We are talking about hosting here, pure and simple. You rent a server, and that costs money. Oh you can get a 256mb VPS for next to nothing, but that is because that is cheap to setup. HD space, traffic, these are cheap to scale up. MEMORY is the killer for servers. If you want 4gb on a VPS, then that must be machine with X*4gb for every VPS that runs on it, and memory scales badly with price. 16gb is NOT 4x4gb price.
So, how are they going to run what is effectively a PC for 14.95 a month? How are you going to fit a 1gb vid card and 2gb memory and a dualcore in a rack and not get killed by the location costs alone? Especially since they got to run windows for each server.
Now, they can save some costs because not to many people will game 24/7, so they can share the same server across multiple accounts BUT because they themselves admit you MUST be within a certain distance from the server, they will also have a lot of low times, when people are not playing but their servers are taking up space and getting old.
And the fee is X for the box, 14.95 for the subscription, 30 for the internet connection and then you still don't have any actual games...
And lets see, 299 for a regular console. Substract the box price, leaves 250. That is just 16 months before you break even. You then own your regular console, and have absolutely NOTHING with this service.
No, it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it is going to work. The hardcore gamers want the performance of the local hardware and for the casual gamers, paying a fixed fee every month, having to buy a piece of hardware, extra fees for the games... that is just to much hassle.
The problem is that trains need people on board who in general want to breath, spoiled brats they are.
So, the train would need an oxygen supply on board, added weight and explosion risk and a LOT of oxygen because people do a lot of breathing. It would also need to scrub the CO2 out, because it is after all a closed system.
Then the train needs to enter a normal area to let people in and out without explosive decompression.
It can be done, but is just not worth the hassle, especially when aerodynamics don't matter all that much for a train. The nose after all is only a small part of a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG train. The carriages don't add much to wind resistance, you can in a way decrease air-resistance per carried passenger by just carrying more passengers.
Being a boss is easy, there are only two kind of employees. Lazy ones, who will slack of any chance they get and perform at best at a level just above firing, and good employees who take pride in their job.
It will cost a fortune to turn a lazy one into a good one. It will save you money to turn a good one into a lazy one, in the short term. It is easy, just keep cutting benefits, breaks, perks and up the work load while micro-managing them to hell.
But most managers/bosses feel they need to earn their keep by showing they are making the people work the hardest. If you spend the money of those kind of managers and their bag of tricks on salary, you would be able to hire the absolute best and have people fighting to stay with your company. Go ahead, offer a cleaner 50% above average wage. No problems filling vacancies, no need to watch their every move and you get motivated employees who got a reason not to exchange you the moment they a chance. Because even cleaning staff builds up a lot of knowledge you can't easily replace with the Xth temp because your turn-over rate is 100%.
By all means, you go tech to try to manage those who can only earn the lowest wages, I pay a bit more and get the cream. In the end, I know who is more efficient.
Those scumbags had a documentary on fat in our food and how we as humans have evolved because of it and become very good at eating very fatty food. And they showed it all with constant displays of fat food... succulent beef, silky smooth chocolate, whipped cream, bacon and eggs... I gained ten pounds just watching and at the end ate my remote control.
On the whole, I have to say they got a point. Fat tastes good. Some animals have learned to eat/detect certain muds because they need the minerals in them. Our brain needs fat to fuel itself, so we have learned to tast fat.
Now if you excuse me, I got to devour a liter of icecream... mmm.
It is confusing isn't it, the decimal system. That is what you get for placing a lot of NASA in the american south, where the number of digits on your hands is more a random number then a static figure.
I agree it has nothing to do with Android, but that case had most certainly something to do with Apple. They use those crappy manufacturing facilities to save a few bucks and then save even more by not doing proper QA.
And before you claim how innocent and harmless this is, consider what is happening to Toyota. Or the numerous quality issues with products from China and god knows how many more places. In order to maximize profits (because you can't claim cost savings are passed onto to the consumer with Apple products) they cut corners everywhere and sooner or later something has to give.
