transport tycoon You ever played transport tycoon multiplayer, I can assure you it is competitive or at least can be played that way;)
The only problem is there are too many dirty tricks possible (e.g. buying up huge swathes of land arround where the other player is trying to construct) so unless you have an agreement with the other player(s) to play nice it quickly devolves into shit;)
The viable alternative is for video is HTML 5 video It's not really viable to completely dump flash in favour of HTML5 video at this point due to the large number of users whose browsers don't support html5 video.
And afaict sites that want to support firefox's implementation of html5 video AND support flash (for all those IE users out there) need to encode and store all thier video TWICE.
apple don't make storage boxes anymore they just resell promise ones. Maybe they are cheap by enterprise storage standards but i'm pretty sure we are talking small buisness here. The box you linked starts at about $7K and then you need a box with fiber channel to drive it!
For those who want a fair bit of storage but not enough to be messing with enterprise san gear the apple options don't look very good. The mac-mini server is very limited (no expansion slots, no full-size drive bays and USB/firewire as the only options for external drives). The mac-pro is physically large and expensive, the xserve is physically smaller but even more so and neither of them have very many drive bays either (so you have to mess arround with external storage sooner).
They do, the thing is when money is tight and you only have a few people dedicating a box as a server seems rather extravagant. This is especially true if it's a mac shop due to the fact apple refuses to sell a regular computer (things have improved a bit with the mac mini server but still there is a huge gap in the middle of the range).
And if people are sensible about it and keep files they are heavily working on locally it needn't be a huge problem.
which probably prompted the internal one to assume tampering and thus it simply sent the general shutdown command except the system WAS NOT completely disabled. Afaict downloadable content failed (presumablly due to it's drm dates being out of range) and the trophy system crashed but afaict games without trophy support continued to run fine as did the web browser and the backwards compatibility. Further things recovered by themselves when the internal clock rolled back to a sane date.
This suggests to me that it should be possible for sony to at least work arround the issue even if it's impossible to fix it at source.
DVD claims 30 to 100 years [osta.org]. Though it's too new a tech to really trust those claims. Accelerated aging is a crude approximation of real aging.
Neither lasts as long as necessary for archival storage. Since afaict there is no storage tech that offers acceptable density while also having been arround long enough to give realistic lifetime claims over 10 years or so IMO the only real option for long term archival storage is do all of the following
1: keep lots of redundancy (preferally using something like parchive) 2: regulally (say once a year perhaps more often) read and test the media replacing any that fails to read correctly by using the redundancy. 3: if using media with seperate drives take steps to ensure that a single misaligned drive isn't a single point of failure. 4: move the data onto new media when it makes sense to do so.
if anything, skip the RAID option and just store 2 copies Another option that may be better than keeping two copies of every drive is to use something like quickpar to generate a load of parity data.
Less chance of accidental loss (e.g. though a rebuild starting at a bad time because not all drives were detected) than raid and potentially more resiliant to drive loss than either raid or simple mirroring of data.
I haven't bought anything with the Seagate name on it since... The trouble I find with hdd vendors is they ALL seem to go through bad patches but you don't know about a bad patch until the bad drives have had some time to show thier problems. Of course by that time it's too late to avoid the bad patch.
IMO the way to go for desktops at the moment is to keep the bulk stuff on hard drive(s) and reserve the SSD for stuff which is relatively small but subject to frequent random access (primerally your OS and applications).
I mean, it's apparently an internal hardware clock, right? It's not user visible. So why, exactly, is it storing dates and not just being a clock? Many off the shelf hardware RTCs do use human style date and time, I guess because they expect people to use them in systems where that is the most convenient format. PCs also traditionally use a human style format for thier RTC so if that part of their system is a derivative of a PC design that could also explain it.
While I agree they should fix the problem I don't think there is any point in pushing an emergency fix at this point. The correct thing to do (assuming this is a periodic problem) is to release a properly QA'd fix as part of a normal firmware update cycle.
There are PCIe lanes on the card anyway so anyone who needs high bandwidth will just use those. The usb is just to make low performance cards cheaper.
P.S. USB3 isn't really an evoloution of USB2 technically, backwards compatability is achived through the technique of putting two seperate sets of pins on the connector.
(a) JPEG doesn't know either JPEG is built on the assumption that the higher frequency components are less important, so it spends less bits on representing those components than it does on the lower frequency ones.
It's a pretty crude model (not least because of the block based architecture that makes it simple to implement but introduces artifacts at block boundries) but it still does a lot better than just throwing away pixels and/or reducing the bits per pixel in the original image.
5. Level five realises that asking for a number between 1 and 10 was a really bad user interface design in the first place and goes back to ask the user what he really wanted to get done. So what would you suggest for say quality settings for an image format.
