to boot the system while removing the primary disk. Somtimes RAID controllers have some irks too.
This method usually depends on the availability of a certain hardware, if you cannot get a new mainboard or raid controller of the same type, the mirrored disk contains data you may have trouble getting at. You may ignore this issue, if you have the same hardware at a safe location again.
the problem was, as always, not the backup. I've rarely seen problems resulting from the backup process.
The troublesome process is the restore. Or as a friend put it once:
Nobody wants backups, what everybody wants is a restore.
In my twenty years of IT i've seen several companies making backups like a well oiled machine. The backup
process was well documented and everyone was trained to a degree, they could do it with their eyes
closed. But everything fell apart in the critical moment, because all they had planned was making
the backup. Nobody ever imagined or tried a restore on the grand scale. So they ended up with a
big stack of tapes with unuseable data.
the GEMA cannot be compared to the RIAA. While the RIAA is mostly an industry organisation, the GEMA is a representation of the artists. Not that it doesn't suffer the same delusions of grandeur the RIAA does, but at least the money paid to the GEMA really ends up in the pocket of the artists. And the fees the GEMA requests are pennys compared to the invoices the RIAA sends out.
since the vice president is allowed to do so, why shouldn't average blind people be allowed to shoot on their fellow citizens... aehmmm... i mean on fair game.
Regards, Martin
P.S.
An english man is on the hunt. He sees some movement, pulls up his rifle and shoots.
Suddenly someone cries "Hey, you nearly shot my wife."
He shouts back "Sorry, have a shot at mine over there."
he (Beckstein) is not the "German Minister of the Interior" but the one of Bavaria (german: Bayern). Bavaria is the most conservative state in germany, ruled for nearly 60 years by the same party. He has been joined in his attempt by the minister of interior of lower saxony.
The core of the prolem is the definition of "killer games". Since nearly all major politicians are 60 or older, they have nearly no understanding of the topic. They believe e.g. that Counterstrike is played with a joystick and the goal of the game to be "killing hostages". Usually, hearing them, i'm torn between laughing and crying.
i ask myself "What fiasco?". I've never even heard about those trinkets. No player (i know of) has those Murlocs pe(s)t trinket. Nobody plays the trading card game. None of my WoW websites (i read about 5 per day) mentions neither the game nor the alleged fiasco. I think the topic is overblown.
i can much agree with the positive impression, but for different reasons. I have 50+ hour work life and i'm happily married. My goal in WoW is not to complete the T2 set ASAP (it is bound to happen anyway some day) or to learn management (better: herding of cats), but to recreate. It's a great tool (and just a tool) for that. No more, but no less...
It is a fact, however, that such a crime will be much, much less expensive than letting the RIAA have their way with you.
If you get caught in the act, this is not true. As we see in this case you get a summary judgement and may get additional charges on top. It will destroy all you credibility in fron of the court and may even haunt you in the future. If you do a "risk/benefit" analysis, destryoing evidence is usually a losing game in such petty cases. It may different if you killed someone, where the additional penalty is negligible (compared to punishment that you get for the original crime).
In fact destroying the evidence may now provide the RIAA with a verdict that they love. The defendant gets a severe punishment which the RIAA can trump out into the world to deter others. Most journalists will probably overlook the specifics of this case.
Isn't it obvious? They couldn't find any pirated files, so she must have wiped it clean!
Just took a look into the court dcouments... Seems they found some more solid evidence. It seems
to me that the defendant forgot to clean the Registry properly and they could at least prove the
use of the file sharing software with the alleged user name and they could show that files were
deleted on certain dates.
If you're interested, read the court's order [...]
Looks pretty clear to me. Changed the subject from "Stupid?" to "Stupid!". I witnessed already several cases were people were deleting evidence from their hard drives and believed they were safe. This one falls into the medium range of stupidity. More severe cases only put the files into the Windows waste basket and emptied it.
When there will be a sentence concerning this case, 70+% will be for the act of destroying the evidence.
destroying evidence after receiving a court order is always a stupid thing to do. The question for me is: How did they proved the data was destroyed after the defendant receivced the court order?
well, after a multiplayer match of more than 5 hours i would surrender my base willingly to anyone. Starving out the enemy seems to be a workable solution here.
Perhaps i missunderstood someting, but i considered games a recreation. I'm already angry at Blizzard for needing to many people and too much time to even sniff at the high end content in the game. Be sure, i won't be playing a multiplayer match for 10 hours.
