That's a tad hard to believe. A fortune 20 company has quite likely a well staffed legal department, and if some lower level manager doesn't get it the legal dept will be more than happy to explain
Yeah, I thought it hard to beleive when I was new there, too. It wasn't a manager though, it was architects and developers, and they were doing pretty much whatever without asking the legal department's opinion.
The thing with extremely large companies is that many of em are split in incredibly large amount of divisions. Some of the divisions work without much of the aproval of the rest, which leads to half of the stories you see on slashdot. "Microsoft says Linux infridge on 2170217940942790 patents!". Then the department thats supposed to handle it goes "WTF?!" and eventualy the statement is retracted? Well, same deal here.
In this case, we didn't even HAVE people dealing with this kind of stuff. The closest the legal dep went to IT and software stuff was when it came to counting how many licenses we had.
I used to work for a very large (not software) company (somewhere in fortune 20) that was using GPL stuff left and right without complying to the terms and redistributing.
I personaly don't care much for the GPL, but I do care for complying with licenses and copyright, so I mentionned it to them. Their answer was "GPwhat? No, its free code people give away on the net!". My reply was a long explaination of the difference between "free to do whatever" and the GPL, and even repeating several time, I'd literaly get the same answer: "But...its free! What conditions could there be?".
Eventually I got through by explaining to a project manager, who essentially said that the day someone asks for the source, we'll give it, and that will be that. I still don't think they realised what it meant considering the amount of trade secrets that were in the code, but...
hehehe, I think you hit a nerve:) Though I feel bad for people who are legit all the way that end in those situations, you're right that its pretty ironic how many will scream fool if THEIR stuff is used without permission, and the curse them out loud while going back to their pirated games and softwares.
They do cross platform, but the APIs are tied to each console, just like Direct X with PCs. Its not like making a game for the Wii and then the PS3, followed by the DS and PSP lets you reuse much code, or hell, even textures and graphics.
I dont think google caches images, actually. They still pull em from the original server, which can be quite a mess when a server is down and you want more than the text.
What cracks me up, too, is whenever people talk about Vista, they go "Blah! Vista doesn't have anything Windows XP doesn't have, why upgrade?"
Then when it DOES: "Waaaaaah! Microsoft should have backported that feature! They're hurting the industries and users relying on it!"
Back in the days when Windows versions came out every 2-3 years (if that), you didn't hear junk like that. People (mostly the developers and companies relying on it) got used to the stagnant, stable target that is XP, and they want it to stay like that, forever. Same thing happened with IE6. It sucked ass, but it never changed, so hundreds of applications (not just web based, since you can use IE's renderer for desktop apps, mainly reporting applications) just relied on it with no upgrade path whatsoever, and it made a mess.
If you ask me, all of this is a good thing. Get people used to change (that would indirectly help Linux anyway, for those who swing that way)
One thing i noticed though, is that certain spammers literally try all combinations, given a domain name. I have my own email server, but as soon as the domain name got in the wild (though I guess they could just fetch it from a lookup or a dns), -I- got junk mail on adresses I had never even used (not even sent a email to myself with em!).
Actually, i remember seeing a few articles showing how in -some- games it was a little faster, back when Vista came out, and that was before drivers got better. I'll admit you won't see an improvement for the most part, thats for sure:) I was simply pointing out it sure as hell isn't 50% across the board, not even close. As a general rule, Vista almost = XP for gaming, as opposed to the horrible reputation it got (and even you have to admit, probably 90% of people saying these things are just repeating what they heard and didn't even try it).
One thing for sure, I have 2 computers on Vista here, and even though I have 2 full licenses of XP laying around, I'm not downgrading, heck no:)
And it would cost a month because OpenGL is far from being as easy to use than DX.
Also, when I talked about porTing games to the 360, it wasn't just because DX is on both PC and 360, its because they're made so its almost the same API. PS3, Wii, etc are totally different architectures, while a (simple) game can run with zero modification on both PC and 360. Thats why you see tons of PC + 360 games out there. PS3 and Wii have features that make em literally incompatible (wiimote anyone), architecture wise, so while you do see cross platform games, they definately take quite a bit more effort.
OpenGL gives almost as good results (not really as good, since videocard makers tend not to put as much efforts in their open gl implementation) as DX once the game is done. Its just not as easy at the beggining.
