I think they're thinking in the right direction here.
It's all nice and well to be all powerful, but there are only a few thnigs that piss off (more or less serious) PvPers more than the 'gank' mentality. I hope they manage to balance it in such a way that actual skill makes a difference as well.
I've been looking forward to this game for quite a while, and most of what I've heard actually sounds promising and well thought out. I hope they can live up to our expectations, though.
I know that a lot of us have played Elite in the past, and there's always some sort of 'could-it-be' feeling when news about these sort of games come out.
Actually. 3GB isn't as sweet a spot as people seem to assume.
In a system where you have 2 DIMM slots (eg a laptop), it's very much advisable to put in 4GB, being 2x2GB modules and still have dual-channel access to your memory.
Dual-channel doesn't work with DIMMs that are different in size.
For most 'normal' boards, this is the same. Using 4x1 or 2x2 is performance-wise better than using 1+2. The cost involved in this is negligible nowadays, so there's no reason not to do it, even if you do 'lose' 1G.
The 3GB limit also entirely depends on whether your system maps 1G to PCI/Graphics/etc. Some systems only map 512M, some 768, etc. So depending on that, you might actually end up with 3.5 or 3.25 usable.
This is way more power than any agency, even government, should have. It's like, "You no longer have any right to privacy. Deal with it." I hope to the higher powers that be that this does not pass.
I would replace 'even government' in this with 'especially government'.
Government is a pretty opaque collection of people with entirely too little safe guards and monitoring on them. A government for the people would be accountable to the people, and I think we all agree that's a utopian thought at the moment.
For now, the games work fine under WINE (which is more than can be said for anything EA), isn't that enough for now? If you want to see game companies developing natively for *nix, get more people using it. The developers will follow, seriously.
One of the main reasons things like WoW work in WINE is because Blizzard actually makes a decent effort to have their games run properly in OpenGL. You can run a WoW client in Windows in OpenGL as well, which in some cases actually solves some DirectX problems on some cards/computers.
Another example is CCP, the producers of Eve Online. They have a MAC and Linux client, respectively on Cedega on the MAC (IIRC) and a specific Wine on Linux, and that seems to work quite well from what I've heard.
If software companies would work closer with the people that write these sort of 'emulators' (they're not really emulators in most cases, except for some specific routines), I think that would start to make a serious difference.
The other option is to go the Quake route, and just write your engine in such a way that it can run natively on other platforms, but that requires development effort from the start, something that up until recently wasn't exactly worth it for most companies.
We'll see what happens in the near future, but I'm afraid that the Winblows/DirectSux combination will be prevalent for a while longer yet.
If I had a screwdriver that would only work when I did 3 pirouettes, closed my eyes, and wiggled the fingers of my opposing hand before I used it to hammer a nail in.... Then yes.. Visual Basic would be a tool.
Ask him if mathematic formula are free, or if there was some crime behind them too...
I'm fairly sure that E=MC^2 should've been outlawed before they used that formula to bomb the hell out of 2 Japanese cities...
(I'm actually not sure whether this post should be sarcastic, cynical, anti-censorship, anti-law, or whatever. It becomes rather weird when you write something and you can't actually think of which category it should be in.. Ah well. Consider it cynical humour for the time being)
Also be very careful with not putting down *too* much experience.
Yes, at one point or another I've done projects in 3 different types of Assembly, I've done Pascal, Basic, C, C++, Modula 2. I have 20 years experience in basic sh scripting, I've been an early adopter of Perl, etc, etc.
You get the picture, I'm probably not that different from a lot of people here on Slashdot in that regard. But if you put all that on a resume in the US, the HR department will simply toss it out according to the "Yeah Right!" idea.
So you need to tailor your resume to what a company 'expects' of you more than to show them what nifty things you can do.
It's rather counter productive having to go through HR people that are absolutely clueless, and I'm glad I have a job where the 'HR people' are actually IT (I hate that term:) people themselves.
