This feature is extremely useful for any website that wants to give their users better content by parsing what they're going through. It also lets you figure out who is clicking advertisements (which are usually off site) and even gives you the ability to run a multitude of websites but aggregate all the statistics on one of your machines.
The first is trivial, the second is also easy to do without a ping attribute, the third may be a bit trickier, but if all the websites are yours anyway, you can do that easy enough as well.
The trick is to use redirect. For exampe, you click on some random add of which the link points to my server (like this: http://www.myserver.com/adclick.jsp?realurl=www.am azon.com). The server will register the click and then tell your browser to redirect to www.amazon.com. The user will not even notice it, and in fact, tons of sites already do it that way.
Dark matter is required by looking at galaxy rotation curves. Essentially, the rotation speed of galaxies is too fast given the mass that can be seen, so there must be some mass that doesn't emit light as conventional, baryonic matter does. Dark matter was first hypothesized by Zwicky in 1933 and has been well accepted throughout the astronomical community for decades.
To me this sounds like the amount, location and mass of the black holes in each galaxy may simply not be accurate. As black holes donot emit light either (and are practically undetectable when no other matter is interacting with them), I must wonder why we are so sure that it isn't some specific distribution of black holes causing this behaviour (or maybe some particularly massive ones) but that it MUST be something else...
As black holes are basically just non-light emitting point sized sources of X amount of gravity (where X can basically be chosen almost arbitrarely), I find it hard to believe that there's no possible distribution of black holes in a galaxy that would account for the additional rotation speed.
Maybe there is a civilization out there that's harvesting this dark energy as a natural resource for fuel, instead of using environmentally friendly fuels.
An interesting development might be that a system completely seperate from the internet (or ISP's) might slowly develop by means of WiFi. Where I live, there are networks that literally cover an entire city run by normal people for free. When they are interconnected (either by using bridges over the internet) or some other means, we'll have ourselves a modern BBS network like in the good old days of UUCP and FIDO net.
I don't buy it. Let's say I have 4x 300 GB in this system, which is redundant and provides 900 GB of storage. Please explain how replacing one of these disks with a higher capacity drive (say 500 GB) will still provide me redundancy, and, of course, more than the 900 GB of storage I already had.
As far as I know, that simply is not possible. All the possible configurations that still provide redundancy (meaning, any one drive can fail, including the new 500 GB drive) will never give more than 900 GB.
1x 300 GB = not redundant
2x 300 GB = 300 GB
3x 300 GB = 600 GB
4x 300 GB = 900 GB
1x 500 GB + 3x 300 GB = 900 GB (!!)
2x 500 GB + 2x 300 GB = 1100 GB
3x 500 GB + 1x 300 GB = 1300 GB
4x 500 GB = 1500 GB
(And before someone asks that 2x 500 GB + 2x 300 GB cannot be 1100 GB with redundancy, I should point out that there are other ways to set these disks up than two simple mirrors).
RAID may not be backup, but I've had several harddisks go "toast" on me (well actually, they never really failed, but were eligible for replacement by Maxtor anyway because they were about to fail) and didn't lose data.
I don't see the point about the RAID controller (not that I even use one, they don't add anything useful for a home system where the NIC is the bottleneck). The PSU toasting discs seems unlikely, but even then, no data will be lost that way, although it will be a bit expensive to get to it again.
Accidently deleting files and being able to recover them is something you should watch out for in a filesystem, and it's the reason I donot use ext3.
But anyway, if I could cheaply backup 2 TB I would, instead I've opted for a different solution. I only backup files that are smaller than 10 MB (or are on a special partition). All the other files are not backed up, but are registered, so in case things fail, I know what I lost. Not surprisingly, most "large" files are of little importance. They are not documents I created, nor are they source code, or anything else I created myself. They're usually movies or some other stuff I still have lying around (or can get easily enough anyway). My backup medium of choice... another harddisk. There simply is nothing cheaper for that much data.
DVD's are not the answer. First, they are WAY too small. Second, the lifetime of burned DVD's is far too low. You'd be surprised how fast burned DVD's become unreadable. First signs they are degrading is when the data on the outer tracks starts copying slower than the stuff on the inner tracks, something which is not the case when freshly burned.
