6 hours every Tuesday early morning IS regular. Regular - occuring at predictable intervals for predictable amounts of time. I've had no problems accustomising myself to it, after all WoW DOES go down at the same time every week. Regularly.
We don't really know the type of maintanance that needs to be done weekly.
If I had to administer servers for Blizz, as a sysadmin I would beg for 6h every day (*grin*), but failing that, some longer maintanance once a week would sound prudent.
Properly equipped datacenters with tons of broadband are a shitload of investment - they are neither cheap to build nor to maintain. Couple with the fact that as far as I understand US property prices are skyhigh, Blizzard would be taking large risks. I work in a datacenter atm, so I have some idea:)
I would pretty much imagine the US servers are divided into datacenters by the timezones. AFAI've heard about Europe, it's at least 2 datacenters in France and 2 in Germany.
As I wrote a bit earlier up the thread, I do think we're talking some 600+ physical machines in US alone, more in EU.
I've always liked Blizzard games. I am addicted to WoW.
But regarding WoW, I'd say that they are by far NOT "very receptive and communicative to their fanbase". Then again, I can't expect them to be. They are trying to cater to and manage a small country of people by now (Imagine: My country has 3x less people than the population of WoW).
Logic says that people involved with developing the game, otoh, must be a not very large team. Which means that they get either swarmed under the pleas for comments and help etc. or those are being filtered out VERY heavily.
Regarding servers. There are now 156 realms in US and 174 in Europe. Dunno about the rest - how's Bliz doing in China - are they in Asia at all? Didn't find anything regarding that on Blizzard site, so I will assume the 6 mln. players refer to the 330 US+EU realms. Soo... assuming the players are spaced out evenly among realms (never happens), it gives us a bit above 18'000 players per realm. Not bad.
Now the speculations: I am betting each realm is served by at least 2-5 servers, maybe more (you need DB, all the calculations - npcs, movements, flight, fight...., perhaps some proxies too). So, we're having like 1500-2000 servers around the globe. Management, organization, all the issues. And ofc Blizz is not doing their own hosting, but renting datacenter space. Frankly, I am surprised they manage to keep the service up much of the time at all.
P.S. Why "IBM", btw? Might've been Oracle or MSSQL for what's it worth.
I cherish my ignorance on the subject.:) In fact, in my 30 years, I haven't even had the need to own a car yet - a cab works for my needs 90% of time and is cheaper in the long run.
As noted before, EU legal system is not THAT different from US.
So "innocent until proven guilty" does hold for trials, as one would expect. However, MS has been tried and found guilty. Now they are appealing, and in appeals it is obviously "guilty unless proven innocent". I bet the same works in US.
Frankly, I am surprised at how much some people consider Europe to be different from US. If somebody told me that anywhere in US presumption of innocence does not hold in trials, I would be as surprised as if I heard it does not hold somewhere in EU. We are talking basic human rights here, almost.
Well, you can call any distro bloated then, almost. I would define "bloated" though as when you have "a lot of apps you HAVE to install in order to BE ABLE to work".
My SuSE server boxes (db + www + devel environment, some additional net services, no X): > rpm -qa | wc -l 476 >
I wouldn't call particularly "bloated" a desktop/server distro which in its "minimal" config by default installs around 800MB.
The current debate on nuclear reactors at least here is not so much reactors themselves as where and how to store the waste securely for how many hundred years?
That's funny. I worked some years in the local US embassy section that among other things coordinated various educational exchanges - fellowship etc professors from the US coming to E.Europe unis, and the opposite.
And as far as I remember, majority of the professors when commenting on the differences between unis, did say that Eastern Europe ones seemed to give broader education than the US ones they've taught at.
Funny thing, of course, is not that Bob is an idiot, but that "you" (the speaker) aren't.
Frankly, I am just as pissed at hearing someone described as "an idiot" as when he is described as "challenging" or "externally motivated".
