I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you. But the machine was stylish and the aura of "eliteness" leaked from every vent grill. Onyxes, Octanes, Origins... They could be beat by a low-level GPU these days, but back then, they were wet dreams coming true.
I'm sad to see them go. Not surprised, but still a bit sad.
The graphics, hm, maybe. The freedom, yes, interesting. The depth and complexity, again, is only a brick in a larger wall. The usual "gamer values" all apply to this title, no doubts.
But still, what I found really astonishing during countless hours in Vvardenfell was the literature: the raw amount of "things to read" is per se staggering, but has also what I consider an extremely well done achievement, and done particularly well in Morrowind.
Every event of history has been recorded with the "natural" bias and spin of the writer and the faction recording it. It's filology and storiography at its best, and the authors needed to take uttermost care in proposing different viewpoints on "facts" that are invariably narrated by a biased narrator.
All the major events of the plots are written down in at least a couple of factions' "official version". And if you listen to each faction, each and every one of them is deeply convinced that their official version is THE only reasonable version.
And IMHO to discover what really happened is the true quest of the game. Deciding who's right and who's wrong. Or who is enough right for you to follow and enough wrong for you to fight against, is in itself a breathtaking experience. Like in real world, you have views on facts, never raw facts, to help you form your own opinion on what's your duty to accomplish.
I think this aspect alone - very often misunderstood and underestimated by gamers and reviewers - is what makes me put TESIII:Morrowind on the pedestal of best game ever.
The rest of more mundane achievements, technical or strictly gameplay oriented, are minor compared to this aspect, merely functional, if you wish, to the presentation of a world where the Truth is never only one.
I'm very, very glad this game and its expansions still work decently on my aging linux+cedega rig. Till I bought cedega, I kept a win partition only for it.
Simply put: when you become a publicly held company you have a responsibility to your shareholders. Until upper management learns this, their stock price is going to continue to decline sharply.
True indeed.
Unless shareholders (or at least the ones holding the majority of share) are ALSO the upper management.
You know, besides the obvious bait, you are right.
I have no purchasing authority whatsoever. I tailor the actual config and arrange for details.
The company (which sells a software that runs ONLY on Linux, on a very selected range of certified hw/sw platforms) decides to purchase other N servers for development that have been/will be paid by N hundred complete hw/sw solutions sold to customers.
I explicitly said that the investment app had to be OKed by Finance, and Finance isn't an OS advocate - their concern for bottom line is even stricter than our director's.
We don't have Windows solutions to sell, we have Linux ones to sell. But my role as liason between the company and the Dell Sales and Tech Rep' is to be extremely sure we don't pay a Microsoft tax - also because we usually wipe the drives upon arrival *anyway*.
In this light I'm very vocal about our Linux enviroment.
Not *MY* environment, but the company's one. They migrated to Linux some four years ago - I'm just an executor of someone else's purchasing authority. Which, luckily for me, picked Linux.
They're required by GPL to distribute the kernel mods if they distribute the kernel.
Somehow I doubt they need to give away the software, and as GPL allows, use the modified version "only internally" at the company.
That everyone with a net access over the planet can benefit of those "mods" is irrelevant. They aren't redistributing nor selling their modified kernel.
SSDs are actually pretty expensive piece of equipment. And for this reason, they're usually out of reach of "normal" sysadmins, i.e. "normal" datacenters, websites, high-volume and high-latency datawarehouses, offices, tech labs, etc.
I'm actually lucky to be testing one of such toys, a 16 GB, 4x2GBit Fibre Channel RamSan 320 (the one linked is a 325), made by Texas Memory Systems. (Disclaimer: neither me nor my company are related to them in any way. We're testing their equipment, evaluating a purchase.)
The price tag of this 2U rackmounted doorstopper is $40'000 (forty thousands) and change. For sixteen gigs!
128- and 256-GB units cost like small and not-too-small houses. Stackable racks up to 64 TB are sold only to governments. (Kidding, but not too much!;) )
People is crazy to buy storage at $2000+ per GB? Well, mainly yes, but these units aren't "storage" ones; it's unwise to use them as storage area - you'd put indexes here, views at most, not tables. The real point of SSDs isn't speed, which is at times even better than RAM, but it's latency. You can access ANY byte on the grid at the same speed, more or less regardless of what the app is doing in the meanwhile.
