It is good to point out the Austin has Grande Communications, which actually has pretty good service for the price. The problem is they have limited coverage.
Sure it's fun to knock Google for shutting down services, but I believe most (if not all) of their shutdowns have always been free services they provide to consumers. I'm not aware of any paid Google service that has been shutdown. Though, Google has been known to drastically increase the cost of their services where it drives people away (mapping and AppEngine are 2 more recent examples, though they lowered the price of maps after a lot of people left).
Google is trying to find services to hook people with, so they fund a lot of startup type projects to see what will hook people. When those projects don't produce the results they want, they just shut them down. But from what I've seen, those have mainly been free services.
Now, taking away open standard support, like CalDAV from calendar, is a much more troublesome issue.
Google Reader was free for 8 years. It has definitely by my favorite RSS software out there. We have 4 months to get our data out of reader (they give it to us in an easy to process JSON file).
A lot of people saw the writing on the wall about Reader. No blog posts from them in 1.5 years. Removing functionality so it didn't compete with Google+. Increased aggressiveness in Google Spring Cleaning. This day was coming, it was just a matter of when.
While it sucks that I now have to find a Google Reader replacement, giving me 4 months to find that alternative is nice. It's like iGoogle, but they gave people 16 months to find an alternative there.
It'll require some client hacking as well. All server communication is via HTTPS. MITM (man-in-the-middle) does not work against it as the simcity client may have checks to look for certain certificates built into the client itself. So you'd probably need to hack the client to allow for other certificates to be accepted during the SSL negotiation.
(I've been digging into this some, but sadly I have a day-job that I actually have to do)
I decided to pre-order SimCity and I have definitely been annoyed by their server issues, but I decided to track down for myself as much info as I could about what's going on.
1) All of the servers seem to be running on Amazon EC2 (or other AWS type services). This is what gives them their different zones. Fun enough, most of the communication seems to just be a HTTP API, and they aren't doing any type of UDP streaming of data. Sadly I haven't been able to MITM the encrypted stuff yet to see what's going on with transferring of game state data.
2) While EA/Maxis's official PR lines have been pretty quiet, a few of the Maxis dev staff have been posting what they can. Here are a few links around information they have been sharing: One of their server guys: https://twitter.com/derricks Maxis Employees on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/ryani and http://www.reddit.com/user/MaxisMC (they have been posting at least a little).
3) They are trying to gather as much feedback as possible to find out where people are having the most problems to get those issues fixed.
With this game being so reliant on their servers, they should have done a few stress test weekends, but sadly, they decided not to do that and EA's customers are now stress testing on a live setup. I'm sure engineering didn't want to do it this way, but that's how it ended up happening.
Exactly. CNN did not truly replicate the test that the NYTimes did, they just did their own test that was somewhat similar. There are a lot more variables at play here than distance driven. No overnight stop without it plugged in. The temperature while driving was significantly higher for the CNN test.
This is just CNN trying to take a shot at the NYTimes.
Banks must have your permission to run your credit report. If a bank or any organization runs your credit without your permission they can get in pretty big trouble.
It's important to remember that there are 2 ways of buying Office 2013 (at least for home use): Office 2013 and Office 365. MS has a nice simple comparison here. The $99/year gets you 5 computers while the other SKUs only let you install on 1 computer.
One important change for the stand-alone SKUs is the # of computers you can install on. In Office 2010, there were SKUs that let you install on 3 PCs for "Home & Student" edition or 2 PCs for "Home and Business" edition. While Office 2013 is 1PC for all editions of the stand-alone. I'm guessing this is MS trying to push Office 365 (the subscription).
If I was installing on 5 PCs, the subscription may be worth it, but I'm not sure I like the idea of my software license expiring and possibly losing data.
As a reader of Hacker News I'm getting a bit sick of this coverage myself. Last night, 9 of the 10 top stories were in relation to Aaron and the whole situation. The guy did some great work, but he never even got into a courtroom to see how things would play out. The other thing to note is that it was known even publicly that he suffered from depression. A high-stress situation plus depression is the recipe for this type of situation.
I'm not say either side (the people making him into a martyr or prosecutor for going after him) is right or wrong with what they are doing. But to me, the reaction I've been seeing so far from those on sites like Hacker News seems to be a little far out there.
Exactly, I wish I had mod points to give you. It sounds like she came to the idea of not taking vaccines on her own and is using her faith as the reason for the decision.
