He graduated, and he's probably still more qualified than the top of their class banana republic unaccredited "medical" school. Note I said "probably", because there's always the chance that the unaccredited "medical" school might have a self-motivated savant type graduate.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
You don't need to write to the proprietary apis. I've written relatively complex apps that you could drop into Tomcat, Resin, ATG, and Weblogic and run with no issues whatsoever on any of them while they were running on Linux, OS X, Solaris, and Windows flavor of the month. I will mention that at least one of those listed app servers is not J2EE spec compliant, but unless you're really playing with J2EE internals or doing stupid things, you'll never know.
The problem with compatibility is usually when you want some specific short cut function for a client app, generally with the GUI. This is usually done for performance reasons.
Heck, I gave 3 months notice at one job. I was asked to not do anything solo from then on, in an effort to transition everything I did over to co-workers taking over my responsibilities. The last month, I didn't do much other than hob-knob with co-workers (I guess you can say they picked my brain...) I'd already documented all SOPs for everything, so there really wasn't much left to do, and the 2 year project was pretty much finished, having been running for a year as it was expanded.
I won't kid you, 3 months notice somewhat scared me initially, as I was really putting myself out there if they had turned into jerks. But everything went as well as I could have hoped, and they planned a smooth transition. I also stayed in contact with these folks for years.
In another job, we were given pretty clear indications that we were to be laid off in 2 months. That helped significantly in finding another job, and no one robbed the place. Yes, there are bad eggs, but those bad eggs will usually have done their damage prior to giving notice. (like stealing IP, contact lists, etc) Those that actually engage in sabotage are another level of bad altogether.
When the original DirectX packages came out, MS wanted to migrate people to XP, so they initially did not support 2K. Later on, that changed. But you also have to recall at the time that XP did not sell at all, and was a huge flop for the first year plus.
Win 2K didn't support the version of DirectX required by whatever game it was back then, either Half Life or Quake III, or perhaps Dungeon Siege, I don't recall. It could have been any number of other games. Oh, and I had Win2K Pro or Server, I don't recall which of those either. I've since moved to Debian/RH/Fedora and OSX, depending upon the need.
If games only came in Mac versions as well at the same time.:)
Addtionally, to mix in other arguments, I agree P IV could generate significant performance if it didn't run out of thermal headroom. You would need good caches and such but despite what the other poster says both Intel and AMD are affected similarly with memory latency and bandwidth issues. Perhaps AMD fares somewhat better. But not so much better that if the P4 were running at double its current clock rate that it wouldn't mop the floor with the AMD.
And you could make the exact same argument about AMD mopping the floor even in that case, by cranking up the clock on the AMD. People have overclocked the 144/146 Opterons to 3.2GHz stable. I'd love to see how AMD's best would compared with Intel's best overclocked.
And with AMD going to DDR2 support, since we're in hypothetical discussions anyways, what would the top-end AMD chip overclocked run, since they already mop the floor with Intel's best in stock configurations? Never mind the dual-core lop-sided comparisons.
Dollar for dollar, AMD's chips really are your only choice these days, and I plan on having one in my next PC system as my P4 2.4 is about at the end of its useful gaming life. Looking forward to the Q1 price drops.
Some of us long ago because our game machines required it and our company's license allowed us to (MS had some really wierd licenses way back when).
In any case - the first thing I do with any Windows machine is strip out all the stupid unnecessary services, including Windows Update. That thing is the most moronic thing I've ever seen. Half the time, after rebooting, some piece of software no longer works at all, or, better yet, you'll start doing a checkdisk on startup and start seeing "lost cluster found" messages scrolling across your screen. While entertaining, it certainly isn't after it completes and you get another reboot and a message like "hal.dll missing or corrupt" or "ntloader.dll missing or corrupt".
So after all this, you can imagine my trepidation when I finally installed my 10 month old copy of Half Life 2 last weekend, I had to update DirectX and my video drivers before being able to start HL2. Those were the first updates done in over a year. Fortunately it still runs.:)
No matter how many SPUs are in the cell processor, it won't make your builds go any faster, allow you to serve more webpages, database-clients, or whatever... For that we need general purpose CPUs.
