I'll field this one. Each blade in the datacenter supports a few to a dozen or so solar systems. They're all linked so it's one seamless universe that is usally running 20-25,000 connected users.
Fleet actions with hundreds of ships fighting lag the hell out of whichever node they're running on. CCP says they're optimizing as fast as they can, but with each ship moving, launching missiles and drones and so on there's a staggering amount of data going back and forth in a large fight. The largest I've been in was a 40 v 50 action and that was pretty much a slideshow.
I'd love to see hard data on how they're progressing, but other than hardware upgrades and additions you really can't make a solid time estimate on optimizing existing code. They are trumpeting the new Need For Speed initiative in their dev blogs, I wish them all the luck - and to hurry the frack up.
Oh yeah, it's better than WoW. No "endgame" to finish, no raid loot grinding, nd PvP with consequences. Yeah, it's better.
It's CCP, and the concurrent user record is a shade over 33,000. And there are technically two, since there a separate server in China. Now, 33,000 concurrent users converts to some ungodly number of transactions per second. For the load they're handling the game runs phenomenally well under load. From a player's perspective lag can be an issue with some regularity, but we seem to be past the worst of it. EVE is growing and so the server infrastructure is lagging behind capacity. They're buying servers, upgrading the network and tweaking things to reduce the load, but they're still behind. The recent network upgrade seems to have helped a lot.
CCP has done two interesting things to avoid lag. A couple dozen solar systems run on a single blade. High traffic systems have been moved to their own hardware, but the problem comes when a fleet action breaks out on the same node you're on. Their plan is to try and dynamically predict load and move systems off of nodes that are about to suffer some severe lag. In the latest expansion they overhauled the gang system to make it a hierarchical fleet structure instead of just a flat group. I'm predicting that in the next round fleet commanders will be able to designate systems as objectives and rally points. That will let the load balancer start moving other systems off of that node.
Fleet actions really lag the system right now. The biggest I've been in was a 40 v 50, but I've heard of 200+ ships per side. I'm a Battlecruiser pilot. I launch 4 drones and put out 3 missiles every 12 seconds. That's a lot of objects in space when you figure that battleships launch more stuff and there can be hundreds in a fleet action.
The other interesting thing is they recently removed the need for bookmarks to move quickly and safely. Many pilots in alliances would have had thousands of bookmarks. CCP deleted just the so-called instas, and left your other bookmarks intact. That took a relatively small but still significant number of objects out of the database. At the point they did it, even a percentage point or two would have helped.
Let's hope Linden Labs is paying as much attention to their performance issues.
It's not a system-selling feature, but adding online play to old multiplayer games is a Good Thing. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Joust wound up with a small but fanatical following online, I've been dragged into multiplayer matches and they turned into grudge matches very quickly. If I end up with a PS3 I'll probably pick up a couple of these. If Sony is smart (heh) they'll show you how many people are only currently while you're shopping for downloads (these days, that'd be patentable).
How cool a gig would it be to update an old game and add a big feature ?
And here's a legible version of the story that CDC is (apparently) mirroring. It's a fun read, kinda like if the Mad Scientists Club did their planning in a dive bar.
Yes, the best case scenario is to just make it impossible to embed content like this. I was speculating that there may in fact be a technical scenario where they really can't block connections based on the referrer. I certainly believe that if their chosen platform, whatever the constraints, was incapable of controlling access in any way then the site admins did make a fundamental error.
I thought I had made it clear, embedding someone's content is bad. The defendant got the ad revenue for all the viewers through his site. That's not right. The people paying for the bandwidth deserve the revenue, it's very simple. Just because they made a mistake doesn't make it right to profit from the bandwidth they paid for. Burglary is still illegal if the door wasn't pushed completely shut.
I agree, I just didn't address that point. Looking at the situation, I think there may be some issues with referrer checks on the streams, if they're actually using their sponsor's network the setup may be fairly complex. There could also be issues with the streaming server itself that keeps them from applying any restrictions to connection attempts. Not that it couldn't be made to happen if they realized they could just do that to resolve the problem.
