While the drop in Iranian exports is certainly a sum of many things, the article completely fails to mention the EU sanctions. Notice the very sharp drop in the export volume graph mid-2012? That's the sanctions coming fully to force in July 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_sanctions_against_Iran#Sanctions
It's easily possible to do better than random: just decide what would your natural throw at a given point, and then actually do the throw that feels worst to you. With a quick test it seemed to work, got something like 5:4 win ratio with lots of ties too.
Out of your four points only the last one is valid. Your document reference is old, and does not take into account the IEEE1588v2 standard released in 2008. PTPv2 can indeed reach good accuracies over WAN, can be used in unicast mode, can form clock hierarchies with multiple atomic (or equivalent) clocks and has security extensions.
For further info you could read the IEEE 1588-2008 standard, it's relatively readable as far as standards go.
In addition to NTP, there's also IEEE 1588. All of these "clock synch over packet switched network" mechanisms are pretty similar, the differences are mainly in the timestamp filtering and processing. NTP details the algorithms, IEEE 1588 leaves them open to implementation and RADClock has its own algorithms (details unknown at least to me).
This story is also a bit dupeish, as RADClock has been recently featured here. Thus I'll copypaste the relevant parts from my previous reply:
--
(disclaimer: just finished my Master's thesis on a related subject) About the 1588 in general: its main selling point is the ability to do hardware timestamping (when using hardware with support!) of the two-way timing messages between master and slave. This eliminates the very significant timing jitter that happens in the software stack before the messages are timestamped. For reference, commercially available master-slave implementations using IEEE 1588 achieve synchronisation within tens of nanoseconds within LAN, and microseconds to tens of microseconds within WAN, depending on network conditions.
So overall I think that while RADclock might be ok as an alternative between NTP and IEEE 1588, it doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Some of the stuff in the Rideaux/Veitch paper has also been used with IEEE 1588 for quite some time, for instance the filtering for fast timing packets is a necessity for accurate synchronisation with IEEE 1588.
--
Like the sibling post says, there's no need to have very high quality oscillators anywhere in the system. A GPS-synched grandmaster with an OCXO should have pretty good holdover properties in case it loses the GPS signal for some time (hours-days).
The slaves can also have OCXOs to enable long time periods for filtering and whatever clever averaging algorithms the slave happens to use to recover the clock after it has been degraded in transit. It's interesting to note that contrary to NTP, IEEE 1588 does not define the clock recovery algorithms, so they are typically proprietary in commercial products.
(disclaimer: just finished my Master's thesis on a related subject)
PTPd is ok, but not in itself up-to-date at the moment. It doesn't implement the most recent IEEE 1588-2008 standard, which has significant improvements compared to the 1588-2002.
About the 1588 in general: its main selling point is the ability to do hardware timestamping (when using hardware with support!) of the two-way timing messages between master and slave. This eliminates the very significant timing jitter that happens in the software stack before the messages are timestamped. For reference, commercially available master-slave implementations using IEEE 1588 achieve synchronisation within tens of nanoseconds within LAN, and microseconds to tens of microseconds within WAN, depending on network conditions.
So overall I think that while RADclock might be ok as an alternative between NTP and IEEE 1588, it doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Some of the stuff in the Rideaux/Veitch paper has also been used with IEEE 1588 for quite some time, for instance the filtering for fast timing packets is a necessity for accurate synchronisation with IEEE 1588.
Yeah, it sure does have a nice GUI for dual screen configuring. That nice utility also doesn't recognise my second monitor at all which makes the whole point kind of moot for me. The available refresh rates for the only monitor are 50Hz and 53Hz which results in some nice tearing when moving windows around. nvidia-settings (I'm using the restricted drivers for my 8800) does recognize the second monitor and has the correct refresh rates available but the settings don't stick.
Overall I'm still sticking with WinXP + UltraMon which is a really nice setup for dual monitor use. I'd rather do something useful with the time that would be spent mucking with problematic dual monitor support in Gutsy.
The thing with Shuttle systems is that from the acoustics perspective their systems have not really developed at all during the last five (or so) years. The cases are still made of thin metal, hard drives are hard mounted (as opposed to mounted with silicon grommets for instance), fans are not too well built and power supplies use whiny small fans. Where desktop systems have taken big leaps acoustics-wise SFF systems have stayed put.
Shuttle could put some effort in to silencing their systems, just steal some ideas from Antec and they'd be good to go. Improved airflow, decent quality fans and suspended hard drives would go long way in making their systems quieter. The increase in system power draw hasn't increased that much since Athlon/P4/Radeon9800 to make quiet systems impossible. At the very least the systems should have nearly silent idle operation when using a low-end passive cooled graphics card.
