That's cyclic; I used to buy the best motherboard I could, and the cheapest CPU that would fit, in expectation of upgrading the CPU every year or so as prices fell. These days, increasingly, you seem to need a new chipset and memory to get the best from later CPUs, so I'd not place quite so much emphasis on claimed future upgradeability as it probably won't pan out (the last boards I bought had 18x multipliers and 667MHz FSB; Intel jumped from 533MHz FSB to 800MHz, and didn't go higher than 3.2GHz).
My preference is to buy the best CPU at the knee in the price/power graph. For instance, if we look at the Athlon64 X2 prices, the 3600 and 3800 are around $60-$65, then the 4000-4800 in the $100-$127 range, the 5000-5600 at $156-$175, and finally the 6000 at $225. So, for an absolute budget processor, I'd go with either a 3600 or 3800, but for an average system, the 4800 is probably the best choice. Beyond that the price ramps up rather quickly.
- Insurance that is never paid out (the policy cost is a sink), OTOH, ships get blown up so often that I wonder if this actually takes ISK out of the game.
- Fees - lots of 0.5% to 1% fees on transactions. Broker fees, sales tax, contract fees, manufacturing slot fees, research slot fees, jump clone fees. NPC sold skill books. Ship repairs.
Guess there really aren't a lot of money sinks in EVE. Most of the economy is based on commerce between players (which doesn't change the amount of ISK in circulation - and fees/taxes reduce that slightly).
While some of the meritocracy associated with text-only gaming disappears when you fire up TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or whatever, in my experience plenty remains. I've played TrueCombat:Elite for a good while now, and I would never want to go back to text-only.
There's a big difference between playing a MMORPG (especially ones based in Fantasy where you expect large characters to speak in deep voices and the little munchkins to have high squeakies) and playing FPS or other non role-playing games.
In EVE, I don't mind voice. All the game characters are human - the only weirdness can be (if you care) the gender benders. The setting is sci-fi, there's not much expectation going in as to what the character should sound like. Hell, you never even see the character (just ships, and a static portrait).
For FPS games, it doesn't matter either. Everyone is using one of a handful of character designs and you can change those character designs at the start of each round (if you wanted). In fact, voice in FPS is definitely superior to text because it allows you to communicate quickly in the heat of battle. (Voice is important in EVE and other PvP environments for the same reason.)
But in a fantasy genre, things get sticky. By looking at the character, your mind conjures up pre-conceived notions of what the voice should sound like. And a lot of people like to role-play in fantasy environments. So you have a conflict between the people who want to treat it like a FPS (hack-n-slash and focus on uber loot) and those who treat it more as a pastime (RP, stay mostly in character, it's all about the journey). The hack-n-slash focused folks don't care about the fantasy aspect - so voice chat isn't seen as jarring.
(That's not to say that you can't RP in voice chat - but unless you're good at voice acting, it's rather difficult for a deep voiced man to play a squeaky voiced female as convincingly as if they were staying with text and emotes.)
A lot of people seem to be getting really bent out of shape considering that all that has really happened is that a few analysts have speculated that AMD might continue doing something that it has already been doing for a while- i.e. outsourcing more of its low end chips to third party fabs.
Exactly - it's pretty much a non-story, unless you're a Slashdot editor who's trying to drive up page views. Or an analyst who is trying to justify their pay and get people to pony up for their "expertise".
the nice thing about Dell is that it is all online and it is fast. The online portion is great because there's not a team of salesmen trying pull a sale out of you; it's just you and the website and a simple click ends it all. And because it is online, the smart people postpone buying until they've found a deal they like.
Which is one of the big reasons why we bought Dell for the last 10 years. We can spec out a machine, modify the build, see what the options will cost, etc. Amusingly, the last is very important and not many companies "got it" back in the mid-late 90s. A lot of companies would show you a list of options (say - hard drive sizes), but they wouldn't tell you what the price delta would be. Instead, you had to play around with the other companies' sites, often having to add the unit to a shopping cart before you could get a price.
Dell's site, OTOH, was (usually) remarkably straightforward. Want another hunk of RAM? Here's how much more it will cost. Another hard drive, sure - that's $XX. Their website is a competitive advantage (whether that is still true is up for debate).
There's a similar reason why most people prefer to buy from NewEgg instead of TheGeeks.net (names changed to protect the guilty). The NewEgg site is friendly, has excellent search/browse facilities, and offers good information and pictures of the products. OTOH, a site like TheGeeks.net looks like something from the mid-late 90s. Abbreviated product descriptions, lots of dense and unreadable technical codes, no pictures, and no product finder.
BoB's been around for a while - slowly gathering and controlling the southwest corner of 0.0 and extending their control around the fringes. While it's tough to tell from the influence maps (because you won't know which alliances are BoB 'pets' that pay rent), here are some links.
Politics in 0.0 are a little strange - and Revelations 2 is changing things up slightly later this year. Personally, I have yet to get into 0.0 - mostly because I have yet to find a 0.0 corp with people that are worth flying with.
Main reason I'm not playing at the moment is that real-life is a bit too distracting and intrusive.
