For what it does, the Cisco solution (Wide Area Application Services) is actually pretty affordable. It's more than just smoke and mirrors imho. Using DRE (Data Redundancy Elimination, a sort of digital shorthand), working outside the TCP spec for larger packet sizes (requires an appliance at each site) and as you mentioned, caching of local files, I've managed around a 2x increase in bandwidth efficiency since rolling it out across 5 locations. When I look at what it would actually cost to double my network connections at each location, it would literally take less than a year to pay for the WAAS rollout.
We also utilize Citrix (We publish a full desktop) and cost wise, you should really take a careful look at what the overall expense regarding Windows PCs vs cheap WYSE Winterms. Not to mention that I'm within arms reach of our computing environment at all times, and a couple of fairly well rounded IT guys can manage all of this (supporting hundreds of users) with a fraction of their day.
Honestly, once you get a decent Citrix farm setup (this is one of those times when its a *really* good idea to bring some decent consultants on board) it's really not much trouble at all.
If you have any questions about this, feel free to email me. I'd be more than happy to spend a few minutes looking at your environment to see if our setup would be useful to you.
Hope that helps,
National Purchase Diary. Most people that pay attention to these numbers don't know / care about that though.
The group tracks product sales and sells this information. Its pretty much recognized as the most respectible source of this type of information, but it isn't completely accurate. Walmart, for example, refuses to take part in NPD data collection.
All joking aside, I recently found out that somewhat older ipbase Catalyst images don't support it. You'll need to upgrade to ipbase w/ crypto if I understand correctly (I'm currently in the process of migrating everything from telnet -> SSH...).
I love Nintendo. I honestly do. I own multiple pairs of boxer shorts featuring Mario. I own both a DS and a Wii, with at least 10 titles for both.
You could get away with calling me a fanboy.
It is because of this that with great sadness that I make the following complaint. Why is Nintendo so hesitant to acknowledge, let alone correct glaring mistakes?
Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.
Admit that there is a storage problem with the Wii, and for the love of god at least say that a USB hard drive is in development. Tell us that games will be playable directly from SD.
This isn't rocket science, and it's not a recent issue.
Anyone else remember the great Mortal Kombat debacle? You know, the whole attitude that violent games don't belong on Nintendo systems? That really didn't work out so well for them, and so they've changed policy. It took years, but it happened.
This isn't "end of the world" stuff, but seriously. It's not that hard, and when your systems are practically printing money, you would think issues like this would get resolved. And ignorance isn't an issue; just as in this interview, and countless others, these issues are raised time and time again.
Hell, if they tossed an intern on customer satisfaction duty and had him read stories and comments on Joystiq, Slashdot, Kotaku, and Destructoid all day, it would do wonders for customer satisfaction, if only that feedback could somehow factor into decision making.
I still love you, Nintendo. We just need to have a talk.
Hrmm. 911 uses ANI, not your garden variety CID. I'm not saying it's impossible to spoof, but WAAAAAY harder and typically involves something being mis configured at your telco. ANI is also used to handle billing for 1-800 numbers, etc.
As an IT professional, I prefer the S60 series of devices over the iPhone hands down. Symbian has a whole slew of applications available for the platform, including Putty, Citrix, and RDP clients. My E61i has built in wifi, and Nokia has released a SCCP client (Cisco VoIP) that registers with my Cisco CallManager cluster as soon as I enter the building. Combine that with their full Intellisync package, and you've got the sexiest work phone ever. I'll grant you that the average cell phone user would have a better time with the iPhone, but for me it's Nokia all the way.
Also it seems extremely gimmicky in relation to the controller. Two of the mostly highly rated games, Wii Sports and Wario Ware Smooth Moves just aren't all that IMO. Wii sports is neat, and is fine for a little sports game, but I don't see anything special.
You're fairly unique in this respect, as Wii Sports isn't a pack-in in Japan, and it continues to sell well (36k as of the last week reported). At any rate, maybe it just isn't your cup of tea. I've enjoyed both titles immensely, and both are very group friendly. These are the kind of titles you pull out at parties, etc.