Actually, the new Sun T1 processors (1 floating point, 8 integer core CPUs) are what you'd want to serve more webpages for instance. Certainly not that 10GHz Intel processor coming out any day now [Tm]
Supercomputing folks can use it, but only for 32bit operations. Depends upon the need, not solely the bits. Not all SC users need 64 bits.
Obviously you haven't tried to stop various services. There's a large number that simply won't stop, and some that stop but don't release their file locks. In these cases, only a reboot will allow for those services/files to be updated.
I use Adium on my Mac. I really like it, except the fact that I can't seem to get Adium to have encrypted connections with GAIM users (even though it's the same base code - Adium throw GAIM errors occassionally)
* Annoy your target the second they log on...:) * Complete a thought in a conversation when they get disconnected. * Send a link to a story or a thought, when they're not on line (kind of like email, except through IM) * 100s of other fun, thoughtful, useful communications
As I mentioned though, I've not used Trillian in 2 years, since the free version was having significant issues at the time. (Back in the bad months when MSN, Yahoo, and AIM were all trying to keep others off "their" servers) GAIM was just a better client at the time, and much more stable, although it will only stay up reliably for about 2 weeks.
What's funny is that you mention GAIM-encryption, yet neglect to state that GAIM already provides you with:
Ability to set other's nicks
Ability to set auto-reply messages.
Direct connect on protocols that permit it
Ability to send messages to people that are offline that they will receive next time they sign on, become active, etc.
Ability to go invisible to clients on all protocols.
There's only a couple of things, the ability to accept others when they add you to their list (MSN) and Direct Connect (AIM, Jabber) that are protocol dependent. Except for that, GAIM (and Trillian, for that matter) give you many many client side features lacking in the "official" clients, plus, you get to chat with people on all networks easily.
Now, here's the things I'd like added to a client like GAIM/Trillian:
Grouping of nicks under a single nick, so you'd only have to click on the nick and the first available (or even preferred) protocol client would be connected. This would also hold for "pounces" - Those messages saved and autosent when one of the nicks becomes available/meets criteria.
Transparent encryption - always encrypt for a protocol, and make those protocols/clients with encryption the preferred protocol for a particular nick with multiple clients.
In the case of GAIM, be able to reliably use the assigned nicks to refer to an intended user (right now, that only worked for me back on version 0.8, it's failed ever since)
Make user icons available reliably.
Allow logging to be specified per nick/user and remember it.
Make client reliable and stable. GAIM's still somewhat flaky in the GUI, the last Trillian version I used about 2 years ago still suffered reliability issues.
Last, but not least, make file transfers reliable across all protocols. If this requires opening a port in your firewall, then document that. (I've looked and not found this documentation)
I know that you are obviously a much better consumer than everyone else, with better tastes. That's because you read Slashdot.:-) But you rely on your fellow man constantly.
I don't believe it's anyone thinking their tastes are better than anyone else's, but more a situation of their taste not matching others or the mainstream.
And to get back on topic, should they create a select any 80 channels out of these 160 for $30/month, that would be fine. But to have to pay for each channel independently would definitely reduce the selection of channels. Personally, I find all shopping channels indecent, along with all religious channels. Do you think any of those will be removed from your selections? Heck no! Shopping channels make too much money, and the religious channels in most cases have plenty of funds to keep them included in the "base free package" you'll start with.
And to address your wondering whether they'll be free, I seriously doubt anything you will want will be free, unless you want religious and shopping channel junk.
As for seeing "the face of their relative on someone else's head" wouldn't be any different than seeing someone else that looks like their relative. After all, aren't organ donations anonymous in the general case? So how would they know this is "the one"?
Actually, that's part of the generic discovery problem for some projects, although you should know to 50% (preferably 25%) by the end of the technical design.
The problem with MS specifically is that they know how long it will take to deliver what they promised last time, but that is usually not what the marketing dept wants, because now those items are already out in other systems. Marketing requires new features, and requires them within 2 years. MS Dev apparently gets it pushed to 3 years while committing to 10 years worth of effort. (why it takes 10 years to create a meta-data file system is beyond me... see OS X Tiger for the counter argument;)
I'm sure MS has some smart people somewhere. They're just not in evidence when the announcements and products come round.