And support for concurrent access. It's perfect when the data to be accessed must be accessed from many "data users" at once (and with "at once" I mean dozens or hundreds of concurrent apps needing dynamica data, either for reading or writing!). Having four FC boards, each one with up to two ports, each one up to 4Gbit/sec in speed, each one linkable directly to a server OR in a fabric, means you aren't in presence of an 1:1 run of the mill SAN, but an N:M beast.
When you're a cell phone provider, and must know NOW if one of your 30 million users has credit on his phone to start the call he's making, you can't wait for a drive head to find the record on disk. Also because, most likely, another million users want to know the same information at the same time.
Consider these things as "database accelerators", for whenever your latency must be really, really low and your database must be shared between lots of consumers!
The market for SSD is a very limited one. But an humongously rich one, too.
Snatching 4GB for $500 is theft, if that's a real SSD SAN-able unit.
Thanks for reply and clarification. It's clearer. Alas, not much better. It means the brits didn't sack all the parliament (and government with it) at the next election... I guess there wasn't enough pissing going on. Either that, or the alternatives looked worse.
This isn't civil. It's also a little ignorant of British politics.
[...]
There's no realistic way to consider the results of the last election any kind of mandate for anything, especially as - thanks to an elected representatives first-past-the-post ballot system, no winning party has won 50% or more of the vote in my entire lifetime.
Yes, I'm ignorant of British politics. Thanks for the info. But then, you mean you're being governed by a group of people voted by the largest minority of people? (Just asking, really)
British governments are almost never the popular choice of the people:-| And this means that UK isn't a real democracy (as in greek's "power of the people")??? Damn, *now* I am confused. If your phrase means what I read in it, I find funny that UK wants to "export democracy" when its own country isn't ruled by the group (even coalition, if you want) with the absolute majority of votes.
Or rather, tragic. But I guess it depends on viewpoints.
Invading Afghanistan was a good thing, because it got rid of a bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits, regardless of whose fault it is that they were in power in the first place.
Invading Iraq would have been a good thing, if it had been done right, without lying about the reasons for it, because it got rid of a bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits, regardless of whose fault it is that they were in power in the first place.
These are your words, stated as they are hard facts. Ok, I disagree. In my opinion, after the attack of today, the "because it got rid of a bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits" is a good intent AND a failed result. And an illusion. You put in jail one (Saddam), and ten more spring out of nowhere. Where is Osama, by the way? Is he eligible of "murderous primitive fuckwit" label? We got rid of him? We got rid of the wrong bunch? The bunch we got rid of was too small? We should nuke everything between Israel and India?
"Getting rid of primitive, murderous fuckwits" is always a Good Thing (tm)
I concur. But if the events of today (like 3/11 in Spain) tell us something is that we did NOT get rid of that whole bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits as the world sheriffs would like us to think after their muscle flexing. Newsflash: they're alive and kicking, it seems. They just moved, dodged the bombs, and retaliated; and wasn't even hard to foresee. And learnt to be even more cautious and covert than before, if they ever needed that.
Expecting all-out war action without all-out terrorism reaction is either monumental idiocy on behalf of our governors (I doubt) or done intentionally to push some agenda (I have doubts on this too, but everyday less).
I just know we're next (Italy) in the list. And this gives me a slight unease feeling.
Sept. 11 happened without Iraq, the Morocco bombings happened without Iraq (Morocco? Arab/muslim country? Hello?), the Turkish synagogue bombing happened without Iraq, the Paris bombings happaned without Iraq, and many others did as well.
So, these things happened before and after the "war on terror". Then, where exactly was the benefit of going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq? Terror attacks didn't get better nor worse, according to you. The "mission accomplished", in fact, accomplished nothing, toward world security. So why exactly we "freed" Iraq? Ah, please, no crap about solidarity with the poor iraqi people or exporting democracy or WMD or any other lame excuse.
Dear brit friends, please accept my deepest sympathy.
But at the same time, are you still convinced that being GWB's lapdogs and "exporting democracy" and "war on terror" are the way to go? You just re-elected TB and confirmed your appreciation for his foreign politics. After Spain railroad bombing, you *really* didn't see that coming?
I'm italian, working for a danish company. We're (both) next on the list. I won't be surprised at all when our turn will come.
I think even bigger news is how the parent post reached new levels of stupidity.
