I worked for a company that used this on all of our *NIX based servers. I never ran into too many problems as an end user and when I did they were easily fixed.
However, talking to our IT director, he said it was one of the biggest pains in the ass to administer. He was forced into using this system by the VP of Engineering, because said VP was an alum from CMU. The IT director wanted nothing more to switch over to an NFS/filer based solution.
This story describes what my life is like, only I don't test games, I test embedded software.
It's called Quality Assurance. And whether you are testing games, applications, or embedded software, the job is hard. You are supposed to think of every stupid thing that the customer can do and test out that scenario before the code is shipped.
60 hour weeks are normal, 100 hour weeks over 7 straight days is expected during crunch time.
The story could be re-written by replacing "game tester" with "QA guy" and it would equate to the same thing.
I don't doubt at all that there was plenty of beyond-questionable behavior in private companies.
I can attest to this.
I joined a startup fresh out of college with high hopes of a multi-million dollar IPO. Unfortunately this didn't happen and money started to run out.
But the staggering amount of money that the company got didn't seem be used very efficiently.
For example...
We had a VP of Sales who lived in NJ (the headquarters were in NH) and he took a limo to an from the airport every time he was in town.
The company revamped the lobby of the building to look more "professional". Rumor has it that it cost about 1 million. And the end result is that it looks like a strip club.
The VP of Engineering was (and still is) sleeping with the Director of HR. They were both married. (OK, that has nothing to do with money, but it is still shady!)
After leaving the company (I was let go), I started to hear all the dirt that stayed behind closed doors. I heard about the VPs taking huge bonuses every month, despite deadlines not being made and revenue not being generated. I even got wind of employees who were friends of said VPs getting substantial chunks of change.
I can only imagine what other monetary blunders and shady deals were made that I never heard about.
While I'm glad to hear of a big company to continue to fund an open source project, I still wish it were free (as in beer).:)
I think they should offer a slimmed down version of SO to those users who don't need all the bells and whistles. I would be happy with an office suite that had just a word processor and a spreadsheet program. I don't need much else.
If I can't find something like that to suit my needs, I would rather stick to everyone's favorite enemy, MS, than stick it to someone who is supporting the open source movement.
Did anyone else think that the direction for this year's show was horrible?
I only watched them for an hour or so, but in that hour I saw so many cheesy pans, misplaced shots, and missed action. They gave a humanitarian award to the guy directing the show, but it seemed to me that he was doing a horrible job.
I don't think there will be a large enough base of broadband users in the US by the time PS3 comes out to support this sort of architecture. Unless we start to see a trend of DSL and cable modem access providers not going under every six months, I believe we are more than a few years away from having a large enough broadband network to support this. Seeing how the majority of home Internet users still connect via narrowband modems, we have a ways to go.
But say we do have a large enough broadband network in place (or maybe people start bringing in their consoles to work in order to use their corporate LAN) by the time PS3 hits the street. Then Sony is betting on those same broadband users are going to be buying a PS3. While there is (and probably will be) a large amount of broadband users that buy the latest consoles, will there be enough to effectively harness the unused CPU cycles? Even then, you have to rely on people leaving their PS3s attached to the network and powered on.
Is this the vision of the future that Sony has? I think minimal distributed computing could be done in the console space, but I don't think it is the way to dramatically increase the amount of computing power for developers. Especially when games are typically becoming more graphic intensive, developers aren't going to want to gamble if there will be enough processing power on the network to render their polys.
To me, it seems there are too many chances that would have to be taken for Sony to effectively use the distributed computing model.
Having been a former AOL user (way back when:) I know the pains of their email system.
Like someone said earlier, it was designed for personal email use, not business. I don't know too many home Internet users (besides dumb executinves) who are trying to transfer large files via email.
Anyone who has used the Internet for more than a few months should have the sense to use a better protocol than SMTP to exchange files. Like FTP, hmmmm? Or go the next step and use SCP.
I can only imagine the tech support hell that the sysadmins over at AOL Time Warner went through during that phase.