And long after guy who got the bonus for cutting costs has left, the shit starts to happen. Toyota used to be the largest and fast growing, with the economy not affecting it nearly as much as the other car makers. Now it can't shift its cars. And the money for huge cash injections has already been spent. This might end up hurting Toyota, and for what? A few cents more to the stock holders.
It will be interesting to find out how this phone got its extra payload, but ultimately the story will be, lack of quality control. And someday your life may depend on cut rate QA.
AMD capable motherboards tend to be a lot cheaper, that can easily save you enough money on a highly capable gaming system to replace the HD with an SSD, and that will have far more influence on game performance then the Intel chip will. In gaming, AMD performs a lot better. Always make sure to read the entire review of a CPU for the stats that are relevant to you. For instance, if you once in a blue moon use Office and never use a database on your PC, what do you care about how fast/slow your CPU is at them?
Simply sell me a bootable CD, that boots the game on the PC in its own environment. Release a supported hardware list and I will simply buy from that. Do that anyway for linux. I have no particular need to run games on my linux desktop, just on the same hardware.
I have hopes that Valve might one day do something for Linux. If they get good experiences with this, then they might just do a cost analysis "how much does it really cost to make our build system do a linux version" and see where it leads. Don't forget that game servers are often linux based, so the FPS market is not entirely unfamiliar with coding for Linux.
Frankly, anyone who is going to use Opera, knows that there are no ads in it for over half a decade now. That you are so badly informed says more about you then Opera.
Do you also refuse to use Windows because of its ME taint?
The TV station does not know whether you switch and neither does the advertiser, so the ad space is sold by viewer averages for the program/hour and any fall-off is just accepted as the way TV-ads work.
But on the net, you can measure eyeballs, and so advertisers have become obsessed with counting eyeballs.
When a tv ad goes out, the only way to measure its success is to see if the product sells, and of course those sales might be unrelated to the ad.
But when you run a internet ad, you CAN in real time track it, all the way from how many view it, from which sites to who arrives at your site. And this creates a drive in advertisers to attempt to maximize this in ways that they would not consider with tv-ads. Maybe it is also a budget thing, internet ads are typically low budget affairs. The Coca-cola's of this world don't bother with overly annoying ads because they got the resources to produce ads that people love to see.
But some cheapo company WANTS to see his conversion rates increase and hey, if they can't help but see it, they must click on it right?
You are modded Funny, but this is EXACTLY what has been happening AND has been done with DVD already. VHS (and other tapes for the anal) used to have only a warning in front (which shows you roughly how content owners think, only people with legal copies are warned, which is like using a speed camera to record everyone travelling the legal limit and then sending them a reminder not to speed) and any ads at the end. Then they moved to the front, forcing you to fast-forward to the start of the movie.
With DVD, you can often no longer skip past them... and DVR's have been outfitted with methods for content owners to forbid their recording AND forced ad watching.
Ads have become so intrusive, so ever present that you have to block them to preserve your sanity. I no longer listen to radio, it is 5 minutes before an 5 minutes after and the ads are getting more inane every day.
And ars is full of it, it has got bloody annoying ads all the time for the longest time.
Ad blocking is an all or nothing affair. Once I have been pushed to install it, configure it etc, I am NOT going to switch it off to see if maybe this site is using decent low annoyance ads. Everything gets blocked.
And frankly, I don't care if they bankrupt because of it. You do NOT have the right to annoy me.
What Americans and right wingers don't get, is that some people prefer a humane society over low taxes in a hellish environment were there is a dollar amount for every human life.
Some of us value humans more then money. You clearly do not. To bad. Maybe one day you will decide to join the human race. Usually about the time when it is your life that is being represented by a dollar amount.
You get a lot of recommendations here, but people tend to just blurt out the flavor of the hour they are using without considering the essential motto of any proffesional, "the right tool for the job".
Simplest, do you need SSH access? I once maintained servers with absolutely no remote access capability of any kind. Didn't need to, lived within 5 minutes of the hosting location and simply worked from there. Saves a LOT of security hassle when only physical access can be used on a server. Most likely not possible, but I hope it does show that you must THINK about what is needed/possible in your situation.