Its literally a C/C++ vs C# type of deal, with virtually the same advantages and weaknesses as the languages (except speed)
Im curious about that really. With all the talk about performance hits in games, I've never actually seen it. Tried douzans and douzans of games, on multiple machines between me and my friends, and at best there's 2-3 fps difference due to the desktop compositing running and slightly (and yes, its SLIGHTLY) higher RAM usage. Half of it can be delt with by just turning off desktop compositing in the game's shortcut.
No different than back when I was trying to run XP on my 366 mhz celeron back in the days (when it just came out), I'd kill explorer.exe completly while playing games to get back some RAM. Except back then it made more than 2-3 fps difference =P
Vista has some real flaws, no need to invent them or to just repeat what everyone else said. Bitch about how Vista + Office 2007 + Remote Desktop sucks ass and crashes non-stop on some (actually common, though not all) setups or something, that at least would be true and significant.
Because developers in business heavy areas care about a lot more than just how advanced it is. While my understanding is that OpenGL is in the process of being revamped, the versions devs had to work with so far sucked hardcore from a dev point of view compared to Direct X.
On top of that, DX lets you porn games relatively easily to the 360, which has a much lower piracy ratio than PC Gaming, on top of simply having a pretty big market in its own right.
Unless you're purposely making a game that would have mass market on Mac and Linux (Starcraft or WoW comes to mind), there's no real BUSINESS incensive to invest in OpenGL. Remember, if your development team is running at multi-millions per month (number out of my ass, its more than that now), saving just ONE month of time on a 2 year development budget makes a huge difference in the bottom line, one that probably will make up for restricting yourself to just one platform.
Walmart really IS an awful place to work at... A few things caught my attention though. Its quite a common policy, no matter your job or social rank, for companies to fire (or at least threaten to) someone giving their salary. Usually work conditions are between you and your employer, so on that, Walmart isn't really special. And while your salary is total crap (like virtually everyone who work there), from what one of my friends who worked there told me, you DO get a bonus at the end of the year (which still doesn't make up for anything, but yeah).
Oh, and unions really ARE evil. Walmart is just more evil than unions.
If you just buy the licenses retail, you're right. But large corporations can (and often do) have contracts with MS for stuff like that. The last place I worked for did.
Never needed it actually, but its in the contract.
Yeah, you can have fun revalidating your windows every 5 minutes if you want, be it valid or not (you can reenter the key at will).
For example the copy of Vista that was provided to me by my workplace didn't get activated correctly on first try for whatever reason. I just reentered it (the exact same one) later on from home and it fixed it, simple as that.
Funny, but its most definately true. Teens, on top of having urges, are also amazingly curious. If you stop them from looking at pictures, their only recourse is the real thing...and once two naked teens are in the same room together, the lack of condoms is the last thing on their mind. Even someone who KNOWS better will have a hard time resisting urges at that point.
I don't have any at hand, but as far as I know, just about every single studies ever made show that teens who are exposed to sexual education and material (aka: are a bit less sexually frustrated, and more importantly, curious) usually end up having their first experiences at an age where they are more aware of the consequences of their action (thats why early teen pregnancies are more common in poorer, less educated areas).
Well, the deal with software, is that (at least for large companies), the cost of commercial license is a write off. At my previous jobs, we got a few douzan MSDN Premium with VS2005 Team Suite (something like 12-15 grands canadian....the canadian price is like 30% higher than USD btw, kindda funny) and it was written off on the corner of a table. Its unnoticeable in a large budget.
The important part though, is let say you didn't read the license, and turns out that MSDN isn't a yearly fee, its every 6 months. Or that (as is amazingly common), you're using software from MSDN as production software (as opposed to development software), which, according to the EULA, can't be done. What do you do? Sign a few thousand dollars check in the worse case scenario. Big deal. If you used Vista Home Basic on virtual machines, again, sign a check and upgrade, its straightforward and about the worse that realistically happens
Now, let say I have a software with douzans of millions lines of code, and I use GPL software all over the place, because, like with commercial software, you didn't read the license, and you distribute it like nuts. Now, a couple of things can happen if you get caught(not in any particular order):
1) You deal with the guy who wrote the GPL stuff you're using for a commercial license. Then its like commercial software, no biggy.
2) You're asked to open source your stuff. I know the software we're writing at my current workplace gets several hundreds of thousands of dollars a shot, and is really nothing, except for ONE DLL that has 7 years of work in it, and its a raw algorythm (just an amazingly complex one). If that algorythm becomes easy to fetch, competitors will pop up left and right (we currently have virtually none), and we're out (not that we don't have a plan Bs in case it happens, but...). So thats worse than having to sign a 100000$ check. Not an option.