Hardware raid 5 is ridiculously expensive and totally unnecessary. Use software raid 5, it's fast enough to handle whatever your NIC can handle (infact, even with full crypto it can easily handle 100 mbit). Just install an extra IDE controller card if whatever your mobo has isn't enough.
My humble home setup consists of 8 300 GB drives, 1 extra promise IDE controller, a gigabit NIC and linux to do software raid 5, plenty of cooling, plus some stuff to mail me when things go wrong.
I simply set up a Linux box, put software raid5 on it, installed 8 harddisks, added crypto for good measure, made it all available through SMB and plugged it into the network. Total capacity is over 2 TB. A barebones computer system will probably be cheaper than any LAN pluggable system out there... and you connect it to your TV and make it remote controlled:)
Stuff to watch out for is overheating, make sure to monitor harddisk temperature and install enough fans (I use a Antec P180 case which has 12 cm fans, and all 8 harddisks run at or below 35C at all times and it's all still pretty quiet).
Also set up smartmontools to mail you when a harddisk failure is imminent or when RAID5 has a disk failing. I've had 2 harddisks fail in the past 3 years (Maxtor) but both were in warranty and they simply send me a replacement.
Also make sure you have enough power. I use a 300 watt PSU, which only barely is enough to "start" the machine (it sometimes refuses to start because of the harddisks spinning up taking too much power, but simply starting it again while the harddisks are spinned up halfway is usually sufficient to get it started all the way -- quite funny when I discovered this for the first time).
The first version of this setup was a standard ATX case which I stripped for as much 3,5" disk room as possible (I mounted 4 in the 3 top 5.25" bays, and another 4 below the disk drive by hanging the harddisks from plastics strips with mounting holes in them. The antec case I'm using actually has enough bays as standard to mount all HD's normally.
The crypto I added is just some wierd thing I wanted to try sometime. At the time I set it up, it was impossible to change the password of your encrypted devices once created. I worked around this by creating a small encrypted partition, which has the ridiculously complex password for all the others. Whenever the password needs changing, I just change the password on the small encrypted partition which has the script that mounts all the others. Performance impact of the crypto is harsh though, average performance of the RAID5 is about 15 MB/sec (reading/writing), however this is still enough to feed a 100 MBit network, and far more than you'd need for video streaming (if that's your intention).
No, files can be fragmented under ext2, it would simply mean that you'd need more extents per file; each extents keeps track of one of the fragments (and they link to each other)
An Extent is simply a structure that contains a start block number and a length (in blocks) and, depending on the implementation, also a next and previous extent or block number (both can be used to find the next or previous extent, depending on implementation). Let's say such a structure would consists of 4 fields (start block number, length, next, previous), which takes up 16 bytes.
When blocksizes are very small (512 bytes for example), or when files are generally quite large, it's not unreasonable to say that there's a good chance that when files are written to disk they will be stored in one or more large chunks of blocks (or "extents"). For example, if I put a 1 MB file on a disk with 4 kB blocks in one large piece, then a single Extent structure (16 bytes) will suffice for me to know where all the data is (and how to seek in the file).
With FAT, for that same file you'd use about 256 entries in the FAT32 table (or 1024 bytes), which obviously is more space than our single extent.
When our 1 MB file gets more fragmented, there will be a break even point. When our file exceeds 64 fragments (64 x 16 bytes = 1024) then FAT32 will become more efficient, since we know need 64+ Extents to keep track of our file. However, such high fragmentation is rare and can be avoided easily enough (and in general such a highly fragmented file / partition would become unworkable under both FAT32 and an Extent based filesystem).
Implementation using Extent structures are generally more complex though, because you'll need to create a mechanism to find the Extent structure you are looking for easily; usually they are stored in somekind of B+ Tree implementation (reiserfs probably does that, and so did Smart Filesystem, something I wrote myself). With FAT, you can directly index and read the appropriate block from the FAT table which makes it a very trivial implementation.
There's one very important point here still however. FAT based filesystems always use the exact same amount of space to store where filedata is located, no matter how unfragmented or fragmented those files are. Extent based filesystems however will use more space (for storing extents) as the files become more fragmented, however use significantly less space than FAT when files are only moderately fragmented.