For instance, moving the SSH port. It is possible, security through obscurity at its finest, but how will it affect your customers? If you then got to deal with endless service calls to explain the non-standard port, or worse, client software can't handle alternate ports, then it is not the right tool.
An alternative to this is switching the IP. Nothings says that the IP used to access the webserver must be the same as the one used to access SSH. Again security through obscurity, but it might help.
Also, there is no law that says every machine should be remotely accesible. If you got a lot of servers, why not create an Admin box? It can connect through all the servers over the internal network, but the world facing servers got no outside admin connections. Yes, if the Admin server is borked, you are in trouble, but I found that people in the name of "Shit might happen" open themselves up to a lot more shit.
An other simple approach is to block parts of the world that you don't expect legit connections to come from. If you are never in China and neither are your customers, why would you allow China to connect to port 22? Just remember that you got such a block in place before you book your holiday in Hong Kong.
An even simpler approach is to block root from using SSH, and then use only somewhat unique account names. You need two parts to login to SSH. Brute forcing passwords is only half the job unless I have been missing something all these years.
And on the whole, 1 million failed login's is a good thing. It is the successful login that you should worry about.
Now call me a suspicious old man, but somehow I think this decision to give up the money was a LOT easier because you still got a real salary coming in?
How would it have been if hers was the only salary?
No, some people indeed don't do it for the money. They are rare, not enough to teach a nation.
The parents: And that is already a complex group, because you got:
The interested: These think they know better what is good for their kids then the school. Some are right, most are dead wrong. But in a class of 30+ kids, you will have some parents who love to tell you their job. For the/.ers this is the boss who can open IE, who will tell you how to run a server.
The dis-interested: See school as little more then a daycare. Get these kids out of my house. You might be amazed by how little parenting some kids get. And yes, some can be reached but you are not renaissance man. You got several dozen students and just don't have the time or even the training to drill down to each and everyone of them to see what their problem is. But don't worry, anyone else can tell you how easy it is, because they seen it in a 1.5 hour movie.
The nut-cases: Oh yeah, everything from the "my kid should not be thought about evolution/sex/different races/ww2" to the "my kid is a genius and you gave him an F because he ate the test-paper, I am going to kill you".
The students: Everything from the brain-dead to the occasional genius but also from the criminally insane to the... actually no, that is all they are. All of society tells them they are free individuals and you need them to sit still for an hour and be measured. Go to fast and the dimwitted kids start to riot, to slow and the smart kids take their turn.
The politicians: Who always see education as a way to cut costs while at the same time introducing some new "fix-all" method who implementation costs have to come out of the existing budget that is still paying for the previous governments pet project.
The system: Schools are not like private industry, you can't really measure performance because if you did, you would be upsetting all the stupid parent/teachers who get graded "waste of space". Pay teachers according to their performance and none will teach your brain-dead spawn from hell. If you are rated per car your repair, you are not going to fix the clunker are you? You replace the wind-shield wipers on the Bentley and collect your bonus.
And finally the teachers themselves: Most start with big dreams that they will reach some kid and make him shine, and then they get into the system where hundreds of kids pass you by before you can blink your eyes and you are spending most of your time just trying to keep things from collapsing, all with a pay that is well below industry standards.
And all the time, teachers see those who take their teaching talent to private industry make several times their pay, with none of the hazards of getting some parent upset or a student who desides to file charges because daddy touched them.
No, if you want to fix education, you got to make a drastic cleaning action.
Misbehaving kids, out of the classroom. yes, that means your little precious who kills kittens but he doesn't mean any harm.
Trim down the management. Less time wasting, more teaching.
Smaller classes, if you want kids to get personal attention, you must ensure there is time to do this.
Pay wages that compete with private industry. If nothing else, tax private industry wages to pay for it. Yeah, that is going to go overly well.
Allow teachers to function at their level. There are plenty of good subject teachers but who can't maintain discipline and others who can maintain discipline, but can't teach advanced classes. So give them the class they can teach. You don't send you guru programmer to talk to the customer do you?
Stop scale enlargement: Most education has been constantly changing, with teachers having no time to read the latest method before it is obsolete again. Adding constant re-orgs to that doesn't help.