I'd be inclined to just return a bit of JavaScript that loads my own page (and ads) in place of the linker's. Some PHB will probably just put ads in the stream, and we certainly don't want that. The clueless have been getting this wrong for years.
No, this isn't what the Internet was designed to do, which is provide links to other information sources. It's still a little vague in The FA - which is still clearer than the summary - but what the case is here is that the defendant was effectively embedding the streams into his own page, complete with his own advertising. That's a no-no. What would be perfectly legitimate would have been a link to the plaintiff's page with the video streams. That's the appropriate thing to do. Notice that embedded YouTube or Google Video content (among many others) is both branded and provides a link to the video's page at the hosting site; they're set up that way because they explicitly allow embedding. In this case the content was just plain hijacked (to misapply another concept to copyright law). The plaintiff had contacted the defendant prior to bringing suit.
Embedding others' content = bad Linking to others' content = good
The Finder is finally an ftp client. But it's a lousy one. You can't write to an ftp volume. The entire Finder can degrade to the performance of the ftp site if the connection is poor (transpacific link, crappy server, huge transfer). It's a shame, some of my users really prefer working with ftp sites the same way they work with local shares. Even if Apple fixes nothing else about the Finder in 10.5 I'd like to see at least an improvement in how the Finder handles slow volumes so they don't drag the whole system down with them.
I'll knock Apple for one thing about the ~/Library folder, I hate having user data in ~/Library/Application\ Support. AddressBook and iCal both put their data there. Every other application I've seen, notably including Apple's, does not. Stickies[1] is worse though, the StickiesDatabase is loose in the ~/Library folder.
[1] Stickies is possibly the most useful application Apple has ever released.
I haven't read the Left Behind books (Mom didn't finish the first one, and she's an avid reader) but I have followed the page-by page reviews over at the Slacktivist blog. Based on the story so far (237 pages worth) they aren't so much preaching hatred as antiintellectualism, shallow social values and discredited theology.
Keynote opens PowerPoint documents just fine. It will even open files that PowerPoint can't. Corrupt files are fairly common, and Keynote (also NeoOffice) can open and re-save them (the files usually get much smaller) in a usable fashion. The worst I saw (besides a business plan presentation that just wouldn't open) was when an intern spent all day putting about 60 hi-res scans into a.ppt file. The next morning the file wouldn't open. I had to open the file in Keynote on our studliest workstation (dual 2.7 GHz G5 with lots of RAM) and it still took all night just to open the roughly 2GB file.
If you run a Mac Office you need a copy of Open/NeoOffice around to salvage documents. And you really should have Keynote if you do important presentations, it's just that much better than PowerPoint.
Office performance on the MacBook Pros I've seen hasn't been so bad. The faster Intel chips do a good job of offsetting the emulation overhead. What's a pain is the reproducible kernel panics when working with Novell AFP volumes. It's probably Novell's fault, but having the machine panic while you're attaching a document to an email from a network share is bloody awful. After all the work I put in training the CFO to keep his work on the server where we can back it up, the poor guy can't anymore. All that work shot to hell.
For the next person in this situation add this: "... plus costs to be determined at trial." Or ask the clerk for total costs (and maybe the loan of a calculator) while you're finalizing the paperwork.
Check with the clerk, but you may also be able to include lost wages, cab fare, your Kinkos bill and any other expense associated with your prosecution of the case. The phrase here should be "costs and fees".
I'm not a lawyer and I'm probably not even in your local jurisdiction. Ask the clerk of court questions while you're doing the paperwork and check your local.gov sites for local rules.
Well, it's holiday season so consoles always sell. And the PS2 is in apparently abundant supply. And there are some very good games newly released. Any kid who gets a PS2 instead of a PS3 or a 360 can complain - but only a little. FFXII and GH2 are smash hits. God of War 2 is going to be just as big. The keys for the PS2's success this season is the huge library of budget editions of great games and the number of games still to be released. As of right now GameFly.com has in their catalog 33 PS2 games listed as coming soon and the 360 has 27. God of War 2 isn't officially announced for release, so it isn't even on that list [1]. The vast used market helps too.
Oh yeah, price. A PS2 with 3-6 games costs about as much as a Wii with just the pack-in game.
