What a piece of crap these things are. There are two big problems:
1. Build quality. They have a small power switch and LED board mounted near the left front that is activated by a pen. Invariably, people press it too hard and destroy the switch, which results in a nonbooting server. But the boards are service parts (they probably are worth 10 or 15 bucks tops) and cannot be purchased in bulk. I mean, i'd be ok with this if we could buy 20 or 50 of them and keep them on hand. They're not so hard to replace. But WTF. I mean, people with little physical strength can render the server inoperable.
The front panels fall off regularly, the optical drive bezels might as well be scotch taped on. Video hardware is chancy and may not work in some cases. I have over 50 of these things so I know whereof I speak, bought in several waves. I mean, if this was Dell i'd understand, their stuff is cheap. But this server is not cheap!
Anyway Sun warranty service is also pretty slow to respond to us, though they do eventually fix the problems, at the cost of devices being out of action for significant stretches of time.
2. Poor integration and poor choices for third party parts. For instance, PXE booting on all four included NICs must execute during bootup. No disabling this is possible. Dell used to do this shit too, but at least Dell was cheap. The x4100 is expensive for an x86 server of its meager specifications.
In addition, the RAID controller is an utter piece of garbage. Most RAID controllers - think Dell PERCs, or HP/Compaq Smart controllers, will treat the disk array as a set of disks that can be transported between servers as a unit, and will be read by the controller as the same unit regardless of the system it is put in. Not so the Sun DPT controller. It apparently stores the RAID config in flash on the card or something, so when you move the disks between systems it basically refuses to recognize the array as a unit. You pretty much have to perform a recovery on the first disk of a RAID 1 set and then reintegrate the second drive, which is a scary prospect when you have data you care about and time is of the essence.
Why DPT of all vendors, anyway? And why did DPT screw the pooch so bad with this one? They have perfectly workable RAID controllers that do not have this flaw. Oh and the controller is dog slow too.
Anyway, they got the contract for a particular large government agency's servers for a particularly large program, so that's why I have the things and they keep getting airdropped on me. I'd like to shitcan them all but I have to make the ones that aren't broken at any given time work until they finally get EOL'd. Hopefully soon.
Graham Chapman was credited by Cleese with coming up with the Norwegian Blue parrot reference. Initially, Cleese intended it to be a toaster the guy was returning. Palin was working it with Cleese because he was so excellent at that type of role.
So, I suggest that we ask Graham Chapman about the parrot thing. Unfortunately, he is extinct as well.
If your numbers of players are declining, your product is in a death spiral, even if it takes 10 years to drop to something equating to nil. If you are not doing well financially now, having fewer players - meaning less cash coming in - means you can afford to develop less and have even less chance of turning things around. And there are several MMOs that have closed down.
It's kind of funny that I loved Ultima Underworld, so much so that I regularly quote it as my favorite game, and have replayed it often, last week even (up to Level 6).
The games industry has sucked the life out of any 'franchise' inherited from when the PC game market was healthy. Tabula Rasa has zero name recognition. The number of people who know who Garriott is, is not enough to sustain usage on an MMO. The cost of the game was exorbitant when you have zero name recognition. MMOs have a shelf life and expire after a (very few) years.
Therefore, why would someone do a project like this, as a pure business case? I love Richard Garriott and what he represents, but I blame NCsoft for greenlighting and funding this MMO, rather than Garriott for creating it.
That interferes with the eye candy 'requirement', to some extent. Note that most Call of Duty 4 scenarios have little detail outside the exact path that the game designers want you to tread.
Games tended to be better in the days before this overattention to art and detail.
I'm not delusional. I think a significant slice of the population could do what I did, and I don't think a degree would have helped after say, job 3. Even the cachet wears off after a while, and I seem to remember a certain bias against hiring those from top schools in some quarters, even. As for what I mean by 'significant slice' - 10%? Something like that.
That said, it would have been nice initially to have the degree, but the money wasn't there and the idea of loans was laughable at the time. So I climbed the hill without it.