And finally, except that education is a wasteful method. You throw in kids and money at one end and hope that 20-30 years later this start
If you can do, why on earth would you settle for a teachers salary?
And I notice that so far, the simplest rememdy, pay more, goes unexplored.
You pay peanuts, you get monkey's.
I have worked with a lot of ex-teachers, who now do things like IT-training, they make several times what they would make in front of a class-room filled with kids, so why would they do it?
The free food sample, that has extra chemicals to leave a nasty after taste.
The test drive, where parts of the car keep fall off the further your drive.
Or the 1st date where she becomes ever more like her mother as the hours pass.
A movie trailer, that gets more inane each time you see it. Ads that become ever more insulting to your intelligene... oh wait.
But why stop there? This is small time stuff. I say we actively seek out anyone considering buying our game and giving them a sound beating. That should teach them.
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We are talking about hosting here, pure and simple. You rent a server, and that costs money. Oh you can get a 256mb VPS for next to nothing, but that is because that is cheap to setup. HD space, traffic, these are cheap to scale up. MEMORY is the killer for servers. If you want 4gb on a VPS, then that must be machine with X*4gb for every VPS that runs on it, and memory scales badly with price. 16gb is NOT 4x4gb price.
So, how are they going to run what is effectively a PC for 14.95 a month? How are you going to fit a 1gb vid card and 2gb memory and a dualcore in a rack and not get killed by the location costs alone? Especially since they got to run windows for each server.
Now, they can save some costs because not to many people will game 24/7, so they can share the same server across multiple accounts BUT because they themselves admit you MUST be within a certain distance from the server, they will also have a lot of low times, when people are not playing but their servers are taking up space and getting old.
And the fee is X for the box, 14.95 for the subscription, 30 for the internet connection and then you still don't have any actual games...
And lets see, 299 for a regular console. Substract the box price, leaves 250. That is just 16 months before you break even. You then own your regular console, and have absolutely NOTHING with this service.
No, it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it is going to work. The hardcore gamers want the performance of the local hardware and for the casual gamers, paying a fixed fee every month, having to buy a piece of hardware, extra fees for the games... that is just to much hassle.
The problem is that trains need people on board who in general want to breath, spoiled brats they are.
So, the train would need an oxygen supply on board, added weight and explosion risk and a LOT of oxygen because people do a lot of breathing. It would also need to scrub the CO2 out, because it is after all a closed system.
Then the train needs to enter a normal area to let people in and out without explosive decompression.
It can be done, but is just not worth the hassle, especially when aerodynamics don't matter all that much for a train. The nose after all is only a small part of a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG train. The carriages don't add much to wind resistance, you can in a way decrease air-resistance per carried passenger by just carrying more passengers.
Being a boss is easy, there are only two kind of employees. Lazy ones, who will slack of any chance they get and perform at best at a level just above firing, and good employees who take pride in their job.
It will cost a fortune to turn a lazy one into a good one. It will save you money to turn a good one into a lazy one, in the short term. It is easy, just keep cutting benefits, breaks, perks and up the work load while micro-managing them to hell.
But most managers/bosses feel they need to earn their keep by showing they are making the people work the hardest. If you spend the money of those kind of managers and their bag of tricks on salary, you would be able to hire the absolute best and have people fighting to stay with your company. Go ahead, offer a cleaner 50% above average wage. No problems filling vacancies, no need to watch their every move and you get motivated employees who got a reason not to exchange you the moment they a chance. Because even cleaning staff builds up a lot of knowledge you can't easily replace with the Xth temp because your turn-over rate is 100%.
By all means, you go tech to try to manage those who can only earn the lowest wages, I pay a bit more and get the cream. In the end, I know who is more efficient.
Those scumbags had a documentary on fat in our food and how we as humans have evolved because of it and become very good at eating very fatty food. And they showed it all with constant displays of fat food... succulent beef, silky smooth chocolate, whipped cream, bacon and eggs... I gained ten pounds just watching and at the end ate my remote control.
On the whole, I have to say they got a point. Fat tastes good. Some animals have learned to eat/detect certain muds because they need the minerals in them. Our brain needs fat to fuel itself, so we have learned to tast fat.