The owner of the blog is a GIRL (you know what it means, right?). Her name is Edda, and she's the poster of the news everyone is commenting about.
The Lego kit is HER own. She built it with the help of HER boyfriend. He didn't need to convince her. She was very convinced from the start, since SHE is the geek.
No geek can be female, right? Nice world you live in. I hope you don't breed.
...To which he says, "I'll just tell 'em we don't know what happened yet"
Even worse:
Talking head: "ehi, engineering guy, what happened? in human readable terms, please" Engineering guy: "well, our post-crash data analisys led us to believe we have a minor problem" TH: "which one?" EG: "the software will shut everything down on all wednesdays, so we better avoid being attacked on weds'" TH: "I'll just tell 'em we don't know what happened yet"
Better question is why does the European Union SUPPORT this country?
You united staters want to be the only ones selling weapons to dictatorships and be paid with money still stained with blood? No way. We all want some part of that cake.
Some tanks here, some land mines there, personal firearms by the ton.
You know how your own country became the superpower it is? By weapons. And you want to stay alone in your ivory tower of impoverished uranium and investigation by torture? No way, sir. All the world wants to follow the leader, inspired by his grandiose lifestyles and shown-off richness.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you. But the machine was stylish and the aura of "eliteness" leaked from every vent grill. Onyxes, Octanes, Origins... They could be beat by a low-level GPU these days, but back then, they were wet dreams coming true.
I'm sad to see them go. Not surprised, but still a bit sad.
Erwin will need a new home...
Germans trying their best to keep US greedy hands at bay? That's a first in history! I'm shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED! :)
'Nuff said.
I see you're new here. :)
I think this is one of the best games ever.
The graphics, hm, maybe. The freedom, yes, interesting. The depth and complexity, again, is only a brick in a larger wall. The usual "gamer values" all apply to this title, no doubts.
But still, what I found really astonishing during countless hours in Vvardenfell was the literature: the raw amount of "things to read" is per se staggering, but has also what I consider an extremely well done achievement, and done particularly well in Morrowind.
Every event of history has been recorded with the "natural" bias and spin of the writer and the faction recording it. It's filology and storiography at its best, and the authors needed to take uttermost care in proposing different viewpoints on "facts" that are invariably narrated by a biased narrator.
All the major events of the plots are written down in at least a couple of factions' "official version". And if you listen to each faction, each and every one of them is deeply convinced that their official version is THE only reasonable version.
And IMHO to discover what really happened is the true quest of the game. Deciding who's right and who's wrong. Or who is enough right for you to follow and enough wrong for you to fight against, is in itself a breathtaking experience. Like in real world, you have views on facts, never raw facts, to help you form your own opinion on what's your duty to accomplish.
I think this aspect alone - very often misunderstood and underestimated by gamers and reviewers - is what makes me put TESIII:Morrowind on the pedestal of best game ever.
The rest of more mundane achievements, technical or strictly gameplay oriented, are minor compared to this aspect, merely functional, if you wish, to the presentation of a world where the Truth is never only one.
I'm very, very glad this game and its expansions still work decently on my aging linux+cedega rig. Till I bought cedega, I kept a win partition only for it.
Simply put: when you become a publicly held company you have a responsibility to your shareholders. Until upper management learns this, their stock price is going to continue to decline sharply.
True indeed.
Unless shareholders (or at least the ones holding the majority of share) are ALSO the upper management.
Which is the case with GOOG, Brin & Page.
You know, besides the obvious bait, you are right.
I have no purchasing authority whatsoever. I tailor the actual config and arrange for details.
The company (which sells a software that runs ONLY on Linux, on a very selected range of certified hw/sw platforms) decides to purchase other N servers for development that have been/will be paid by N hundred complete hw/sw solutions sold to customers.
I explicitly said that the investment app had to be OKed by Finance, and Finance isn't an OS advocate - their concern for bottom line is even stricter than our director's.
We don't have Windows solutions to sell, we have Linux ones to sell. But my role as liason between the company and the Dell Sales and Tech Rep' is to be extremely sure we don't pay a Microsoft tax - also because we usually wipe the drives upon arrival *anyway*.
In this light I'm very vocal about our Linux enviroment.