This is important because it can mean that your filesystem has 1 MB of free space (but all that space is fragmented into small chunks). With FAT, you can store a 1 MB file there, without any problem. However, with Extents, you may also need to allocate one or more new blocks in the B+ Tree for holding the extra Extents needed for all that fragmented space, which will result in slightly less space being available for that 1 MB file, and so it won't fit.
Sure it will, NTFS will happily use 4 kB (or smaller) on even a 300 GB drive. Windows + FAT32 will probably not allow you to do it (because of the huge FAT table I mentioned) but using larger blocks results in other major pains; you get a huge amount of overhead for small files. For example, if you have 200.000 files, and 16 kB blocks, then on average each of those files wastes about 8 kB, or about 1.6 GB.
It is silly to use on harddisks:) With FAT16 for example, a 2 GB partition was forced to use 32kB blocks, resulting in huge overhead for small files, not to mention having a ~60000 file limit for each partition.
FAT32 isn't much better. For a modern 120 GB harddisk, the FAT table would consume 125 MB (using 4 kB blocks), which is a bit too big to keep in RAM all the time. Large file performance would start to suffer, especially seek performance. Although the concept of FAT is nice, for larger disks using bitmaps + extents results in far better performance with far less memory overhead.
This reminds of a discussion I had at work once, whether or not we should put Apache in front of a Tomcat Java based webserver. Apache is updated often, while Tomcat doesn't bother much with updates. Which is more secure? I'd lean towards Tomcat simply because the most common security issues all arise from buffer/stack overflow issues.
The only place stack of buffer overflows could result are in the VM itself, but since this is a much smaller piece of code (compared to writing your entire project in C, like Apache) it can be more easily debugged and made secure.
The popularity of MMORPG's in particular has to do with character development, the interaction with so many other people and meeting people of all walks of life, from all countries and with similar interests to yours. The game world is active 24 hours a day, and doesn't stop when you leave, giving you a feeling you missed out when you weren't there.
In the beginning, you are just playing and doing whatever you want. Then you start levelling your character to get more powerful, killing monsters, do some quests. Then you'll find that there's stuff that you can only do with a group which leads to more interesting gear for your character or some other reward that would be hard to attain by yourself. You'll make friends, and after a while you'll come to know people online and they'll know you and know that they can trust you and you can trust them. They'll even miss you when you are absent at your usual play time or when you stopped playing for a week. After a night of gaming you make plans for the next time you meet, and you'll be expected to show up.
Then, once you are really getting addicted, you'll notice stuff that even your group of friends isn't enough to help you with. You join a guild, and go on huge 30+ player raids on some zone or monster for a chance at a reward way better than you ever had before. These things are planned in advance, and often cannot be held at all if specific character classes are absent or not present in enough numbers. Not showing up could spoil it for everybody.
Guilds offer an almost instant set of new friends, people you can do things with and willing to help you on your quests (especially if you offer your help for their quests whenever possible). The people in your guild often are very willing to help you because they see it as an advance of the guild as a whole if your character improves meaning the guild as a whole can take on more difficult challenges.
Anyway, the reason these games are so popular is because they have a very good ability to keep the game interesting (read: get you addicted). This often has nothing to do with content, gameplay or graphics, but more with the social aspect of it. It's not that a huge number of people play such games, but the people that do play them tend to stick with the game for years (there aren't many "single player" games I'd play every day, 8 hours a day and in the weekends for years in a row). Quitting is hard, because you feel like you lose a lot time invested in your character and you'll lose all your online friends (without the game as a mutual interest, you will soon lose touch with them).
Anyway, the advice I always give when people ask me about such games is, don't try them. You'll get addicted. I've stopped playing for 2 years now, but still find it tempting to start again. I've seen it happen often enough, people just trying WoW for the fun, now playing it every day whenever they can. I even joked about someone sharing his WoW account with his girlfriend that they would soon buy another PC and account. A month later they had... and still playing.
but stupid people can still download software via the web and mess things up
Smarter people can just tunnel out via HTTP, and do whatever they want.
The simplest solution is to lock down the user's rights. Problem solved.
No, actually you just created a huge support problem, not to mention that some people's jobs actually involves installing new software. And it can be worked around and disabled easily enough as well.
