Those weren't drugged-out bums sitting against the wall, they were burned-out WoW players who ran out of money at the Cyber Cafe. Signs would include dark circles under eyes, gaunt appearance, and many empty Ballz soda bottles sitting next to them....
I have seen many gaming cafes spring up and then disappear within typically two years in the Seattle area. I also personally know of one guy that owned a shopping mall in southern Washington and gave a gaming cafe a try in one of the empty mall spaces. He hired a very knowledgable admin to run the place and it still didn't make money despite the fact that the shop didn't have to pay rent for the space. He closed shop and then had 25-30 computers sitting in his garage collecting dust. Not knowing what to do with them, he hired me to set up a gaming LAN at his house for when his friends and family come over. While setting up the computers, I found the admin's resume on one of the hard drives. Seems he was looking for a real job while the cafe went in the tank. I think I'd avoid starting a gaming cafe like the plague....I've never seen one survive.
Yah I had a Timex Sinclair. Not hex, but BASIC. Same agony. It just proves I was born a computer geek because that was my first computer and I still loved them despite the Sinclair being a disaster. If I pressed the "keys" too hard or too fast, my 16k expansion pak would lose connection and the machine would reset, thus losing all of my code. Ack.
Any company who thinks innovation is dead will find themselves envying the other companies that do innovate. This is coming from the company that co-developed the Cell processor??
I work for a hardware reseller that sells and services PCs for Microsoft developers. We perform onsite service frequently all over campus, so myself and a couple of other people in my company have orange badges for that purpose. These badges don't look any different than the ones the on-campus temps wear and my badge doesn't mean a god damn thing to me. So I guess that makes matters worse since there really is no way to tell the difference in the halls between a contracter who wants to fit in to MS culture and be recognized as an equal and someone who is just there to drop off some RAM. Personally I don't like temp jobs and I am really turned off by the fact that MS won't commit year-round to a contracter. I feel I am a skilled technician and I want to work for a company that can offer me a real job (read:stability) because I am proud of what I do. Temping is a choice, so remember before you start bellyaching about discrimination and 100 day hiatus that you have a choice to contract or not. Instead of trying to form a temp union, get a real job and tell Volt to fuck themselves.
I understand you may feel a little hurt by your employer's actions, but really the other replies here are correct.
1) They have no reason to put corporate information systems at risk no matter how good of a job you did and how trustworthy you feel you are. It's a hard pill to swallow, but they did the best practice for security.
2) This really doesn't belong on Slashdot. Isn't this a technical and science news forum?
Nothing personal and I don't think you could have done anything different as far as resigning goes. What's unprofessional is walking off the job and you didn't do that. Happy vacation!
Clockspeed means *nothing*
I understand your argument, and you are correct, however take away the Hz and you don't have a computer! So clockspeed means everything if you look at it that way. So many people these days including G5 and AMD enthusisasts are making statements like "clockspeed means nothing", but I think it weakens their arguments because although you get the gist of what they are trying to say, it sounds ridiculous. Your arguments will have more gravitas if you avoid extreme statements such as this.
Dude you really should sit back with a fifth of Jack and get off your soapbox man, who gives a rats ass about the TOS? People just play games to have fun and when they're asked to pick a toon name, they aren't going to put any thought process into whether it violates the rules with the possible exception of deliberately choosing an obcene one to offend other players (racial slurs, etc.) BTW, you spelled irrelevant incorrectly. Ass.
I think you might have one of the boards that actually worked for the MP platform, but there were many others that suffered stability issues due to an immature chipset and also the K7D-Master from MSI was a commonly used board in MP systems that just loved to fail.