3) You have to take out the GPL stuff from your code. If its huge and integrated (no external library should ever be, but go tell that to 95% of the wannabe software architects out there), there's no taking it out. You'll have to spend months refactoring. Again, a lot worse than having to pay a few douzan thousand bucks to microsoft.
So all around, my point is, as a general rule, if you don't read licenses of commercial softwares, USUALY the consequences are a lot less dire than with many OSS licenses. Of course, I simply read the licenses and its never a problem, so no biggy for me, but there's a lot of idiots out there:)
Well, technically all softwares install tons of things without you consenting to it. Could you picture the install wizard?
"This software will install xyz123abc.dll on your computer. This library has purpose X. Do you agree?" (yes/no).
About 500 times? Will make windows vista with security features enabled look easy.
It definately definately definately should be taken away afterward though. Some of these pieces of trash are single handedly (along with Norton and such) the reason Windows has stability issues, NOT Microsoft. I'd have (almost) zero issues with em installing all the garbage they want on my PC, as long as one I uninstall the game, its GONE. But noooooooo, have to uninstall em separately and tracking the uninstallers isn't always as easy as it could be...
Indeed. Copy protection comes from two fronts. A) To stop the "If there is NOTHING stopping me from doing it, then I have the right to do it" crowd, which is quite a lot of people, and B) simply because the people making these decisions are NOT the ones writing the software. A lot of game developers HATE copy protection and see it only as something that makes em lose money.
Definately possible, yes. Though when you have 60 thousand users, the 2-3 tables per transactions you're hitting could very well be hundreds of gigs. And the database is only ONE part of the equation in a big system, and definately can take multiple seconds. That a transaction takes 1-2 sec doesn't take away from the SSL and authentication, querying the user specific properties. The app may be graphic intensive, who knows:) Thats why I was just replying to the main question which had to do with high availability development. The rest is his or her problem.
That being said, its very possible that if they're going around toying with server side cursors all over the place and crappy queries, it will be an issue. But 90 simultaneous users on an app that contains transactions made by 60k users probably add up something fast. I mean, I've worked on an app that had -3- concurrent users, and the entire app was 30 tables, with never more than 6 tables accessed at a time. "Small fry stuff" one think. Until you realise that one of the actors on the tables would pump in millions of rows per -day- in the best of cases. Not much to do about that at that point but scale somehow...
for many complex, distributed, multi-tier applications, especially those doing heavy real time calculations across multiple systems, and web apps doing pretty specific user session monitoring and personalisation, a second or two is pretty freagin blazing actually. A second or two is only an eternity if talking about a stand alone system doing simple stuff with only a few boundaries to cross, if any.
Task queuing to deal with server downtimes, and horizontal scalability.
The first is handled by just about any messaging/queue system. J2EE has had one for ages, Microsoft has MSMQ that recently (better late than never...::SLAPS::) integrated it directly in.NET via WCF, and there are others. In its simplest form, you really just send your jobs to a "queue", and have automated processes pick em up and handle em. If the processes go down, they'll just handle them when they get back up, so even a whole database server farm going down at the same time won't make you lose queued up requests. Nifty (it of course gets more complicated than that, but the basic scenarios can be learned by following an internet tutorial).
Then horizontal scaling. Why horizontal? Because just taking a random new box and plugging in it the network is easier and faster (especially in case of emergency) than having to take servers down to upgrade them (vertically scaling). Also adds to redundancy, so the more servers you add to your farm, the less likely your system will go down. There are documents on it all over (Microsoft Patterns&Practices has some on their web sites, non-MS documentation is hard to miss if you google for it, and many third partys will be more than happy to spam you with their solutions), but it really just come down to: "Use an RDBMS that handles clustering and table partitioning, use distributed caching solutions, push as much stuff on the client side (stuff that doesn't need to be trusted only!), and make sure that nothing ever depends on ressources that can only be accessed from a single machine (think local flat files, in process session management, etc)".
With that, no matter what goes down, things go on purring, and if someone ever bitch that the system is slow, you just buy a 1000$ server, stick a standard pre-made image on the disk, plug it in, have fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought it hard to beleive when I was new there, too. It wasn't a manager though, it was architects and developers, and they were doing pretty much whatever without asking the legal department's opinion.