If businesses that are swiping your ID and gathering all this kind of info from your license, wouldn't it constitute an invasion of privacy if they were to use that information without your consent and/or knowledge?
Thank God Jobs got off of his megalomaniacal pedestal for long enough to point the company in the right direction.
I've always loved Apple, being raised on them as a child. Only when I entered college and wanted to play the latest games did switch from a Mac to a Wintel platform. But I always had hope that Apple would somehow turn themselves around.
And, lo and behold, the seemingly permanent "interim" CEO has made leaps and bounds with the company.
With the influx of the various digital media into society, I find myself wanting a Mac more and more each day. With a new Mac equipped with FireWire, USB, and wireless (and a BSD-style kernel) I would be a very happy geek.
Anyone have a cool $2000 laying around that I could use to buy myself an iMac or iBook?;)
1) Interoperability. Test your stuff with other peoples' and make sure it works. If it doesn't, good luck selling it. This is the Internet way. Sometimes comes out very badly - viz. tons of not-quite-RFC-compliant mail servers...
Couldn't have said it better myself. I used to work for the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (www.iol.unh.edu) while I was a student at UNH. That lab is the interoperability mecca. They test hundreds of products each year from countless vendors for compliance to the major networking standards.
All the big netwokring players are there; Cisco, Nortel, 3Com, Intel, HP, etc., plus many smaller companies send their stuff their. They all strive for the IOL's stamp of approval because that usually means their product will work in any sort of mixed vendor environment.
I saw plenty of devices come into the lab right before they were ready to ship and we would turn over our results and they would have to delay their shipping until they fixed their problems. It's pretty amazing to see a product that claims to be "compliant to X standard" and see it perform like a bunch of monkeys wrote the code.
If I had to give advice to up-and-coming network hardware manufacturers, it would be to get your product tested for interoperability. If your product doesn't work with other companies products, you'll have a tough time selling them on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
http://biz.yahoo.com/cbsmb/051003/97ee9ea6268242b7 b7d004e11ebe8dcf.html?.v=1
I worked for a company that used this on all of our *NIX based servers. I never ran into too many problems as an end user and when I did they were easily fixed.
However, talking to our IT director, he said it was one of the biggest pains in the ass to administer. He was forced into using this system by the VP of Engineering, because said VP was an alum from CMU. The IT director wanted nothing more to switch over to an NFS/filer based solution.
Just my two cents.
This story describes what my life is like, only I don't test games, I test embedded software.
It's called Quality Assurance. And whether you are testing games, applications, or embedded software, the job is hard. You are supposed to think of every stupid thing that the customer can do and test out that scenario before the code is shipped.
60 hour weeks are normal, 100 hour weeks over 7 straight days is expected during crunch time.
The story could be re-written by replacing "game tester" with "QA guy" and it would equate to the same thing.
Are there any cameras available to the consumer market?
Besides the Sigma one?
That had to be the worst interview I've read on slashdot in a long time.
Not only were Shatner's responses VERY short, but sometimes they didn't even address the question asked (see #8).
Bill needs to stop pushing his books and priceline.com and pay a little more attention to his online fans.
-RageEar
I can attest to this.
I joined a startup fresh out of college with high hopes of a multi-million dollar IPO. Unfortunately this didn't happen and money started to run out.
But the staggering amount of money that the company got didn't seem be used very efficiently.
For example...
After leaving the company (I was let go), I started to hear all the dirt that stayed behind closed doors. I heard about the VPs taking huge bonuses every month, despite deadlines not being made and revenue not being generated. I even got wind of employees who were friends of said VPs getting substantial chunks of change.
I can only imagine what other monetary blunders and shady deals were made that I never heard about.
While I'm glad to hear of a big company to continue to fund an open source project, I still wish it were free (as in beer). :)
I think they should offer a slimmed down version of SO to those users who don't need all the bells and whistles. I would be happy with an office suite that had just a word processor and a spreadsheet program. I don't need much else.
If I can't find something like that to suit my needs, I would rather stick to everyone's favorite enemy, MS, than stick it to someone who is supporting the open source movement.
I just wish it was still free (as in beer).