I would imagine they are watching the handshaking and looking for certain patterns at the start of TCP sessions. If the streams match a certain pattern (VPN connection handshake), then the connection will be added to the global blacklist at the next update. For VPNs that do their negotiation fully over UDP, the firewall probably just has to look for a specific set of packets between 2 systems over a short period of time.
Protocol/Application detection isn't all that hard with the right tools.
Why not mail the executive office? Stop being lazy and gather all the info on it that you can. Once you hit a wall or have sufficient data, publish your findings.
If they are doing something weird, I bet you could take then small claims court over any overage charges you end up receiving.
From the employee comments that were posted when OnLive went belly up, that doesn't sound like it was the case at all. I don't have links for any of this (it was either on/., reddit, or some other site), but the basic idea was:
* The tech seemed to work pretty well. I think it was best if a customer was within 50 miles of a data center. * The cost of games through the service was near the same price as retal box versions (difficulty #1, as customers didn't feel like they had ownership of the games). * OnLive had a hell of a time getting titles available on their systems when they hit the streets. So not having AAA games available when they launched made it difficult to attract people. * The CEO was bull-headed. From one story I read, he was trying to get an exclusive contract with EA for being the only streaming gaming service EA used, but EA was also partnering with another company that had similar tech to OnLive. The CEO of OnLive flipped out and told his staff to pull all the EA games from their system 2 weeks before launch.
That can still be ambiguous. Sure, after using it for a bit, users would learn by feel which way is the right way. But how do you know which way connector should go into the device without trial and error?
There may be an arrow on the device to help you align it, but that's still only part-way there (especially with how many people put their mobile devices in cases).
If you want to follow the whole thing yourself, ArenaNet has been very public about all of this, posting on Reddit with the information (they aren't posting on their own blog as they don't want to do anything else that will hammer their infrastructure with more traffic):
A lot of people agree with you on this topic. I think the only reason they are letting people undo the bans is because of the bad press they were starting to receive (and rightfully so). But at the same time, ArenaNet is sending a message to the community that they should play nicely.
Basically what happened was an item was priced at 21 karma (a currency that you get from doing quests/events and is not tradable). Items similar to that one item were normally around 600+ karma. People saw this and started buying hundreds of that single item to throw into the Mystic Forge (takes items as input, and outputs possibly higher quality items at random). So some people buy 1000+ of this 21 karma item for the sole purpose of using it in the mystic forge.
So the people that did this knew that something was possibly wrong (or greatly in their favor) and abused to get ahead in the game.
ArenaNet has now taught people, if you see something that is too good to be true, it probably is and should be reported.
About sales: the game is still available in box form from game stores and online (such as Amazon). The digital sale stop was not meant to completely stop incoming player population, just to slow it down.
Furthermore on this topic, ArenaNet has been trying to keep the number of servers low so they don't end up with a lot of empty servers when the initial hype dies down. Though, due to player and guild names being globally unique, doing server merges are much easier compared to other games.
About bans: ArenaNet is banning for exploiting because they want to send a very clear message that exploiting design errors will not be tolerated. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is and shouldn't be taken advantage of. There was an item for that that was selling for a fraction of its expected cost, so some people bought hundreds (or thousands) of that item to be used for other purposes (crafting and mystic forge). ArenaNet banned those player. People that did around 50-100 purchases just got a 3 day suspension.
To add, people that were banned are being given the option to submit a customer service ticket and have their account unbanned and converted to a 72-hour suspension instead. They must also promise to delete any items or money they gained through the exploit. This was done as it was the first exploit found in the game.
ArenaNet is doing all this to send a very clear message on how they expect their players to behave, and I'm happy they are.
Well, the true NetApp stuff, yes, you're probably right.
I was talking about the Engenio group (which NetApp purchased last year from LSI). They sold through channel partners like IBM, Oracle (via StorageTek who Sun bought), and others. Their low end systems used to run XScale processors, but that was probably back in 2003 or 2004.
Unless they are targeting a lower end of the market. If you look at the low-end NetApp and Equilogic systems, I'm betting those could be (and may already be) powered by ARM chips.
One of EMC's competitors (Engenio, owned by NetApp now), had boxes in a variety of price ranges. The high-end boxes were all Xeons, while going down in price you would find PowerPC, and ARM chips (specifically XScale) inside.
Also, running on low-power chips is easier if they have a secondary chip to do RAID 5 and 6 calculations for them (or if it's built into the main CPU as an add-on module. Intel actually does this now with some of their Xeon chips).