Yeah, I work for one of such companies. They lock the screensaver to 5 minutes, have a background process running that keeps a list of all the files on the system, have a virusscanner that scans every file, even text files (each time they're modified or newly created, which slows compile processes down by a factor of 10-100), deletes any attachments to email that ends in certain extensions (not by content) and so on.
So I just disabled all that shit, and ended up with a machine which did some actions 100 times faster. This was about 1 month after I got employed, and after about a year they still have no clue.
As for network security, I have yet to find a network I can't http tunnel out of. The IT staff thinks it is god or something, and cannot even give me external cvs access to do my work, so I just work around them. At some point however they'll realize that they provide a service and that they should provide what the company needs while still trying to make it secure.
Well, I disagree. I can create a network right here in my home of 100 computers, with no fear whatsoever they'll ever get hacked, no matter how advanced your technology (assuming you donot have any physical access to these systems, which seems to be the case for Galactica). This amazing feat is accomplished by not allowing external connections (like wireless) or even bothering connecting to any network that would go beyond the confines of the ship. What mechanism was used by the cylons to breach galactica's firewall is beyond me, unless they can somehow alter the processes on a computer from a distance... in which case they could do that to any computer, networked or not.
So either, they only invented wireless networking and forgot to research encryption, or cylons can somehow not only disrupt network cables from a distance, but they can do so in such a way as to plant a virus. The first one would be totally stupid (on galactica's part) and doesn't seem to be the case as they used wires, the second one not even remotely possible.
I didn't even count that one as a huge plothole though, as I come to expect nothing less when it comes to computer knowledge in popular sci-fi.
Atleast they could hold a camera still in those days. Presenting a shakey picture on a TV screen, and seeing one in real life (because you are walking, running, dancing) is a totally different thing. There's a reason why they call shakey "real life" footage taken of plane crash landings, tsunami's and what not "amateur video"; it's because it makes it hard to see what is really going on and is annoying to watch.
[quote]By that do you mean the emulation of battlefield witness filming?[/quote]
There's a reason that when they show such "clips" on the news they call it amateur video. My TV screen only occupies a small part of my field of vision. Making the camera shake means parts of the visuals are continously falling of the edge (in REAL LIFE, you'd still see those because humans have almost 180 degree vision). However, on my TV screen they disappear in the black border which is the frame of my TV set. Your eyes therefore won't be able to correct for this motion, since one second it is there, next it is gone. It's like seeing the world with tunnel vision.
Professionals should realize this, and stay away from these MTV practices. Also a significant portion of people actually get motion sick because their brain tries to correct this shakey vision, but fails because the image is too small and things keep falling of the edge; it's like the center of vision says "we're moving!" while at the edge of your vision you can still see you are lying on your couch...
I'm definitely watching the same show, and I think it is total rubbish. It's the first show which has managed to irritate me with its HUGE plotholes and crap camera work. The old series was way better (for its time). The new series is a mix of very futuristic technology like anti-grav, hyperdrive and huge spaceships with almost primitive 80's technology like unnetworked (even slow) computers (don't tell me they can't create a secure network -- bullshit), projectile weapons and the total inability to distinguish a cylon from a real person.
I also think they messed with a good thing. The old special effects are way better, just use those as a model instead of creating totally new ones. Why the hell they felt it neccesary to totally change the "robot form" cylons and vipers, especially the sounds of both, is beyond me.
That's saying something when I've managed to watch stuff like Andromeda, Stargate and Enterprise without too much of a problem.
Then perhaps it's time for these show creators to realize that when I run at a rapid pace through the jungle in real life, my brain will correct for this motion and give me a fairly decent impression of what is going on around me.
When I'm lying on my couch, eating chips and watching TV, this automatic correction does not happen. For one thing, the screen is not large enough for this, the visuals at the edge of the screen keep falling off in total blackness (the edge of my TV) and then reappearing as the camera swings back. You cannot correct for this, as essential visual information is simply missing (it's like watching through a tube, cause only the center of the screen is visible at all times).
The fact that they don't realize this (so called "professionals") is just sad. Coupled with the fact that a lot of people get motion sickness from this kind of camera work and it doesn't really add anything makes me wonder why it is being done at all, hence why I would favor incompetence over intended effect.