Or what about when someone enters the order number from a package that has just arrived in goods inwards to receipt it and the order in question does not exist?
Or what about when your customer gives you thier customer number to order and the database says they are blocked and not allowed to order anything because they haven't been paying thier invoices?
Or what about when something beyond your programs control (out of disk space, out of memory, network down etc) makes what should be a reasonable operation impossible?
For better or worse errors will happen and need to be reported.
Though I do think popping up a modal dialog is a lazy way to report errors, for say a bad value in a form i'd much rather show the user the form again with the "bad" entry highlighted in red and a message about why it's bad at the top. For quick and simple validation (e.g. checking a number is in range) you could even do the highlighting in real time.
How about the *NIX date bug? In 2038 the intarwebs will come to a screaching halt and we are all going to die and... On what do you base this claim? I'd expect by 2038 most internet stuff will be running 64-bit software which at least on linux means a 64-bit time_t.
Individual applications may break if they did stupid things (like using int where they should have used time_t ), if they stored dates in binary files or they never got rebuilt for 64-bit but I don't see any major problem for the internet in general.
Did you actually read the article? afaict this is impacting all games with trophy support regardless of whether the user is online or offline (and these games can most certainly be played without an internet connection)
One of the (many) reasons I tend to buy console versions rather than PC versions of games is that they don't tend to have online activation BS.
Really these exams should be on computers now days with a basic calculator built in to the program. Of course doing exams on computers opens up huge cans of worms of it's own.
Plus there is STILL no good method for entering equations on computers (and at least the exams i've done as an EE student required loads of working that was heavy in equations). point and click entry is slow, latex has a steep learning curve and isn't really used anywhere else.
Pretty much any technique I can think of One that comes to mind that could potentially run forever with a sufficiently fucked comparison function is a naive bubble-sort that doesn't bother with the optimisation of reducing the list size with each pass and uses a pass with no changes as the terminating condition.
If you actually design your system to use serial properly the timing stuff with USB-serial chips shouldn't be a problem. It's devices that try to cheat and do weird shit with the handshake lines that cause problems.
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transport tycoon ;)
You ever played transport tycoon multiplayer, I can assure you it is competitive or at least can be played that way
The only problem is there are too many dirty tricks possible (e.g. buying up huge swathes of land arround where the other player is trying to construct) so unless you have an agreement with the other player(s) to play nice it quickly devolves into shit ;)
The viable alternative is for video is HTML 5 video
It's not really viable to completely dump flash in favour of HTML5 video at this point due to the large number of users whose browsers don't support html5 video.
And afaict sites that want to support firefox's implementation of html5 video AND support flash (for all those IE users out there) need to encode and store all thier video TWICE.
Presumablly this also means they won't be able to blame flash whenever a flash user has a firefox problem.......
apple don't make storage boxes anymore they just resell promise ones. Maybe they are cheap by enterprise storage standards but i'm pretty sure we are talking small buisness here. The box you linked starts at about $7K and then you need a box with fiber channel to drive it!
For those who want a fair bit of storage but not enough to be messing with enterprise san gear the apple options don't look very good. The mac-mini server is very limited (no expansion slots, no full-size drive bays and USB/firewire as the only options for external drives). The mac-pro is physically large and expensive, the xserve is physically smaller but even more so and neither of them have very many drive bays either (so you have to mess arround with external storage sooner).
They do, the thing is when money is tight and you only have a few people dedicating a box as a server seems rather extravagant. This is especially true if it's a mac shop due to the fact apple refuses to sell a regular computer (things have improved a bit with the mac mini server but still there is a huge gap in the middle of the range).
And if people are sensible about it and keep files they are heavily working on locally it needn't be a huge problem.
which probably prompted the internal one to assume tampering and thus it simply sent the general shutdown command
except the system WAS NOT completely disabled. Afaict downloadable content failed (presumablly due to it's drm dates being out of range) and the trophy system crashed but afaict games without trophy support continued to run fine as did the web browser and the backwards compatibility. Further things recovered by themselves when the internal clock rolled back to a sane date.
This suggests to me that it should be possible for sony to at least work arround the issue even if it's impossible to fix it at source.
DVD claims 30 to 100 years [osta.org].
Though it's too new a tech to really trust those claims. Accelerated aging is a crude approximation of real aging.
Neither lasts as long as necessary for archival storage.
Since afaict there is no storage tech that offers acceptable density while also having been arround long enough to give realistic lifetime claims over 10 years or so IMO the only real option for long term archival storage is do all of the following
1: keep lots of redundancy (preferally using something like parchive)
2: regulally (say once a year perhaps more often) read and test the media replacing any that fails to read correctly by using the redundancy.
3: if using media with seperate drives take steps to ensure that a single misaligned drive isn't a single point of failure.