My EVE account is semi-inactive at the moment. I'm only logging in to change training skills while I work on some other stuff. Sort of waiting to see where things end up with the BoB vs everyone else war and to see what is coming in Revelations 2.
If *I* were running an MMORPG, I'd give it a working economy similar to EVE Online. WoW is big enough to have a player run economy with a limited (but not quite finite) amount of total cash, isn't it?
I suspect that WoW shards aren't large enough to have the critical mass needed for a real economy. Even in EVE, with everyone crammed into a single "world / shard / server", it's still possible that you can't find item X for sale. Or that a few producers have banded together and created a monopoly on item Y. (Although, at least with EVE and the roughly 30-45k active players, it's rare that it happens.)
The usual problems in MMO economies are:
- Crafting / manufacturing is not as profitable per hour as adventuring. Often because NPC vendors sell identical product too cheaply (worse, with infinite inventory). EVE handles this by making nearly everything as player-made, NPC vendors sell only a small handful of base goods.
- NPCs that buy goods. This gets more into the money supply issue. But it causes problems for producers. If NPCs are buying a raw material at price X, that sets a floor on the raw material price. Often that floor price is out of sync with what the market really feels that the raw material is worth. Which leads to problems obtaining raw materials. In EVE, NPCs don't buy raw or finished materials.
- Item destruction is a required aspect. If items never wear out, players never need to purchase new items. Which means that the economy grinds to a halt. Soul-binding of equipment isn't the answer. Equipment needs to wear out, with the option to repair it - but repairs should cost money and possibly a *lot* of money. In EVE, because of PvP and the death penalty, equipment is constantly being destroyed (you might get back 5% of your gear after a ship loss).
- Single markets = 2-dimensional economies that don't work. Distance and location need to be part of the economy. Travel in the MMO needs to require time / effort or money. That allows multiple producers to compete without one producer getting 100% of the volume because they undercut prices by 1 copper. EVE handles this by limiting markets to Regions (and there are 50+ regions). You can only search pricing within a region, so you have to travel a bit in order to check on prices in other regions. There's no "fast travel" - 20 jumps is 20 jumps. So often a buyer will pay a premium to purchase goods that are physically closer.
And that just glosses the surface of what is required to have a "working" economy in an MMO.
However if this steals marketshare away from firefox it will make many web developers give up on anything non IE.
Firefox is going to be responsible for losing its own market share.
Single-threaded UI is the biggest PITA that I deal with on a daily basis. They've had years to get this right and they're still stuck in the stone ages. When I open a link in a background tab, I'm not doing it for aesthetic reasons, I'm doing it because I want to continue to interact with the foreground tab. Yet in Firefox, it gets stuck blocking while it waits on the remote website to respond and start transferring data.
Then there's the issue that Firefox developers think that a large portion of free memory should be theirs to use to store old pages in memory. And instead of basing that decision on the amount of memory free, they base it on total installed RAM. Which, for those of us that run at 50-75% committed capacity, means a lot of manual tweaking.
And don't forget the issue that Firefox, when you View Source, doesn't display what's on the screen, but re-queries the website for a newer copy of the page. Which can cause double-charges, or other issues with sites that aren't careful about checking for double-submits.
Yeah, I'm a little jaded against Firefox after dealing with the above issues for 3+ years. I'm tired of hoping that they'll fix it in the next release. Which means that I'm no longer willing to recommend Firefox to *anyone*.
What privacy implications? You have no expectation of privacy if you can be seen from the street without special equipment - and the cameras don't capture anything that can't be seen by a human standing in the same place.
I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as that. And I think it rests on the principle that Google is trying to turn it into money. There's a difference between someone walking down the street (physically and individually) and someone who is taking pictures for publication in order to turn a profit. Seeing something is ethereal - taking pictures for a permanent record isn't.
I'm not sure which way society will end up on this. Whether we end up in a dystopia like David Brin's Earth where there is zero privacy (which is an interesting concept) or whether society will draw a line somewhere.
Back in the mid-90s, I worked on a mapping project for a large US company. All we were doing was driving around and verifying / collecting address information (street numbers, mailbox numbers). No collection of house pictures, or family names, or the make/model of cars parked on the street. Even back then, we fielded at least a call per day from concerned citizens or officials who wanted to know what we were up to. Some places required us to get permits, just for driving down public streets while gathering address information.
So it wouldn't surprise me that, even if it's legal, if Google hasn't stepped into a potential PR minefield with StreetView (or whatever they're calling it). It's a little too close to the "ick" zone for a lot of people.
The only place I know that uses Jabber is work. Trillian basic is what's been working for me for years as well. Perhaps the pro version is bloated, but I never had a problem with it back on my 400mhz Celeron(ok, I had a gig of ram, but still). It was version 3.1 as well.
I believe that iChat also uses Jabber (at least our Mac folks use it to talk to our Jabber server).
more freedom to do anything; theivery (from players, shops, houses...all with appropriate punishments if caught); ability to kill anyone (player or npc), at anytime, for any reason (with bounties, or appropriate punishments placed on your character for evil doing);
That opens you up to all sorts of nasty player behavior. EVE Online is probably the closest to what you describe and it's very much a niche game as a result.