The thing is that these so-called comparisons are totally useless from a silencing point of view unless the heatsinks are tested with the same airflow. They are even useless for maximum cooling crowd because it is quite common among the enthusiasts to swap the stock fan for something more suitable.
Check www.silentpcreview.com if you want decent heatsink reviews with comparable results. Their advertising is annoying but the content is good.
Having played in the late beta phase for about a month I'd say the so-called review reads like a sales pitch. IMO the game was quite fun until lvl20 after which the content went downhill. Lots of repetetive grind quests killing the same creatures at different locations or alternatively different creatures at the same location. At some point the grinds creatures become Signatures or Elites just to force the player join a Fellowship without giving any extra XP. Aurorchs anyone?
Overall the game looked nice, had a better-than-could-be-expected feeling of Middle-Earthedness in it but fell really short on giving interesting tasks to the player. Also, some areas were totally out of Middle-Earth context, for example Agamaur (red bloody swamp with swarms of undead).
Not something I'd spend my money on but for each his own.
I realize this is/. and all, but still it is a bit disconcerting to see an interesting article only to find out that all the highly modded comments detail the typos in the summary:D
I would guess it is a bit of most of those. CPU is AMD64 (vs. some embedded level CPU), I did switch to gigabit (although testing with 100Mbit also produced good results). The hard drives were however about the same (3,5" 7200RPM same generation) and memory was "only" 1GB.
I measured the performance with IOzone. I would guess the difference in performance is mainly caused by processor speed and larger memory.
In the context of using this in low-cost environments with Linux I can hardly see how this could kill iSCSI. Last week I implemented an iSCSI setup for about 500 euros (target serves out 500GB disk space for non-critical backup) using standard components, FC5, iSCSI Enterprise Target and Microsoft iSCSI Initiator.
Works great and is a lot (>10x) faster than the about similarly priced NAS device that was used for the same task before.
Having worked part-time at Eurotech I've seen a working version of this device and it seemed to have all the external features claimed in the article. It was running Linux and I used it with the touchscreen. It also had an USB connector and a memory card slot.
I was not working on the device so I do have any exact information about the project or its status. However, it is definately not vaporware as in Duke Nukem Forever, but rather a working physical device.
Disclaimer: all views and observations are mine and not representative of Eurotech.
Please provide something more than just this "proof by intimidation". From what I've understood EMP is still a real threat even for supposedly EMP-proof devices/vehicles as it is considerably cheaper to produce an EMP big enough to fry a number of devices than it is to protect them from the said pulse.
Also, I'm still under the impression that simply covering sockets and cables isn't quite enough but you have to be really careful about then material, thicknesses and sealings used. A thick, hollow block of metal is quite EMP proof but once make a door for it and put something inside it is not that EMP proof anymore.
If you have some contradictory information, please do present it.
The Blender UI has been described as "intuitive once you learn how to use it". In my opinion it has been described in a far more eloquent way by a./ poster whose name I cannot remember: "Blender user interface is made by schizophrenic space monkeys for schizophrenic space monkeys."
When I was in the army there were some BPL performed. It was considered a fact that if BPL would be generally implemented the background noise within kilometers or tens of kilometers from powerlines the increase in background noise / interference would considerably reduce the maximum range of man-portable VHF radios.
Electronic warfare would be even more badly hit as the devices used to gather radio intelligence can operate at the level of background interference.
I would recommend trying Eraser, which is free, easy to use and seems quite credible.
With it you can erase everything on a disk or just unused space or selected files with selectable number of patterned overwrites (not just 1 or 0). Supports the elsewhere-mentioned "Darik's boot and Nuke method". Integrates very nicely and non-obtrusively into MS operating systems.
With the risk of sounding like a fanboy: Recommended:)
The point of RPG's is not to be able to prowl through the dungeons with all the objects and corridors mapped to 1 hex accuracy. As the overall name - Role Playing Games - says the point is immersing yourself into the character you're playing and having great fun in the process.
I'm not trying to be elitist or otherwise uptight and I do not condemn hack 'n slash RPG's per se (actually I'm running a Conan RPG campaign;)) but when an RPG session goes to the level where you need to draw every hex and play everything by the book the point is lost along the way.
Overall, I think doing this is really silly. It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to download some Heroquest adventures from the net and play them if you want to calculate your move rates to extreme accuracy on a premade map. Personally I find maps drawn by hand on the spot/occasion quite a bit more interesting and they also give more room to use one's imagination - both for immersion and fun.