I agree about memory compatibility charts, but it's usually a narrow selection of vendors/models, and there is a heck of alot of memory out there which say the same thing on the label. To most people, including the salespeople that spec the systems, a 1GB DDR400 Reg ECC is the same as another stick with the same label, because that is how RAM is marketed to the public. Sticking to the vendor charts was not as necessary in the past, and still doesn't seem as critical with the intel platform. With the special memory architecture of the AMD CPUs, it is definitely more sensitive to the RAM used, but it seems people have not been educated about AMD memory compatibility and are still playing the old "just cram in a stick" method of the past. I am surprised AMD and the motherboard manufacturers aren't extremely insistent that a builder follow the qualified memory list. As long as the 64 bit CPUS have been out, it should be common knowledge by now amongst all Opteron users, OEMs and enthusiasts alike, that the memory compatibility charts need to be heeded for a stable system. How hard would it be for a mainboard manufacturer to put an errata sheet in the box so that it is the first thing you see when you open it? If you don't educate your customers, how can you expect anyone but a professional PC technician to know what single-ranked RAM is (needed to fully populate slots with DDR400)? By the way, the on-die memory controller can go bad on the Opteron and look like memory errors. Some CPUs will appear to run fine until you push them really hard, such as compiling code for hours on end. Believe me, the customers my company sells these to push the systems very hard; there is no possible way you could achieve a zero failure rate in the same situation. Furthermore, a software-based memory tester is not a robust enough indication of system reliability as memory will not fail the test unless largely compromised. Only real life tests where you are pushing the cpus 100% for extended periods of time, using most or all of the memory space available, and stressing the disk I/O can give you reasonable confidence in a newly built system. MemTest or Windows Memory Test don't mean squat, they are just quick tools to confirm what you already suspect...that faulty memory is causing that IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL stop error you keep getting.
I'd like to know what motherboards you are using as well as power supplies please, so I can try them out. To be fair, Tyan does have some boards that behave alot better than the S2875 I mentioned, namely the S2885 (dual) and the S4882 (quad). The S2895 looked promising at first, but apparently there have been some BIOS-level memory issues since the board has been on the market, and Tyan only got around to fixing it recently.
Unless you are talking about first tier equipment such as an HP Opteron Quad, I don't think there are many other mobo choices beyond Tyan, Rioworks, Asus, Giga-byte, or MSI. The Asus K8N-DL seems ok, but I don't trust MSI or Giga-byte dual boards to last long before needing replacement. So who do you use? Tyan has really been the leader in Opteron board offerings and to have so many issues with their motherboards really puts a dent in the confidence of the Opteron platform as a whole in my opinion. I could build a bunch of Xeons with intel boards and be done with the headaches if were up to me.
Give me a break! Asus...maybe,but they only have one Nforce-based dual board as far as I know. First one I installed had a bad onboard NIC, second one worked though. But ASRock or Gigabyte? I don't see how you can recommend tertierary brands as a solution, Giga-byte is more unreliable than either Rioworks or Tyan, hands-down. They are popular as enthusiast boards because they are cheap and pack more features, but break they do, all the time. And their customer support is pretty weak. ASRock? Ghetto....
As a PC technician that works on multi-cpu Opterons day in and day out, I can tell you that despite the performance and lower cost of AMD (which gets all the limelight), they are far less reliable than intel processors and the motherboards on the market tend to be unreliable as well. Anybody who has dealt with the Rioworks HDAMB or Tyan S2875 can tell you that. The 32-bit Athlon MP motherboards were god-awful as well and the trend continues. Instability issues are rampant because AMD CPUs are so picky about the type of RAM used. My company is constantly having to order more expensive single-ranked RAM modules to solve banking limitations of the CPU memory controller, machine check errors, and ECC corrections. This also makes RAM warranty replacement take longer than it would normally. Even when you are talking about consumer level AMD-based systems, such as 3000+ up, nForce-based motherboards (by far the most popular chipset) have been historically picky about what RAM is installed. Believe me, people don't love their AMDs so much when they are down, they are often referred to as pieces of sh** by customers that experience these all too common problems. As AMDs are becoming more popluar these days, more small businesses are buying servers based on AMD, they don't have backup equipment, and they get really pissed off when their Exchange server quits because an Opteron just suddenly gave up the ghost.
Seriously people, you can champion performance and lower heat output all day, but both platforms offer more power than most people utilize, and I would think that less downtime is what equates into real dollars saved, not faster CPU operations. Most people would rather drive a Toyota that gets them from point A to point B everytime than rely on a Ferrari that drives faster but breaks frequently. In some ways, AMD has already demonstrated my analogy for me. Acer-Ferrari overheat notebook anybody? Reminds me of Fiat-Ferrari...:(
All of the online subscription games I have played over the years have been this way. I don't think it's particularly fair myself. What if you decide that the game is not as fun as you initially thought it would be, and you decide to dump it? Well, if you make that decision, of course you can cancel your subscription like normal services, but in this case it also renders your initial investment of $40-$50 to no value. If game companies refuse to allow a middle market for their products, then perhaps they should offer a direct refund or at least a voucher for another product? Seems like the game industry sorely needs some Satisfaction Guaranteed policies rather than continually screwing over their customers with shovelware.