Take the tennis game for example. Yes, you swing the Wiimote rather than pressing a button, but that's all you are doing in effect. It doesn't measure the angle you swing at or anything, it is just timing. You hit at the right time and you get the ball to go where you want. This is the same thing you did with an older, button pressing style game, just using a different action. Interesting, but not something that really changes how games are played.
This is incorrect. It's not really your style of game, so I can see you not spending enough time to become more familiar with it, but here are some tips I pulled off an online forum that have helped me.
"Topspin: Rotate your wrist forward while swinging the remote forward (just as you would in regular tennis). This technique is particulary useful for getting good angles from the backcourt player because you can aim for sharper angles and with enough topspin the ball will still land in the court (just like regular tennis).
Backspin: Rotate your wrist backwards when making a swing. This isn't really a natural tennis movement... so, on the backhand, try holding the remote with your wrist twisted holding the face of the remote towards the screen. When you swing, move your wrist so that the back of the remote is facing towards the tv. Once you get this technique down you can add crazy sidespin, and really fast backspin so that the ball will quickly skip off the surface. This can fool the bots at lower difficulty.
Lobs: Move the remote in an upwards direction, lifting it. Good for defensive shots when you are recovering from an opponents high angled shots. It gives you more time to move back towards the middle (you'll notice bots using this technique when they get better). You can also use it for netplay to lob over the front court player into the back corner of the court."
Likewise Wario Ware seems like nothing but a giant controller gimmick. You do tons of rapid fire mini games (about 3 seconds a piece) that involve just figuring out what kind of motion they want you to make with the controller. You do it right, you win, do it wrong you lose. These are punctuated by extremely strange sound effects and visuals. Regardless, it doesn't seem like any real attempt to use the controller in an innovate way, just various gimmicks.
I'm actually a fan of the fast pace in WW. It keeps things lively, which makes it well suited for group environments. I don't think this is the type of gaming atmosphere that you seem to enjoy, so I can understand your criticism. I consider it one of my favorite titles, though.
We'll see where it goes from here, but thus far I don't see it really capturing the imagination, more I see it just putting out some silly gimmicks that people find fun. Nothing wrong with that, stupid fun is good fun, but that isn't the kind of thing that is likely to keep it going solid in the long run. After all, there's only so many controller gimmicks you can try before it gets old. What will sell me is when I see a good game that uses the controller to really enhance the experience. Something where I go "Nope, couldn't see this working well on a pad/mouse/keyboard/joystick/whatever." So far, I haven't seen that. Haven't had a change to play a whole lot of games yet but other than the gimmick games, the others seem to
Out of sentimental reasons, I had to reply. Back in the day, guitar tabs were literally the first thing I searched for.
OGLA was a good source, as were a number of other sites. It struck me as odd how I had been paying 20+ bucks then (more than the album cost!) for a book that contained tabs.
This was essentially the first time I realized the power of information sharing that the internet possessed.
BTW, OLGA was the Online Guitar Archive...
RIP, OLGA.
I evaluated Altiris and SMS, but in the end I went with EMCO's Remote Administration and Network Inventory. The nice thing about those is that it doesn't involve a client, and provides almost all of the stuff that Altiris would have. Regarding deployment, I went with the open source "Unattended", and it works like a champ.
The EMCO stuff also cost less than a 10th of what Altiris wanted.
I had originally typed I'll take Google over any day, but HTML formatting must have seen it as an invalid tag. I suppose I should have used the preview button o.O
Agreed. This is something often overlooked when there is a discussion about Google, but its willingness to develop on open standards for multiple platforms should serve as a model for the tech industry.
While a number of scenarios have dinged their "Do no evil" approach, I'll take Google over any day.
I'm not sure if you paid attention during the whole iPhone naming dispute between Cisco and Apple, but part of the resolution was a promise of interoperability between Cisco's corporate voice solution (CallManager) and Apple's iPhone.