[1] Metal Slug Anthology is on the list; some people who care might not have known.
EVE doesn't have any aliens and it's doing just fine. We broke 33,000 users on the Western server on the 4th (no numbers yet from the Chinese server). Last I heard there were about 150,000 subscribers, a lot of SWG refugees and a lot of browncoats.
Go check out the new video (link is to a.wmv file) and get ready for some serious PVP. The video is one part beauty shots of the new ships and one part a fleet attacking a player-owned space station. And maybe one more part of CCP showing off their explosion effect. In EVE, if you lose your ship you pocket the insurance money (if you had it) and can try and pick up some of your fittings and cargo. If your escape pod gets popped you wake up in a cloning facility. If your clone isn't up to date, you lose weeks or months worth of skills (you wake up in a cloning facility, so there's no excuse not to have a current clone).
Actually, they're planning on letting you walk around stations at some time in the foreseeable future. Not for essential services, but more for player interaction. And we have a promise of "no dancing" in there.
Landing on planets has to be a loooong way in the future.
1. He didn't say he let his kid on the Internet without an AV package running.
2. He didn't say "firewall". Speaking of which, ZoneAlarm just grabbed focus and I think I let something connect out to the Internet. I'm running an installer so I'm not gonna freak out, but I certainly hope Vista won't let apps steal focus while you're fracking typing.
3. He also didn't say the kid would be online unsupervised or without parental controls running.
4. It's a safe bet to assume he meant the kid would use IE if he went online, but he didn't actually say it either.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll field this one. Each blade in the datacenter supports a few to a dozen or so solar systems. They're all linked so it's one seamless universe that is usally running 20-25,000 connected users.
Fleet actions with hundreds of ships fighting lag the hell out of whichever node they're running on. CCP says they're optimizing as fast as they can, but with each ship moving, launching missiles and drones and so on there's a staggering amount of data going back and forth in a large fight. The largest I've been in was a 40 v 50 action and that was pretty much a slideshow.
I'd love to see hard data on how they're progressing, but other than hardware upgrades and additions you really can't make a solid time estimate on optimizing existing code. They are trumpeting the new Need For Speed initiative in their dev blogs, I wish them all the luck - and to hurry the frack up.
Oh yeah, it's better than WoW. No "endgame" to finish, no raid loot grinding, nd PvP with consequences. Yeah, it's better.
In some cases, scarcity can drive both price and demand. Prestige, hand-crafted items for example - Aston Martin cars being an excellent example.
Ummm... I dunno.... the subject really sums it up.
Oh yeah, do the country a favor and resign you raving fuckwad.
As God is my witness...
It's CCP, and the concurrent user record is a shade over 33,000. And there are technically two, since there a separate server in China. Now, 33,000 concurrent users converts to some ungodly number of transactions per second. For the load they're handling the game runs phenomenally well under load. From a player's perspective lag can be an issue with some regularity, but we seem to be past the worst of it. EVE is growing and so the server infrastructure is lagging behind capacity. They're buying servers, upgrading the network and tweaking things to reduce the load, but they're still behind. The recent network upgrade seems to have helped a lot.
CCP has done two interesting things to avoid lag. A couple dozen solar systems run on a single blade. High traffic systems have been moved to their own hardware, but the problem comes when a fleet action breaks out on the same node you're on. Their plan is to try and dynamically predict load and move systems off of nodes that are about to suffer some severe lag. In the latest expansion they overhauled the gang system to make it a hierarchical fleet structure instead of just a flat group. I'm predicting that in the next round fleet commanders will be able to designate systems as objectives and rally points. That will let the load balancer start moving other systems off of that node.
Fleet actions really lag the system right now. The biggest I've been in was a 40 v 50, but I've heard of 200+ ships per side. I'm a Battlecruiser pilot. I launch 4 drones and put out 3 missiles every 12 seconds. That's a lot of objects in space when you figure that battleships launch more stuff and there can be hundreds in a fleet action.