I noticed that Prescott P4s are noisy with stock heatsinks/fans, even with the built in fan speed control on the motherboards. I have an AMD 64 personally, an Antec case w/ 120mm fans (swapped out for Vantec Stealth) and a 3rd party heatsink can yield better results.
I think if consumers look at the Mini for what it is, an appliance, it makes more sense. As you, said, you use it in the kitchen, and it suits it's purpose well. But alot of Mac Zealots seem to think this is the model that'll make PC Users "switch" to the platform and then they'll be hooked on OS X and dump PCs for good. Somehow I doubt that considering that most models of Macs are anemic in performance until you get into the very high end G5s (expensive!) and it's not a very good gaming platform which is actually pretty important to many PC users. Other than less virus problems, any advantages of OSX are hard to find. Windows XP is stable enough (blue screens are mostly from hardware failure these days), and it has way more software, unless of course you just have to have GarageBand;)
I 've played in the public beta week-ends. I thought
Guild Wars was cool until I tried WoW for the first time. Despite all the claimed advantages of balance and no fees, GW just feels like Dungeon Siege/not quite MMORPG. WoW just sucks you in and the graphics are better to boot. Immersiveness is fantastic. The fact that GW doesn't have you running around the world map actually detracts from the feeling that you're there...seems more like stages which isn't really different from many many other games.
Actually I have heard from a reliable source inside MS that an unpatched machine will have a virus on it within minutes when connected to their own internal network. the network "Ops" do monitor the network and will shut off your port if you do just that.
Also, since their users are admins of their own machines, I have heard of at least one guy who uses Linux because it better suited to a certain task, but overall what the CIO said is true unsurprisingly. I also have seen an inflatable Tux punch toy in one of their labs before. I desired to save Tux from the evil MS Server people, but alas, I had to exude professionalism and not let emotion overwhelm me....:P
Slashdot Mirror
Those weren't drugged-out bums sitting against the wall, they were burned-out WoW players who ran out of money at the Cyber Cafe. Signs would include dark circles under eyes, gaunt appearance, and many empty Ballz soda bottles sitting next to them....
I have seen many gaming cafes spring up and then disappear within typically two years in the Seattle area. I also personally know of one guy that owned a shopping mall in southern Washington and gave a gaming cafe a try in one of the empty mall spaces. He hired a very knowledgable admin to run the place and it still didn't make money despite the fact that the shop didn't have to pay rent for the space. He closed shop and then had 25-30 computers sitting in his garage collecting dust. Not knowing what to do with them, he hired me to set up a gaming LAN at his house for when his friends and family come over. While setting up the computers, I found the admin's resume on one of the hard drives. Seems he was looking for a real job while the cafe went in the tank. I think I'd avoid starting a gaming cafe like the plague....I've never seen one survive.
Yah I had a Timex Sinclair. Not hex, but BASIC. Same agony. It just proves I was born a computer geek because that was my first computer and I still loved them despite the Sinclair being a disaster. If I pressed the "keys" too hard or too fast, my 16k expansion pak would lose connection and the machine would reset, thus losing all of my code. Ack.
Any company who thinks innovation is dead will find themselves envying the other companies that do innovate. This is coming from the company that co-developed the Cell processor??
I work for a hardware reseller that sells and services PCs for Microsoft developers. We perform onsite service frequently all over campus, so myself and a couple of other people in my company have orange badges for that purpose. These badges don't look any different than the ones the on-campus temps wear and my badge doesn't mean a god damn thing to me. So I guess that makes matters worse since there really is no way to tell the difference in the halls between a contracter who wants to fit in to MS culture and be recognized as an equal and someone who is just there to drop off some RAM. Personally I don't like temp jobs and I am really turned off by the fact that MS won't commit year-round to a contracter. I feel I am a skilled technician and I want to work for a company that can offer me a real job (read:stability) because I am proud of what I do. Temping is a choice, so remember before you start bellyaching about discrimination and 100 day hiatus that you have a choice to contract or not. Instead of trying to form a temp union, get a real job and tell Volt to fuck themselves.