While the Nokia E-Series (Cant wait for the E61i!) is going to offer a solution like this much sooner, its good to have options. Businesses would also not have as much of an issue with the iPhone pricing model.
I see integration with Corp PBX's as a HUGE untapped market, with nobody rushing to fill the void. I can't blame cellular companies for not wanting to enable someone to use their service less, though.
The surplus that was created to fuel holiday shopping has been exhausted. Considering the Wii is pretty much sold out everywhere, expect similar numbers until Nintendo opens additional production facilities.
I happen to think it was the best (and possibly most difficult) of them all...
What I find more curious is the price... When did NES games go up in price? I guess the VC is just cashing in on any nostalgia the movie might bring back.
At any rate, Download Successful!. I'll be afk for awhile now.
That the launch wasn't a sellout? This is going to sound rather trollish, but I'd like to know when the last time a major console *didn't* sell out during launch.
We could also take a look at the Japanese and American game sales for the month of February, if we were really looking for an indication of how things were going... It seems like in both counts, Nintendo consoles are responsible for 4 of the 5 titles.
Japanese Chart, 18th Mar 2007
1 Yoshi Island DS 132,750
2 World Puzzle Mojipittan DS 75,750
3 Monster Hunter Freedom 2 64,500
4 Wii Sports 35,750
5 Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village 35,500
American Chart, Feb 2007
1 Crackdown 461,000
2 Wii Play 406,250
3 Wii Sports 379,250
4 Diddy Kong Racing 280,250
5 Nintendogs 178,500
This is so obviously bad I'd declare shenanigans, but a whois reveals that the technical contact is:
Technical Contact:
Munn, Stacy
munnmultimedia
318 First Ave S
Apt 501
Seattle, WA 98104, US
Phone: 2063555916
Email: stacymunn@gmail.com
Who has the following listed on her resume...
Employment
Learning and Media Specialist March 2005 - current
Contractor at Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Design and produce user interfaces for multimedia training materials.
Design and develop interactive assessments with scoring and tracking capabilities.
Use ADDIE methodology to create learning content.
Publish courses and assessments to Voyager LMS.
Design PowerPoint templates for use in presentations and training deliveries.
Create and maintain Share Point site that serves as a portal for internal marketing training.
Record, optimize and integrate voice-over for rich media presentations.
Microsoft also did something along the same lines with their Power Together program, although the end result of that was a fully functional copy of Office or Vista. You actually had to watch a few webcasts (Hit play and go to sleep) but its essentially the same thing. I'll be getting a free copy of Vista as well as Solaris, but more as a novelty than anything on both counts.
It's not a matter of feeding data directly into our cabinet; (as you suggested) have that fed to a PLC. The situation is a bit different than described in the summary. The IDF is already in place, and the decision has been made to place a new furnace in this area. My options include moving the IDF, which would require an impossible amount of downtime, setting up a new IDF with identical equipment and run both in parallel, which is more expensive but tolerable regarding downtime, or "fireproofing" our current IDF.
I do realize it does sound a bit ridiculous, but this is Slashdot. Geeks make impossible things happen every day;)
Try searching on amazon.com, which, as an american, is where I do my shopping. The best you can manage is freelance stores selling for above retail value. I'm not sure why Japan has it so much better.
As an active word user in a mostly MS shop (The only linux you see runs oracle, which is almost funny considering that our DB stuff is our most mission critical) its actually pretty stable. The main problem I have is zombie processes in our Citrix farm... Cleaning out unused winword.exe's is pretty painful.
I could say the same for Acrobat, though. I guess great software is hard to find;)
Slashdot Mirror
For what it does, the Cisco solution (Wide Area Application Services) is actually pretty affordable. It's more than just smoke and mirrors imho. Using DRE (Data Redundancy Elimination, a sort of digital shorthand), working outside the TCP spec for larger packet sizes (requires an appliance at each site) and as you mentioned, caching of local files, I've managed around a 2x increase in bandwidth efficiency since rolling it out across 5 locations. When I look at what it would actually cost to double my network connections at each location, it would literally take less than a year to pay for the WAAS rollout.