I'm imagining a game between two people determined by how much they spend on the game. Oh wait, they already did that with Magic The Gathering.
Which is exactly the reason why I only played Sealed Deck tournaments. They were tons of fun, and absolutely not money related in any way, shape or form.
Actually got a quite high standing in that as well way back in the day.
Nice piece of work there:) However I need to disagree on one thing:
"Bug" has a very specfic meaning. When you say you've "squashed a bug", there is very little doubt as to what you mean.
Yes, it was initially attached to a metaphor.
For some reason a lot of people seem to think it is a metaphore, when it really isn't. The term bug comes from early age computing (late 40's, begin 50's) when a lot of the actual components in a machine were relays. (Those clicky things).
When things broke down it was quite often because there was an actual bug squished between two poles of a relay, thus making it fail to make contact (meh, that was a horrible sentence, but you get the point)
In this case 'getting the bug out of the computer' was quite literally removing the dead beetle from a disfunctional relay. (And depending on how much current there was running through these things, sometime a rather scorched dead beetle:)
The same thing could happen when a bug accidentilly made a connection between 2 poles that shouldn't be making that connection (Yes, bugs can be conducting in certain scenarios).
All reasonably big datacenters I've ever worked on have a combination of raids, with hotswappable spares, in most cases a RAID 1/0 solution.
Also in terms of reliability, there are tons of ways to avoid double failures in drives. One of the easiest being to replace disks in a staggered fashion. Something that most major datacenters will do anyway.
MTBF suddenly becomes a whole lot less important.
I think you're overestimating the actual time/costs involved with replacing a disk as well. Good solutions will all be hot swappable, meaning you don't actually have any downtime, and you can switch out disks in a standardized solution in the time it takes you to walk to the actual disk cabinet.
All your reasons have basically already been addressed within any self respecting datacenter.
I agree however that for 'small' implementations, your arguments hold true, but they wouldn't have the enormous costs of cooling a large datacenter either.
I've read quite a bit about this whole idea of free cooling, and as far as I've been able to conclude, the basic premise is that the replacement cost for failures very much outweighs the costs for cooling it properly.
If you realize that the last decade or so, most components can easilly be overclocked with proper cooling, and will function quite well in a wide range of temperatures, it's not hard to imagine that operating temperatures of anywhere between -10C and +40C are generally fine for most equipment.
The only thing that would be affected, in the sense of less cleaning of air, would be movable parts components, like harddisks, fans, etc.
With the prices on HDDs and the ease of use and availability of any sort of RAID configuration you can think of, the actual costs for replacing these parts when they fail, could very well be a fraction of the costs that would be required to make them function 'properly'.
All in all it seems an economically very viable option, with the added advantage of using a lot less energy overall.
I know this isn't typical slashdottiness, but I actually read the article, and have some knowledge of telescopes in general. But since you won't believe me purely on my supposed knowledge, here's a quote from TFA:
Most liquid-mirror telescopes on Earth have used mercury. Mercury remains molten at room temperature, and it reflects about 75 percent of incoming light, almost as good as silver. The biggest liquid-mirror telescope on Earth, the Large Zenith Telescope operated by the University of British Columbia in Canada, is 6 meters across--
But still the original error message was not uncommon in A4 countries...
Actually, this specific error was most common in A4 countries, since it didn't actually refer to a paper tray being empty, but to a document being set up in paper format and there only being A4 paper in the tray.
Which is one of the many reasons why this error was so damn confusing. You get a document from the US (defaults to 'paper' or sometimes 'legal' size), try to print it in your non-US office, and this shows up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they're thinking in the right direction here.
It's all nice and well to be all powerful, but there are only a few thnigs that piss off (more or less serious) PvPers more than the 'gank' mentality. I hope they manage to balance it in such a way that actual skill makes a difference as well.
I've been looking forward to this game for quite a while, and most of what I've heard actually sounds promising and well thought out. I hope they can live up to our expectations, though.