The other interesting thing is they recently removed the need for bookmarks to move quickly and safely. Many pilots in alliances would have had thousands of bookmarks. CCP deleted just the so-called instas, and left your other bookmarks intact. That took a relatively small but still significant number of objects out of the database. At the point they did it, even a percentage point or two would have helped.
Let's hope Linden Labs is paying as much attention to their performance issues.
It's not a system-selling feature, but adding online play to old multiplayer games is a Good Thing. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Joust wound up with a small but fanatical following online, I've been dragged into multiplayer matches and they turned into grudge matches very quickly. If I end up with a PS3 I'll probably pick up a couple of these. If Sony is smart (heh) they'll show you how many people are only currently while you're shopping for downloads (these days, that'd be patentable).
How cool a gig would it be to update an old game and add a big feature ?
And here's a legible version of the story that CDC is (apparently) mirroring. It's a fun read, kinda like if the Mad Scientists Club did their planning in a dive bar.
Yes, the best case scenario is to just make it impossible to embed content like this. I was speculating that there may in fact be a technical scenario where they really can't block connections based on the referrer. I certainly believe that if their chosen platform, whatever the constraints, was incapable of controlling access in any way then the site admins did make a fundamental error.
I thought I had made it clear, embedding someone's content is bad. The defendant got the ad revenue for all the viewers through his site. That's not right. The people paying for the bandwidth deserve the revenue, it's very simple. Just because they made a mistake doesn't make it right to profit from the bandwidth they paid for. Burglary is still illegal if the door wasn't pushed completely shut.
I agree, I just didn't address that point. Looking at the situation, I think there may be some issues with referrer checks on the streams, if they're actually using their sponsor's network the setup may be fairly complex. There could also be issues with the streaming server itself that keeps them from applying any restrictions to connection attempts. Not that it couldn't be made to happen if they realized they could just do that to resolve the problem.
I'd be inclined to just return a bit of JavaScript that loads my own page (and ads) in place of the linker's. Some PHB will probably just put ads in the stream, and we certainly don't want that. The clueless have been getting this wrong for years.
No, this isn't what the Internet was designed to do, which is provide links to other information sources. It's still a little vague in The FA - which is still clearer than the summary - but what the case is here is that the defendant was effectively embedding the streams into his own page, complete with his own advertising. That's a no-no. What would be perfectly legitimate would have been a link to the plaintiff's page with the video streams. That's the appropriate thing to do. Notice that embedded YouTube or Google Video content (among many others) is both branded and provides a link to the video's page at the hosting site; they're set up that way because they explicitly allow embedding. In this case the content was just plain hijacked (to misapply another concept to copyright law). The plaintiff had contacted the defendant prior to bringing suit.
Embedding others' content = bad
Linking to others' content = good
The Finder is finally an ftp client. But it's a lousy one. You can't write to an ftp volume. The entire Finder can degrade to the performance of the ftp site if the connection is poor (transpacific link, crappy server, huge transfer). It's a shame, some of my users really prefer working with ftp sites the same way they work with local shares. Even if Apple fixes nothing else about the Finder in 10.5 I'd like to see at least an improvement in how the Finder handles slow volumes so they don't drag the whole system down with them.
I'll knock Apple for one thing about the ~/Library folder, I hate having user data in ~/Library/Application\ Support. AddressBook and iCal both put their data there. Every other application I've seen, notably including Apple's, does not. Stickies[1] is worse though, the StickiesDatabase is loose in the ~/Library folder.
[1] Stickies is possibly the most useful application Apple has ever released.
I haven't read the Left Behind books (Mom didn't finish the first one, and she's an avid reader) but I have followed the page-by page reviews over at the Slacktivist blog. Based on the story so far (237 pages worth) they aren't so much preaching hatred as antiintellectualism, shallow social values and discredited theology.
Keynote opens PowerPoint documents just fine. It will even open files that PowerPoint can't. Corrupt files are fairly common, and Keynote (also NeoOffice) can open and re-save them (the files usually get much smaller) in a usable fashion. The worst I saw (besides a business plan presentation that just wouldn't open) was when an intern spent all day putting about 60 hi-res scans into a .ppt file. The next morning the file wouldn't open. I had to open the file in Keynote on our studliest workstation (dual 2.7 GHz G5 with lots of RAM) and it still took all night just to open the roughly 2GB file.