We also utilize Citrix (We publish a full desktop) and cost wise, you should really take a careful look at what the overall expense regarding Windows PCs vs cheap WYSE Winterms. Not to mention that I'm within arms reach of our computing environment at all times, and a couple of fairly well rounded IT guys can manage all of this (supporting hundreds of users) with a fraction of their day.
Honestly, once you get a decent Citrix farm setup (this is one of those times when its a *really* good idea to bring some decent consultants on board) it's really not much trouble at all.
If you have any questions about this, feel free to email me. I'd be more than happy to spend a few minutes looking at your environment to see if our setup would be useful to you. Hope that helps,
Jason
National Purchase Diary. Most people that pay attention to these numbers don't know / care about that though.
The group tracks product sales and sells this information. Its pretty much recognized as the most respectible source of this type of information, but it isn't completely accurate. Walmart, for example, refuses to take part in NPD data collection.
Hope that helps.
But, my question is... does Cisco IOS support it?
All joking aside, I recently found out that somewhat older ipbase Catalyst images don't support it. You'll need to upgrade to ipbase w/ crypto if I understand correctly (I'm currently in the process of migrating everything from telnet -> SSH...).
I love Nintendo. I honestly do. I own multiple pairs of boxer shorts featuring Mario. I own both a DS and a Wii, with at least 10 titles for both.
You could get away with calling me a fanboy.
It is because of this that with great sadness that I make the following complaint. Why is Nintendo so hesitant to acknowledge, let alone correct glaring mistakes?
Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.
Admit that there is a storage problem with the Wii, and for the love of god at least say that a USB hard drive is in development. Tell us that games will be playable directly from SD.
This isn't rocket science, and it's not a recent issue.
Anyone else remember the great Mortal Kombat debacle? You know, the whole attitude that violent games don't belong on Nintendo systems? That really didn't work out so well for them, and so they've changed policy. It took years, but it happened.
This isn't "end of the world" stuff, but seriously. It's not that hard, and when your systems are practically printing money, you would think issues like this would get resolved. And ignorance isn't an issue; just as in this interview, and countless others, these issues are raised time and time again.
Hell, if they tossed an intern on customer satisfaction duty and had him read stories and comments on Joystiq, Slashdot, Kotaku, and Destructoid all day, it would do wonders for customer satisfaction, if only that feedback could somehow factor into decision making.
I still love you, Nintendo. We just need to have a talk.
Hrmm. 911 uses ANI, not your garden variety CID. I'm not saying it's impossible to spoof, but WAAAAAY harder and typically involves something being mis configured at your telco. ANI is also used to handle billing for 1-800 numbers, etc.
As an IT professional, I prefer the S60 series of devices over the iPhone hands down. Symbian has a whole slew of applications available for the platform, including Putty, Citrix, and RDP clients. My E61i has built in wifi, and Nokia has released a SCCP client (Cisco VoIP) that registers with my Cisco CallManager cluster as soon as I enter the building. Combine that with their full Intellisync package, and you've got the sexiest work phone ever. I'll grant you that the average cell phone user would have a better time with the iPhone, but for me it's Nokia all the way.
p hone">this review.
For a more humorous take on what I'm talking about, check out http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i
Also it seems extremely gimmicky in relation to the controller. Two of the mostly highly rated games, Wii Sports and Wario Ware Smooth Moves just aren't all that IMO. Wii sports is neat, and is fine for a little sports game, but I don't see anything special.
You're fairly unique in this respect, as Wii Sports isn't a pack-in in Japan, and it continues to sell well (36k as of the last week reported). At any rate, maybe it just isn't your cup of tea. I've enjoyed both titles immensely, and both are very group friendly. These are the kind of titles you pull out at parties, etc.
