A 40 man raid dungeon is an area of the game that an organized group of people (raid) can enter to play without the area being accessible to the general population (WoW calls them instance dungeons). The article is about a new one that was just released, and is much harder than the others. There was a per server build up for this that one server completed first, then died in the storm of people who wanted to go see it.
So your high availability video download website has requirements comparable to a five million person persisted world? I'd love to have some of what your are smoking. The problems that blizzard has are not ones of bandwidth or processing, but designing a solution that fits game requirements AND scales to the number of users they have.
I was going to try and come up with a scenario for your business with similar demands, but I couldn't think up anything that fit. The fact that you are able to solve problems in your domain through bigger and better hardware shows this. A video download website with search and purchasing is orders of magnitude less difficult than allowing several nations worth of people to play a game together.
Their website does not stay up because traffic fluctuates with server status. If a server goes down probably about half of its population goes to the site to check status, or the forums to bitch. Given that each server probably has at least two thousand people that means you get an extra thousand hits on your site in the span of ten minutes, per server, in addition to all the traffic it is getting already. How would your site handle something like that?
IMO WoW is the best. Think about the task at hand, you are asking for a server to handle multiple requests per individual per second for something on the order of a thousand or so concurrent users. A lot of websites have trouble with that kind of traffic, and they are not even expected to respond in that kind of timeframe. Now add on to all of this the fact that half of your playerbase are morons who think canceling and restarting the login/select character process will make it go faster, or decide to all camp out in their sides home town for hours on end, spawning tons of server activity notifying everyone about the placement and actions of 100+ characters.
In the end it works pretty well, given the requirements. The servers start to have issues once they hit population limits, but what servers don't? Think of what happened here more as a slashdotting than any true performance screwups.
Really, why is it important if slashdot or digg gets it first. Hell even knowing about this stuff as soon as possible is not really important. If the building is on fire, I want to know right away. If my car gets stolen, I want to know right away. If some random study confirms my assumption that web users mentally rate sites before they have a chance at seeing the content, I don't really need that information on the same timescale.
If you like slashdot for x, y, and z, and most other sites suck at one or all of these, then go with them. Don't expect/. to A) post news as it happens, or B) not post dupes, the test of time has proven that these are not core concepts of the site.
How much awesome can you cram into a single sentence?
They're perl programmers, the most awesome in a single line is an e-peen contest for them.
Re:Perl 6 is evolving the language into awesome!
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
And, one of my favourite points: "Why is the method call operator two characters (one shifted), not a single dot? "
I think it is amusing that PHP seems to be borrowing a lot of the bad ideas from perl. I don't care what a method call operator is as long as it fits the following requirements:
It does not step on characters that logically fit other operations
It can be typed with one keypress, no shifting.
If the language is going to abuse OO the way most seem to nowadays the operator needs to be on the home row or one of the adjoining rows.
Re:Neat, yes, but It's not pleasant to read...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
When did he say PHP was great? Personally I don't like either of them. The fact that you can make a whole program in perl does not mean it is a good idea. Given enough time and sufficient understanding you could write a program in assembly, doubt many people will want to do it.
The biggest problem I have ever seen with perl is the mindset it creates. Flexability is an awesome language feature, but if your perl programming team consists of more than one person (concurrently or over time) being able to do clever programming tricks is going to cause problems.
That and Larry Wall is nuts. It may be a strength, it may be a weakness, but I don't think it should be in dispute anymore.
When I first saw this I thought it would be useful to turn the mouse into a barcode reader. A quick look at prices shows them starting at around forty bucks. If this could be made to work roughly as well as the barcode readers it might be pretty useful.
IIRC the original one did not have a click wheel, but put the fast forward etc buttons in a ring around a scroll wheel. I always thought that was the better design.
Lisp is a programming language that treats its code as data at runtime. This allows you to alter the programming environment to suit your needs, approach problems in different and often more efficient (by some metric) ways, and seriously shoot yourself in the foot.
The point though, is that lisp treats the code/data distinction as being arbitrary, and that slightly bent philosophy has apparently escaped into the gp's worldview.
So when you get tired of futurama, or if it starts to suck, or any of the vast array of other reasons why you might decide to watch something else, how will you find it? Pure channel surfing lead me to futurama, house, mythbusters and farscape all before anyone I knew had heard about it. How would that happen in a subscription system?
Seriously? If half of the country's garbagemen exploded, not only would the vacancies go unfilled but the rest of the garbagemen would quit.
Actually it would be harder than just replacing half the country's garbagemen, you would also have to hire on extras to clean up not-so-lucky garbageman chunks.
Imagine another 20 years of weather like last year and Cat 5 hurricanes 3 or 4 times a year. The Entire Southeas would become uninhabitable - uninsurable - our Port infrastructure would have to be totally retooled to keep supplies coming into the US.
While we are imagining stuff, how about hyperintelligent mutant twinkies that can spontaneously combust at will? It would decimate our geek population and could possibly wipe out the internet. Our national communications infrastructure would be entirely unusable.