Not *MY* environment, but the company's one. They migrated to Linux some four years ago - I'm just an executor of someone else's purchasing authority. Which, luckily for me, picked Linux.
I'm the IT manager of a local branch of a 4000-employees worldwide company.
;)
I buy servers from Dell. Lots.
Our Dell servers never had anything but Linux installed because our main software products run on Linux.
Thursday I bought from Dell another 15'000,00 EUR worth of PowerEdges, after the investment applications have been OKed by the Finance.
Trust me, I was *very* vocal (as usual) about what kind of O.S. we would put it on. And at least in my case, they won't count as Windows sales.
Well, the dupe times are improving. This time, only three days.
4 0&tid=118
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/19/14262
They're required by GPL to distribute the kernel mods if they distribute the kernel.
Somehow I doubt they need to give away the software, and as GPL allows, use the modified version "only internally" at the company.
That everyone with a net access over the planet can benefit of those "mods" is irrelevant. They aren't redistributing nor selling their modified kernel.
Oh the irony!
:)
That display is in the BILL GATES building basement at Stanford...
Two things come to mind: "karma" and "thorn in the side".
SSDs are actually pretty expensive piece of equipment. And for this reason, they're usually out of reach of "normal" sysadmins, i.e. "normal" datacenters, websites, high-volume and high-latency datawarehouses, offices, tech labs, etc.
;) )
I'm actually lucky to be testing one of such toys, a 16 GB, 4x2GBit Fibre Channel RamSan 320 (the one linked is a 325), made by Texas Memory Systems. (Disclaimer: neither me nor my company are related to them in any way. We're testing their equipment, evaluating a purchase.)
The price tag of this 2U rackmounted doorstopper is $40'000 (forty thousands) and change. For sixteen gigs!
128- and 256-GB units cost like small and not-too-small houses. Stackable racks up to 64 TB are sold only to governments. (Kidding, but not too much!
People is crazy to buy storage at $2000+ per GB? Well, mainly yes, but these units aren't "storage" ones; it's unwise to use them as storage area - you'd put indexes here, views at most, not tables. The real point of SSDs isn't speed, which is at times even better than RAM, but it's latency. You can access ANY byte on the grid at the same speed, more or less regardless of what the app is doing in the meanwhile.
And support for concurrent access. It's perfect when the data to be accessed must be accessed from many "data users" at once (and with "at once" I mean dozens or hundreds of concurrent apps needing dynamica data, either for reading or writing!). Having four FC boards, each one with up to two ports, each one up to 4Gbit/sec in speed, each one linkable directly to a server OR in a fabric, means you aren't in presence of an 1:1 run of the mill SAN, but an N:M beast.
When you're a cell phone provider, and must know NOW if one of your 30 million users has credit on his phone to start the call he's making, you can't wait for a drive head to find the record on disk. Also because, most likely, another million users want to know the same information at the same time.
Consider these things as "database accelerators", for whenever your latency must be really, really low and your database must be shared between lots of consumers!
The market for SSD is a very limited one. But an humongously rich one, too.
Snatching 4GB for $500 is theft, if that's a real SSD SAN-able unit.
The vast, vast majority of Americans simply do not have any ability in any language other than English.
:)
More often than not, many of them lack also the ability in proper english.
Its/it's, your/you're, there/their, then/than, etc. anyone?
Creating a bootable CD-Rom just for a firmware update is a bit of a pain
Agree.
Bootable floppies are very easy
So are bootable USB keys. And you hardly hit an 1.44MB barrier, nowadays.
Thanks for reply and clarification. It's clearer. Alas, not much better. It means the brits didn't sack all the parliament (and government with it) at the next election... I guess there wasn't enough pissing going on. Either that, or the alternatives looked worse.
This isn't civil. It's also a little ignorant of British politics.
:-| And this means that UK isn't a real democracy (as in greek's "power of the people")??? Damn, *now* I am confused. If your phrase means what I read in it, I find funny that UK wants to "export democracy" when its own country isn't ruled by the group (even coalition, if you want) with the absolute majority of votes.
[...]
There's no realistic way to consider the results of the last election any kind of mandate for anything, especially as - thanks to an elected representatives first-past-the-post ballot system, no winning party has won 50% or more of the vote in my entire lifetime.