The big problem here is that SELinux is overly cryptic to configure and that the logging regarding access failures are extremely cryptic. This results in a situation where SELinux is often considered more of a problem than an enhancement. The designers of SELinux seems to have forgotten that the log files often are read by humans and that humans act upon the data from the log files and responses from commands issued.
That's my biggest peeve with it as well. They give you all the information, but don't do a good job of explaining it (yet).
On the upside, I can hope that by RedHat pushing this harder that the tools will mature sooner. (Red Hat's interest in improvement would be so they don't have to deal with as many support calls?)
In this situation SE Linux might just be total overkill.
We used to say the same about some other security precautions that are now commonplace. Down the road, I'm not sure it will be seen as overkill. Especially if it is effective and they can get the default policies correct.
I'm still on the fence with SELinux. I'm glad that RHEL5 is putting it out there on the systems as part of the default install. I think that will help it shake bugs out of SELinux a lot faster then before (larger install base, plus RedHat's now invested in making it work). I've already cursed at it a few times on the CentOS5 box that I have, but it's forcing me to learn it. (And for the most part it is staying out of the way, except for half a dozen cases where I need to fix it and file bug reports.)
Good GUIs are a wonderful thing, but I want to emphasize that SELinux isn't really all that difficult to begin with. High quality SELinux rules shipped with solid distributions such as RHEL 5 eliminate many of the problems that early adopters faced; indeed, that's more or less the subject of this article.
Well... maybe. I'm using SELinux on CentOS5 in enforcing mode right now.
Out of the box, there are still half-a-dozen things that SELinux is blocking that I would consider to be normal applications to install on a server. Such as NTP writing back to the hardware clock on shutdown, or LVM tools being able to update the cache files, and other trivial things like that.
Fortunately, none of it is stopping operations (the machine works, so far). But it's going to take me a good solid few hours when I can go learn how SELinux works, and figure out how to adjust the profile to let it do what it should be doing.
So, I'm glad that it's installed in Enforcing mode from the start. I'd always wanted to use SELinux on my old distro, but never got around to it. With RHEL5/CentOS5 having it installed from the start, it's forcing me to learn it.
(Hopefully it's worth the effort and keeps the machine more secure.)
I moved into an apartment, and no longer have the luxury of keeping my drives in an enormously loud server. So I put the drives in the lower drive bay of the Antec P180 case. Now the drives have one low-speed (quiet) 120mm fan behind them. The drives stay in the mid 30s, which is plenty cool. But the case is very quiet. I credit the fact that the P180 gives a good 1/2 inch or so between each drive. Compared to the Chenbro (and every other X-in-Y solution I've seen), which sandwich the drives together as close as possible, you get effective cooling with substantially less airflow.
I have a p180 case as well. The middle set of drive bays (with a 120mm fan in front and (2) hard drives installed in the chassis) does very well. The air flow for the units down below is okay with 4 drives installed, but not great. I've also used a CM 4:3 unit in the top bays to hold another (4) drives.
But along those lines, I used to be able to buy a 3:2 unit with a 80mm fan. It's similar to the CM 4:3 unit, except it has a front filter, an 80mm fan (intake) and room for 3 3.5" hard drives taking up (2) 5.25" bays. If you only put (2) 3.5" drives in the unit, the 80mm fan (which is pretty quiet) draws excellent airflow across the two drives. Enough airflow that active temp (drive under heavy seeks / activity) will only be 1-2C above idle temp.
Unfortunately, MWave doesn't seem to carry the 3:2 w/ 80mm bay cooler anymore. It's a rare find (bought my first one from DirtCheapDrives in Texas about a decade ago and I still use it). I've bought a few more since then because they come in handy for times when you absolutely need assured cooling for a pair of drives. Ah, you might find it here (unit on the right in the picture at the top).
I actually put those (15) drive inside of a SuperMicro 4U rackmount/tower case with the triple 760W PSU (that's a $600 case). But for a backup system or less critical system where a few hours of downtime doesn't matter, the Lian-Li case is suitable along with a regular PSU. Using a modular plug PSU with a spare in the closet can be a serviceable method instead of buying a large expensive enclosure.
I was skeptical of the 5:3 backplanes too. But the 5:3 backplanes actually do a pretty good job of cooling. They're aluminum trays, it's all metal-to-metal contact points, so the heat spreads out a bit. There's also a 80mm fan on the back of each backplane that pulls a small amount of air through the drives. Some (most?) backplanes also come with a temperature sensor that you can set for temps of 50/55/60 Celsius which causes a buzzer to go off in the unit when it gets too warm.
As for (3) way RAID1 vs (2) way RAID1 + hot-spare... Well, if I'm going to dedicate the drive to being available for the RAID as a hot-spare, why not get use out of it and make it active? Then, when a disk fails in the RAID1, I'm not depending on a single disk while the hot-spare gets synchronized.