That was exactly my reaction when I saw the headline... Apart form the crap camera work (do they pay you extra for making the camera bounce all over the place?), the huge plot holes and the incredibly backwards religious attitudes, they also still are using calculators (because apparently the concept of a firewall can be bypassed at will), cannot easily detect what is or isn't a cylon and they still use projectile guns.. this is a total mismatch when you compare this with the technology needed for building huge spaceships, anti-grav and hyperdrive.
Not only that, but the cylons imho look and sound worse than the original, the vipers are crappier than in the original, and would you really have me believe you can fly a crashlanded cylon attacker by digging into its guts and then squeezing certain organs?
I was hoping that in season 2 they would atleast be able to create episodes without atleast one huge plothole in it, but so far season 2 is even worse than the first one was.
Slashdot Mirror
The trick is to use redirect. For exampe, you click on some random add of which the link points to my server (like this: http://www.myserver.com/adclick.jsp?realurl=www.am azon.com). The server will register the click and then tell your browser to redirect to www.amazon.com. The user will not even notice it, and in fact, tons of sites already do it that way.
120 GB, when I ask my dad how much memory his computer has.
As black holes are basically just non-light emitting point sized sources of X amount of gravity (where X can basically be chosen almost arbitrarely), I find it hard to believe that there's no possible distribution of black holes in a galaxy that would account for the additional rotation speed.
Maybe there is a civilization out there that's harvesting this dark energy as a natural resource for fuel, instead of using environmentally friendly fuels.
Good luck tracing anything over such a network :)
As far as I know, that simply is not possible. All the possible configurations that still provide redundancy (meaning, any one drive can fail, including the new 500 GB drive) will never give more than 900 GB.
1x 300 GB = not redundant
2x 300 GB = 300 GB
3x 300 GB = 600 GB
4x 300 GB = 900 GB
1x 500 GB + 3x 300 GB = 900 GB (!!)
2x 500 GB + 2x 300 GB = 1100 GB
3x 500 GB + 1x 300 GB = 1300 GB
4x 500 GB = 1500 GB
(And before someone asks that 2x 500 GB + 2x 300 GB cannot be 1100 GB with redundancy, I should point out that there are other ways to set these disks up than two simple mirrors).
I don't see the point about the RAID controller (not that I even use one, they don't add anything useful for a home system where the NIC is the bottleneck). The PSU toasting discs seems unlikely, but even then, no data will be lost that way, although it will be a bit expensive to get to it again.
Accidently deleting files and being able to recover them is something you should watch out for in a filesystem, and it's the reason I donot use ext3.
But anyway, if I could cheaply backup 2 TB I would, instead I've opted for a different solution. I only backup files that are smaller than 10 MB (or are on a special partition). All the other files are not backed up, but are registered, so in case things fail, I know what I lost. Not surprisingly, most "large" files are of little importance. They are not documents I created, nor are they source code, or anything else I created myself. They're usually movies or some other stuff I still have lying around (or can get easily enough anyway). My backup medium of choice... another harddisk. There simply is nothing cheaper for that much data.
DVD's are not the answer. First, they are WAY too small. Second, the lifetime of burned DVD's is far too low. You'd be surprised how fast burned DVD's become unreadable. First signs they are degrading is when the data on the outer tracks starts copying slower than the stuff on the inner tracks, something which is not the case when freshly burned.
Somehow I don't think installing it will make things better...
My humble home setup consists of 8 300 GB drives, 1 extra promise IDE controller, a gigabit NIC and linux to do software raid 5, plenty of cooling, plus some stuff to mail me when things go wrong.
Stuff to watch out for is overheating, make sure to monitor harddisk temperature and install enough fans (I use a Antec P180 case which has 12 cm fans, and all 8 harddisks run at or below 35C at all times and it's all still pretty quiet).
Also set up smartmontools to mail you when a harddisk failure is imminent or when RAID5 has a disk failing. I've had 2 harddisks fail in the past 3 years (Maxtor) but both were in warranty and they simply send me a replacement.
Also make sure you have enough power. I use a 300 watt PSU, which only barely is enough to "start" the machine (it sometimes refuses to start because of the harddisks spinning up taking too much power, but simply starting it again while the harddisks are spinned up halfway is usually sufficient to get it started all the way -- quite funny when I discovered this for the first time).