Speaking of MS failures.... where's Cairo? Remember that promised OO GUI that would just smoke OS/2... and never appeared, even today, 14 years later? OS/2's Warp release had it down pat. What about distributed objects? COM/DCOM is still a bad hack. SOM/DSOM worked even with MS COM objects, before DCOM even came out. The list goes on and on, and could actually be used to indicate how MS never innovates anything, and doesn't even really successfully copy better technologies. Hell, MS can't successfully copy 10+ year old technology today.
Look at MS's file system, it's one of the most horrible POS FSes out there. Hugely wasteful and inefficient. What's really ironic is that they OWNED the base patents for HPFS which is a much much better file system for home users than NTFS, yet they refused to use it, and even dropped support for it in Windows 2K. Imagine running a system that effectively never had its disk performance decay over time due to fragmentation.
Anyway, I've filled my anti-MS quota for the year...
That's why the first part of estimation is discovery. This takes a lot of time for large products. Generally, you don't announce your product during this phase, which apparently MS is fond of doing, in an effort to head off other product adoptions (OS/2, Linux, now OS X) Unfortunately for MS, even as they finished discovery, started development, and then started removing big chunks of announced functionality, OS X rolled out 3 versions that surpassed most of what MS had originally promised.
Think about this for a second - most people are intolerant of other people attempting to force them to believe as they do. Almost all religions have as one of their central tenants to "spread" or "preach" or "convert" the "truth", as if calling a random set of beliefs "truth" lends it more credence. Then consider who really is at fault for causing the intolerant situation.
Including snippets in speeches to appease the masses, or, in the case of Carter, keeping your religion mostly as a personal thing is not the same thing as our current "I am a Rightous Christian" armbanded hypocrit. Remind me again what he said about the person who leaked Plame's name? Remind me again what one of his planks in his campaign was? Something about bringing "honesty and integrity" back into the White House? I suppose Rove, Libby, Michael Brown, and Harriet Miers were examples of this?
Exactly why are people opposed to religion nutty? Is there a rational reason to be irrational? The core tenet of most religions is "faith", which by definition has no rational support, or it wouldn't be faith, would it? Note that this doesn't excuse the radical atheists, who are almost as full of fundamentalist zealotry as their religious counterparts, although in general I note that atheists aren't as hypocritical.
Let's pretend people are lemmings, and, you happen to be a "rational" lemming and stand outside the stampede to the cliff. Is it "nutty" to try to change the viewpoint of some of the horde stampeding to the cliff? (ignoring the fact that the horde would probably try to stampede you for getting in their way/viewpoint)
As for the bible-thumpers taking over America, start with Bush, and end with the extremely discouraging discriminating TX "marriage" law. Yes, there's a good reason to be alarmist.
You are correct. IIS pre version 6 anyways was an entirely unrunnable POS for anything more complicated than simple web pages on a single web site. We ran IPlanet instead (and if you've never installed IPlanet on a windows box, you don't know what an indictment that is of IIS).
As for SMTP, the SMTP "server" that comes with Windows is about as useful as a CS Freshman's first semester SMTP Server project.
Exchange? Please. Yes, it's easy to setup. Yes it's deceptively easy to manage. Better break out the wallet for someone smarter than MCS (that'd be Microsoft Consulting Services) once you're running and need to do anything with it. Need to setup backups for it so that you can recover a single mailbox? Better have a REALLY expensive backup solution working. Oh, and dedicated backup time. Got a corruption in your Exchange DB? You darn well better have a full backup and a few spare hours. (Yes, backup software/hardware has gotten better, but I still hear people have major issues with this) Need to reconfigure your organization? Go find another job. It's less painful. Oh, and let's not forget about the massive cost associated with Exchange. It's not just limited to the server software/hardware, but all clients that access it, even if they're not using MS clients.... in which case, why use Exchange in the first place?