A man Tom Georgens was hired on at LSI back in the late 90's as the president of the company's enterprise storage division (about 600 employees in that division). LSI at the time was a business casual dress code at the time (most everyone wore slacks and a nice shirt, some wore nicer clothes).
Sometime shortly after he became president of the division he was holding a all-hands meeting at their main development center. That day he greeted everyone at the front-door of the building as they walked in. He was dressed in jeans (possibly shorts), sandals, and a t-shirt. From that day forward engineering started to go to a "tech casual" dress code.
A number of years later, Tom Georgens became the CEO of NetApp.
You should wear clothes that fit the enviroment you will be working in for that day. If you plan on meeting with customers you should dress for it. If you are going to just be working with your employees, wear the clothes that you feel is needed to express your attitude towards your employees and peers.
Why, what's wrong with Austin? It's a pretty decent city, though it has some more suburban sprawl than compared to california (since they have the land to do it in Austin).
Also, if you moved to Austin before last years heat wave, I do feel sorry for you. Last year was the worst summer I've seen down here in the 10 years I've been here.
I wish I has karma to give you, as I was coming to say the same thing.
The wikipedia entry on the Higgs Boson has some quotes from the author who nicknamed the Higgs Boson "the god particle":
While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it is sensational and overstates the particle's importance. Its discovery would still leave unanswered questions about the unification of quantum chromodynamics, the electroweak interaction, and gravity, as well as the ultimate origin of the universe. Higgs, an atheist himself, is displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the "God particle", because the term "might offend people who are religious".
Lederman said he gave it a nickname because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," and added that he chose "the God particle" because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
I understand he did it so his book had a catchy title, but the media decided to go crazy when talking about it. Sure, it's a big discovery to physicists and understanding how our universe works, it really shouldn't be receiving the coverage it's getting. There is just too many ignorant reporters trying to explain something, which is creating a lot of mis-information.
Slashdot Mirror
It is good to point out the Austin has Grande Communications, which actually has pretty good service for the price. The problem is they have limited coverage.
Sure it's fun to knock Google for shutting down services, but I believe most (if not all) of their shutdowns have always been free services they provide to consumers. I'm not aware of any paid Google service that has been shutdown. Though, Google has been known to drastically increase the cost of their services where it drives people away (mapping and AppEngine are 2 more recent examples, though they lowered the price of maps after a lot of people left).
Google is trying to find services to hook people with, so they fund a lot of startup type projects to see what will hook people. When those projects don't produce the results they want, they just shut them down. But from what I've seen, those have mainly been free services.
Now, taking away open standard support, like CalDAV from calendar, is a much more troublesome issue.
Google Reader was free for 8 years. It has definitely by my favorite RSS software out there. We have 4 months to get our data out of reader (they give it to us in an easy to process JSON file).
A lot of people saw the writing on the wall about Reader. No blog posts from them in 1.5 years. Removing functionality so it didn't compete with Google+. Increased aggressiveness in Google Spring Cleaning. This day was coming, it was just a matter of when.
While it sucks that I now have to find a Google Reader replacement, giving me 4 months to find that alternative is nice. It's like iGoogle, but they gave people 16 months to find an alternative there.
It'll require some client hacking as well. All server communication is via HTTPS. MITM (man-in-the-middle) does not work against it as the simcity client may have checks to look for certain certificates built into the client itself. So you'd probably need to hack the client to allow for other certificates to be accepted during the SSL negotiation.
(I've been digging into this some, but sadly I have a day-job that I actually have to do)
I decided to pre-order SimCity and I have definitely been annoyed by their server issues, but I decided to track down for myself as much info as I could about what's going on.
1) All of the servers seem to be running on Amazon EC2 (or other AWS type services). This is what gives them their different zones. Fun enough, most of the communication seems to just be a HTTP API, and they aren't doing any type of UDP streaming of data. Sadly I haven't been able to MITM the encrypted stuff yet to see what's going on with transferring of game state data.
2) While EA/Maxis's official PR lines have been pretty quiet, a few of the Maxis dev staff have been posting what they can. Here are a few links around information they have been sharing:
One of their server guys: https://twitter.com/derricks
Maxis Employees on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/ryani and http://www.reddit.com/user/MaxisMC (they have been posting at least a little).
3) They are trying to gather as much feedback as possible to find out where people are having the most problems to get those issues fixed.