The first version of this setup was a standard ATX case which I stripped for as much 3,5" disk room as possible (I mounted 4 in the 3 top 5.25" bays, and another 4 below the disk drive by hanging the harddisks from plastics strips with mounting holes in them. The antec case I'm using actually has enough bays as standard to mount all HD's normally.
The crypto I added is just some wierd thing I wanted to try sometime. At the time I set it up, it was impossible to change the password of your encrypted devices once created. I worked around this by creating a small encrypted partition, which has the ridiculously complex password for all the others. Whenever the password needs changing, I just change the password on the small encrypted partition which has the script that mounts all the others. Performance impact of the crypto is harsh though, average performance of the RAID5 is about 15 MB/sec (reading/writing), however this is still enough to feed a 100 MBit network, and far more than you'd need for video streaming (if that's your intention).
An Extent is simply a structure that contains a start block number and a length (in blocks) and, depending on the implementation, also a next and previous extent or block number (both can be used to find the next or previous extent, depending on implementation). Let's say such a structure would consists of 4 fields (start block number, length, next, previous), which takes up 16 bytes.
When blocksizes are very small (512 bytes for example), or when files are generally quite large, it's not unreasonable to say that there's a good chance that when files are written to disk they will be stored in one or more large chunks of blocks (or "extents"). For example, if I put a 1 MB file on a disk with 4 kB blocks in one large piece, then a single Extent structure (16 bytes) will suffice for me to know where all the data is (and how to seek in the file).
With FAT, for that same file you'd use about 256 entries in the FAT32 table (or 1024 bytes), which obviously is more space than our single extent.
When our 1 MB file gets more fragmented, there will be a break even point. When our file exceeds 64 fragments (64 x 16 bytes = 1024) then FAT32 will become more efficient, since we know need 64+ Extents to keep track of our file. However, such high fragmentation is rare and can be avoided easily enough (and in general such a highly fragmented file / partition would become unworkable under both FAT32 and an Extent based filesystem).
Implementation using Extent structures are generally more complex though, because you'll need to create a mechanism to find the Extent structure you are looking for easily; usually they are stored in somekind of B+ Tree implementation (reiserfs probably does that, and so did Smart Filesystem, something I wrote myself). With FAT, you can directly index and read the appropriate block from the FAT table which makes it a very trivial implementation.
There's one very important point here still however. FAT based filesystems always use the exact same amount of space to store where filedata is located, no matter how unfragmented or fragmented those files are. Extent based filesystems however will use more space (for storing extents) as the files become more fragmented, however use significantly less space than FAT when files are only moderately fragmented.
This is important because it can mean that your filesystem has 1 MB of free space (but all that space is fragmented into small chunks). With FAT, you can store a 1 MB file there, without any problem. However, with Extents, you may also need to allocate one or more new blocks in the B+ Tree for holding the extra Extents needed for all that fragmented space, which will result in slightly less space being available for that 1 MB file, and so it won't fit.
Sure it will, NTFS will happily use 4 kB (or smaller) on even a 300 GB drive. Windows + FAT32 will probably not allow you to do it (because of the huge FAT table I mentioned) but using larger blocks results in other major pains; you get a huge amount of overhead for small files. For example, if you have 200.000 files, and 16 kB blocks, then on average each of those files wastes about 8 kB, or about 1.6 GB.
FAT32 isn't much better. For a modern 120 GB harddisk, the FAT table would consume 125 MB (using 4 kB blocks), which is a bit too big to keep in RAM all the time. Large file performance would start to suffer, especially seek performance. Although the concept of FAT is nice, for larger disks using bitmaps + extents results in far better performance with far less memory overhead.
Get firefox, install flashblock, go to about:config and change image.animation_mode to "none".
danish: masseødelæggelsesvåben dutch: massavernietigingswapens :-)
direct english translation:
massdestructionweapons
The only place stack of buffer overflows could result are in the VM itself, but since this is a much smaller piece of code (compared to writing your entire project in C, like Apache) it can be more easily debugged and made secure.
In the beginning, you are just playing and doing whatever you want. Then you start levelling your character to get more powerful, killing monsters, do some quests. Then you'll find that there's stuff that you can only do with a group which leads to more interesting gear for your character or some other reward that would be hard to attain by yourself. You'll make friends, and after a while you'll come to know people online and they'll know you and know that they can trust you and you can trust them. They'll even miss you when you are absent at your usual play time or when you stopped playing for a week. After a night of gaming you make plans for the next time you meet, and you'll be expected to show up.