Now for SQL Server. It's a fine and dandy replacement for Access, if it were free/cheap (which there is a free version now). Otherwise, if you need more than what the free version offers, go get a real DB. MySQL, Postgres, Sybase, Oracle, DB/2, probably in that order, depending upon your needs. If you have any doubts, take a look at lock escaltion in SQL Server (I doubt this has been fixed in SQL2005). You gotta love completely locking the entire DB.
The Yorktown's failures encompass a large number of flaws and single points of failure. I guess it's more a testament to bad architecture than any one single bug.
The real issue is to create a game that has good gameplay, not the rather sordid and boring task of collecting "Super Vampire Slayer Sword +3", only to find out a week later that there's now a "Super Duper Vampire Slayer Sword +4 that also makes coffee in the morning", which, btw, costs 3 times as much. Coincidently, tomorrow, all mobs (mobiles, otherwise known as monsters or nasty things out to kill or abuse you) will only be attackable by +4 weapons....
That's the crap that makes MMORPGs boring and prone to cheating. Well, that and the endless camping (sitting around waiting for a mob to spawn, ie, reappear) so you can kill a mob again and again, ooo - what fun! Or, and these are my favorites, "quests" that involve a minimum of 8 hours of continuous online time so that you can travel from point A to B to retrieve an arbitrary piece of crap to deliver to C to retrieve another arbitrary piece of crap so you can hike back across the entire planet 3 times to get your +1 dagger gilded, so there are now 59,142 +1 gilded daggers in the world.
So, how to fix it? First off, electronic real estate is essentially free. Therefore, why do houses, castles, or Ogre swamps keep going up in value with time? MMORPGs are mostly fantasy worlds, use a little fantasy and fix the core issue. (If I have to explain this, you shouldn't be dabbling in fantasy...)
Secondly, if game play becomes the attractant, and the collection of equipment etc becomes secondary, then you'll have a truly decent world without ebay gold miners, because there won't be any point to it. To make most equipment even less attractive, some breakage rules and such should be instituted. Since it's a fantasy world, make every change of ownership degrade the eq in question, in some way, perhaps raising its "breakability" rating. People would want to get their own eq, as you could never be sure how far down the hand-me down chain the eq has survived.
Lastly, if the game is properly setup, you can't "cheat". RPGs aren't inteded to be FPS's, so server driven play isn't necessarily "bad". The graphics et al can be handled on the client side, with the server controlling all portions of it. For user server networks, using an MD5 routine to generate a hash based on client requested specifics could be used for authentication? (This could also be gotten around, but it gets harder, basically, user controlled servers always put security at greater risk than hosted systems.) A trusted registration system could also be used, with automatic downloads of code snippets that would modify an executables signature to verify that the executable truly is unaltered. This would be harder and not be 100% user based, but is a possibility.
You should note I love the concept of RPGs, but the execution of most games falls far short of what RPGs are meant to be. These are just some rambling thoughts that've gathered over the years.
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He graduated, and he's probably still more qualified than the top of their class banana republic unaccredited "medical" school. Note I said "probably", because there's always the chance that the unaccredited "medical" school might have a self-motivated savant type graduate.
You don't need to write to the proprietary apis. I've written relatively complex apps that you could drop into Tomcat, Resin, ATG, and Weblogic and run with no issues whatsoever on any of them while they were running on Linux, OS X, Solaris, and Windows flavor of the month. I will mention that at least one of those listed app servers is not J2EE spec compliant, but unless you're really playing with J2EE internals or doing stupid things, you'll never know.
The problem with compatibility is usually when you want some specific short cut function for a client app, generally with the GUI. This is usually done for performance reasons.
Heck, I gave 3 months notice at one job. I was asked to not do anything solo from then on, in an effort to transition everything I did over to co-workers taking over my responsibilities. The last month, I didn't do much other than hob-knob with co-workers (I guess you can say they picked my brain...) I'd already documented all SOPs for everything, so there really wasn't much left to do, and the 2 year project was pretty much finished, having been running for a year as it was expanded.
I won't kid you, 3 months notice somewhat scared me initially, as I was really putting myself out there if they had turned into jerks. But everything went as well as I could have hoped, and they planned a smooth transition. I also stayed in contact with these folks for years.