Now if you excuse me, I got to devour a liter of icecream... mmm.
It is confusing isn't it, the decimal system. That is what you get for placing a lot of NASA in the american south, where the number of digits on your hands is more a random number then a static figure.
MS apologists and Apple fanboys teaming up together... now if only he said something nasty about linux, the rage would be complete.
Do you have a "pay once" internet connection. No you don't. Pay once cable? No you don't. Pay once newspaper? No you don't.
But somehow a game that you can play for years running on expensive servers with 24/7 support, must be paid once.
Gosh, for services, you pay per month. What a novel concept.
I agree it has nothing to do with Android, but that case had most certainly something to do with Apple. They use those crappy manufacturing facilities to save a few bucks and then save even more by not doing proper QA.
And before you claim how innocent and harmless this is, consider what is happening to Toyota. Or the numerous quality issues with products from China and god knows how many more places. In order to maximize profits (because you can't claim cost savings are passed onto to the consumer with Apple products) they cut corners everywhere and sooner or later something has to give.
And long after guy who got the bonus for cutting costs has left, the shit starts to happen. Toyota used to be the largest and fast growing, with the economy not affecting it nearly as much as the other car makers. Now it can't shift its cars. And the money for huge cash injections has already been spent. This might end up hurting Toyota, and for what? A few cents more to the stock holders.
It will be interesting to find out how this phone got its extra payload, but ultimately the story will be, lack of quality control. And someday your life may depend on cut rate QA.
Only non-blood related titties are allowed as evidence. Sorry American southerners.
AMD capable motherboards tend to be a lot cheaper, that can easily save you enough money on a highly capable gaming system to replace the HD with an SSD, and that will have far more influence on game performance then the Intel chip will. In gaming, AMD performs a lot better. Always make sure to read the entire review of a CPU for the stats that are relevant to you. For instance, if you once in a blue moon use Office and never use a database on your PC, what do you care about how fast/slow your CPU is at them?
Rounded corners are part of CSS3 and Webkit and Mozilla support it.
Oh and even the largest javascript libraries come in at 100kb, so where do you get 5mb from? Went trolling for it perhaps?
So, next time you complain, check your facts and use a real browser. Not the joke browser that came with your joke OS on your dad's Dell.
Simply sell me a bootable CD, that boots the game on the PC in its own environment. Release a supported hardware list and I will simply buy from that. Do that anyway for linux. I have no particular need to run games on my linux desktop, just on the same hardware.
I have hopes that Valve might one day do something for Linux. If they get good experiences with this, then they might just do a cost analysis "how much does it really cost to make our build system do a linux version" and see where it leads. Don't forget that game servers are often linux based, so the FPS market is not entirely unfamiliar with coding for Linux.
You know no gamers with a Mac, but claim to know that Mac owners pirate games. How do you know?
Frankly, anyone who is going to use Opera, knows that there are no ads in it for over half a decade now. That you are so badly informed says more about you then Opera.
Do you also refuse to use Windows because of its ME taint?
For how long does Disney keep the right to its products? Infinity+? You seem not even to consider a limit, says it all for your sort.
The TV station does not know whether you switch and neither does the advertiser, so the ad space is sold by viewer averages for the program/hour and any fall-off is just accepted as the way TV-ads work.
But on the net, you can measure eyeballs, and so advertisers have become obsessed with counting eyeballs.
When a tv ad goes out, the only way to measure its success is to see if the product sells, and of course those sales might be unrelated to the ad.
But when you run a internet ad, you CAN in real time track it, all the way from how many view it, from which sites to who arrives at your site. And this creates a drive in advertisers to attempt to maximize this in ways that they would not consider with tv-ads. Maybe it is also a budget thing, internet ads are typically low budget affairs. The Coca-cola's of this world don't bother with overly annoying ads because they got the resources to produce ads that people love to see.
But some cheapo company WANTS to see his conversion rates increase and hey, if they can't help but see it, they must click on it right?