What's the next move of the gaming industry?
Perhaps involuntary conscriptions... Before my mental eyes, i see press gangs scanning the streets and forcing hapless retirees into their virtual armies...
Collector editions containing diapers and a manual for self-catheterisation...
Ingame service requests for nurses to provide you with IV nutrition...
You can slave your PC to a desktop in China where they will play for you. Wait... They're already doing this.
When i'm thinking about it, i just came up with an idea for a marketing blitz: Crysis, the game for the wooden stomach and the iron bladder.
Calculate with about 20-30 man days for the initial design. You'll need some software
development for about 30-50 man days, 100 man
days for setup, testing and fine tuning.
Figures may wary upon skill and LWF. Time
for integration into your backup service is
not included.
Use a directory service with replication mechanism (preferred LDAP, we've done it with MySQL too). Every system except the load balancers will
get a replica.
The user data is stored on machines with Cyrus . Depending on machine size, user profile, mbox size etc. you take between 5.000 and 50.000 users per system.
The directory service knows which user is on which system. Prepare a script to move users from
one server to another (including the mbox).
Incoming IMAP connects go through a loadbalancer to frontend systems with the perdition proxy. Those will relay thre requests
according to the directory to the responsible
IMAP server.
Incoming HTTP requests will go through the
loadbalance to an Apache with Squirrel on the
frontend systems. Those will convert the requests
into IMAP requests and connect to the local
perdition.
Generate a web frontend for the user to setup
auto reply, vacation and anti-spam settings.
From those settings you can create SIEVE scripts for the user.
Incoming and outgoing SMTP traffic is handled by systems with sendmail. Local delivery is handled by LMTP connects directly to the IMAP servers (cyrus can handle LMTP).
Antivirus and Antispam is handled through the milter interface and appropiate plugins. Plan for individual settings per user (can be generated
from the data in the directory server).
Loadbalancing SMTP us trivial.
Add monitoring (e.g. Nagios), Backup and Restore (last one most important, nobody wants backup, all everyone wants is restore).
If desired, use a cluster file system for those
IMAP servers to have even more redundancy.
Make sure you have access to the internal DNS of your company. If you can setup "mail.acmecompany.com" to point to several ips (depending on location) this may ease your job
lot. If you cannot, this may be hard (and expensive) for your load balancers.
You can scale everything horizontal in this concept. Choking point may be the load balancers.
You can distribute the system easily onto several locations. Distribution over several continents is only recommended if you can either manage the DNS or the mail agent settings per continent.
Please forgive me, if i'm not completely correct. I'm only the sales rep;-). But we've done it several times for ISPs. OSS software usually does
the biggest part of the work. Usually some components (depending on existing contracts and
knowledge) are commercial software (e.g. anti virus, load balancers, cluster file system).
Typical operating systems are Solaris or Linux.
With backup support you should be able to setup
such a system in 6 to 12 months (the later more
realistic for big companies).
Most probably users will complain about the lacking calendar.
Most troublesome will be the migration phase (hope you realized i didn't mention it above). This depends so much on your current scenario that it
is very difficult to give a general advice.
> where would you start?
Contacting me;-). Perhaps get a budget first. As i said, i'm sales....
So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers?
i hate those questions. It's like "What car do you recommend?" without going much into the details of the intended use. Well general questions ask for general answers:
I would use Check
Point Firewall-1. There is a single server
license available for 1.000 US$ (list price). But
you still need a management station (about 20K
for an unlimted number of managed firewalls).
It's available for the major operating systems, very flexible and powerfull.
i've been there last thursday for about four hours. At that time, about 5.000 other people did the
same. On some days between the holidays, the dome
had to be closed due to overcrowding (max. 7.500 people at the same time). The visit was the birthday present for my girlfriend (together with
a musical visit later that day).
The dome is extremely impressive. The size dwarves
everything i ever seen before. I'm familier with
large halls (productions sites) due to my connections to AIRBUS, but those are much smaller.
The Statue of Liberty would fit inside the dome upright. The
mentioned Eiffel tower would fit only if laid down. The tropical feeling suffers from the size.
Only lower 10m (30feet) contain some tropical stuff (houses, plants, pools), the remaining dome looks still industrial. It seemed a little dark to me, i would have prefered more and warmer light.
The temperature inside is as warm as advertised.