Both of these descriptions seem to share something - viewing people as flat cartoon things. Everything is mowed down to the level of the speaker. All too often, _whatever_ Bob does it is explained as done _because_ he is an idiot. Or "challenging", or "challenged", whatever you prefer.
And it doesn't matter which of these he is called, as long as the speaker make the assumptions automatically, it's just as bad.
I don't think we should fawn over people who do stupid things - we do what we got to do about them. However, all too often I can see and hear fellow people written down carelessly, by people who are not really any much better - but probably need to feel they are.
We are running a couple datacenters and whenever we use Linux, we try to do SuSE Pro whenever we can - it is de facto standard now.
I myself recently stumbled across a mind boggling issue with the newest RH ES -- when installing on a fairly typical IBM x346 it failed to install LILO complaining that kernel (RH stock kernel at that!) was too large, but silently finished install leaving a machine in an unbootable state!
The only place we've RH left now is where we have Oracle DB, but we've asked to investigate our DBAs on whether they wouldn't mind running it on SLES.
The thing that worries me, is actually, what kind of information (kept by ISP) can be used in what capacity? As proof in court??
Since it is generally so ridiculously easy to insert or completely rewrite anything that is kept in logfiles, this places a tremendous responsibility on (especially) the sysadmins taking care of that information. Which seems to be something that the data retention doesn't care much about.
Where there is paper involved, there can be copies made, and any actual changes can be examined for forgeries.
With logfiles, if law enforcement asks me eg, for webmail activity logs of person X, I can just copy/paste any log of another person, modify a bit, delete the info, replace the logfile in backups, and in fact create an entirely different usage pattern than what really took place. And I bet nobody is going to check that, and even if they did, they'd have hell of a time proving I modified anything.
In Lithuania, I believe it is the same as in my country, which is its neigbour. And I think it is basically the same in a lot of other countries in Europe.
It is not illegal. You can get license to own a gun (pistol, hunter rifle or suchlike), and if you can reasonably state that you might be having a dangerous situation or are taking risks during your daily life (like, back in 1990ies, when racketeering was rampant, many of the small businessmen), you can get a licence to carry a gun.
It is just that it is/is perceived/ as big enough hassle and bureaucracy, so that only a small percentage of people do it.
So, this controversial issue that has been debated by scientists for some years now, and has not been shot down as preposterous even after trying, is merely some "conventional wisdom" spread by half-literate teenagers on par with "masturbation leads to blindness".
Nice. I guess people shouldn't have gone on barricades in Eastern Europe, in 90ies. After all, they had a life, the only thing they didn't really have were actually the civil liberties.
About this phrase: > This has nothing to do with anything we may or may not have done or our foreign policy or anything like that. There are a lot of evil people on this planet that wish to destroy us - this is a fact that we much accept.
Somehow, nobody's trying to blow up Switzerland, Mauritius, or even any big part of Australia or Canada for that matter. Funny isn't it?
I shudder to think what would happen if you get to being a law-giver, should you have the inclination.
Oh, I fully support you on being against "script reading monkeys".
The issue I had, was with the fact that you linked, in your original comment: "outscorcing" = "low quality". Which does seem to say that the guys from overseas are by definition worse.
A minor point I would like to make is that "script reading monkeys" have been present (in the US) before serious outsourcing started. Just being local ones.
Thank you for the clarification, it was quite interesting.
I would have only two things to note further, as this is probably going outside the original discussion:
1) Insofar as price for product is defined by the producer, he may both opt to reduce his price margin in order to keep the price of product within range of demand, or to not actually start that particular line of product if it is economically unfeasible - I am refering to a situation when minimum wage is a given, rather than going to be introduced in future.
2) my particular country is undergoing a stage in which there exists a rather high level of "envelope salaries", particularly in specific sectors, where the employer is declaring the minimum wage salaries and paying the rest of the wages in cash, for tax evasion.
While the situation with such illegal activities is gradually improving, it is widely held that until it improves past some percentage (at least some 3/4ds of employment to be on fully legal pay) minimum wages are providing at least a minimum of protection for employees (severance pay etc.) as well as providing at least some minimal amount of taxation meanwhile.