The thing with extremely large companies is that many of em are split in incredibly large amount of divisions. Some of the divisions work without much of the aproval of the rest, which leads to half of the stories you see on slashdot. "Microsoft says Linux infridge on 2170217940942790 patents!". Then the department thats supposed to handle it goes "WTF?!" and eventualy the statement is retracted? Well, same deal here.
In this case, we didn't even HAVE people dealing with this kind of stuff. The closest the legal dep went to IT and software stuff was when it came to counting how many licenses we had.
I did mention they were using GPL stuff left and right AND redistributing, in like the first 2 lines of my post :)
I used to work for a very large (not software) company (somewhere in fortune 20) that was using GPL stuff left and right without complying to the terms and redistributing.
I personaly don't care much for the GPL, but I do care for complying with licenses and copyright, so I mentionned it to them. Their answer was "GPwhat? No, its free code people give away on the net!". My reply was a long explaination of the difference between "free to do whatever" and the GPL, and even repeating several time, I'd literaly get the same answer: "But...its free! What conditions could there be?".
Eventually I got through by explaining to a project manager, who essentially said that the day someone asks for the source, we'll give it, and that will be that. I still don't think they realised what it meant considering the amount of trade secrets that were in the code, but...
hehehe, I think you hit a nerve :) Though I feel bad for people who are legit all the way that end in those situations, you're right that its pretty ironic how many will scream fool if THEIR stuff is used without permission, and the curse them out loud while going back to their pirated games and softwares.
They do cross platform, but the APIs are tied to each console, just like Direct X with PCs. Its not like making a game for the Wii and then the PS3, followed by the DS and PSP lets you reuse much code, or hell, even textures and graphics.
I dont think google caches images, actually. They still pull em from the original server, which can be quite a mess when a server is down and you want more than the text.
What cracks me up, too, is whenever people talk about Vista, they go "Blah! Vista doesn't have anything Windows XP doesn't have, why upgrade?"
Then when it DOES: "Waaaaaah! Microsoft should have backported that feature! They're hurting the industries and users relying on it!"
Back in the days when Windows versions came out every 2-3 years (if that), you didn't hear junk like that. People (mostly the developers and companies relying on it) got used to the stagnant, stable target that is XP, and they want it to stay like that, forever. Same thing happened with IE6. It sucked ass, but it never changed, so hundreds of applications (not just web based, since you can use IE's renderer for desktop apps, mainly reporting applications) just relied on it with no upgrade path whatsoever, and it made a mess.
If you ask me, all of this is a good thing. Get people used to change (that would indirectly help Linux anyway, for those who swing that way)
One thing i noticed though, is that certain spammers literally try all combinations, given a domain name. I have my own email server, but as soon as the domain name got in the wild (though I guess they could just fetch it from a lookup or a dns), -I- got junk mail on adresses I had never even used (not even sent a email to myself with em!).
Actually, i remember seeing a few articles showing how in -some- games it was a little faster, back when Vista came out, and that was before drivers got better. I'll admit you won't see an improvement for the most part, thats for sure :) I was simply pointing out it sure as hell isn't 50% across the board, not even close. As a general rule, Vista almost = XP for gaming, as opposed to the horrible reputation it got (and even you have to admit, probably 90% of people saying these things are just repeating what they heard and didn't even try it).
:)
One thing for sure, I have 2 computers on Vista here, and even though I have 2 full licenses of XP laying around, I'm not downgrading, heck no
WHOOPS! Now thats embarassing.
And it would cost a month because OpenGL is far from being as easy to use than DX.
Also, when I talked about porTing games to the 360, it wasn't just because DX is on both PC and 360, its because they're made so its almost the same API. PS3, Wii, etc are totally different architectures, while a (simple) game can run with zero modification on both PC and 360. Thats why you see tons of PC + 360 games out there. PS3 and Wii have features that make em literally incompatible (wiimote anyone), architecture wise, so while you do see cross platform games, they definately take quite a bit more effort.
OpenGL gives almost as good results (not really as good, since videocard makers tend not to put as much efforts in their open gl implementation) as DX once the game is done. Its just not as easy at the beggining.
Its literally a C/C++ vs C# type of deal, with virtually the same advantages and weaknesses as the languages (except speed)
Works pretty good for console gaming, and consoles are tied to a single company.