I understand you may feel a little hurt by your employer's actions, but really the other replies here are correct. 1) They have no reason to put corporate information systems at risk no matter how good of a job you did and how trustworthy you feel you are. It's a hard pill to swallow, but they did the best practice for security. 2) This really doesn't belong on Slashdot. Isn't this a technical and science news forum? Nothing personal and I don't think you could have done anything different as far as resigning goes. What's unprofessional is walking off the job and you didn't do that. Happy vacation!
Clockspeed means *nothing*
I understand your argument, and you are correct, however take away the Hz and you don't have a computer! So clockspeed means everything if you look at it that way. So many people these days including G5 and AMD enthusisasts are making statements like "clockspeed means nothing", but I think it weakens their arguments because although you get the gist of what they are trying to say, it sounds ridiculous. Your arguments will have more gravitas if you avoid extreme statements such as this.
Sorry, that's just tech lingo these days.
Dude you really should sit back with a fifth of Jack and get off your soapbox man, who gives a rats ass about the TOS? People just play games to have fun and when they're asked to pick a toon name, they aren't going to put any thought process into whether it violates the rules with the possible exception of deliberately choosing an obcene one to offend other players (racial slurs, etc.) BTW, you spelled irrelevant incorrectly. Ass.
Because Guild Wars is so coo and I hate paying $15/mo anyways for WoW.
I think you might have one of the boards that actually worked for the MP platform, but there were many others that suffered stability issues due to an immature chipset and also the K7D-Master from MSI was a commonly used board in MP systems that just loved to fail.
I agree about memory compatibility charts, but it's usually a narrow selection of vendors/models, and there is a heck of alot of memory out there which say the same thing on the label. To most people, including the salespeople that spec the systems, a 1GB DDR400 Reg ECC is the same as another stick with the same label, because that is how RAM is marketed to the public. Sticking to the vendor charts was not as necessary in the past, and still doesn't seem as critical with the intel platform. With the special memory architecture of the AMD CPUs, it is definitely more sensitive to the RAM used, but it seems people have not been educated about AMD memory compatibility and are still playing the old "just cram in a stick" method of the past. I am surprised AMD and the motherboard manufacturers aren't extremely insistent that a builder follow the qualified memory list. As long as the 64 bit CPUS have been out, it should be common knowledge by now amongst all Opteron users, OEMs and enthusiasts alike, that the memory compatibility charts need to be heeded for a stable system. How hard would it be for a mainboard manufacturer to put an errata sheet in the box so that it is the first thing you see when you open it? If you don't educate your customers, how can you expect anyone but a professional PC technician to know what single-ranked RAM is (needed to fully populate slots with DDR400)? By the way, the on-die memory controller can go bad on the Opteron and look like memory errors. Some CPUs will appear to run fine until you push them really hard, such as compiling code for hours on end. Believe me, the customers my company sells these to push the systems very hard; there is no possible way you could achieve a zero failure rate in the same situation. Furthermore, a software-based memory tester is not a robust enough indication of system reliability as memory will not fail the test unless largely compromised. Only real life tests where you are pushing the cpus 100% for extended periods of time, using most or all of the memory space available, and stressing the disk I/O can give you reasonable confidence in a newly built system. MemTest or Windows Memory Test don't mean squat, they are just quick tools to confirm what you already suspect...that faulty memory is causing that IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL stop error you keep getting. I'd like to know what motherboards you are using as well as power supplies please, so I can try them out. To be fair, Tyan does have some boards that behave alot better than the S2875 I mentioned, namely the S2885 (dual) and the S4882 (quad). The S2895 looked promising at first, but apparently there have been some BIOS-level memory issues since the board has been on the market, and Tyan only got around to fixing it recently. Unless you are talking about first tier equipment such as an HP Opteron Quad, I don't think there are many other mobo choices beyond Tyan, Rioworks, Asus, Giga-byte, or MSI. The Asus K8N-DL seems ok, but I don't trust MSI or Giga-byte dual boards to last long before needing replacement. So who do you use? Tyan has really been the leader in Opteron board offerings and to have so many issues with their motherboards really puts a dent in the confidence of the Opteron platform as a whole in my opinion. I could build a bunch of Xeons with intel boards and be done with the headaches if were up to me.
Give me a break! Asus...maybe,but they only have one Nforce-based dual board as far as I know. First one I installed had a bad onboard NIC, second one worked though. But ASRock or Gigabyte? I don't see how you can recommend tertierary brands as a solution, Giga-byte is more unreliable than either Rioworks or Tyan, hands-down. They are popular as enthusiast boards because they are cheap and pack more features, but break they do, all the time. And their customer support is pretty weak. ASRock? Ghetto....