In another job, we were given pretty clear indications that we were to be laid off in 2 months. That helped significantly in finding another job, and no one robbed the place. Yes, there are bad eggs, but those bad eggs will usually have done their damage prior to giving notice. (like stealing IP, contact lists, etc) Those that actually engage in sabotage are another level of bad altogether.
Or power a metal skeletoned cyborg, and go back in time... Sarah....
When the original DirectX packages came out, MS wanted to migrate people to XP, so they initially did not support 2K. Later on, that changed. But you also have to recall at the time that XP did not sell at all, and was a huge flop for the first year plus.
Win 2K didn't support the version of DirectX required by whatever game it was back then, either Half Life or Quake III, or perhaps Dungeon Siege, I don't recall. It could have been any number of other games. Oh, and I had Win2K Pro or Server, I don't recall which of those either. I've since moved to Debian/RH/Fedora and OSX, depending upon the need.
:)
If games only came in Mac versions as well at the same time.
Umm, same hardware that NT boxes came with. From some amazing coincidence, OS/2 and NT ran on most of the same hardware.
And you could make the exact same argument about AMD mopping the floor even in that case, by cranking up the clock on the AMD. People have overclocked the 144/146 Opterons to 3.2GHz stable. I'd love to see how AMD's best would compared with Intel's best overclocked.
And with AMD going to DDR2 support, since we're in hypothetical discussions anyways, what would the top-end AMD chip overclocked run, since they already mop the floor with Intel's best in stock configurations? Never mind the dual-core lop-sided comparisons.
Dollar for dollar, AMD's chips really are your only choice these days, and I plan on having one in my next PC system as my P4 2.4 is about at the end of its useful gaming life. Looking forward to the Q1 price drops.
Some of us long ago because our game machines required it and our company's license allowed us to (MS had some really wierd licenses way back when).
:)
In any case - the first thing I do with any Windows machine is strip out all the stupid unnecessary services, including Windows Update. That thing is the most moronic thing I've ever seen. Half the time, after rebooting, some piece of software no longer works at all, or, better yet, you'll start doing a checkdisk on startup and start seeing "lost cluster found" messages scrolling across your screen. While entertaining, it certainly isn't after it completes and you get another reboot and a message like "hal.dll missing or corrupt" or "ntloader.dll missing or corrupt".
So after all this, you can imagine my trepidation when I finally installed my 10 month old copy of Half Life 2 last weekend, I had to update DirectX and my video drivers before being able to start HL2. Those were the first updates done in over a year. Fortunately it still runs.
Actually, the new Sun T1 processors (1 floating point, 8 integer core CPUs) are what you'd want to serve more webpages for instance. Certainly not that 10GHz Intel processor coming out any day now [Tm]
Supercomputing folks can use it, but only for 32bit operations. Depends upon the need, not solely the bits. Not all SC users need 64 bits.
Obviously you haven't tried to stop various services. There's a large number that simply won't stop, and some that stop but don't release their file locks. In these cases, only a reboot will allow for those services/files to be updated.
Wish I had mod points instead. You never seem to have them when you need them....
I use Adium on my Mac. I really like it, except the fact that I can't seem to get Adium to have encrypted connections with GAIM users (even though it's the same base code - Adium throw GAIM errors occassionally)
Good items for "pounces"
:)
* Annoy your target the second they log on...
* Complete a thought in a conversation when they get disconnected.
* Send a link to a story or a thought, when they're not on line (kind of like email, except through IM)
* 100s of other fun, thoughtful, useful communications
As I mentioned though, I've not used Trillian in 2 years, since the free version was having significant issues at the time. (Back in the bad months when MSN, Yahoo, and AIM were all trying to keep others off "their" servers) GAIM was just a better client at the time, and much more stable, although it will only stay up reliably for about 2 weeks.
There's only a couple of things, the ability to accept others when they add you to their list (MSN) and Direct Connect (AIM, Jabber) that are protocol dependent. Except for that, GAIM (and Trillian, for that matter) give you many many client side features lacking in the "official" clients, plus, you get to chat with people on all networks easily.
Now, here's the things I'd like added to a client like GAIM/Trillian:
That's a list of desirables.