Take the tennis game for example. Yes, you swing the Wiimote rather than pressing a button, but that's all you are doing in effect. It doesn't measure the angle you swing at or anything, it is just timing. You hit at the right time and you get the ball to go where you want. This is the same thing you did with an older, button pressing style game, just using a different action. Interesting, but not something that really changes how games are played.
This is incorrect. It's not really your style of game, so I can see you not spending enough time to become more familiar with it, but here are some tips I pulled off an online forum that have helped me.
"Topspin: Rotate your wrist forward while swinging the remote forward (just as you would in regular tennis). This technique is particulary useful for getting good angles from the backcourt player because you can aim for sharper angles and with enough topspin the ball will still land in the court (just like regular tennis).
Backspin: Rotate your wrist backwards when making a swing. This isn't really a natural tennis movement... so, on the backhand, try holding the remote with your wrist twisted holding the face of the remote towards the screen. When you swing, move your wrist so that the back of the remote is facing towards the tv. Once you get this technique down you can add crazy sidespin, and really fast backspin so that the ball will quickly skip off the surface. This can fool the bots at lower difficulty.
Lobs: Move the remote in an upwards direction, lifting it. Good for defensive shots when you are recovering from an opponents high angled shots. It gives you more time to move back towards the middle (you'll notice bots using this technique when they get better). You can also use it for netplay to lob over the front court player into the back corner of the court."
Likewise Wario Ware seems like nothing but a giant controller gimmick. You do tons of rapid fire mini games (about 3 seconds a piece) that involve just figuring out what kind of motion they want you to make with the controller. You do it right, you win, do it wrong you lose. These are punctuated by extremely strange sound effects and visuals. Regardless, it doesn't seem like any real attempt to use the controller in an innovate way, just various gimmicks.
I'm actually a fan of the fast pace in WW. It keeps things lively, which makes it well suited for group environments. I don't think this is the type of gaming atmosphere that you seem to enjoy, so I can understand your criticism. I consider it one of my favorite titles, though.
We'll see where it goes from here, but thus far I don't see it really capturing the imagination, more I see it just putting out some silly gimmicks that people find fun. Nothing wrong with that, stupid fun is good fun, but that isn't the kind of thing that is likely to keep it going solid in the long run. After all, there's only so many controller gimmicks you can try before it gets old. What will sell me is when I see a good game that uses the controller to really enhance the experience. Something where I go "Nope, couldn't see this working well on a pad/mouse/keyboard/joystick/whatever." So far, I haven't seen that. Haven't had a change to play a whole lot of games yet but other than the gimmick games, the others seem to
Out of sentimental reasons, I had to reply. Back in the day, guitar tabs were literally the first thing I searched for.
OGLA was a good source, as were a number of other sites. It struck me as odd how I had been paying 20+ bucks then (more than the album cost!) for a book that contained tabs.
This was essentially the first time I realized the power of information sharing that the internet possessed.
BTW, OLGA was the Online Guitar Archive...
RIP, OLGA.
Whoever modded that troll should investigate where Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth gathered his wealth...
Jeez, anyone with a sense of humor around here?
Sounds great, maybe one of the Ubuntu guys can help? How about that one guy?
I evaluated Altiris and SMS, but in the end I went with EMCO's Remote Administration and Network Inventory. The nice thing about those is that it doesn't involve a client, and provides almost all of the stuff that Altiris would have. Regarding deployment, I went with the open source "Unattended", and it works like a champ.
The EMCO stuff also cost less than a 10th of what Altiris wanted.
I'm going to stop trying now...
I had originally typed I'll take Google over any day, but HTML formatting must have seen it as an invalid tag. I suppose I should have used the preview button o.O
Agreed. This is something often overlooked when there is a discussion about Google, but its willingness to develop on open standards for multiple platforms should serve as a model for the tech industry.
While a number of scenarios have dinged their "Do no evil" approach, I'll take Google over any day.
I'm not sure if you paid attention during the whole iPhone naming dispute between Cisco and Apple, but part of the resolution was a promise of interoperability between Cisco's corporate voice solution (CallManager) and Apple's iPhone.