With this game being so reliant on their servers, they should have done a few stress test weekends, but sadly, they decided not to do that and EA's customers are now stress testing on a live setup. I'm sure engineering didn't want to do it this way, but that's how it ended up happening.
Exactly. CNN did not truly replicate the test that the NYTimes did, they just did their own test that was somewhat similar. There are a lot more variables at play here than distance driven. No overnight stop without it plugged in. The temperature while driving was significantly higher for the CNN test.
This is just CNN trying to take a shot at the NYTimes.
Banks must have your permission to run your credit report. If a bank or any organization runs your credit without your permission they can get in pretty big trouble.
It's important to remember that there are 2 ways of buying Office 2013 (at least for home use): Office 2013 and Office 365. MS has a nice simple comparison here. The $99/year gets you 5 computers while the other SKUs only let you install on 1 computer.
One important change for the stand-alone SKUs is the # of computers you can install on. In Office 2010, there were SKUs that let you install on 3 PCs for "Home & Student" edition or 2 PCs for "Home and Business" edition. While Office 2013 is 1PC for all editions of the stand-alone. I'm guessing this is MS trying to push Office 365 (the subscription).
If I was installing on 5 PCs, the subscription may be worth it, but I'm not sure I like the idea of my software license expiring and possibly losing data.
As a reader of Hacker News I'm getting a bit sick of this coverage myself. Last night, 9 of the 10 top stories were in relation to Aaron and the whole situation. The guy did some great work, but he never even got into a courtroom to see how things would play out. The other thing to note is that it was known even publicly that he suffered from depression. A high-stress situation plus depression is the recipe for this type of situation.
I'm not say either side (the people making him into a martyr or prosecutor for going after him) is right or wrong with what they are doing. But to me, the reaction I've been seeing so far from those on sites like Hacker News seems to be a little far out there.
Exactly, I wish I had mod points to give you. It sounds like she came to the idea of not taking vaccines on her own and is using her faith as the reason for the decision.
I would imagine they are watching the handshaking and looking for certain patterns at the start of TCP sessions. If the streams match a certain pattern (VPN connection handshake), then the connection will be added to the global blacklist at the next update. For VPNs that do their negotiation fully over UDP, the firewall probably just has to look for a specific set of packets between 2 systems over a short period of time.
Protocol/Application detection isn't all that hard with the right tools.
The guy who was tested in the video has a blog post up (and his server actually works): http://blog.theincredibleholk.org/blog/2012/12/18/how-do-we-read-code/
Direct youtube links to the videos:
Video 1
Video 2 (Novice)
Why not mail the executive office? Stop being lazy and gather all the info on it that you can. Once you hit a wall or have sufficient data, publish your findings.
If they are doing something weird, I bet you could take then small claims court over any overage charges you end up receiving.
From the employee comments that were posted when OnLive went belly up, that doesn't sound like it was the case at all. I don't have links for any of this (it was either on /., reddit, or some other site), but the basic idea was:
* The tech seemed to work pretty well. I think it was best if a customer was within 50 miles of a data center.
* The cost of games through the service was near the same price as retal box versions (difficulty #1, as customers didn't feel like they had ownership of the games).
* OnLive had a hell of a time getting titles available on their systems when they hit the streets. So not having AAA games available when they launched made it difficult to attract people.
* The CEO was bull-headed. From one story I read, he was trying to get an exclusive contract with EA for being the only streaming gaming service EA used, but EA was also partnering with another company that had similar tech to OnLive. The CEO of OnLive flipped out and told his staff to pull all the EA games from their system 2 weeks before launch.
That can still be ambiguous. Sure, after using it for a bit, users would learn by feel which way is the right way. But how do you know which way connector should go into the device without trial and error?
There may be an arrow on the device to help you align it, but that's still only part-way there (especially with how many people put their mobile devices in cases).
5-cheers for 5-digit IDs!
If you want to follow the whole thing yourself, ArenaNet has been very public about all of this, posting on Reddit with the information (they aren't posting on their own blog as they don't want to do anything else that will hammer their infrastructure with more traffic):
Initial posting announcing the bans
Follow-up posting that will let people undo the ban and make it a suspension
A lot of people agree with you on this topic. I think the only reason they are letting people undo the bans is because of the bad press they were starting to receive (and rightfully so). But at the same time, ArenaNet is sending a message to the community that they should play nicely.