I don't believe it's anyone thinking their tastes are better than anyone else's, but more a situation of their taste not matching others or the mainstream.
And to get back on topic, should they create a select any 80 channels out of these 160 for $30/month, that would be fine. But to have to pay for each channel independently would definitely reduce the selection of channels. Personally, I find all shopping channels indecent, along with all religious channels. Do you think any of those will be removed from your selections? Heck no! Shopping channels make too much money, and the religious channels in most cases have plenty of funds to keep them included in the "base free package" you'll start with.
And to address your wondering whether they'll be free, I seriously doubt anything you will want will be free, unless you want religious and shopping channel junk.
As for seeing "the face of their relative on someone else's head" wouldn't be any different than seeing someone else that looks like their relative. After all, aren't organ donations anonymous in the general case? So how would they know this is "the one"?
Actually, that's part of the generic discovery problem for some projects, although you should know to 50% (preferably 25%) by the end of the technical design.
The problem with MS specifically is that they know how long it will take to deliver what they promised last time, but that is usually not what the marketing dept wants, because now those items are already out in other systems. Marketing requires new features, and requires them within 2 years. MS Dev apparently gets it pushed to 3 years while committing to 10 years worth of effort. (why it takes 10 years to create a meta-data file system is beyond me... see OS X Tiger for the counter argument;)
I'm sure MS has some smart people somewhere. They're just not in evidence when the announcements and products come round.
Speaking of MS failures.... where's Cairo? Remember that promised OO GUI that would just smoke OS/2... and never appeared, even today, 14 years later? OS/2's Warp release had it down pat. What about distributed objects? COM/DCOM is still a bad hack. SOM/DSOM worked even with MS COM objects, before DCOM even came out. The list goes on and on, and could actually be used to indicate how MS never innovates anything, and doesn't even really successfully copy better technologies. Hell, MS can't successfully copy 10+ year old technology today.
Look at MS's file system, it's one of the most horrible POS FSes out there. Hugely wasteful and inefficient. What's really ironic is that they OWNED the base patents for HPFS which is a much much better file system for home users than NTFS, yet they refused to use it, and even dropped support for it in Windows 2K. Imagine running a system that effectively never had its disk performance decay over time due to fragmentation.
Anyway, I've filled my anti-MS quota for the year...
That's why the first part of estimation is discovery. This takes a lot of time for large products. Generally, you don't announce your product during this phase, which apparently MS is fond of doing, in an effort to head off other product adoptions (OS/2, Linux, now OS X) Unfortunately for MS, even as they finished discovery, started development, and then started removing big chunks of announced functionality, OS X rolled out 3 versions that surpassed most of what MS had originally promised.
Think about this for a second - most people are intolerant of other people attempting to force them to believe as they do. Almost all religions have as one of their central tenants to "spread" or "preach" or "convert" the "truth", as if calling a random set of beliefs "truth" lends it more credence. Then consider who really is at fault for causing the intolerant situation.
Including snippets in speeches to appease the masses, or, in the case of Carter, keeping your religion mostly as a personal thing is not the same thing as our current "I am a Rightous Christian" armbanded hypocrit. Remind me again what he said about the person who leaked Plame's name? Remind me again what one of his planks in his campaign was? Something about bringing "honesty and integrity" back into the White House? I suppose Rove, Libby, Michael Brown, and Harriet Miers were examples of this?
Exactly why are people opposed to religion nutty? Is there a rational reason to be irrational? The core tenet of most religions is "faith", which by definition has no rational support, or it wouldn't be faith, would it? Note that this doesn't excuse the radical atheists, who are almost as full of fundamentalist zealotry as their religious counterparts, although in general I note that atheists aren't as hypocritical.
Let's pretend people are lemmings, and, you happen to be a "rational" lemming and stand outside the stampede to the cliff. Is it "nutty" to try to change the viewpoint of some of the horde stampeding to the cliff? (ignoring the fact that the horde would probably try to stampede you for getting in their way/viewpoint)
As for the bible-thumpers taking over America, start with Bush, and end with the extremely discouraging discriminating TX "marriage" law. Yes, there's a good reason to be alarmist.