Which is one of the downsides of Software RAID. It works at the partition level, rather then the whole disk level. So it's more difficult to share hot-spares between different types of arrays. OTOH, it provides a lot more flexibility compared to hardware RAID. If you were doing a (4) disk RAID, you could do the first few partitions (for/boot and / and swap) as RAID1 across all 4 disks, then use the rest of the disk as a RAID5 or RAID10 volume.
Only 11 of those are usable bays, since they put the power switch in with the 3.5" bay module.
The 4-3 devices modules are cute, but a pain to deal with when you want to replace a drive (you have to rip apart 4 sets of cables). I'm not entirely satisfied with the 4-3 modules that I have, I prefer the older 3:2 units with a 80mm fan. Stick to only putting 2 drives in those old 3:2 units and you get superior airflow because there's no strange grillwork between the intake fan and the hard drives. You might get the same out of those 4-3 units if you install a drive in the middle upside down to create a decent gap.
But if you want maximum storage density, go look at the SuperMicro (or others) SATA 5:3 backplanes. Hot-swap (assuming your chipset supports it) SATA trays that fit (5) drives into (3) 5.25" bays. Merge that with a 4U rackcase or one of the (9) 5.25" bay cases from Lian Li (PC A16) and you have (15) SATA slots to play with. Or you could do (3) 5:3 and (1) 3:2 in that CM Stacker case for a total of (18) drives. (There are 3 types of SATA hotswap backplanes, 5:3 for cases with clean sides in the 5.25" bays, 4:3 for cases with guide-rails or tabs in between the 5.25" bays, and 3:2 units. Some cases have metal tabs designed to guide 5.25" devices into place, they'll interfere with 5:3 backplanes.)
My preferred setup for (15) drives? A (3) active disk RAID1 for the OS and misc partitions, then either a (10) disk RAID10 w/ (2) hot spares or a pair of RAID6 volumes with (2) hot spares. RAID5 is too risky once you get into the 1TB+ range. Rebuilding onto a hot-spare takes too long and leaves you vulnerable to a 2nd drive failure during the rebuild window. RAID6 is at least better in that regard, but with RAID10, rebuild times are static (they're based on the time required to rebuild a single RAID1 pair) no matter the # of spindles in the array.
Or over-spec'd power cells that provide more power then the unit actually needs so that they can deal with cloudy days. (While a more efficient cell could be smaller and cost less.)
I'm not so sure that would work on the economic side. It's hard to balance an economy, and allowing complete player control will probably make you end up with monopolies that break the game for casual and/or new players.
Yes, no and maybe.
EVE Online probably comes the closest to a "good" economy. It has the following features:
- NPCs do not buy goods (except for a few basic things), instead goods are destroyed in battle or through use
- NPCs make very few goods, players fill the void
- EVE is one huge server world, which makes it very likely that *someone* is selling the widget that you're looking for
- EVE breaks the galactic cluster into regions and you have to travel from region to region to collect price information. Or get your corpmates to price check something for you.
- Goods only move physical location if players haul them. Thus, distance = money, and players may choose to pay 10% more for goods that are closer. Goods for sale in a low-sec area (meaning you can be attacked by other players) tend to be less expensive, but buy orders in low-sec have to be priced above normal to draw suppliers.
- A quite decent buy/sell system that lets you put goods up for sale or put a buy order up for others to fill.
- Playing a miner or industrialist is a good source of income in EVE. You don't have to go out and kill rats to earn coin. Instead you supply raw or finished materials to other people who like to go out and kill rats.
- Players can craft just about anything that could possibly drop from a rat wreck.
In EQ2, there were only 2 markets (Qeynos and Freeport) at the start. And you were competing with the NPCs for pricing, which limited your potential profits. The devs had their own ideas about the economy, which often interfered. Ultimately, everyone had to compete on price instead of location.
As you can tell, I think EVE's economy comes the closest to a "good" implementation. The devs basically try to stay out of the way as much as possible.
Good points, and I concede I have not watched the director's vo. I did watch the extra dvd footage with jackson interviewed, lee, etc
It's well worth the time to listen to the various voice-overs. They do a good job of presenting why they chose to do something different then the book. And for the most part, they make good enough decisions to make a great film. (Such as why Faramir is drawn to the ring's power instead of treating like a trinket that he has no interest in claiming for his own.) They mostly tried to be true to the books, except when it was unfilmable, or too complex for the audience to grok, or they got carried away with themselves (reference Legolas surfing on shields).
Wow, either they have the graphics quality turned down or else the EQ2 art quality has taken a severe nosedive. Back when I played it was very pretty (and sometimes gritty) visually, but the devs couldn't decide which direction they were heading.
Slashdot Mirror
That's cyclic; I used to buy the best motherboard I could, and the cheapest CPU that would fit, in expectation of upgrading the CPU every year or so as prices fell. These days, increasingly, you seem to need a new chipset and memory to get the best from later CPUs, so I'd not place quite so much emphasis on claimed future upgradeability as it probably won't pan out (the last boards I bought had 18x multipliers and 667MHz FSB; Intel jumped from 533MHz FSB to 800MHz, and didn't go higher than 3.2GHz).