Basically what happened was an item was priced at 21 karma (a currency that you get from doing quests/events and is not tradable). Items similar to that one item were normally around 600+ karma. People saw this and started buying hundreds of that single item to throw into the Mystic Forge (takes items as input, and outputs possibly higher quality items at random). So some people buy 1000+ of this 21 karma item for the sole purpose of using it in the mystic forge.
So the people that did this knew that something was possibly wrong (or greatly in their favor) and abused to get ahead in the game.
ArenaNet has now taught people, if you see something that is too good to be true, it probably is and should be reported.
About sales: the game is still available in box form from game stores and online (such as Amazon). The digital sale stop was not meant to completely stop incoming player population, just to slow it down.
Furthermore on this topic, ArenaNet has been trying to keep the number of servers low so they don't end up with a lot of empty servers when the initial hype dies down. Though, due to player and guild names being globally unique, doing server merges are much easier compared to other games.
About bans: ArenaNet is banning for exploiting because they want to send a very clear message that exploiting design errors will not be tolerated. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is and shouldn't be taken advantage of. There was an item for that that was selling for a fraction of its expected cost, so some people bought hundreds (or thousands) of that item to be used for other purposes (crafting and mystic forge). ArenaNet banned those player. People that did around 50-100 purchases just got a 3 day suspension.
To add, people that were banned are being given the option to submit a customer service ticket and have their account unbanned and converted to a 72-hour suspension instead. They must also promise to delete any items or money they gained through the exploit. This was done as it was the first exploit found in the game.
ArenaNet is doing all this to send a very clear message on how they expect their players to behave, and I'm happy they are.
What's wrong with Guild Wars 2? I'm having a blast with it. Is this more of an issue that you don't enjoy MMOs anymore?
Well, the true NetApp stuff, yes, you're probably right.
I was talking about the Engenio group (which NetApp purchased last year from LSI). They sold through channel partners like IBM, Oracle (via StorageTek who Sun bought), and others. Their low end systems used to run XScale processors, but that was probably back in 2003 or 2004.
Unless they are targeting a lower end of the market. If you look at the low-end NetApp and Equilogic systems, I'm betting those could be (and may already be) powered by ARM chips.
One of EMC's competitors (Engenio, owned by NetApp now), had boxes in a variety of price ranges. The high-end boxes were all Xeons, while going down in price you would find PowerPC, and ARM chips (specifically XScale) inside.
Also, running on low-power chips is easier if they have a secondary chip to do RAID 5 and 6 calculations for them (or if it's built into the main CPU as an add-on module. Intel actually does this now with some of their Xeon chips).
A man Tom Georgens was hired on at LSI back in the late 90's as the president of the company's enterprise storage division (about 600 employees in that division). LSI at the time was a business casual dress code at the time (most everyone wore slacks and a nice shirt, some wore nicer clothes).
Sometime shortly after he became president of the division he was holding a all-hands meeting at their main development center. That day he greeted everyone at the front-door of the building as they walked in. He was dressed in jeans (possibly shorts), sandals, and a t-shirt. From that day forward engineering started to go to a "tech casual" dress code.
A number of years later, Tom Georgens became the CEO of NetApp.
You should wear clothes that fit the enviroment you will be working in for that day. If you plan on meeting with customers you should dress for it. If you are going to just be working with your employees, wear the clothes that you feel is needed to express your attitude towards your employees and peers.
Why, what's wrong with Austin? It's a pretty decent city, though it has some more suburban sprawl than compared to california (since they have the land to do it in Austin).
Also, if you moved to Austin before last years heat wave, I do feel sorry for you. Last year was the worst summer I've seen down here in the 10 years I've been here.
I wish I has karma to give you, as I was coming to say the same thing.
The wikipedia entry on the Higgs Boson has some quotes from the author who nicknamed the Higgs Boson "the god particle":
While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it is sensational and overstates the particle's importance. Its discovery would still leave unanswered questions about the unification of quantum chromodynamics, the electroweak interaction, and gravity, as well as the ultimate origin of the universe. Higgs, an atheist himself, is displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the "God particle", because the term "might offend people who are religious".
Lederman said he gave it a nickname because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," and added that he chose "the God particle" because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
I understand he did it so his book had a catchy title, but the media decided to go crazy when talking about it. Sure, it's a big discovery to physicists and understanding how our universe works, it really shouldn't be receiving the coverage it's getting. There is just too many ignorant reporters trying to explain something, which is creating a lot of mis-information.
The US elected W as their president. So I would say that Texas is good at churning out politicians that have a chance at the federal level.