You know they are lower quality workers, and you must make sure the public realizes this also.
That's probably why I am getting invited to the US for the third year in a row by my friend who went there 10 years ago.
He works for a company whose boss wouldn't mind at all to do with local staff - he is not offering me less than a local developer, as far as I've learned inquiring about the general IT wages in the state.
Apparently, the guys around there are just "too high quality" and he feels uncomfortable with that.
Sarcasm off.
Honestly. Do you reasonably expect that any particular country has monopoly on talent and knowledge? In the age of Internet?? Do you think that just because you went to a college or uni in the US this means you are by default better than somebody who's been programming in assembler for fun when he was 10? *lol*
When I read about the appalling quality of IT stuff coming from eg India, it does not make me conclude that Indian IT guys can't find their backside IN GENERAL. It reminds me that India is the world's second largest country by population - three times bigger than the US and that if the amount of talented vs mediocre and dumb IT people would be the same in there as in the rest of the world, it would _still_ mean that you have a FAR bigger chance to have to deal with mediocre or below than with the tops.
The US, Australia and the richer countries elsewhere, among other things are looking for smart people. And they can afford it.
Raising the price will decrease demand, and so less of the product will be sold.
It is a huge oversimplifaction, isn't it? You seem to have an education in economy, but to me - as somebody who hasn't got one - this post seems overgeneralized exceedingly past usefulness.
Surely, there will be tons of products, for which the demand will stay the same for a range of price change?
If you drink milk, you are probably going to buy it regardless if it costs $0.50 or $0.70?
Well, there might be an impact anyway. There are a number of jobs in IT, which either can not be done by overseas outsourcing, or companies prefer a guy who comes to work every day (or night, for that matter). Still, in general I would agree.
Slashdot Mirror
6 hours every Tuesday early morning IS regular. Regular - occuring at predictable intervals for predictable amounts of time. I've had no problems accustomising myself to it, after all WoW DOES go down at the same time every week. Regularly.
We don't really know the type of maintanance that needs to be done weekly.
If I had to administer servers for Blizz, as a sysadmin I would beg for 6h every day (*grin*), but failing that, some longer maintanance once a week would sound prudent.
Properly equipped datacenters with tons of broadband are a shitload of investment - they are neither cheap to build nor to maintain. Couple with the fact that as far as I understand US property prices are skyhigh, Blizzard would be taking large risks. I work in a datacenter atm, so I have some idea :)
I would pretty much imagine the US servers are divided into datacenters by the timezones.
AFAI've heard about Europe, it's at least 2 datacenters in France and 2 in Germany.
As I wrote a bit earlier up the thread, I do think we're talking some 600+ physical machines in US alone, more in EU.
I've always liked Blizzard games.
I am addicted to WoW.
But regarding WoW, I'd say that they are by far NOT "very receptive and communicative to their fanbase". Then again, I can't expect them to be.
They are trying to cater to and manage a small country of people by now (Imagine:
My country has 3x less people than the population of WoW).
Logic says that people involved with developing the game, otoh, must be a not very large team. Which means that they get either swarmed under the pleas for comments and help etc. or those are being filtered out VERY heavily.
Regarding servers. There are now 156 realms in US and 174 in Europe. Dunno about the rest - how's Bliz doing in China - are they in Asia at all? Didn't find anything regarding that on Blizzard site, so I will assume the 6 mln. players refer to the 330 US+EU realms. Soo... assuming the players are spaced out evenly among realms (never happens), it gives us a bit above 18'000 players per realm. Not bad.
Now the speculations: I am betting each realm is served by at least 2-5 servers, maybe more (you need DB, all the calculations - npcs, movements, flight, fight...., perhaps some proxies too). So, we're having like 1500-2000 servers around the globe. Management, organization, all the issues. And ofc Blizz is not doing their own hosting, but renting datacenter space. Frankly, I am surprised they manage to keep the service up much of the time at all.