My preference is to buy the best CPU at the knee in the price/power graph. For instance, if we look at the Athlon64 X2 prices, the 3600 and 3800 are around $60-$65, then the 4000-4800 in the $100-$127 range, the 5000-5600 at $156-$175, and finally the 6000 at $225. So, for an absolute budget processor, I'd go with either a 3600 or 3800, but for an average system, the 4800 is probably the best choice. Beyond that the price ramps up rather quickly.
Money sinks in EVE...
- Insurance that is never paid out (the policy cost is a sink), OTOH, ships get blown up so often that I wonder if this actually takes ISK out of the game.
- Fees - lots of 0.5% to 1% fees on transactions. Broker fees, sales tax, contract fees, manufacturing slot fees, research slot fees, jump clone fees. NPC sold skill books. Ship repairs.
Guess there really aren't a lot of money sinks in EVE. Most of the economy is based on commerce between players (which doesn't change the amount of ISK in circulation - and fees/taxes reduce that slightly).
While some of the meritocracy associated with text-only gaming disappears when you fire up TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or whatever, in my experience plenty remains. I've played TrueCombat:Elite for a good while now, and I would never want to go back to text-only.
There's a big difference between playing a MMORPG (especially ones based in Fantasy where you expect large characters to speak in deep voices and the little munchkins to have high squeakies) and playing FPS or other non role-playing games.
In EVE, I don't mind voice. All the game characters are human - the only weirdness can be (if you care) the gender benders. The setting is sci-fi, there's not much expectation going in as to what the character should sound like. Hell, you never even see the character (just ships, and a static portrait).
For FPS games, it doesn't matter either. Everyone is using one of a handful of character designs and you can change those character designs at the start of each round (if you wanted). In fact, voice in FPS is definitely superior to text because it allows you to communicate quickly in the heat of battle. (Voice is important in EVE and other PvP environments for the same reason.)
But in a fantasy genre, things get sticky. By looking at the character, your mind conjures up pre-conceived notions of what the voice should sound like. And a lot of people like to role-play in fantasy environments. So you have a conflict between the people who want to treat it like a FPS (hack-n-slash and focus on uber loot) and those who treat it more as a pastime (RP, stay mostly in character, it's all about the journey). The hack-n-slash focused folks don't care about the fantasy aspect - so voice chat isn't seen as jarring.
(That's not to say that you can't RP in voice chat - but unless you're good at voice acting, it's rather difficult for a deep voiced man to play a squeaky voiced female as convincingly as if they were staying with text and emotes.)
A lot of people seem to be getting really bent out of shape considering that all that has really happened is that a few analysts have speculated that AMD might continue doing something that it has already been doing for a while- i.e. outsourcing more of its low end chips to third party fabs.
Exactly - it's pretty much a non-story, unless you're a Slashdot editor who's trying to drive up page views. Or an analyst who is trying to justify their pay and get people to pony up for their "expertise".
the nice thing about Dell is that it is all online and it is fast. The online portion is great because there's not a team of salesmen trying pull a sale out of you; it's just you and the website and a simple click ends it all. And because it is online, the smart people postpone buying until they've found a deal they like.
Which is one of the big reasons why we bought Dell for the last 10 years. We can spec out a machine, modify the build, see what the options will cost, etc. Amusingly, the last is very important and not many companies "got it" back in the mid-late 90s. A lot of companies would show you a list of options (say - hard drive sizes), but they wouldn't tell you what the price delta would be. Instead, you had to play around with the other companies' sites, often having to add the unit to a shopping cart before you could get a price.
Dell's site, OTOH, was (usually) remarkably straightforward. Want another hunk of RAM? Here's how much more it will cost. Another hard drive, sure - that's $XX. Their website is a competitive advantage (whether that is still true is up for debate).
There's a similar reason why most people prefer to buy from NewEgg instead of TheGeeks.net (names changed to protect the guilty). The NewEgg site is friendly, has excellent search/browse facilities, and offers good information and pictures of the products. OTOH, a site like TheGeeks.net looks like something from the mid-late 90s. Abbreviated product descriptions, lots of dense and unreadable technical codes, no pictures, and no product finder.
Usability... it matters.
BoB's been around for a while - slowly gathering and controlling the southwest corner of 0.0 and extending their control around the fringes. While it's tough to tell from the influence maps (because you won't know which alliances are BoB 'pets' that pay rent), here are some links.
Latest territorial map
March '07?
January '07?
An "automated" map
The latesset automated map
Somewhat dated, animaged GIF
Another map from Mar 2007
Same map, 2 weeks earlier
Politics in 0.0 are a little strange - and Revelations 2 is changing things up slightly later this year. Personally, I have yet to get into 0.0 - mostly because I have yet to find a 0.0 corp with people that are worth flying with.
Main reason I'm not playing at the moment is that real-life is a bit too distracting and intrusive.
My EVE account is semi-inactive at the moment. I'm only logging in to change training skills while I work on some other stuff. Sort of waiting to see where things end up with the BoB vs everyone else war and to see what is coming in Revelations 2.
If *I* were running an MMORPG, I'd give it a working economy similar to EVE Online. WoW is big enough to have a player run economy with a limited (but not quite finite) amount of total cash, isn't it?