As a PC technician that works on multi-cpu Opterons day in and day out, I can tell you that despite the performance and lower cost of AMD (which gets all the limelight), they are far less reliable than intel processors and the motherboards on the market tend to be unreliable as well. Anybody who has dealt with the Rioworks HDAMB or Tyan S2875 can tell you that. The 32-bit Athlon MP motherboards were god-awful as well and the trend continues. Instability issues are rampant because AMD CPUs are so picky about the type of RAM used. My company is constantly having to order more expensive single-ranked RAM modules to solve banking limitations of the CPU memory controller, machine check errors, and ECC corrections. This also makes RAM warranty replacement take longer than it would normally. Even when you are talking about consumer level AMD-based systems, such as 3000+ up, nForce-based motherboards (by far the most popular chipset) have been historically picky about what RAM is installed. Believe me, people don't love their AMDs so much when they are down, they are often referred to as pieces of sh** by customers that experience these all too common problems. As AMDs are becoming more popluar these days, more small businesses are buying servers based on AMD, they don't have backup equipment, and they get really pissed off when their Exchange server quits because an Opteron just suddenly gave up the ghost. Seriously people, you can champion performance and lower heat output all day, but both platforms offer more power than most people utilize, and I would think that less downtime is what equates into real dollars saved, not faster CPU operations. Most people would rather drive a Toyota that gets them from point A to point B everytime than rely on a Ferrari that drives faster but breaks frequently. In some ways, AMD has already demonstrated my analogy for me. Acer-Ferrari overheat notebook anybody? Reminds me of Fiat-Ferrari...:(
At this rate it's only a matter of time before Earth is conquered by the Magnetars! All your base....
All of the online subscription games I have played over the years have been this way. I don't think it's particularly fair myself. What if you decide that the game is not as fun as you initially thought it would be, and you decide to dump it? Well, if you make that decision, of course you can cancel your subscription like normal services, but in this case it also renders your initial investment of $40-$50 to no value. If game companies refuse to allow a middle market for their products, then perhaps they should offer a direct refund or at least a voucher for another product? Seems like the game industry sorely needs some Satisfaction Guaranteed policies rather than continually screwing over their customers with shovelware.
I noticed that Prescott P4s are noisy with stock heatsinks/fans, even with the built in fan speed control on the motherboards. I have an AMD 64 personally, an Antec case w/ 120mm fans (swapped out for Vantec Stealth) and a 3rd party heatsink can yield better results. I think if consumers look at the Mini for what it is, an appliance, it makes more sense. As you, said, you use it in the kitchen, and it suits it's purpose well. But alot of Mac Zealots seem to think this is the model that'll make PC Users "switch" to the platform and then they'll be hooked on OS X and dump PCs for good. Somehow I doubt that considering that most models of Macs are anemic in performance until you get into the very high end G5s (expensive!) and it's not a very good gaming platform which is actually pretty important to many PC users. Other than less virus problems, any advantages of OSX are hard to find. Windows XP is stable enough (blue screens are mostly from hardware failure these days), and it has way more software, unless of course you just have to have GarageBand ;)
Sooo many PC users are giving up their LGA775 P4s and AMD64 systems for this baby. All that matters is style and size. Steve Jobs, you're a nut!
I 've played in the public beta week-ends. I thought Guild Wars was cool until I tried WoW for the first time. Despite all the claimed advantages of balance and no fees, GW just feels like Dungeon Siege/not quite MMORPG. WoW just sucks you in and the graphics are better to boot. Immersiveness is fantastic. The fact that GW doesn't have you running around the world map actually detracts from the feeling that you're there...seems more like stages which isn't really different from many many other games.
Actually I have heard from a reliable source inside MS that an unpatched machine will have a virus on it within minutes when connected to their own internal network. the network "Ops" do monitor the network and will shut off your port if you do just that. Also, since their users are admins of their own machines, I have heard of at least one guy who uses Linux because it better suited to a certain task, but overall what the CIO said is true unsurprisingly. I also have seen an inflatable Tux punch toy in one of their labs before. I desired to save Tux from the evil MS Server people, but alas, I had to exude professionalism and not let emotion overwhelm me....:P