4: move the data onto new media when it makes sense to do so.
if anything, skip the RAID option and just store 2 copies
Another option that may be better than keeping two copies of every drive is to use something like quickpar to generate a load of parity data.
Less chance of accidental loss (e.g. though a rebuild starting at a bad time because not all drives were detected) than raid and potentially more resiliant to drive loss than either raid or simple mirroring of data.
I haven't bought anything with the Seagate name on it since...
The trouble I find with hdd vendors is they ALL seem to go through bad patches but you don't know about a bad patch until the bad drives have had some time to show thier problems. Of course by that time it's too late to avoid the bad patch.
Presumablly the same problem can happen when removing tapes from a tape library to move them to offsite storage.
IMO the way to go for desktops at the moment is to keep the bulk stuff on hard drive(s) and reserve the SSD for stuff which is relatively small but subject to frequent random access (primerally your OS and applications).
I mean, it's apparently an internal hardware clock, right? It's not user visible. So why, exactly, is it storing dates and not just being a clock?
Many off the shelf hardware RTCs do use human style date and time, I guess because they expect people to use them in systems where that is the most convenient format. PCs also traditionally use a human style format for thier RTC so if that part of their system is a derivative of a PC design that could also explain it.
While I agree they should fix the problem I don't think there is any point in pushing an emergency fix at this point. The correct thing to do (assuming this is a periodic problem) is to release a properly QA'd fix as part of a normal firmware update cycle.
There are PCIe lanes on the card anyway so anyone who needs high bandwidth will just use those. The usb is just to make low performance cards cheaper.
P.S. USB3 isn't really an evoloution of USB2 technically, backwards compatability is achived through the technique of putting two seperate sets of pins on the connector.
(a) JPEG doesn't know either
JPEG is built on the assumption that the higher frequency components are less important, so it spends less bits on representing those components than it does on the lower frequency ones.
It's a pretty crude model (not least because of the block based architecture that makes it simple to implement but introduces artifacts at block boundries) but it still does a lot better than just throwing away pixels and/or reducing the bits per pixel in the original image.
5. Level five realises that asking for a number between 1 and 10 was a really bad user interface design in the first place and goes back to ask the user what he really wanted to get done.
So what would you suggest for say quality settings for an image format.
Or what about when someone enters the order number from a package that has just arrived in goods inwards to receipt it and the order in question does not exist?
Or what about when your customer gives you thier customer number to order and the database says they are blocked and not allowed to order anything because they haven't been paying thier invoices?
Or what about when something beyond your programs control (out of disk space, out of memory, network down etc) makes what should be a reasonable operation impossible?
For better or worse errors will happen and need to be reported.
Though I do think popping up a modal dialog is a lazy way to report errors, for say a bad value in a form i'd much rather show the user the form again with the "bad" entry highlighted in red and a message about why it's bad at the top. For quick and simple validation (e.g. checking a number is in range) you could even do the highlighting in real time.
it is not like your roof has a warranty much longer than 2 decades anyways.
warranty != expected lifetime.
How about the *NIX date bug? In 2038 the intarwebs will come to a screaching halt and we are all going to die and...
On what do you base this claim? I'd expect by 2038 most internet stuff will be running 64-bit software which at least on linux means a 64-bit time_t.
Individual applications may break if they did stupid things (like using int where they should have used time_t ), if they stored dates in binary files or they never got rebuilt for 64-bit but I don't see any major problem for the internet in general.
Did you actually read the article? afaict this is impacting all games with trophy support regardless of whether the user is online or offline (and these games can most certainly be played without an internet connection)
One of the (many) reasons I tend to buy console versions rather than PC versions of games is that they don't tend to have online activation BS.
Still afaict this is a defect in original workmanship (not a wear-out and not a random failure) that renders the product largely unusable.
If sony doesn't sort this out quickly i'd expect lawsuits in the EU at least.
Really these exams should be on computers now days with a basic calculator built in to the program.
Of course doing exams on computers opens up huge cans of worms of it's own.
Plus there is STILL no good method for entering equations on computers (and at least the exams i've done as an EE student required loads of working that was heavy in equations). point and click entry is slow, latex has a steep learning curve and isn't really used anywhere else.
Is there any guarantee that the sort algorithm the browser uses will be a quicksort?
Pretty much any technique I can think of
One that comes to mind that could potentially run forever with a sufficiently fucked comparison function is a naive bubble-sort that doesn't bother with the optimisation of reducing the list size with each pass and uses a pass with no changes as the terminating condition.
What I suspect a lot of them will just do is stick a USB-serial chip in the device.
If you actually design your system to use serial properly the timing stuff with USB-serial chips shouldn't be a problem. It's devices that try to cheat and do weird shit with the handshake lines that cause problems.