If you run a Mac Office you need a copy of Open/NeoOffice around to salvage documents. And you really should have Keynote if you do important presentations, it's just that much better than PowerPoint.
Office performance on the MacBook Pros I've seen hasn't been so bad. The faster Intel chips do a good job of offsetting the emulation overhead. What's a pain is the reproducible kernel panics when working with Novell AFP volumes. It's probably Novell's fault, but having the machine panic while you're attaching a document to an email from a network share is bloody awful. After all the work I put in training the CFO to keep his work on the server where we can back it up, the poor guy can't anymore. All that work shot to hell.
For the next person in this situation add this: "... plus costs to be determined at trial." Or ask the clerk for total costs (and maybe the loan of a calculator) while you're finalizing the paperwork.
.gov sites for local rules.
Check with the clerk, but you may also be able to include lost wages, cab fare, your Kinkos bill and any other expense associated with your prosecution of the case. The phrase here should be "costs and fees".
I'm not a lawyer and I'm probably not even in your local jurisdiction. Ask the clerk of court questions while you're doing the paperwork and check your local
Well, it's holiday season so consoles always sell. And the PS2 is in apparently abundant supply. And there are some very good games newly released. Any kid who gets a PS2 instead of a PS3 or a 360 can complain - but only a little. FFXII and GH2 are smash hits. God of War 2 is going to be just as big. The keys for the PS2's success this season is the huge library of budget editions of great games and the number of games still to be released. As of right now GameFly.com has in their catalog 33 PS2 games listed as coming soon and the 360 has 27. God of War 2 isn't officially announced for release, so it isn't even on that list [1]. The vast used market helps too.
Oh yeah, price. A PS2 with 3-6 games costs about as much as a Wii with just the pack-in game.
[1] Metal Slug Anthology is on the list; some people who care might not have known.
EVE doesn't have any aliens and it's doing just fine. We broke 33,000 users on the Western server on the 4th (no numbers yet from the Chinese server). Last I heard there were about 150,000 subscribers, a lot of SWG refugees and a lot of browncoats.
.wmv file) and get ready for some serious PVP. The video is one part beauty shots of the new ships and one part a fleet attacking a player-owned space station. And maybe one more part of CCP showing off their explosion effect. In EVE, if you lose your ship you pocket the insurance money (if you had it) and can try and pick up some of your fittings and cargo. If your escape pod gets popped you wake up in a cloning facility. If your clone isn't up to date, you lose weeks or months worth of skills (you wake up in a cloning facility, so there's no excuse not to have a current clone).
Go check out the new video (link is to a
Actually, they're planning on letting you walk around stations at some time in the foreseeable future. Not for essential services, but more for player interaction. And we have a promise of "no dancing" in there.
Landing on planets has to be a loooong way in the future.
Congratulations, you win teh Internet.
Seriously, every DARPA grant, every CompSci thesis, every failed IPO, every mile of fibre, every microwave repeater, just to get me that one joke.
Worth it !
Coupla key points:
1. He didn't say he let his kid on the Internet without an AV package running.
2. He didn't say "firewall". Speaking of which, ZoneAlarm just grabbed focus and I think I let something connect out to the Internet. I'm running an installer so I'm not gonna freak out, but I certainly hope Vista won't let apps steal focus while you're fracking typing.
3. He also didn't say the kid would be online unsupervised or without parental controls running.
4. It's a safe bet to assume he meant the kid would use IE if he went online, but he didn't actually say it either.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Somebody realizing the OP is being evil will probably mod it Insightful. Being out of mod points all I can do is make sarky comments.
Three axes of translation + three axes of rotation = 6-axis controller.
Get over it.
And for the non-RTFA crowd I have two words about the game, "no blood". And three more, "go to class".
This isn't remotely a GTA-in-school game. Then again, Catcher in the Rye has been banned or burned many times. Get over it.
IHBT
Nice. I had to stop and consider deleting Slashdot from my bookmarks. That just sums it all up neatly, you can stop reading right there.