I suspect that WoW shards aren't large enough to have the critical mass needed for a real economy. Even in EVE, with everyone crammed into a single "world / shard / server", it's still possible that you can't find item X for sale. Or that a few producers have banded together and created a monopoly on item Y. (Although, at least with EVE and the roughly 30-45k active players, it's rare that it happens.)
The usual problems in MMO economies are:
- Crafting / manufacturing is not as profitable per hour as adventuring. Often because NPC vendors sell identical product too cheaply (worse, with infinite inventory). EVE handles this by making nearly everything as player-made, NPC vendors sell only a small handful of base goods.
- NPCs that buy goods. This gets more into the money supply issue. But it causes problems for producers. If NPCs are buying a raw material at price X, that sets a floor on the raw material price. Often that floor price is out of sync with what the market really feels that the raw material is worth. Which leads to problems obtaining raw materials. In EVE, NPCs don't buy raw or finished materials.
- Item destruction is a required aspect. If items never wear out, players never need to purchase new items. Which means that the economy grinds to a halt. Soul-binding of equipment isn't the answer. Equipment needs to wear out, with the option to repair it - but repairs should cost money and possibly a *lot* of money. In EVE, because of PvP and the death penalty, equipment is constantly being destroyed (you might get back 5% of your gear after a ship loss).
- Single markets = 2-dimensional economies that don't work. Distance and location need to be part of the economy. Travel in the MMO needs to require time / effort or money. That allows multiple producers to compete without one producer getting 100% of the volume because they undercut prices by 1 copper. EVE handles this by limiting markets to Regions (and there are 50+ regions). You can only search pricing within a region, so you have to travel a bit in order to check on prices in other regions. There's no "fast travel" - 20 jumps is 20 jumps. So often a buyer will pay a premium to purchase goods that are physically closer.
And that just glosses the surface of what is required to have a "working" economy in an MMO.
However if this steals marketshare away from firefox it will make many web developers give up on anything non IE.
Firefox is going to be responsible for losing its own market share.
Single-threaded UI is the biggest PITA that I deal with on a daily basis. They've had years to get this right and they're still stuck in the stone ages. When I open a link in a background tab, I'm not doing it for aesthetic reasons, I'm doing it because I want to continue to interact with the foreground tab. Yet in Firefox, it gets stuck blocking while it waits on the remote website to respond and start transferring data.
Then there's the issue that Firefox developers think that a large portion of free memory should be theirs to use to store old pages in memory. And instead of basing that decision on the amount of memory free, they base it on total installed RAM. Which, for those of us that run at 50-75% committed capacity, means a lot of manual tweaking.
And don't forget the issue that Firefox, when you View Source, doesn't display what's on the screen, but re-queries the website for a newer copy of the page. Which can cause double-charges, or other issues with sites that aren't careful about checking for double-submits.
Yeah, I'm a little jaded against Firefox after dealing with the above issues for 3+ years. I'm tired of hoping that they'll fix it in the next release. Which means that I'm no longer willing to recommend Firefox to *anyone*.
Bounties in EVE are under-used because:
- For 100k, you can buy a jump clone to protect any expensive implants.
- If the bounty is high enough, find a trusted friend (or use an alt on a 2nd account) to kill your JC'd no-implant body and split the reward.
There are few people with multi-million (or billion) ISK bounties. Usually put on themselves just for bragging rights or by friends for kicks.
It's a nice concept, in theory. Until players get ahold of it...
"Asparagus. Fireplace. Ladder. Mosquito." makes as much sense.
Sounds like a solution to a Monkey's Island puzzle....
What privacy implications? You have no expectation of privacy if you can be seen from the street without special equipment - and the cameras don't capture anything that can't be seen by a human standing in the same place.
I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as that. And I think it rests on the principle that Google is trying to turn it into money. There's a difference between someone walking down the street (physically and individually) and someone who is taking pictures for publication in order to turn a profit. Seeing something is ethereal - taking pictures for a permanent record isn't.
I'm not sure which way society will end up on this. Whether we end up in a dystopia like David Brin's Earth where there is zero privacy (which is an interesting concept) or whether society will draw a line somewhere.
Back in the mid-90s, I worked on a mapping project for a large US company. All we were doing was driving around and verifying / collecting address information (street numbers, mailbox numbers). No collection of house pictures, or family names, or the make/model of cars parked on the street. Even back then, we fielded at least a call per day from concerned citizens or officials who wanted to know what we were up to. Some places required us to get permits, just for driving down public streets while gathering address information.
So it wouldn't surprise me that, even if it's legal, if Google hasn't stepped into a potential PR minefield with StreetView (or whatever they're calling it). It's a little too close to the "ick" zone for a lot of people.
The only place I know that uses Jabber is work. Trillian basic is what's been working for me for years as well. Perhaps the pro version is bloated, but I never had a problem with it back on my 400mhz Celeron(ok, I had a gig of ram, but still). It was version 3.1 as well.