Im curious about that really. With all the talk about performance hits in games, I've never actually seen it. Tried douzans and douzans of games, on multiple machines between me and my friends, and at best there's 2-3 fps difference due to the desktop compositing running and slightly (and yes, its SLIGHTLY) higher RAM usage. Half of it can be delt with by just turning off desktop compositing in the game's shortcut.
No different than back when I was trying to run XP on my 366 mhz celeron back in the days (when it just came out), I'd kill explorer.exe completly while playing games to get back some RAM. Except back then it made more than 2-3 fps difference =P
Vista has some real flaws, no need to invent them or to just repeat what everyone else said. Bitch about how Vista + Office 2007 + Remote Desktop sucks ass and crashes non-stop on some (actually common, though not all) setups or something, that at least would be true and significant.
Because developers in business heavy areas care about a lot more than just how advanced it is. While my understanding is that OpenGL is in the process of being revamped, the versions devs had to work with so far sucked hardcore from a dev point of view compared to Direct X.
On top of that, DX lets you porn games relatively easily to the 360, which has a much lower piracy ratio than PC Gaming, on top of simply having a pretty big market in its own right.
Unless you're purposely making a game that would have mass market on Mac and Linux (Starcraft or WoW comes to mind), there's no real BUSINESS incensive to invest in OpenGL. Remember, if your development team is running at multi-millions per month (number out of my ass, its more than that now), saving just ONE month of time on a 2 year development budget makes a huge difference in the bottom line, one that probably will make up for restricting yourself to just one platform.
Walmart really IS an awful place to work at... A few things caught my attention though. Its quite a common policy, no matter your job or social rank, for companies to fire (or at least threaten to) someone giving their salary. Usually work conditions are between you and your employer, so on that, Walmart isn't really special. And while your salary is total crap (like virtually everyone who work there), from what one of my friends who worked there told me, you DO get a bonus at the end of the year (which still doesn't make up for anything, but yeah).
Oh, and unions really ARE evil. Walmart is just more evil than unions.
Oh nice! So you mean the W3C took it over?
If you just buy the licenses retail, you're right. But large corporations can (and often do) have contracts with MS for stuff like that. The last place I worked for did.
Never needed it actually, but its in the contract.
Yeah, you can have fun revalidating your windows every 5 minutes if you want, be it valid or not (you can reenter the key at will).
For example the copy of Vista that was provided to me by my workplace didn't get activated correctly on first try for whatever reason. I just reentered it (the exact same one) later on from home and it fixed it, simple as that.
Funny, but its most definately true. Teens, on top of having urges, are also amazingly curious. If you stop them from looking at pictures, their only recourse is the real thing...and once two naked teens are in the same room together, the lack of condoms is the last thing on their mind. Even someone who KNOWS better will have a hard time resisting urges at that point.
I don't have any at hand, but as far as I know, just about every single studies ever made show that teens who are exposed to sexual education and material (aka: are a bit less sexually frustrated, and more importantly, curious) usually end up having their first experiences at an age where they are more aware of the consequences of their action (thats why early teen pregnancies are more common in poorer, less educated areas).
Well, the deal with software, is that (at least for large companies), the cost of commercial license is a write off. At my previous jobs, we got a few douzan MSDN Premium with VS2005 Team Suite (something like 12-15 grands canadian....the canadian price is like 30% higher than USD btw, kindda funny) and it was written off on the corner of a table. Its unnoticeable in a large budget.
:)
The important part though, is let say you didn't read the license, and turns out that MSDN isn't a yearly fee, its every 6 months. Or that (as is amazingly common), you're using software from MSDN as production software (as opposed to development software), which, according to the EULA, can't be done. What do you do? Sign a few thousand dollars check in the worse case scenario. Big deal. If you used Vista Home Basic on virtual machines, again, sign a check and upgrade, its straightforward and about the worse that realistically happens
Now, let say I have a software with douzans of millions lines of code, and I use GPL software all over the place, because, like with commercial software, you didn't read the license, and you distribute it like nuts. Now, a couple of things can happen if you get caught(not in any particular order):
1) You deal with the guy who wrote the GPL stuff you're using for a commercial license. Then its like commercial software, no biggy.
2) You're asked to open source your stuff. I know the software we're writing at my current workplace gets several hundreds of thousands of dollars a shot, and is really nothing, except for ONE DLL that has 7 years of work in it, and its a raw algorythm (just an amazingly complex one). If that algorythm becomes easy to fetch, competitors will pop up left and right (we currently have virtually none), and we're out (not that we don't have a plan Bs in case it happens, but...). So thats worse than having to sign a 100000$ check. Not an option.