I was a stand worker at CeBIT 2004, and I find the highly modded "hot stand bunnies all around"-comments as somewhat infantile. From my surveillance walks (I had another guy to share the stand with) during three days the main feeling I was left with was being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of companies making almost exact duplicates of each others' low-end products.
The reality of the exhibition was quite far from nice gadgets and women everywhere. Unless you knew where you should go to find interesting stuff you would not find it by wandering around. Knowing _what_ you were looking for was not necessarily enough either as the exhibition area was/is too vast to go through and the hall definitions are mostly somewhat vague.
This should be a very interesting product for the silent computing community (check SilentPCRReview) if some manufacturer decides to make desktop motherboards for it. People are already using Mobile Athlon XP's and Pentium-M's in desktop computers because of their relatively low heat output.
My own wish would be to some day have a passively air cooled computer. Running an Athlon64 passively with only one big slow (=nearly silent) case fan is already feasible with carefully managed airflow inside the computer case. Turion could be theoretically cool enough to cool with convection airflow if the potential is realized with wellmade motherboards.
From what I've read about the truly unbelievable bugginess of ToEE, the main fault lies with the publisher (Atari) who forced the product out before it was actually ready. Atari also used copy protection that prevented some computers from running the game. Atari did not have any interest in putting emphasis on fixing the game after the release.
So, while admitting that Troika has written buggy code and released at least ToEE as a half-finished product I have to defend them by saying that Arcanum was as solid as Fallout and the problems with release quality may well lie more with the publisher than Troika personnel.
It really is quite sad to see how the people who have made two excellent computer RPG's (original Fallout and Arcanum) cannot succeed in the current computer game market.
Fallout was undoubtably one of the very best computer RPGs and Arcanum is not far behind IMHO. I was actually really looking forward to perhaps one day seeing Arcanum 2 with the same great world and especially atmosphere as the original.
It would be really nice to see these people succeed in what they are really good in doing, especially as this (making excellent computer RPGs) produces some additional happiness to other people. The closing of Troika Games is sad in the sense that there is little hope for the same magic atmosphere to appear again soon in computer games.
Slashdot Mirror
While the drop in Iranian exports is certainly a sum of many things, the article completely fails to mention the EU sanctions. Notice the very sharp drop in the export volume graph mid-2012? That's the sanctions coming fully to force in July 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_sanctions_against_Iran#Sanctions
It's easily possible to do better than random: just decide what would your natural throw at a given point, and then actually do the throw that feels worst to you. With a quick test it seemed to work, got something like 5:4 win ratio with lots of ties too.
Replying to a bygone thread, but here it goes:
Out of your four points only the last one is valid. Your document reference is old, and does not take into account the IEEE1588v2 standard released in 2008. PTPv2 can indeed reach good accuracies over WAN, can be used in unicast mode, can form clock hierarchies with multiple atomic (or equivalent) clocks and has security extensions.
For further info you could read the IEEE 1588-2008 standard, it's relatively readable as far as standards go.
In addition to NTP, there's also IEEE 1588. All of these "clock synch over packet switched network" mechanisms are pretty similar, the differences are mainly in the timestamp filtering and processing. NTP details the algorithms, IEEE 1588 leaves them open to implementation and RADClock has its own algorithms (details unknown at least to me).
This story is also a bit dupeish, as RADClock has been recently featured here. Thus I'll copypaste the relevant parts from my previous reply:
--
(disclaimer: just finished my Master's thesis on a related subject) About the 1588 in general: its main selling point is the ability to do hardware timestamping (when using hardware with support!) of the two-way timing messages between master and slave. This eliminates the very significant timing jitter that happens in the software stack before the messages are timestamped. For reference, commercially available master-slave implementations using IEEE 1588 achieve synchronisation within tens of nanoseconds within LAN, and microseconds to tens of microseconds within WAN, depending on network conditions.
So overall I think that while RADclock might be ok as an alternative between NTP and IEEE 1588, it doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Some of the stuff in the Rideaux/Veitch paper has also been used with IEEE 1588 for quite some time, for instance the filtering for fast timing packets is a necessity for accurate synchronisation with IEEE 1588.
--
Like the sibling post says, there's no need to have very high quality oscillators anywhere in the system. A GPS-synched grandmaster with an OCXO should have pretty good holdover properties in case it loses the GPS signal for some time (hours-days).
The slaves can also have OCXOs to enable long time periods for filtering and whatever clever averaging algorithms the slave happens to use to recover the clock after it has been degraded in transit. It's interesting to note that contrary to NTP, IEEE 1588 does not define the clock recovery algorithms, so they are typically proprietary in commercial products.