P.S. Why "IBM", btw? Might've been Oracle or MSSQL for what's it worth.
I cherish my ignorance on the subject. :)
In fact, in my 30 years, I haven't even had the need to own a car yet - a cab works for my needs 90% of time and is cheaper in the long run.
Not yet... not yet.
The scary part is not "having" to watch adverts, but losing control over equipment in your apartment.
As noted before, EU legal system is not THAT different from US.
So "innocent until proven guilty" does hold for trials, as one would expect.
However, MS has been tried and found guilty.
Now they are appealing, and in appeals it is obviously "guilty unless proven innocent". I bet the same works in US.
Frankly, I am surprised at how much some people consider Europe to be different from US. If somebody told me that anywhere in US presumption of innocence does not hold in trials, I would be as surprised as if I heard it does not hold somewhere in EU. We are talking basic human rights here, almost.
Well, you can call any distro bloated then, almost. I would define "bloated" though as when you have "a lot of apps you HAVE to install in order to BE ABLE to work".
My SuSE server boxes (db + www + devel environment, some additional net services, no X):
> rpm -qa | wc -l
476
>
I wouldn't call particularly "bloated" a desktop/server distro which in its "minimal" config by default installs around 800MB.
The current debate on nuclear reactors at least here is not so much reactors themselves as where and how to store the waste securely for how many hundred years?
That's funny. I worked some years in the local US embassy section that among other things coordinated various educational exchanges - fellowship etc professors from the US coming to E.Europe unis, and the opposite.
And as far as I remember, majority of the professors when commenting on the differences between unis, did say that Eastern Europe ones seemed to give broader education than the US ones they've taught at.
Funny thing, of course, is not that Bob is an idiot, but that "you" (the speaker) aren't.
Frankly, I am just as pissed at hearing someone described as "an idiot" as when he is described as "challenging" or "externally motivated".
Both of these descriptions seem to share something - viewing people as flat cartoon things.
Everything is mowed down to the level of the speaker. All too often, _whatever_ Bob does it is explained as done _because_ he is an idiot. Or "challenging", or "challenged", whatever you prefer.
And it doesn't matter which of these he is called, as long as the speaker make the assumptions automatically, it's just as bad.
I don't think we should fawn over people who do stupid things - we do what we got to do about them. However, all too often I can see and hear fellow people written down carelessly, by people who are not really any much better - but probably need to feel they are.
Agreed.
We are running a couple datacenters and whenever we use Linux, we try to do SuSE Pro whenever we can - it is de facto standard now.
I myself recently stumbled across a mind boggling issue with the newest RH ES -- when installing on a fairly typical IBM x346 it failed to install LILO complaining that kernel (RH stock kernel at that!) was too large, but silently finished install leaving a machine in an unbootable state!
The only place we've RH left now is where we have Oracle DB, but we've asked to investigate our DBAs on whether they wouldn't mind running it on SLES.
I recently migrated my data from 7.2 to 8.1.
Zero glitches for the pg_dump/restore.
AFAI remember PG does automatic periodic vacuums now since 8.x
If the lock and key need to "know" each other's sequences, what happens if I activate the key without the door? They are out of sync then?
The thing that worries me, is actually, what kind of information (kept by ISP) can be used in what capacity? As proof in court??
Since it is generally so ridiculously easy to insert or completely rewrite anything that is kept in logfiles, this places a tremendous responsibility on (especially) the sysadmins taking care of that information. Which seems to be something that the data retention doesn't care much about.
Where there is paper involved, there can be copies made, and any actual changes can be examined for forgeries.
With logfiles, if law enforcement asks me eg, for webmail activity logs of person X, I can just copy/paste any log of another person, modify a bit, delete the info, replace the logfile in backups, and in fact create an entirely different usage pattern than what really took place. And I bet nobody is going to check that, and even if they did, they'd have hell of a time proving I modified anything.
In Lithuania, I believe it is the same as in my country, which is its neigbour. And I think it is basically the same in a lot of other countries in Europe.