Both pools were overcrowded and queuing up was
required for nearly everything (food, toilett, entry, cashier, changing cubicle, etc.). Prices are very fair. Overall rating would be a "B". There a quite a lot places to improve, but i hope the "Tropical Island" will survive.
For geeks: Every person entering the dome receives
a card with a RFID chip. This card is used to pay
food, drinks, etc. The RFID chip even operates the
lockers (instead of a key). On exiting the dome,
you pay according to the bill for your RFID card.
Unluckily they had some trouble with this process.
So it was up to "What did you have?" and paying what you told them.
The dome is open round the clock; i would recommend to visit it during the night, when there are less visitors (there were too many small children for my taste). You can even rent a tent for inside camping;-).
If anyone is interested, i can add links to images
and a short video later.
I found it refreshing that although it was possible, quite a bit of work had to go into hacking the bikes in the first place. The only way to circumvent the system was to physically get inside it and reprogram the firmware. This is solid engineering IMHO.
I don't consider this engineering. In the first
step it meant stealing a bike and then quite a bit
of vandalism. This is not engineering. Or to quote Gandalf: And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to see new content, you cannot do so as a casual player. I was far beyond a casual player (2 RAIDs a week, several hours of farming) and still noticed, that i was falling behind on the content scale.
New instances were added faster i could complete them. Going through SSC and TK literally took months. The RAID had several crisis meetings, weaker players were encouraged to seek their fortune somewhere else. In the end, we made progress and were inside the black temple, but the fun was left behind. In April i quit after playing my Rogue for more then 2.500 hours.
Quitting hurts... as intended. But there was no choice. You can either do the easy instances again and again or try new content. There you need two things: equip and error-free playing. I loved the game, but it was becoming a second job. No need for that :-(.
The desertion rate is currently high. In the month after i quit, the RAID lost 4 more players with 3+ years under their epic belt. There are still new players coming in (still got 330$ for my Rogue), but WoW is loosing a lot of experienced players currently.
All the things done for casual players considered, the R&D of Bliizzard is still focussed on the power gamer (Nihilum&Co). 90% of all instanced content (SSC and higher) will only be seen by a small minoritry of all players (~15%).
Please don't missunderstand me: The game was fun till the last minute. But to continue and make progress it would have required more time of me, that i was prepared to give. The content for the casual player (daily quests, small isntances, etc) didn't appeal to me.
CU, martin
i'm owning an IRexx Iliad for nearly 12 months now and i'm still very happy with it. I have purchased about 5 "dead tree" books since then and 50+ eBooks (Mobipocket). It's a completely new feeling being able to travel while being unable to run out of new books to read. Usually i have about 1GB of eBooks with me.
Battery life is shorter than advertised but still enough for most uses. When i pull it out, usually i have several people asking me about it.
Regards, Martin
i just order an Iliad iRex and the next days coloured ePaper is announced ;-).
I think ePaper will do a huge jump ahead the next years. For me it is very practical. Usually i take 1kg of books per 3 days of vacation with me. With an eBook reader this will free up a lot of travel luggage.
Regards, Martin
Yes and No:
- Mirrored drives are a good protection against drive failures and (usually) offer an easy restore process. If you mirror a drive and put the copy away (e.g. into a safe) this is a real and widely used backup method. As always you should at least try once to boot the system while removing the primary disk. Somtimes RAID controllers have some irks too.
- This method usually depends on the availability of a certain hardware, if you cannot get a new mainboard or raid controller of the same type, the mirrored disk contains data you may have trouble getting at. You may ignore this issue, if you have the same hardware at a safe location again.
Regards, Martinthe problem was, as always, not the backup. I've rarely seen problems resulting from the backup process. The troublesome process is the restore. Or as a friend put it once:
Nobody wants backups, what everybody wants is a restore.
In my twenty years of IT i've seen several companies making backups like a well oiled machine. The backup process was well documented and everyone was trained to a degree, they could do it with their eyes closed. But everything fell apart in the critical moment, because all they had planned was making the backup. Nobody ever imagined or tried a restore on the grand scale. So they ended up with a big stack of tapes with unuseable data.
Backup is the mean, not the goal.
Regards, Martin
the GEMA cannot be compared to the RIAA. While the RIAA is mostly an industry organisation, the GEMA is a representation of the artists. Not that it doesn't suffer the same delusions of grandeur the RIAA does, but at least the money paid to the GEMA really ends up in the pocket of the artists. And the fees the GEMA requests are pennys compared to the invoices the RIAA sends out.