You are modded Funny, but this is EXACTLY what has been happening AND has been done with DVD already. VHS (and other tapes for the anal) used to have only a warning in front (which shows you roughly how content owners think, only people with legal copies are warned, which is like using a speed camera to record everyone travelling the legal limit and then sending them a reminder not to speed) and any ads at the end. Then they moved to the front, forcing you to fast-forward to the start of the movie.
With DVD, you can often no longer skip past them... and DVR's have been outfitted with methods for content owners to forbid their recording AND forced ad watching.
Ads have become so intrusive, so ever present that you have to block them to preserve your sanity. I no longer listen to radio, it is 5 minutes before an 5 minutes after and the ads are getting more inane every day.
And ars is full of it, it has got bloody annoying ads all the time for the longest time.
Ad blocking is an all or nothing affair. Once I have been pushed to install it, configure it etc, I am NOT going to switch it off to see if maybe this site is using decent low annoyance ads. Everything gets blocked.
And frankly, I don't care if they bankrupt because of it. You do NOT have the right to annoy me.
What Americans and right wingers don't get, is that some people prefer a humane society over low taxes in a hellish environment were there is a dollar amount for every human life.
Some of us value humans more then money. You clearly do not. To bad. Maybe one day you will decide to join the human race. Usually about the time when it is your life that is being represented by a dollar amount.
You get a lot of recommendations here, but people tend to just blurt out the flavor of the hour they are using without considering the essential motto of any proffesional, "the right tool for the job".
Simplest, do you need SSH access? I once maintained servers with absolutely no remote access capability of any kind. Didn't need to, lived within 5 minutes of the hosting location and simply worked from there. Saves a LOT of security hassle when only physical access can be used on a server. Most likely not possible, but I hope it does show that you must THINK about what is needed/possible in your situation.
For instance, moving the SSH port. It is possible, security through obscurity at its finest, but how will it affect your customers? If you then got to deal with endless service calls to explain the non-standard port, or worse, client software can't handle alternate ports, then it is not the right tool.
An alternative to this is switching the IP. Nothings says that the IP used to access the webserver must be the same as the one used to access SSH. Again security through obscurity, but it might help.
Also, there is no law that says every machine should be remotely accesible. If you got a lot of servers, why not create an Admin box? It can connect through all the servers over the internal network, but the world facing servers got no outside admin connections. Yes, if the Admin server is borked, you are in trouble, but I found that people in the name of "Shit might happen" open themselves up to a lot more shit.
An other simple approach is to block parts of the world that you don't expect legit connections to come from. If you are never in China and neither are your customers, why would you allow China to connect to port 22? Just remember that you got such a block in place before you book your holiday in Hong Kong.
An even simpler approach is to block root from using SSH, and then use only somewhat unique account names. You need two parts to login to SSH. Brute forcing passwords is only half the job unless I have been missing something all these years.
And on the whole, 1 million failed login's is a good thing. It is the successful login that you should worry about.
Now call me a suspicious old man, but somehow I think this decision to give up the money was a LOT easier because you still got a real salary coming in?
How would it have been if hers was the only salary?
No, some people indeed don't do it for the money. They are rare, not enough to teach a nation.
Because nowhere in your recommendations do you acknowledge the pay gap between private and public education.
None of the those private teachers apparently managed to touch your morals.
Roughly, you got the following groups involved:
And all the time, teachers see those who take their teaching talent to private industry make several times their pay, with none of the hazards of getting some parent upset or a student who desides to file charges because daddy touched them.
No, if you want to fix education, you got to make a drastic cleaning action.
If you can do, why on earth would you settle for a teachers salary?
And I notice that so far, the simplest rememdy, pay more, goes unexplored.
You pay peanuts, you get monkey's.
I have worked with a lot of ex-teachers, who now do things like IT-training, they make several times what they would make in front of a class-room filled with kids, so why would they do it?
The free food sample, that has extra chemicals to leave a nasty after taste.
The test drive, where parts of the car keep fall off the further your drive.
Or the 1st date where she becomes ever more like her mother as the hours pass.
A movie trailer, that gets more inane each time you see it. Ads that become ever more insulting to your intelligene... oh wait.
But why stop there? This is small time stuff. I say we actively seek out anyone considering buying our game and giving them a sound beating. That should teach them.
Subject says it all.