It is not illegal. You can get license to own a gun (pistol, hunter rifle or suchlike), and if you can reasonably state that you might be having a dangerous situation or are taking risks during your daily life (like, back in 1990ies, when racketeering was rampant, many of the small businessmen), you can get a licence to carry a gun.
It is just that it is/is perceived/ as big enough hassle and bureaucracy, so that only a small percentage of people do it.
Right.
So, this controversial issue that has been debated by scientists for some years now, and has not been shot down as preposterous even after trying, is merely some "conventional wisdom" spread by half-literate teenagers on par with "masturbation leads to blindness".
Nice. I guess people shouldn't have gone on barricades in Eastern Europe, in 90ies. After all, they had a life, the only thing they didn't really have were actually the civil liberties.
About this phrase:
> This has nothing to do with anything we may or may not have done or our foreign policy or anything like that. There are a lot of evil people on this planet that wish to destroy us - this is a fact that we much accept.
Somehow, nobody's trying to blow up Switzerland, Mauritius, or even any big part of Australia or Canada for that matter. Funny isn't it?
I shudder to think what would happen if you get to being a law-giver, should you have the inclination.
Well then, I rest my case.
Oh, I fully support you on being against "script reading monkeys".
The issue I had, was with the fact that you linked, in your original comment: "outscorcing" = "low quality". Which does seem to say that the guys from overseas are by definition worse.
A minor point I would like to make is that "script reading monkeys" have been present (in the US) before serious outsourcing started. Just being local ones.
Thank you for the clarification, it was quite interesting.
I would have only two things to note further, as this is probably going outside the original discussion:
1) Insofar as price for product is defined by the producer, he may both opt to reduce his price margin in order to keep the price of product within range of demand, or to not actually start that particular line of product if it is economically unfeasible - I am refering to a situation when minimum wage is a given, rather than going to be introduced in future.
2) my particular country is undergoing a stage in which there exists a rather high level of "envelope salaries", particularly in specific sectors, where the employer is declaring the minimum wage salaries and paying the rest of the wages in cash, for tax evasion.
While the situation with such illegal activities is gradually improving, it is widely held that until it improves past some percentage (at least some 3/4ds of employment to be on fully legal pay) minimum wages are providing at least a minimum of protection for employees (severance pay etc.) as well as providing at least some minimal amount of taxation meanwhile.
That's probably why I am getting invited to the US for the third year in a row by my friend who went there 10 years ago.
He works for a company whose boss wouldn't mind at all to do with local staff - he is not offering me less than a local developer, as far as I've learned inquiring about the general IT wages in the state.
Apparently, the guys around there are just "too high quality" and he feels uncomfortable with that.
Sarcasm off.
Honestly. Do you reasonably expect that any particular country has monopoly on talent and knowledge? In the age of Internet?? Do you think that just because you went to a college or uni in the US this means you are by default better than somebody who's been programming in assembler for fun when he was 10? *lol*
When I read about the appalling quality of IT stuff coming from eg India, it does not make me conclude that Indian IT guys can't find their backside IN GENERAL. It reminds me that India is the world's second largest country by population - three times bigger than the US and that if the amount of talented vs mediocre and dumb IT people would be the same in there as in the rest of the world, it would _still_ mean that you have a FAR bigger chance to have to deal with mediocre or below than with the tops. The US, Australia and the richer countries elsewhere, among other things are looking for smart people. And they can afford it.
It is a huge oversimplifaction, isn't it? You seem to have an education in economy, but to me - as somebody who hasn't got one - this post seems overgeneralized exceedingly past usefulness.
Surely, there will be tons of products, for which the demand will stay the same for a range of price change?
If you drink milk, you are probably going to buy it regardless if it costs $0.50 or $0.70?
Well, there might be an impact anyway. There are a number of jobs in IT, which either can not be done by overseas outsourcing, or companies prefer a guy who comes to work every day (or night, for that matter).
Still, in general I would agree.