Regards, Martin
Hi,
since the vice president is allowed to do so, why shouldn't average blind people be allowed to shoot on their fellow citizens ... aehmmm... i mean on fair game.
Regards, Martin
P.S.
An english man is on the hunt. He sees some movement, pulls up his rifle and shoots.
Suddenly someone cries "Hey, you nearly shot my wife."
He shouts back "Sorry, have a shot at mine over there."
What difference would it make if that were actually true?
If an illiterate asks a book to be censored and someone who has read it, i would take the later one more serious.
Regards, Martin
he (Beckstein) is not the "German Minister of the Interior" but the one of Bavaria (german: Bayern). Bavaria is the most conservative state in germany, ruled for nearly 60 years by the same party. He has been joined in his attempt by the minister of interior of lower saxony.
The core of the prolem is the definition of "killer games". Since nearly all major politicians are 60 or older, they have nearly no understanding of the topic. They believe e.g. that Counterstrike is played with a joystick and the goal of the game to be "killing hostages". Usually, hearing them, i'm torn between laughing and crying.
Regards, Martin
i ask myself "What fiasco?". I've never even heard about those trinkets. No player (i know of) has those Murlocs pe(s)t trinket. Nobody plays the trading card game. None of my WoW websites (i read about 5 per day) mentions neither the game nor the alleged fiasco. I think the topic is overblown.
Regards, Martin
i can much agree with the positive impression, but for different reasons. I have 50+ hour work life and i'm happily married. My goal in WoW is not to complete the T2 set ASAP (it is bound to happen anyway some day) or to learn management (better: herding of cats), but to recreate. It's a great tool (and just a tool) for that. No more, but no less...
Regards, Martin
If you get caught in the act, this is not true. As we see in this case you get a summary judgement and may get additional charges on top. It will destroy all you credibility in fron of the court and may even haunt you in the future. If you do a "risk/benefit" analysis, destryoing evidence is usually a losing game in such petty cases. It may different if you killed someone, where the additional penalty is negligible (compared to punishment that you get for the original crime).
In fact destroying the evidence may now provide the RIAA with a verdict that they love. The defendant gets a severe punishment which the RIAA can trump out into the world to deter others. Most journalists will probably overlook the specifics of this case.
Regards, Martin
Just took a look into the court dcouments... Seems they found some more solid evidence. It seems to me that the defendant forgot to clean the Registry properly and they could at least prove the use of the file sharing software with the alleged user name and they could show that files were deleted on certain dates.
Regards, Martin
If you're interested, read the court's order [...]
Looks pretty clear to me. Changed the subject from "Stupid?" to "Stupid!". I witnessed already several cases were people were deleting evidence from their hard drives and believed they were safe. This one falls into the medium range of stupidity. More severe cases only put the files into the Windows waste basket and emptied it.
When there will be a sentence concerning this case, 70+% will be for the act of destroying the evidence.
[...] please be gentle with my server
Did he feel anything?
Regards, Martin
destroying evidence after receiving a court order is always a stupid thing to do. The question for me is: How did they proved the data was destroyed after the defendant receivced the court order?
Regards, Martin
well, after a multiplayer match of more than 5 hours i would surrender my base willingly to anyone. Starving out the enemy seems to be a workable solution here.
Perhaps i missunderstood someting, but i considered games a recreation. I'm already angry at Blizzard for needing to many people and too much time to even sniff at the high end content in the game. Be sure, i won't be playing a multiplayer match for 10 hours.
What's the next move of the gaming industry?
When i'm thinking about it, i just came up with an idea for a marketing blitz: Crysis, the game for the wooden stomach and the iron bladder.
Regards, Martin
Not really: There are three offerings: cheap, secure, useable... Pick any two
You may combine ease of use and secure, but this will cost...
Regards, Martin
So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels
With 132 votes, the result is complete random. Why don't we start a poll on /. ?
Regards, Martin
It seems the whole story does not contain clearly good or bad guys. But it seems that everyone involved is at least ugly ;-).
Regards, Martin
we evaluated the SSL network extender and it worked fine with Linux. It's not a full flavored SecureClient but will suffice for most uses.
Regards, Martin
my recommendations:
- Calculate with about 20-30 man days for the initial design. You'll need some software
development for about 30-50 man days, 100 man
days for setup, testing and fine tuning.