I know that a lot of us have played Elite in the past, and there's always some sort of 'could-it-be' feeling when news about these sort of games come out.
Splut.
ps. No 'The One' jokes please :)
Let me mod you irrelevant.
Aw crap...
Take the bloody candle and leave me the hell alone, or I'll sue your ass for genocide!
(I always thought it was a bit odd 'Candle or Death'.. 'Uhm.. Death please'..)
It's there so you can find the dvd player in the dark to insert your porn DVDs. I thought that was blindingly obvious!
With their sinking boat you can still bail them over.
Actually. 3GB isn't as sweet a spot as people seem to assume.
In a system where you have 2 DIMM slots (eg a laptop), it's very much advisable to put in 4GB, being 2x2GB modules and still have dual-channel access to your memory.
Dual-channel doesn't work with DIMMs that are different in size.
For most 'normal' boards, this is the same. Using 4x1 or 2x2 is performance-wise better than using 1+2. The cost involved in this is negligible nowadays, so there's no reason not to do it, even if you do 'lose' 1G.
The 3GB limit also entirely depends on whether your system maps 1G to PCI/Graphics/etc. Some systems only map 512M, some 768, etc. So depending on that, you might actually end up with 3.5 or 3.25 usable.
Regards,
Splut
No. Because that would be comparing Lions and Rhinos.
I would replace 'even government' in this with 'especially government'.
Government is a pretty opaque collection of people with entirely too little safe guards and monitoring on them. A government for the people would be accountable to the people, and I think we all agree that's a utopian thought at the moment.
Oh hell no! Can you imagine the uniform of the Paris Hilton Police...
AAAARGH! I need to wash out my brain now. Thanks for that.... Bastard...
One of the main reasons things like WoW work in WINE is because Blizzard actually makes a decent effort to have their games run properly in OpenGL. You can run a WoW client in Windows in OpenGL as well, which in some cases actually solves some DirectX problems on some cards/computers.
Another example is CCP, the producers of Eve Online. They have a MAC and Linux client, respectively on Cedega on the MAC (IIRC) and a specific Wine on Linux, and that seems to work quite well from what I've heard.
If software companies would work closer with the people that write these sort of 'emulators' (they're not really emulators in most cases, except for some specific routines), I think that would start to make a serious difference.
The other option is to go the Quake route, and just write your engine in such a way that it can run natively on other platforms, but that requires development effort from the start, something that up until recently wasn't exactly worth it for most companies.
We'll see what happens in the near future, but I'm afraid that the Winblows/DirectSux combination will be prevalent for a while longer yet.
If I had a screwdriver that would only work when I did 3 pirouettes, closed my eyes, and wiggled the fingers of my opposing hand before I used it to hammer a nail in.... Then yes.. Visual Basic would be a tool.
Actually. Vinegar seems to work quite well for fruit flies :)
(My apologies, I couldn't resist :)
I'm fairly sure that E=MC^2 should've been outlawed before they used that formula to bomb the hell out of 2 Japanese cities...
(I'm actually not sure whether this post should be sarcastic, cynical, anti-censorship, anti-law, or whatever. It becomes rather weird when you write something and you can't actually think of which category it should be in.. Ah well. Consider it cynical humour for the time being)
Also be very careful with not putting down *too* much experience.
Yes, at one point or another I've done projects in 3 different types of Assembly, I've done Pascal, Basic, C, C++, Modula 2. I have 20 years experience in basic sh scripting, I've been an early adopter of Perl, etc, etc.
You get the picture, I'm probably not that different from a lot of people here on Slashdot in that regard. But if you put all that on a resume in the US, the HR department will simply toss it out according to the "Yeah Right!" idea.
So you need to tailor your resume to what a company 'expects' of you more than to show them what nifty things you can do.
It's rather counter productive having to go through HR people that are absolutely clueless, and I'm glad I have a job where the 'HR people' are actually IT (I hate that term :) people themselves.