(disclaimer: just finished my Master's thesis on a related subject) PTPd is ok, but not in itself up-to-date at the moment. It doesn't implement the most recent IEEE 1588-2008 standard, which has significant improvements compared to the 1588-2002. About the 1588 in general: its main selling point is the ability to do hardware timestamping (when using hardware with support!) of the two-way timing messages between master and slave. This eliminates the very significant timing jitter that happens in the software stack before the messages are timestamped. For reference, commercially available master-slave implementations using IEEE 1588 achieve synchronisation within tens of nanoseconds within LAN, and microseconds to tens of microseconds within WAN, depending on network conditions. So overall I think that while RADclock might be ok as an alternative between NTP and IEEE 1588, it doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Some of the stuff in the Rideaux/Veitch paper has also been used with IEEE 1588 for quite some time, for instance the filtering for fast timing packets is a necessity for accurate synchronisation with IEEE 1588.
Yeah, it sure does have a nice GUI for dual screen configuring. That nice utility also doesn't recognise my second monitor at all which makes the whole point kind of moot for me. The available refresh rates for the only monitor are 50Hz and 53Hz which results in some nice tearing when moving windows around. nvidia-settings (I'm using the restricted drivers for my 8800) does recognize the second monitor and has the correct refresh rates available but the settings don't stick. Overall I'm still sticking with WinXP + UltraMon which is a really nice setup for dual monitor use. I'd rather do something useful with the time that would be spent mucking with problematic dual monitor support in Gutsy.
The thing with Shuttle systems is that from the acoustics perspective their systems have not really developed at all during the last five (or so) years. The cases are still made of thin metal, hard drives are hard mounted (as opposed to mounted with silicon grommets for instance), fans are not too well built and power supplies use whiny small fans. Where desktop systems have taken big leaps acoustics-wise SFF systems have stayed put. Shuttle could put some effort in to silencing their systems, just steal some ideas from Antec and they'd be good to go. Improved airflow, decent quality fans and suspended hard drives would go long way in making their systems quieter. The increase in system power draw hasn't increased that much since Athlon/P4/Radeon9800 to make quiet systems impossible. At the very least the systems should have nearly silent idle operation when using a low-end passive cooled graphics card.
The thing is that these so-called comparisons are totally useless from a silencing point of view unless the heatsinks are tested with the same airflow. They are even useless for maximum cooling crowd because it is quite common among the enthusiasts to swap the stock fan for something more suitable.
Check www.silentpcreview.com if you want decent heatsink reviews with comparable results. Their advertising is annoying but the content is good.
Having played in the late beta phase for about a month I'd say the so-called review reads like a sales pitch. IMO the game was quite fun until lvl20 after which the content went downhill. Lots of repetetive grind quests killing the same creatures at different locations or alternatively different creatures at the same location. At some point the grinds creatures become Signatures or Elites just to force the player join a Fellowship without giving any extra XP. Aurorchs anyone?
Overall the game looked nice, had a better-than-could-be-expected feeling of Middle-Earthedness in it but fell really short on giving interesting tasks to the player. Also, some areas were totally out of Middle-Earth context, for example Agamaur (red bloody swamp with swarms of undead).
Not something I'd spend my money on but for each his own.
I realize this is /. and all, but still it is a bit disconcerting to see an interesting article only to find out that all the highly modded comments detail the typos in the summary :D
Replying to AC, but here it goes:
I would guess it is a bit of most of those. CPU is AMD64 (vs. some embedded level CPU), I did switch to gigabit (although testing with 100Mbit also produced good results). The hard drives were however about the same (3,5" 7200RPM same generation) and memory was "only" 1GB.
I measured the performance with IOzone. I would guess the difference in performance is mainly caused by processor speed and larger memory.
In the context of using this in low-cost environments with Linux I can hardly see how this could kill iSCSI. Last week I implemented an iSCSI setup for about 500 euros (target serves out 500GB disk space for non-critical backup) using standard components, FC5, iSCSI Enterprise Target and Microsoft iSCSI Initiator.
Works great and is a lot (>10x) faster than the about similarly priced NAS device that was used for the same task before.
This story is kind of a dupe, and as I wrote before I've seen this device and it's not vaporware.
I recommend contacting info(at)eurotech(dot)it as that seems to be referred in the Eurotech press release.
Having worked part-time at Eurotech I've seen a working version of this device and it seemed to have all the external features claimed in the article. It was running Linux and I used it with the touchscreen. It also had an USB connector and a memory card slot.