Not to say that your ideas are baseless, or even wrong, but they are unsupported, and right now I would rather think about imaginary evil flaming twinkies.
Wow, you really burned him... good thing all those influential people on slashdot saw you calling someone on the other side out... I mean, now that you spent probably half an hour looking up information to tell us that the GP probably didn't read the whole website before he took a quote everything is just about settled.
On the other hand maybe you could just supply the missing information without accusing someone of anything more than not having all the facts. Then again I guess it is easier to assume that people are evil instead of just misinformed.
What I am wondering is how a warrant to search your premesis for drugs could possibly also allow them to take your computer as well to "look for activity". That sounds like a judge who needs a swift kick in the pants.
However, it does have Perfect Dark: Zero, Project Gotham 3, Kameo (don't knock it 'till you try it) and soon, DOA4 and Battlefield.
I doubt I should even try to put out the good games list of ps2 titles (that will also be ps3 titles when it releases, no questions asked[1]) Needless to say it puts the 360 launch list to shame.
Granted, I don't know a whole lot about what games are coming soon to the Xbox 360 for lack of time, but by the time the Playstation 3 comes out, Xbox 360 will have a lot more games by great developers and I'm going to venture a guess and say the premium system won't cost as much as the PS3 will.
Probably will, as all systems seem to launch at a high price with a mostly crap lineup. However backwards compatability out of the box means that I won't have to switch any plugs around to play games I bought a few months before the system released.
That was my point, was that waiting for a PS3 was stupid. You get less (no unified online service, which is a BIG, BIG portion of why you should get an Xbox 360 over PS3, no titles from Rare or Bungie)
I can get better online service from my pc, and it is free. Rare and Bungie have yet to do anything terribly impressive that is not also available on pc. Name a few games aside from an fps where online service really matters? It just is not the big deal you think it is, unless you are into fps's, where (imo) keyboard+mouse is a better setup anyways.
and get some things that are somewhat unpleasant (blu-ray: Who really wants a disc format that can brick your system of the manufacturer tells it to? How long before it's cracked and a virus is written?
So you think someone will release a program that actually does brick a system?[2] As for "viruses being written" there is the slight problem that you have to PUT THE FREAKIN DISK IN THE DRIVE. Unless you have ninjas slipping into your house while you sleep to brick your ps3 this is a non-issue, and if that is happening you have bigger things to worry about than your consoles.
Who really would be angry about getting up every few hours to change a disc? Big deal. None of us had problems with it in the PSX days.)
I would. People had no problems with traveling for days on end when hitching up to a horse was the only way to go, but society moves past these sort of things. Multiple disks means I have to keep track of more than on disk, and run the risk of renting a game that I can play for two days THEN find out some idiot scratched one of the other disks. It is hard enough to get my roommates to put a single disk back in the case when all the necessary parts are sitting right there, several of them just compounds the problem.
[1] Unlike the xbox, where support for the previous system depends on them figuring out a way to make that specific title work.
[2] Not to say that I agree with the concept either, but the backlash against it being used is going to be enough of an inhibitor to keep that from happening.
Slashdot Mirror
A 40 man raid dungeon is an area of the game that an organized group of people (raid) can enter to play without the area being accessible to the general population (WoW calls them instance dungeons). The article is about a new one that was just released, and is much harder than the others. There was a per server build up for this that one server completed first, then died in the storm of people who wanted to go see it.
So your high availability video download website has requirements comparable to a five million person persisted world? I'd love to have some of what your are smoking. The problems that blizzard has are not ones of bandwidth or processing, but designing a solution that fits game requirements AND scales to the number of users they have. I was going to try and come up with a scenario for your business with similar demands, but I couldn't think up anything that fit. The fact that you are able to solve problems in your domain through bigger and better hardware shows this. A video download website with search and purchasing is orders of magnitude less difficult than allowing several nations worth of people to play a game together. Their website does not stay up because traffic fluctuates with server status. If a server goes down probably about half of its population goes to the site to check status, or the forums to bitch. Given that each server probably has at least two thousand people that means you get an extra thousand hits on your site in the span of ten minutes, per server, in addition to all the traffic it is getting already. How would your site handle something like that?
IMO WoW is the best. Think about the task at hand, you are asking for a server to handle multiple requests per individual per second for something on the order of a thousand or so concurrent users. A lot of websites have trouble with that kind of traffic, and they are not even expected to respond in that kind of timeframe. Now add on to all of this the fact that half of your playerbase are morons who think canceling and restarting the login/select character process will make it go faster, or decide to all camp out in their sides home town for hours on end, spawning tons of server activity notifying everyone about the placement and actions of 100+ characters. In the end it works pretty well, given the requirements. The servers start to have issues once they hit population limits, but what servers don't? Think of what happened here more as a slashdotting than any true performance screwups.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Who cares?
Really, why is it important if slashdot or digg gets it first. Hell even knowing about this stuff as soon as possible is not really important. If the building is on fire, I want to know right away. If my car gets stolen, I want to know right away. If some random study confirms my assumption that web users mentally rate sites before they have a chance at seeing the content, I don't really need that information on the same timescale.