I believe that iChat also uses Jabber (at least our Mac folks use it to talk to our Jabber server).
more freedom to do anything; theivery (from players, shops, houses...all with appropriate punishments if caught); ability to kill anyone (player or npc), at anytime, for any reason (with bounties, or appropriate punishments placed on your character for evil doing);
That opens you up to all sorts of nasty player behavior. EVE Online is probably the closest to what you describe and it's very much a niche game as a result.
At 1mbps? Um hell no. HDTV is 19mbps for a reason (which of course is probably sent over the wire at ~8mbps or so ... cheap bastards).
Yes, it's sent at 19mbps (or so) for a reason: they're using a MPEG2 codec to do the compression. Not a more modern codec.
The big problem here is that SELinux is overly cryptic to configure and that the logging regarding access failures are extremely cryptic. This results in a situation where SELinux is often considered more of a problem than an enhancement. The designers of SELinux seems to have forgotten that the log files often are read by humans and that humans act upon the data from the log files and responses from commands issued.
That's my biggest peeve with it as well. They give you all the information, but don't do a good job of explaining it (yet).
On the upside, I can hope that by RedHat pushing this harder that the tools will mature sooner. (Red Hat's interest in improvement would be so they don't have to deal with as many support calls?)
In this situation SE Linux might just be total overkill.
We used to say the same about some other security precautions that are now commonplace. Down the road, I'm not sure it will be seen as overkill. Especially if it is effective and they can get the default policies correct.
I'm still on the fence with SELinux. I'm glad that RHEL5 is putting it out there on the systems as part of the default install. I think that will help it shake bugs out of SELinux a lot faster then before (larger install base, plus RedHat's now invested in making it work). I've already cursed at it a few times on the CentOS5 box that I have, but it's forcing me to learn it. (And for the most part it is staying out of the way, except for half a dozen cases where I need to fix it and file bug reports.)
Good GUIs are a wonderful thing, but I want to emphasize that SELinux isn't really all that difficult to begin with. High quality SELinux rules shipped with solid distributions such as RHEL 5 eliminate many of the problems that early adopters faced; indeed, that's more or less the subject of this article.
Well... maybe. I'm using SELinux on CentOS5 in enforcing mode right now.
Out of the box, there are still half-a-dozen things that SELinux is blocking that I would consider to be normal applications to install on a server. Such as NTP writing back to the hardware clock on shutdown, or LVM tools being able to update the cache files, and other trivial things like that.
Fortunately, none of it is stopping operations (the machine works, so far). But it's going to take me a good solid few hours when I can go learn how SELinux works, and figure out how to adjust the profile to let it do what it should be doing.
So, I'm glad that it's installed in Enforcing mode from the start. I'd always wanted to use SELinux on my old distro, but never got around to it. With RHEL5/CentOS5 having it installed from the start, it's forcing me to learn it.
(Hopefully it's worth the effort and keeps the machine more secure.)
I moved into an apartment, and no longer have the luxury of keeping my drives in an enormously loud server. So I put the drives in the lower drive bay of the Antec P180 case. Now the drives have one low-speed (quiet) 120mm fan behind them. The drives stay in the mid 30s, which is plenty cool. But the case is very quiet. I credit the fact that the P180 gives a good 1/2 inch or so between each drive. Compared to the Chenbro (and every other X-in-Y solution I've seen), which sandwich the drives together as close as possible, you get effective cooling with substantially less airflow.
I have a p180 case as well. The middle set of drive bays (with a 120mm fan in front and (2) hard drives installed in the chassis) does very well. The air flow for the units down below is okay with 4 drives installed, but not great. I've also used a CM 4:3 unit in the top bays to hold another (4) drives.
But along those lines, I used to be able to buy a 3:2 unit with a 80mm fan. It's similar to the CM 4:3 unit, except it has a front filter, an 80mm fan (intake) and room for 3 3.5" hard drives taking up (2) 5.25" bays. If you only put (2) 3.5" drives in the unit, the 80mm fan (which is pretty quiet) draws excellent airflow across the two drives. Enough airflow that active temp (drive under heavy seeks / activity) will only be 1-2C above idle temp.
Unfortunately, MWave doesn't seem to carry the 3:2 w/ 80mm bay cooler anymore. It's a rare find (bought my first one from DirtCheapDrives in Texas about a decade ago and I still use it). I've bought a few more since then because they come in handy for times when you absolutely need assured cooling for a pair of drives. Ah, you might find it here (unit on the right in the picture at the top).
I actually put those (15) drive inside of a SuperMicro 4U rackmount/tower case with the triple 760W PSU (that's a $600 case). But for a backup system or less critical system where a few hours of downtime doesn't matter, the Lian-Li case is suitable along with a regular PSU. Using a modular plug PSU with a spare in the closet can be a serviceable method instead of buying a large expensive enclosure.
/boot and / and swap) as RAID1 across all 4 disks, then use the rest of the disk as a RAID5 or RAID10 volume.
I was skeptical of the 5:3 backplanes too. But the 5:3 backplanes actually do a pretty good job of cooling. They're aluminum trays, it's all metal-to-metal contact points, so the heat spreads out a bit. There's also a 80mm fan on the back of each backplane that pulls a small amount of air through the drives. Some (most?) backplanes also come with a temperature sensor that you can set for temps of 50/55/60 Celsius which causes a buzzer to go off in the unit when it gets too warm.