I was not working on the device so I do have any exact information about the project or its status. However, it is definately not vaporware as in Duke Nukem Forever, but rather a working physical device.
Disclaimer: all views and observations are mine and not representative of Eurotech.
Please provide something more than just this "proof by intimidation". From what I've understood EMP is still a real threat even for supposedly EMP-proof devices/vehicles as it is considerably cheaper to produce an EMP big enough to fry a number of devices than it is to protect them from the said pulse.
Also, I'm still under the impression that simply covering sockets and cables isn't quite enough but you have to be really careful about then material, thicknesses and sealings used. A thick, hollow block of metal is quite EMP proof but once make a door for it and put something inside it is not that EMP proof anymore.
If you have some contradictory information, please do present it.
The Blender UI has been described as "intuitive once you learn how to use it". In my opinion it has been described in a far more eloquent way by a ./ poster whose name I cannot remember: "Blender user interface is made by schizophrenic space monkeys for schizophrenic space monkeys."
When I was in the army there were some BPL performed. It was considered a fact that if BPL would be generally implemented the background noise within kilometers or tens of kilometers from powerlines the increase in background noise / interference would considerably reduce the maximum range of man-portable VHF radios.
Electronic warfare would be even more badly hit as the devices used to gather radio intelligence can operate at the level of background interference.
I would recommend trying Eraser, which is free, easy to use and seems quite credible.
:)
With it you can erase everything on a disk or just unused space or selected files with selectable number of patterned overwrites (not just 1 or 0). Supports the elsewhere-mentioned "Darik's boot and Nuke method". Integrates very nicely and non-obtrusively into MS operating systems.
With the risk of sounding like a fanboy: Recommended
The point of RPG's is not to be able to prowl through the dungeons with all the objects and corridors mapped to 1 hex accuracy. As the overall name - Role Playing Games - says the point is immersing yourself into the character you're playing and having great fun in the process.
;)) but when an RPG session goes to the level where you need to draw every hex and play everything by the book the point is lost along the way.
I'm not trying to be elitist or otherwise uptight and I do not condemn hack 'n slash RPG's per se (actually I'm running a Conan RPG campaign
Overall, I think doing this is really silly. It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to download some Heroquest adventures from the net and play them if you want to calculate your move rates to extreme accuracy on a premade map. Personally I find maps drawn by hand on the spot/occasion quite a bit more interesting and they also give more room to use one's imagination - both for immersion and fun.
I was a stand worker at CeBIT 2004, and I find the highly modded "hot stand bunnies all around"-comments as somewhat infantile. From my surveillance walks (I had another guy to share the stand with) during three days the main feeling I was left with was being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of companies making almost exact duplicates of each others' low-end products.
The reality of the exhibition was quite far from nice gadgets and women everywhere. Unless you knew where you should go to find interesting stuff you would not find it by wandering around. Knowing _what_ you were looking for was not necessarily enough either as the exhibition area was/is too vast to go through and the hall definitions are mostly somewhat vague.
This should be a very interesting product for the silent computing community (check SilentPCRReview) if some manufacturer decides to make desktop motherboards for it. People are already using Mobile Athlon XP's and Pentium-M's in desktop computers because of their relatively low heat output.
My own wish would be to some day have a passively air cooled computer. Running an Athlon64 passively with only one big slow (=nearly silent) case fan is already feasible with carefully managed airflow inside the computer case. Turion could be theoretically cool enough to cool with convection airflow if the potential is realized with wellmade motherboards.
From what I've read about the truly unbelievable bugginess of ToEE, the main fault lies with the publisher (Atari) who forced the product out before it was actually ready. Atari also used copy protection that prevented some computers from running the game. Atari did not have any interest in putting emphasis on fixing the game after the release.
So, while admitting that Troika has written buggy code and released at least ToEE as a half-finished product I have to defend them by saying that Arcanum was as solid as Fallout and the problems with release quality may well lie more with the publisher than Troika personnel.
It really is quite sad to see how the people who have made two excellent computer RPG's (original Fallout and Arcanum) cannot succeed in the current computer game market.
Fallout was undoubtably one of the very best computer RPGs and Arcanum is not far behind IMHO. I was actually really looking forward to perhaps one day seeing Arcanum 2 with the same great world and especially atmosphere as the original.
It would be really nice to see these people succeed in what they are really good in doing, especially as this (making excellent computer RPGs) produces some additional happiness to other people. The closing of Troika Games is sad in the sense that there is little hope for the same magic atmosphere to appear again soon in computer games.