You work a shitty job till you develop some credibility. Creative resume writing 101. You can make a clerical post sound like IT work with some effort.
I look at my job progression over the last 20 years as being something like the mob going legit. You launder yourself slowly after lying through your teeth to get the job. Now all that BS is off my resume. Shiny clean!
I disagree. I do not have a degree. The main ingredient for success is not a piece of paper or 'getting your foot in the door', but excelling - and working hard as part of that - and not being dumb about the value of your skills. Sell yourself. I don't consider any break I got 'lucky'. I was in the right place at the right time, and you can be too.
After a couple weeks he is a mess? Sheesh, you barely are in-country by that point. Didn't like the toilets?
I'm serious, they make you do a whole shitload of training before you ever see an actual Iraqi. There are literally no exceptions. It's a quite annoying process, actually.
Apple can punt on this at any time and haul it back into court if it's not going their way. 'quietly squash' rather than 'publically squash' is the plan. If that doesn't work out, they'll publically squash, because the entire vitality of Apple as a corporation depends on this issue: control of their hardware platforms.
I mean, doing business with Yahoo has been bad business for years now. And people are surprised that Yahoo just doesn't give a shit? Why would you use their services? They've been customer-unfriendly at least since the dot-com thing went south.
I was kinda hoping Microsoft would buy them so a few dozen bil of their funds would wink out of existence over a couple years. This Google ad deal is far less satisfying.
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What a piece of crap these things are. There are two big problems:
1. Build quality. They have a small power switch and LED board mounted near the left front that is activated by a pen. Invariably, people press it too hard and destroy the switch, which results in a nonbooting server. But the boards are service parts (they probably are worth 10 or 15 bucks tops) and cannot be purchased in bulk. I mean, i'd be ok with this if we could buy 20 or 50 of them and keep them on hand. They're not so hard to replace. But WTF. I mean, people with little physical strength can render the server inoperable.
The front panels fall off regularly, the optical drive bezels might as well be scotch taped on. Video hardware is chancy and may not work in some cases. I have over 50 of these things so I know whereof I speak, bought in several waves. I mean, if this was Dell i'd understand, their stuff is cheap. But this server is not cheap!
Anyway Sun warranty service is also pretty slow to respond to us, though they do eventually fix the problems, at the cost of devices being out of action for significant stretches of time.
2. Poor integration and poor choices for third party parts. For instance, PXE booting on all four included NICs must execute during bootup. No disabling this is possible. Dell used to do this shit too, but at least Dell was cheap. The x4100 is expensive for an x86 server of its meager specifications.
In addition, the RAID controller is an utter piece of garbage. Most RAID controllers - think Dell PERCs, or HP/Compaq Smart controllers, will treat the disk array as a set of disks that can be transported between servers as a unit, and will be read by the controller as the same unit regardless of the system it is put in. Not so the Sun DPT controller. It apparently stores the RAID config in flash on the card or something, so when you move the disks between systems it basically refuses to recognize the array as a unit. You pretty much have to perform a recovery on the first disk of a RAID 1 set and then reintegrate the second drive, which is a scary prospect when you have data you care about and time is of the essence.
Why DPT of all vendors, anyway? And why did DPT screw the pooch so bad with this one? They have perfectly workable RAID controllers that do not have this flaw. Oh and the controller is dog slow too.
Anyway, they got the contract for a particular large government agency's servers for a particularly large program, so that's why I have the things and they keep getting airdropped on me. I'd like to shitcan them all but I have to make the ones that aren't broken at any given time work until they finally get EOL'd. Hopefully soon.
But yeah, i'll never even look at Sun gear again.
Graham Chapman was credited by Cleese with coming up with the Norwegian Blue parrot reference. Initially, Cleese intended it to be a toaster the guy was returning. Palin was working it with Cleese because he was so excellent at that type of role.
So, I suggest that we ask Graham Chapman about the parrot thing. Unfortunately, he is extinct as well.