Which is exactly the reason why I only played Sealed Deck tournaments. They were tons of fun, and absolutely not money related in any way, shape or form.
Actually got a quite high standing in that as well way back in the day.
Nice piece of work there :) However I need to disagree on one thing:
For some reason a lot of people seem to think it is a metaphore, when it really isn't. The term bug comes from early age computing (late 40's, begin 50's) when a lot of the actual components in a machine were relays. (Those clicky things).
When things broke down it was quite often because there was an actual bug squished between two poles of a relay, thus making it fail to make contact (meh, that was a horrible sentence, but you get the point)
In this case 'getting the bug out of the computer' was quite literally removing the dead beetle from a disfunctional relay. (And depending on how much current there was running through these things, sometime a rather scorched dead beetle :)
The same thing could happen when a bug accidentilly made a connection between 2 poles that shouldn't be making that connection (Yes, bugs can be conducting in certain scenarios).
So 'bug' was actually the physical beetle :)
ps. For some reason my blockquote screws up...
Well. It's not officially registered to a company, so your router doesn't exist.
From http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml :
Here are the results of your search through the public section of the IEEE Standards OUI database report for de-ad-be:
Sorry!
The public OUI listing contains no match for the query de-ad-be
Please back up to the search page and try again.
You're not thinking on a corporate scale there.
All reasonably big datacenters I've ever worked on have a combination of raids, with hotswappable spares, in most cases a RAID 1/0 solution.
Also in terms of reliability, there are tons of ways to avoid double failures in drives. One of the easiest being to replace disks in a staggered fashion. Something that most major datacenters will do anyway.
MTBF suddenly becomes a whole lot less important.
I think you're overestimating the actual time/costs involved with replacing a disk as well. Good solutions will all be hot swappable, meaning you don't actually have any downtime, and you can switch out disks in a standardized solution in the time it takes you to walk to the actual disk cabinet.
All your reasons have basically already been addressed within any self respecting datacenter.
I agree however that for 'small' implementations, your arguments hold true, but they wouldn't have the enormous costs of cooling a large datacenter either.
I've read quite a bit about this whole idea of free cooling, and as far as I've been able to conclude, the basic premise is that the replacement cost for failures very much outweighs the costs for cooling it properly.
If you realize that the last decade or so, most components can easilly be overclocked with proper cooling, and will function quite well in a wide range of temperatures, it's not hard to imagine that operating temperatures of anywhere between -10C and +40C are generally fine for most equipment.
The only thing that would be affected, in the sense of less cleaning of air, would be movable parts components, like harddisks, fans, etc.
With the prices on HDDs and the ease of use and availability of any sort of RAID configuration you can think of, the actual costs for replacing these parts when they fail, could very well be a fraction of the costs that would be required to make them function 'properly'.
All in all it seems an economically very viable option, with the added advantage of using a lot less energy overall.
Okay.... That title is just wrong, it immediately made me wonder what sort of talkshow this 'Focus' was where Jason was fried.
I guess that goes a long way towards Fried's philosophy as well :)
I know this isn't typical slashdottiness, but I actually read the article, and have some knowledge of telescopes in general. But since you won't believe me purely on my supposed knowledge, here's a quote from TFA:
And to add insult to injury (Uh Oh...): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Zenith_Telescope
Yeah... They'll never work. Mythbusters said so.
Pfew! Thankfully I've got autosave mode on.
!! General Einstein Failure Detected, Please Reboot Universe !!
Actually, this specific error was most common in A4 countries, since it didn't actually refer to a paper tray being empty, but to a document being set up in paper format and there only being A4 paper in the tray.
Which is one of the many reasons why this error was so damn confusing. You get a document from the US (defaults to 'paper' or sometimes 'legal' size), try to print it in your non-US office, and this shows up.
As the old saying goes:
Give a man a fire, and he will be warm for the rest of the night.
Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
Followed quite shortly I'm sure by a Motion to Smithe.