Figures may wary upon skill and LWF. Time
for integration into your backup service is
not included.
- Use a directory service with replication mechanism (preferred LDAP, we've done it with MySQL too). Every system except the load balancers will
get a replica.
- The user data is stored on machines with Cyrus . Depending on machine size, user profile, mbox size etc. you take between 5.000 and 50.000 users per system.
- The directory service knows which user is on which system. Prepare a script to move users from
one server to another (including the mbox).
- Incoming IMAP connects go through a loadbalancer to frontend systems with the perdition proxy. Those will relay thre requests
according to the directory to the responsible
IMAP server.
- Incoming HTTP requests will go through the
loadbalance to an Apache with Squirrel on the
frontend systems. Those will convert the requests
into IMAP requests and connect to the local
perdition.
- Generate a web frontend for the user to setup
auto reply, vacation and anti-spam settings.
- From those settings you can create SIEVE scripts for the user.
- Incoming and outgoing SMTP traffic is handled by systems with sendmail. Local delivery is handled by LMTP connects directly to the IMAP servers (cyrus can handle LMTP).
- Antivirus and Antispam is handled through the milter interface and appropiate plugins. Plan for individual settings per user (can be generated
from the data in the directory server).
- Loadbalancing SMTP us trivial.
- Add monitoring (e.g. Nagios), Backup and Restore (last one most important, nobody wants backup, all everyone wants is restore).
- If desired, use a cluster file system for those
IMAP servers to have even more redundancy.
- Make sure you have access to the internal DNS of your company. If you can setup "mail.acmecompany.com" to point to several ips (depending on location) this may ease your job
lot. If you cannot, this may be hard (and expensive) for your load balancers.
- You can scale everything horizontal in this concept. Choking point may be the load balancers.
- You can distribute the system easily onto several locations. Distribution over several continents is only recommended if you can either manage the DNS or the mail agent settings per continent.
Please forgive me, if i'm not completely correct. I'm only the sales repWith backup support you should be able to setup such a system in 6 to 12 months (the later more realistic for big companies).
Most probably users will complain about the lacking calendar.
Most troublesome will be the migration phase (hope you realized i didn't mention it above). This depends so much on your current scenario that it is very difficult to give a general advice.
> where would you start?
Contacting me ;-). Perhaps get a budget first. As i said, i'm sales....
Regards, Martin
Regards, Martin
So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers?
i hate those questions. It's like "What car do you recommend?" without going much into the details of the intended use. Well general questions ask for general answers:
I would use Check Point Firewall-1. There is a single server license available for 1.000 US$ (list price). But you still need a management station (about 20K for an unlimted number of managed firewalls). It's available for the major operating systems, very flexible and powerfull.
Regards, Martin
i've been there last thursday for about four hours. At that time, about 5.000 other people did the same. On some days between the holidays, the dome had to be closed due to overcrowding (max. 7.500 people at the same time). The visit was the birthday present for my girlfriend (together with a musical visit later that day).
The dome is extremely impressive. The size dwarves everything i ever seen before. I'm familier with large halls (productions sites) due to my connections to AIRBUS, but those are much smaller. The Statue of Liberty would fit inside the dome upright. The mentioned Eiffel tower would fit only if laid down. The tropical feeling suffers from the size. Only lower 10m (30feet) contain some tropical stuff (houses, plants, pools), the remaining dome looks still industrial. It seemed a little dark to me, i would have prefered more and warmer light.
The temperature inside is as warm as advertised. Both pools were overcrowded and queuing up was required for nearly everything (food, toilett, entry, cashier, changing cubicle, etc.). Prices are very fair. Overall rating would be a "B". There a quite a lot places to improve, but i hope the "Tropical Island" will survive.
For geeks: Every person entering the dome receives a card with a RFID chip. This card is used to pay food, drinks, etc. The RFID chip even operates the lockers (instead of a key). On exiting the dome, you pay according to the bill for your RFID card. Unluckily they had some trouble with this process. So it was up to "What did you have?" and paying what you told them.
The dome is open round the clock; i would recommend to visit it during the night, when there are less visitors (there were too many small children for my taste). You can even rent a tent for inside camping ;-).
If anyone is interested, i can add links to images and a short video later.
Regards, Martin
I don't consider this engineering. In the first step it meant stealing a bike and then quite a bit of vandalism. This is not engineering. Or to quote Gandalf: And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
Regards, Martin