Guess I have to go back to finding a copy of Office on one of the P2P networks.
I thought I heard the presenters of the award refer to the recipient as "our director".
Did I misinterpret this as "the director of the oscar show"? Were the presenters in a movie that was directed by the recipient?
I forget....
Did anyone else think that the direction for this year's show was horrible?
I only watched them for an hour or so, but in that hour I saw so many cheesy pans, misplaced shots, and missed action. They gave a humanitarian award to the guy directing the show, but it seemed to me that he was doing a horrible job.
This could be a big gamble on Sony's part.
I don't think there will be a large enough base of broadband users in the US by the time PS3 comes out to support this sort of architecture. Unless we start to see a trend of DSL and cable modem access providers not going under every six months, I believe we are more than a few years away from having a large enough broadband network to support this. Seeing how the majority of home Internet users still connect via narrowband modems, we have a ways to go.
But say we do have a large enough broadband network in place (or maybe people start bringing in their consoles to work in order to use their corporate LAN) by the time PS3 hits the street. Then Sony is betting on those same broadband users are going to be buying a PS3. While there is (and probably will be) a large amount of broadband users that buy the latest consoles, will there be enough to effectively harness the unused CPU cycles? Even then, you have to rely on people leaving their PS3s attached to the network and powered on.
Is this the vision of the future that Sony has? I think minimal distributed computing could be done in the console space, but I don't think it is the way to dramatically increase the amount of computing power for developers. Especially when games are typically becoming more graphic intensive, developers aren't going to want to gamble if there will be enough processing power on the network to render their polys.
To me, it seems there are too many chances that would have to be taken for Sony to effectively use the distributed computing model.
Is anyone surprised by this story?
:) I know the pains of their email system.
Having been a former AOL user (way back when
Like someone said earlier, it was designed for personal email use, not business. I don't know too many home Internet users (besides dumb executinves) who are trying to transfer large files via email.
Anyone who has used the Internet for more than a few months should have the sense to use a better protocol than SMTP to exchange files. Like FTP, hmmmm? Or go the next step and use SCP.
I can only imagine the tech support hell that the sysadmins over at AOL Time Warner went through during that phase.
That was a review?
/.
I would expect a little more meat to a review from someone at
How about some pros/cons? Or at least go into some more depth in one area.
For example, the idea of heroes is intriguing to me. What sort of skills do they possess or can learn? How does that help you in the game?
Anyone else agree?
If businesses that are swiping your ID and gathering all this kind of info from your license, wouldn't it constitute an invasion of privacy if they were to use that information without your consent and/or knowledge?
Thank God Jobs got off of his megalomaniacal pedestal for long enough to point the company in the right direction.
;)
I've always loved Apple, being raised on them as a child. Only when I entered college and wanted to play the latest games did switch from a Mac to a Wintel platform. But I always had hope that Apple would somehow turn themselves around.
And, lo and behold, the seemingly permanent "interim" CEO has made leaps and bounds with the company.
With the influx of the various digital media into society, I find myself wanting a Mac more and more each day. With a new Mac equipped with FireWire, USB, and wireless (and a BSD-style kernel) I would be a very happy geek.
Anyone have a cool $2000 laying around that I could use to buy myself an iMac or iBook?
Couldn't have said it better myself. I used to work for the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (www.iol.unh.edu) while I was a student at UNH. That lab is the interoperability mecca. They test hundreds of products each year from countless vendors for compliance to the major networking standards.
All the big netwokring players are there; Cisco, Nortel, 3Com, Intel, HP, etc., plus many smaller companies send their stuff their. They all strive for the IOL's stamp of approval because that usually means their product will work in any sort of mixed vendor environment.
I saw plenty of devices come into the lab right before they were ready to ship and we would turn over our results and they would have to delay their shipping until they fixed their problems. It's pretty amazing to see a product that claims to be "compliant to X standard" and see it perform like a bunch of monkeys wrote the code.
If I had to give advice to up-and-coming network hardware manufacturers, it would be to get your product tested for interoperability. If your product doesn't work with other companies products, you'll have a tough time selling them on the market.
Just my two cents.