3) You have to take out the GPL stuff from your code. If its huge and integrated (no external library should ever be, but go tell that to 95% of the wannabe software architects out there), there's no taking it out. You'll have to spend months refactoring. Again, a lot worse than having to pay a few douzan thousand bucks to microsoft.
So all around, my point is, as a general rule, if you don't read licenses of commercial softwares, USUALY the consequences are a lot less dire than with many OSS licenses. Of course, I simply read the licenses and its never a problem, so no biggy for me, but there's a lot of idiots out there
Well, technically all softwares install tons of things without you consenting to it. Could you picture the install wizard?
"This software will install xyz123abc.dll on your computer. This library has purpose X. Do you agree?" (yes/no).
About 500 times? Will make windows vista with security features enabled look easy.
It definately definately definately should be taken away afterward though. Some of these pieces of trash are single handedly (along with Norton and such) the reason Windows has stability issues, NOT Microsoft. I'd have (almost) zero issues with em installing all the garbage they want on my PC, as long as one I uninstall the game, its GONE. But noooooooo, have to uninstall em separately and tracking the uninstallers isn't always as easy as it could be...
Indeed. Copy protection comes from two fronts. A) To stop the "If there is NOTHING stopping me from doing it, then I have the right to do it" crowd, which is quite a lot of people, and B) simply because the people making these decisions are NOT the ones writing the software. A lot of game developers HATE copy protection and see it only as something that makes em lose money.
Definately possible, yes. Though when you have 60 thousand users, the 2-3 tables per transactions you're hitting could very well be hundreds of gigs. And the database is only ONE part of the equation in a big system, and definately can take multiple seconds. That a transaction takes 1-2 sec doesn't take away from the SSL and authentication, querying the user specific properties. The app may be graphic intensive, who knows :) Thats why I was just replying to the main question which had to do with high availability development. The rest is his or her problem.
That being said, its very possible that if they're going around toying with server side cursors all over the place and crappy queries, it will be an issue. But 90 simultaneous users on an app that contains transactions made by 60k users probably add up something fast. I mean, I've worked on an app that had -3- concurrent users, and the entire app was 30 tables, with never more than 6 tables accessed at a time. "Small fry stuff" one think. Until you realise that one of the actors on the tables would pump in millions of rows per -day- in the best of cases. Not much to do about that at that point but scale somehow...
for many complex, distributed, multi-tier applications, especially those doing heavy real time calculations across multiple systems, and web apps doing pretty specific user session monitoring and personalisation, a second or two is pretty freagin blazing actually. A second or two is only an eternity if talking about a stand alone system doing simple stuff with only a few boundaries to cross, if any.
Same thing that happens everytime something like this is "proven".
"thats what we were saying -ALLLLLLLLLLLLLL ALONG-, but it doesn't change anything!"
Task queuing to deal with server downtimes, and horizontal scalability.
::SLAPS::) integrated it directly in .NET via WCF, and there are others. In its simplest form, you really just send your jobs to a "queue", and have automated processes pick em up and handle em. If the processes go down, they'll just handle them when they get back up, so even a whole database server farm going down at the same time won't make you lose queued up requests. Nifty (it of course gets more complicated than that, but the basic scenarios can be learned by following an internet tutorial).
:)
The first is handled by just about any messaging/queue system. J2EE has had one for ages, Microsoft has MSMQ that recently (better late than never...
Then horizontal scaling. Why horizontal? Because just taking a random new box and plugging in it the network is easier and faster (especially in case of emergency) than having to take servers down to upgrade them (vertically scaling). Also adds to redundancy, so the more servers you add to your farm, the less likely your system will go down. There are documents on it all over (Microsoft Patterns&Practices has some on their web sites, non-MS documentation is hard to miss if you google for it, and many third partys will be more than happy to spam you with their solutions), but it really just come down to: "Use an RDBMS that handles clustering and table partitioning, use distributed caching solutions, push as much stuff on the client side (stuff that doesn't need to be trusted only!), and make sure that nothing ever depends on ressources that can only be accessed from a single machine (think local flat files, in process session management, etc)".
With that, no matter what goes down, things go on purring, and if someone ever bitch that the system is slow, you just buy a 1000$ server, stick a standard pre-made image on the disk, plug it in, have fun.
Oh, and fast network switches are a must