You are correct. IIS pre version 6 anyways was an entirely unrunnable POS for anything more complicated than simple web pages on a single web site. We ran IPlanet instead (and if you've never installed IPlanet on a windows box, you don't know what an indictment that is of IIS).
As for SMTP, the SMTP "server" that comes with Windows is about as useful as a CS Freshman's first semester SMTP Server project.
Exchange? Please. Yes, it's easy to setup. Yes it's deceptively easy to manage. Better break out the wallet for someone smarter than MCS (that'd be Microsoft Consulting Services) once you're running and need to do anything with it. Need to setup backups for it so that you can recover a single mailbox? Better have a REALLY expensive backup solution working. Oh, and dedicated backup time. Got a corruption in your Exchange DB? You darn well better have a full backup and a few spare hours. (Yes, backup software/hardware has gotten better, but I still hear people have major issues with this) Need to reconfigure your organization? Go find another job. It's less painful. Oh, and let's not forget about the massive cost associated with Exchange. It's not just limited to the server software/hardware, but all clients that access it, even if they're not using MS clients.... in which case, why use Exchange in the first place?
Now for SQL Server. It's a fine and dandy replacement for Access, if it were free/cheap (which there is a free version now). Otherwise, if you need more than what the free version offers, go get a real DB. MySQL, Postgres, Sybase, Oracle, DB/2, probably in that order, depending upon your needs. If you have any doubts, take a look at lock escaltion in SQL Server (I doubt this has been fixed in SQL2005). You gotta love completely locking the entire DB.
The Yorktown's failures encompass a large number of flaws and single points of failure. I guess it's more a testament to bad architecture than any one single bug.
The real issue is to create a game that has good gameplay, not the rather sordid and boring task of collecting "Super Vampire Slayer Sword +3", only to find out a week later that there's now a "Super Duper Vampire Slayer Sword +4 that also makes coffee in the morning", which, btw, costs 3 times as much. Coincidently, tomorrow, all mobs (mobiles, otherwise known as monsters or nasty things out to kill or abuse you) will only be attackable by +4 weapons....
That's the crap that makes MMORPGs boring and prone to cheating. Well, that and the endless camping (sitting around waiting for a mob to spawn, ie, reappear) so you can kill a mob again and again, ooo - what fun! Or, and these are my favorites, "quests" that involve a minimum of 8 hours of continuous online time so that you can travel from point A to B to retrieve an arbitrary piece of crap to deliver to C to retrieve another arbitrary piece of crap so you can hike back across the entire planet 3 times to get your +1 dagger gilded, so there are now 59,142 +1 gilded daggers in the world.
So, how to fix it? First off, electronic real estate is essentially free. Therefore, why do houses, castles, or Ogre swamps keep going up in value with time? MMORPGs are mostly fantasy worlds, use a little fantasy and fix the core issue. (If I have to explain this, you shouldn't be dabbling in fantasy...)
Secondly, if game play becomes the attractant, and the collection of equipment etc becomes secondary, then you'll have a truly decent world without ebay gold miners, because there won't be any point to it. To make most equipment even less attractive, some breakage rules and such should be instituted. Since it's a fantasy world, make every change of ownership degrade the eq in question, in some way, perhaps raising its "breakability" rating. People would want to get their own eq, as you could never be sure how far down the hand-me down chain the eq has survived.
Lastly, if the game is properly setup, you can't "cheat". RPGs aren't inteded to be FPS's, so server driven play isn't necessarily "bad". The graphics et al can be handled on the client side, with the server controlling all portions of it. For user server networks, using an MD5 routine to generate a hash based on client requested specifics could be used for authentication? (This could also be gotten around, but it gets harder, basically, user controlled servers always put security at greater risk than hosted systems.) A trusted registration system could also be used, with automatic downloads of code snippets that would modify an executables signature to verify that the executable truly is unaltered. This would be harder and not be 100% user based, but is a possibility.
You should note I love the concept of RPGs, but the execution of most games falls far short of what RPGs are meant to be. These are just some rambling thoughts that've gathered over the years.
those songs are worth listening to, and not the fad hit of the day, or the target of ClearChannel as a new "hit".