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/
There's some data.
If your numbers of players are declining, your product is in a death spiral, even if it takes 10 years to drop to something equating to nil. If you are not doing well financially now, having fewer players - meaning less cash coming in - means you can afford to develop less and have even less chance of turning things around. And there are several MMOs that have closed down.
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/ - have fun checking it out.
It's kind of funny that I loved Ultima Underworld, so much so that I regularly quote it as my favorite game, and have replayed it often, last week even (up to Level 6).
The games industry has sucked the life out of any 'franchise' inherited from when the PC game market was healthy.
Tabula Rasa has zero name recognition.
The number of people who know who Garriott is, is not enough to sustain usage on an MMO.
The cost of the game was exorbitant when you have zero name recognition.
MMOs have a shelf life and expire after a (very few) years.
Therefore, why would someone do a project like this, as a pure business case? I love Richard Garriott and what he represents, but I blame NCsoft for greenlighting and funding this MMO, rather than Garriott for creating it.
That interferes with the eye candy 'requirement', to some extent. Note that most Call of Duty 4 scenarios have little detail outside the exact path that the game designers want you to tread.
Games tended to be better in the days before this overattention to art and detail.
You just go ahead and tell the truth all the time. I hope poverty suits you.
I'm not delusional. I think a significant slice of the population could do what I did, and I don't think a degree would have helped after say, job 3. Even the cachet wears off after a while, and I seem to remember a certain bias against hiring those from top schools in some quarters, even. As for what I mean by 'significant slice' - 10%? Something like that.
That said, it would have been nice initially to have the degree, but the money wasn't there and the idea of loans was laughable at the time. So I climbed the hill without it.
You work a shitty job till you develop some credibility. Creative resume writing 101. You can make a clerical post sound like IT work with some effort.
I look at my job progression over the last 20 years as being something like the mob going legit. You launder yourself slowly after lying through your teeth to get the job. Now all that BS is off my resume. Shiny clean!
I disagree. I do not have a degree. The main ingredient for success is not a piece of paper or 'getting your foot in the door', but excelling - and working hard as part of that - and not being dumb about the value of your skills. Sell yourself. I don't consider any break I got 'lucky'. I was in the right place at the right time, and you can be too.
True, it won't help the banks who lend the money or the college faculties. Or beer vendors.
But it just might help a lot of people who don't necessarily need to go to college.
It would seem to me that most smartphone OS' would be hobbled by limited RAM were they to be virtualized on existing phone hardware.
Wouldn't it be easier to just write an emulator for the smartphone CPU architecture to run on x86?
SCOX? :-)
"Someone was dumb" seemed like an adequate solution to me.
Sounds like a huge market.
Firefox+Noscript works nicely to avoid these.
Seriously. Hearing what the French think could be worth a point or two to the Republican candidate.
Like the Brits did in 1812? 1914? Forget the rest of Europe...
You ask for things you were not willing to do yourselves...
After a couple weeks he is a mess? Sheesh, you barely are in-country by that point. Didn't like the toilets?
I'm serious, they make you do a whole shitload of training before you ever see an actual Iraqi. There are literally no exceptions. It's a quite annoying process, actually.
Brezinski is a bad choice. He presided over the Iran hostage thing, for instance, and the failed rescue attempt. He's damaged goods.
Apple can punt on this at any time and haul it back into court if it's not going their way. 'quietly squash' rather than 'publically squash' is the plan. If that doesn't work out, they'll publically squash, because the entire vitality of Apple as a corporation depends on this issue: control of their hardware platforms.
I mean, doing business with Yahoo has been bad business for years now. And people are surprised that Yahoo just doesn't give a shit? Why would you use their services? They've been customer-unfriendly at least since the dot-com thing went south.
I was kinda hoping Microsoft would buy them so a few dozen bil of their funds would wink out of existence over a couple years. This Google ad deal is far less satisfying.
Because they sue people mindlessly to sow fear?