While the Nokia E-Series (Cant wait for the E61i!) is going to offer a solution like this much sooner, its good to have options. Businesses would also not have as much of an issue with the iPhone pricing model.
I see integration with Corp PBX's as a HUGE untapped market, with nobody rushing to fill the void. I can't blame cellular companies for not wanting to enable someone to use their service less, though.
The surplus that was created to fuel holiday shopping has been exhausted. Considering the Wii is pretty much sold out everywhere, expect similar numbers until Nintendo opens additional production facilities.
I happen to think it was the best (and possibly most difficult) of them all...
What I find more curious is the price...
When did NES games go up in price?
I guess the VC is just cashing in on any nostalgia the movie might bring back.
At any rate, Download Successful!. I'll be afk for awhile now.
That the launch wasn't a sellout?
This is going to sound rather trollish, but I'd like to know when the last time a major console *didn't* sell out during launch.
We could also take a look at the Japanese and American game sales for the month of February, if we were really looking for an indication of how things were going... It seems like in both counts, Nintendo consoles are responsible for 4 of the 5 titles.
Japanese Chart, 18th Mar 2007
1 Yoshi Island DS 132,750
2 World Puzzle Mojipittan DS 75,750
3 Monster Hunter Freedom 2 64,500
4 Wii Sports 35,750
5 Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village 35,500
American Chart, Feb 2007
1 Crackdown 461,000
2 Wii Play 406,250
3 Wii Sports 379,250
4 Diddy Kong Racing 280,250
5 Nintendogs 178,500
This is so obviously bad I'd declare shenanigans, but a whois reveals that the technical contact is:
Technical Contact: Munn, Stacy munnmultimedia 318 First Ave S Apt 501 Seattle, WA 98104, US Phone: 2063555916 Email: stacymunn@gmail.com
Who has the following listed on her resume...
Employment Learning and Media Specialist March 2005 - current Contractor at Microsoft, Redmond, WA Design and produce user interfaces for multimedia training materials. Design and develop interactive assessments with scoring and tracking capabilities. Use ADDIE methodology to create learning content. Publish courses and assessments to Voyager LMS. Design PowerPoint templates for use in presentations and training deliveries. Create and maintain Share Point site that serves as a portal for internal marketing training. Record, optimize and integrate voice-over for rich media presentations.
Sigh. This is tacky, at best.
I didn't even know!
Microsoft also did something along the same lines with their Power Together program, although the end result of that was a fully functional copy of Office or Vista.
You actually had to watch a few webcasts (Hit play and go to sleep) but its essentially the same thing.
I'll be getting a free copy of Vista as well as Solaris, but more as a novelty than anything on both counts.
It's not a matter of feeding data directly into our cabinet; (as you suggested) have that fed to a PLC. The situation is a bit different than described in the summary. The IDF is already in place, and the decision has been made to place a new furnace in this area. My options include moving the IDF, which would require an impossible amount of downtime, setting up a new IDF with identical equipment and run both in parallel, which is more expensive but tolerable regarding downtime, or "fireproofing" our current IDF.
;)
I do realize it does sound a bit ridiculous, but this is Slashdot. Geeks make impossible things happen every day
Try searching on amazon.com, which, as an american, is where I do my shopping. The best you can manage is freelance stores selling for above retail value. I'm not sure why Japan has it so much better.
You will have a much harder time finding controllers for the Wii (Wii-mote or nunchuck) than finding an actually PS3 console. Think about it.
Also, if anyone knows where I can find Wii-motes or nunchucks for sale at non-gouging prices, let me know. Please.
As an active word user in a mostly MS shop (The only linux you see runs oracle, which is almost funny considering that our DB stuff is our most mission critical) its actually pretty stable. The main problem I have is zombie processes in our Citrix farm... Cleaning out unused winword.exe's is pretty painful.
;)
I could say the same for Acrobat, though. I guess great software is hard to find