Yes, I'm ignorant of British politics. Thanks for the info. But then, you mean you're being governed by a group of people voted by the largest minority of people? (Just asking, really)
British governments are almost never the popular choice of the people
Or rather, tragic. But I guess it depends on viewpoints.
Invading Afghanistan was a good thing, because it got rid of a bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits, regardless of whose fault it is that they were in power in the first place.
Invading Iraq would have been a good thing, if it had been done right, without lying about the reasons for it, because it got rid of a bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits, regardless of whose fault it is that they were in power in the first place.
These are your words, stated as they are hard facts. Ok, I disagree. In my opinion, after the attack of today, the "because it got rid of a bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits" is a good intent AND a failed result. And an illusion. You put in jail one (Saddam), and ten more spring out of nowhere. Where is Osama, by the way? Is he eligible of "murderous primitive fuckwit" label? We got rid of him? We got rid of the wrong bunch? The bunch we got rid of was too small? We should nuke everything between Israel and India?
"Getting rid of primitive, murderous fuckwits" is always a Good Thing (tm)
I concur. But if the events of today (like 3/11 in Spain) tell us something is that we did NOT get rid of that whole bunch of murderous primitive fuckwits as the world sheriffs would like us to think after their muscle flexing. Newsflash: they're alive and kicking, it seems. They just moved, dodged the bombs, and retaliated; and wasn't even hard to foresee. And learnt to be even more cautious and covert than before, if they ever needed that.
Expecting all-out war action without all-out terrorism reaction is either monumental idiocy on behalf of our governors (I doubt) or done intentionally to push some agenda (I have doubts on this too, but everyday less).
I just know we're next (Italy) in the list. And this gives me a slight unease feeling.
Sept. 11 happened without Iraq, the Morocco bombings happened without Iraq (Morocco? Arab/muslim country? Hello?), the Turkish synagogue bombing happened without Iraq, the Paris bombings happaned without Iraq, and many others did as well.
So, these things happened before and after the "war on terror". Then, where exactly was the benefit of going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq? Terror attacks didn't get better nor worse, according to you. The "mission accomplished", in fact, accomplished nothing, toward world security. So why exactly we "freed" Iraq? Ah, please, no crap about solidarity with the poor iraqi people or exporting democracy or WMD or any other lame excuse.
Dear brit friends, please accept my deepest sympathy.
But at the same time, are you still convinced that being GWB's lapdogs and "exporting democracy" and "war on terror" are the way to go? You just re-elected TB and confirmed your appreciation for his foreign politics. After Spain railroad bombing, you *really* didn't see that coming?
I'm italian, working for a danish company. We're (both) next on the list. I won't be surprised at all when our turn will come.
I think even bigger news is how the parent post reached new levels of stupidity.
The owner of the blog is a GIRL (you know what it means, right?). Her name is Edda, and she's the poster of the news everyone is commenting about.
The Lego kit is HER own. She built it with the help of HER boyfriend. He didn't need to convince her. She was very convinced from the start, since SHE is the geek.
No geek can be female, right? Nice world you live in. I hope you don't breed.
Actually, no.
He died in 2002, a whopping 57 years after his "walk in the atomic park".
...To which he says, "I'll just tell 'em we don't know what happened yet"
Even worse:
Talking head: "ehi, engineering guy, what happened? in human readable terms, please"
Engineering guy: "well, our post-crash data analisys led us to believe we have a minor problem"
TH: "which one?"
EG: "the software will shut everything down on all wednesdays, so we better avoid being attacked on weds'"
TH: "I'll just tell 'em we don't know what happened yet"
Better question is why does the European Union SUPPORT this country?
You united staters want to be the only ones selling weapons to dictatorships and be paid with money still stained with blood? No way. We all want some part of that cake.
Some tanks here, some land mines there, personal firearms by the ton.
You know how your own country became the superpower it is? By weapons. And you want to stay alone in your ivory tower of impoverished uranium and investigation by torture? No way, sir. All the world wants to follow the leader, inspired by his grandiose lifestyles and shown-off richness.
honest citizens have no defense against dishonest citizens
See... We invented something, some time ago. Maybe you heard of it.
It's called "law". We also invented law enforcing armed groups. Probably you will have it mentioned in your country, some time or another.
Until then, I understand your need for daily gunfights. Have g^Hfun.
And who uses wget to download something from a website, anyway?
Uhm... What about every gentoo user when installs stuff thru emerge?