As for (3) way RAID1 vs (2) way RAID1 + hot-spare... Well, if I'm going to dedicate the drive to being available for the RAID as a hot-spare, why not get use out of it and make it active? Then, when a disk fails in the RAID1, I'm not depending on a single disk while the hot-spare gets synchronized.
Which is one of the downsides of Software RAID. It works at the partition level, rather then the whole disk level. So it's more difficult to share hot-spares between different types of arrays. OTOH, it provides a lot more flexibility compared to hardware RAID. If you were doing a (4) disk RAID, you could do the first few partitions (for
Only 11 of those are usable bays, since they put the power switch in with the 3.5" bay module.
The 4-3 devices modules are cute, but a pain to deal with when you want to replace a drive (you have to rip apart 4 sets of cables). I'm not entirely satisfied with the 4-3 modules that I have, I prefer the older 3:2 units with a 80mm fan. Stick to only putting 2 drives in those old 3:2 units and you get superior airflow because there's no strange grillwork between the intake fan and the hard drives. You might get the same out of those 4-3 units if you install a drive in the middle upside down to create a decent gap.
But if you want maximum storage density, go look at the SuperMicro (or others) SATA 5:3 backplanes. Hot-swap (assuming your chipset supports it) SATA trays that fit (5) drives into (3) 5.25" bays. Merge that with a 4U rackcase or one of the (9) 5.25" bay cases from Lian Li (PC A16) and you have (15) SATA slots to play with. Or you could do (3) 5:3 and (1) 3:2 in that CM Stacker case for a total of (18) drives. (There are 3 types of SATA hotswap backplanes, 5:3 for cases with clean sides in the 5.25" bays, 4:3 for cases with guide-rails or tabs in between the 5.25" bays, and 3:2 units. Some cases have metal tabs designed to guide 5.25" devices into place, they'll interfere with 5:3 backplanes.)
My preferred setup for (15) drives? A (3) active disk RAID1 for the OS and misc partitions, then either a (10) disk RAID10 w/ (2) hot spares or a pair of RAID6 volumes with (2) hot spares. RAID5 is too risky once you get into the 1TB+ range. Rebuilding onto a hot-spare takes too long and leaves you vulnerable to a 2nd drive failure during the rebuild window. RAID6 is at least better in that regard, but with RAID10, rebuild times are static (they're based on the time required to rebuild a single RAID1 pair) no matter the # of spindles in the array.
See - solar cells. Perfectly happy solar cells.
Or over-spec'd power cells that provide more power then the unit actually needs so that they can deal with cloudy days. (While a more efficient cell could be smaller and cost less.)
I'm not so sure that would work on the economic side. It's hard to balance an economy, and allowing complete player control will probably make you end up with monopolies that break the game for casual and/or new players.
Yes, no and maybe.
EVE Online probably comes the closest to a "good" economy. It has the following features:
- NPCs do not buy goods (except for a few basic things), instead goods are destroyed in battle or through use
- NPCs make very few goods, players fill the void
- EVE is one huge server world, which makes it very likely that *someone* is selling the widget that you're looking for
- EVE breaks the galactic cluster into regions and you have to travel from region to region to collect price information. Or get your corpmates to price check something for you.
- Goods only move physical location if players haul them. Thus, distance = money, and players may choose to pay 10% more for goods that are closer. Goods for sale in a low-sec area (meaning you can be attacked by other players) tend to be less expensive, but buy orders in low-sec have to be priced above normal to draw suppliers.
- A quite decent buy/sell system that lets you put goods up for sale or put a buy order up for others to fill.
- Playing a miner or industrialist is a good source of income in EVE. You don't have to go out and kill rats to earn coin. Instead you supply raw or finished materials to other people who like to go out and kill rats.
- Players can craft just about anything that could possibly drop from a rat wreck.
In EQ2, there were only 2 markets (Qeynos and Freeport) at the start. And you were competing with the NPCs for pricing, which limited your potential profits. The devs had their own ideas about the economy, which often interfered. Ultimately, everyone had to compete on price instead of location.
As you can tell, I think EVE's economy comes the closest to a "good" implementation. The devs basically try to stay out of the way as much as possible.
Good points, and I concede I have not watched the director's vo. I did watch the extra dvd footage with jackson interviewed, lee, etc
It's well worth the time to listen to the various voice-overs. They do a good job of presenting why they chose to do something different then the book. And for the most part, they make good enough decisions to make a great film. (Such as why Faramir is drawn to the ring's power instead of treating like a trinket that he has no interest in claiming for his own.) They mostly tried to be true to the books, except when it was unfilmable, or too complex for the audience to grok, or they got carried away with themselves (reference Legolas surfing on shields).
EQ2 http://www.jeffmaloneshirtlesspvp.com/images/EQ2_0 04330.jpg
Wow, either they have the graphics quality turned down or else the EQ2 art quality has taken a severe nosedive. Back when I played it was very pretty (and sometimes gritty) visually, but the devs couldn't decide which direction they were heading.