Then, once you are really getting addicted, you'll notice stuff that even your group of friends isn't enough to help you with. You join a guild, and go on huge 30+ player raids on some zone or monster for a chance at a reward way better than you ever had before. These things are planned in advance, and often cannot be held at all if specific character classes are absent or not present in enough numbers. Not showing up could spoil it for everybody.
Guilds offer an almost instant set of new friends, people you can do things with and willing to help you on your quests (especially if you offer your help for their quests whenever possible). The people in your guild often are very willing to help you because they see it as an advance of the guild as a whole if your character improves meaning the guild as a whole can take on more difficult challenges.
Anyway, the reason these games are so popular is because they have a very good ability to keep the game interesting (read: get you addicted). This often has nothing to do with content, gameplay or graphics, but more with the social aspect of it. It's not that a huge number of people play such games, but the people that do play them tend to stick with the game for years (there aren't many "single player" games I'd play every day, 8 hours a day and in the weekends for years in a row). Quitting is hard, because you feel like you lose a lot time invested in your character and you'll lose all your online friends (without the game as a mutual interest, you will soon lose touch with them).
Anyway, the advice I always give when people ask me about such games is, don't try them. You'll get addicted. I've stopped playing for 2 years now, but still find it tempting to start again. I've seen it happen often enough, people just trying WoW for the fun, now playing it every day whenever they can. I even joked about someone sharing his WoW account with his girlfriend that they would soon buy another PC and account. A month later they had... and still playing.
So I just disabled all that shit, and ended up with a machine which did some actions 100 times faster. This was about 1 month after I got employed, and after about a year they still have no clue.
As for network security, I have yet to find a network I can't http tunnel out of. The IT staff thinks it is god or something, and cannot even give me external cvs access to do my work, so I just work around them. At some point however they'll realize that they provide a service and that they should provide what the company needs while still trying to make it secure.
So either, they only invented wireless networking and forgot to research encryption, or cylons can somehow not only disrupt network cables from a distance, but they can do so in such a way as to plant a virus. The first one would be totally stupid (on galactica's part) and doesn't seem to be the case as they used wires, the second one not even remotely possible.
I didn't even count that one as a huge plothole though, as I come to expect nothing less when it comes to computer knowledge in popular sci-fi.
Atleast they could hold a camera still in those days. Presenting a shakey picture on a TV screen, and seeing one in real life (because you are walking, running, dancing) is a totally different thing. There's a reason why they call shakey "real life" footage taken of plane crash landings, tsunami's and what not "amateur video"; it's because it makes it hard to see what is really going on and is annoying to watch.
Professionals should realize this, and stay away from these MTV practices. Also a significant portion of people actually get motion sick because their brain tries to correct this shakey vision, but fails because the image is too small and things keep falling of the edge; it's like the center of vision says "we're moving!" while at the edge of your vision you can still see you are lying on your couch...
I also think they messed with a good thing. The old special effects are way better, just use those as a model instead of creating totally new ones. Why the hell they felt it neccesary to totally change the "robot form" cylons and vipers, especially the sounds of both, is beyond me.
That's saying something when I've managed to watch stuff like Andromeda, Stargate and Enterprise without too much of a problem.
When I'm lying on my couch, eating chips and watching TV, this automatic correction does not happen. For one thing, the screen is not large enough for this, the visuals at the edge of the screen keep falling off in total blackness (the edge of my TV) and then reappearing as the camera swings back. You cannot correct for this, as essential visual information is simply missing (it's like watching through a tube, cause only the center of the screen is visible at all times).
The fact that they don't realize this (so called "professionals") is just sad. Coupled with the fact that a lot of people get motion sickness from this kind of camera work and it doesn't really add anything makes me wonder why it is being done at all, hence why I would favor incompetence over intended effect.
Not only that, but the cylons imho look and sound worse than the original, the vipers are crappier than in the original, and would you really have me believe you can fly a crashlanded cylon attacker by digging into its guts and then squeezing certain organs?
I was hoping that in season 2 they would atleast be able to create episodes without atleast one huge plothole in it, but so far season 2 is even worse than the first one was.