If you like slashdot for x, y, and z, and most other sites suck at one or all of these, then go with them. Don't expect /. to A) post news as it happens, or B) not post dupes, the test of time has proven that these are not core concepts of the site.
They're perl programmers, the most awesome in a single line is an e-peen contest for them.
I think it is amusing that PHP seems to be borrowing a lot of the bad ideas from perl. I don't care what a method call operator is as long as it fits the following requirements:
The biggest problem I have ever seen with perl is the mindset it creates. Flexability is an awesome language feature, but if your perl programming team consists of more than one person (concurrently or over time) being able to do clever programming tricks is going to cause problems.
That and Larry Wall is nuts. It may be a strength, it may be a weakness, but I don't think it should be in dispute anymore.
With their cold fusion powered quantum supercomputer, duh. Your tin foil hat obviously lacks a gold star.
When I first saw this I thought it would be useful to turn the mouse into a barcode reader. A quick look at prices shows them starting at around forty bucks. If this could be made to work roughly as well as the barcode readers it might be pretty useful.
IIRC the original one did not have a click wheel, but put the fast forward etc buttons in a ring around a scroll wheel. I always thought that was the better design.
One of the best ways to solve most really hard problems is to redefine them as an easier one.
Funny, I just figured that they made light so slow it couldn't even beat the word 'than' to the end of the sentance.
The point though, is that lisp treats the code/data distinction as being arbitrary, and that slightly bent philosophy has apparently escaped into the gp's worldview.
So when you get tired of futurama, or if it starts to suck, or any of the vast array of other reasons why you might decide to watch something else, how will you find it? Pure channel surfing lead me to futurama, house, mythbusters and farscape all before anyone I knew had heard about it. How would that happen in a subscription system?
Actually it would be harder than just replacing half the country's garbagemen, you would also have to hire on extras to clean up not-so-lucky garbageman chunks.
Whoosh
There was no adware or spyware in the pc preinstallation or on the game disks. I do not think these words mean what you think they mean.
While we are imagining stuff, how about hyperintelligent mutant twinkies that can spontaneously combust at will? It would decimate our geek population and could possibly wipe out the internet. Our national communications infrastructure would be entirely unusable.
Not to say that your ideas are baseless, or even wrong, but they are unsupported, and right now I would rather think about imaginary evil flaming twinkies.
On the other hand maybe you could just supply the missing information without accusing someone of anything more than not having all the facts. Then again I guess it is easier to assume that people are evil instead of just misinformed.
What I am wondering is how a warrant to search your premesis for drugs could possibly also allow them to take your computer as well to "look for activity". That sounds like a judge who needs a swift kick in the pants.
Any way you can hook your internet up to the existing one so I can vpn into it?
I doubt I should even try to put out the good games list of ps2 titles (that will also be ps3 titles when it releases, no questions asked[1]) Needless to say it puts the 360 launch list to shame.
Granted, I don't know a whole lot about what games are coming soon to the Xbox 360 for lack of time, but by the time the Playstation 3 comes out, Xbox 360 will have a lot more games by great developers and I'm going to venture a guess and say the premium system won't cost as much as the PS3 will.
Probably will, as all systems seem to launch at a high price with a mostly crap lineup. However backwards compatability out of the box means that I won't have to switch any plugs around to play games I bought a few months before the system released.
That was my point, was that waiting for a PS3 was stupid. You get less (no unified online service, which is a BIG, BIG portion of why you should get an Xbox 360 over PS3, no titles from Rare or Bungie)
I can get better online service from my pc, and it is free. Rare and Bungie have yet to do anything terribly impressive that is not also available on pc. Name a few games aside from an fps where online service really matters? It just is not the big deal you think it is, unless you are into fps's, where (imo) keyboard+mouse is a better setup anyways.
and get some things that are somewhat unpleasant (blu-ray: Who really wants a disc format that can brick your system of the manufacturer tells it to? How long before it's cracked and a virus is written?
So you think someone will release a program that actually does brick a system?[2] As for "viruses being written" there is the slight problem that you have to PUT THE FREAKIN DISK IN THE DRIVE. Unless you have ninjas slipping into your house while you sleep to brick your ps3 this is a non-issue, and if that is happening you have bigger things to worry about than your consoles.
Who really would be angry about getting up every few hours to change a disc? Big deal. None of us had problems with it in the PSX days.)
I would. People had no problems with traveling for days on end when hitching up to a horse was the only way to go, but society moves past these sort of things. Multiple disks means I have to keep track of more than on disk, and run the risk of renting a game that I can play for two days THEN find out some idiot scratched one of the other disks. It is hard enough to get my roommates to put a single disk back in the case when all the necessary parts are sitting right there, several of them just compounds the problem.
[1] Unlike the xbox, where support for the previous system depends on them figuring out a way to make that specific title work. [2] Not to say that I agree with the concept either, but the backlash against it being used is going to be enough of an inhibitor to keep that from happening.
Of course it does, how else would we be able to ask the "yeah, but does it run linux" questions?
After some careful analysis I have managed to condense all the information needed to answer that question. It can be found here.