Actually I used this program that also came in Compute! that let you type in another program just as a sequence of lines of numbers, each line with a checksum at the end. SpeedScript was like 20 pages or so of raw numbers to be typed into this program. The program would prompt you for each number in sequence and at the end of each line, after you entered the checksum, would either ding to indicate success or buzz to indicate failure, in which case you'd have to type the line again.
I think it took me 4 or 5 hours to type all of SpeedScript in this way. Of course, the program which I needed to use to type in speedscript, was itself a BASIC program which I had typed in directly from the pages of Compute! as well. But I re-used that program over and over again for other big programs like SpeedScript.
I can't imagine why I have fond memories of these times; it sounds like the pain of typing in pages and pages of numbers from a magazine just to have a dippy little 40-column text editor would have been terribly boring. But all I can remember is the excitement of having a text editor on my computer that had so many amazing features (query-replace! holy cow, the concept boggled my mind!), that I typed in myself.
On a related note, I recently recovered all of the contents off of the lone C-64 5.25 in floppy that I saved from my junior high/high school days of the late 80's. The disk had been sitting in between the pages of a programming book for around 15 years.
I found a very nice person who had a Commodore 1571 disk drive hooked up to his PC and was able to get the files off. I was really impressed that after sitting around for 15 years, the data was all completely readable.
I was also amazed to learn that when I was in junior high I was using a program called "SpeedScript" which I had typed in from a Compute magazine, and it had, to some degree, EMACS KEY BINDINGS!!! Holy crap, I had no idea that the emacs seed had been planted in my brain so early on... no wonder I'm an emacs freak!
I'm skeptical that Dell, HP, Compaq, and IBM are rebadging Clevo laptops. I know that Sager, Winbook, ProStar, and many, many other smaller laptop brands are just rebadged Clevos, but I highly doubt that the same is true for the big names you mentioned. You can tell that the small name laptops are all rebadged because the models all look identical except for the badge. Dell's notebook look quite custom, same for HP, Compaq, and IBM. I think that they really manufacture their own laptops.
Didn't Clevo used to be Kapok? I am still using the Kapok that I bought in 1998. It was rebranded as a ProStar but never re-badged. The only emblem on it simply says "Notebook". It's been a real champ and stood up to alot of abuse in the past 5.5 years... I've upgraded memory, CPU, and hard drive on this thing, it's still decent for simple stuff and non-3d games...
You are correct, the DIRECTiVo is lacking a few of the features of Series 2 TiVos, and Series 2 TiVos are not as hackable as Series 1.
However, the fundamental purpose of a DVR is to record and playback programs, and the rest is all gravy. The vast majority of people will find that DIRECTV's DVR is far and away the best because they don't need or don't care about those other features.
I agree that it would be great if DIRECTiVo's could do all that Series 1/Series 2 standalones can do, and if all of our platforms were more open to video extraction. But the core competency of TiVo standalones and especially DIRECTV's TiVo-based DVR is vastly superior to all others, and when it comes down to it, that is what matters the most to most people.
I feel the need to reiterate that although I work for TiVo, my opinions are entirely my own.
Thank you very much for those pointers. If I get enough energy, I will print those out and take them back to the museum for the benefit of the curator.
My friends and I went to the NASA Ames Research Center Mars museum at Moffett Field yesterday and it was pretty cool, in a museum-for-kids kind of way. But there was one fact on display that I simply could not understand, and that the curator on duty could not help me with. I told my friend that I would ask Slashdot, where someone was sure to know, and was only joking, but now that this story has been posted (and although it's only loosely related), what the heck...
The description of the rover module that is going to be deployed on one of the upcoming Mars missions states that it is designed to last for 3 months or until its solar panels become covered in Mars dust and it can no longer get the solar power that it needs. The question is, if they are going to send up a multi-multi-million dollar craft, why not put some simple wipers on the solar panels so that they can wipe off the dust and get some more use out of the thing?
The curator said that "five hundred people" before me had asked the same question, and that he had never been able to figure out the answer. And of course there MUST be a good reason for this; my closest guess is that the robot wouldn't last for more than 3 months anyway and so they don't bother to include the extra expense and complexity of a motorized wiper system just to keep its solar panels clean for longer than it is expected to live. But there must be a better reason than that, no?
Sorry. It's because I subscribe to Slashdot and so I see the stories before they are posted. I type out my comments in an emacs buffer and then copy-and-paste them into the Slashdot submission, and because I tend to type newlines at the end of my lines as I enter them into the emacs buffer (programming habits die hard), I end up copying the newlines into the Slashdot submission as well. Sometimes I catch this before it is too late, but this time I was in a hurry as I received a phone call as I was trying to do the copy and paste. Sorry about that...
I have always wondered what the world would be like if a company with better technical leadership had been handed the PC operating system monopoly by IBM oh so many years ago. Perhaps it would not have been possible for that company, whoever they might have been, to achieve the level of domination that Microsoft achieved because such a company might have put too many resources to the task of technical innovation and left the business (i.e. monopolization) side of things to falter. It is quite possible that the only company which could achieve the kind of dominance that Microsoft has achieved would be one which, like Microsoft, cannot innovate or excel technically, because it would take too many resources away from the business side of things to focus on the technical.
I guess this would mean that the companies which achieve monopoly status are by definition technically inferior? This would certainly seem to be the case...
Some people would argue that Microsoft is not a monopoly because it does not in fact have 100% complete control over the operating system market. But Microsoft does have a monopoly in one *very* important market - operating systems capable of running Microsoft Windows software. You see, I think that the fact Microsoft's operating system's are the only ones which literally trillions of dollars worth of software can run on means that Microsoft is by definition monopolizing an absolutely enormous market. While it may sound flippant to say that Microsoft has a monopoly on Microsoft operating systems, I think there is something really important behind this. No one company should be the producers of a commodity which so many other companies depend upon to sell their product. It's not healthy for the market and it's certainly not to the benefit of consumers.
I probably wasn't very clear when I asked my question. Or maybe my question didn't make any sense.
Maybe I could illustrate the problem I am wondering how Terazona solves, and you can tell me how you solve it (or at least give me a general idea)...
The world includes models of objects which the player interacts with. Let's say a player is in a certain location and wants to walk north. But they can't because a tree is in the way. Whatever server is keeping track of the player's movements and doing collision detection or whatever, has to know that there was a tree there. So the server has to have a map of at least the part of the world that the player is currently in, to know what obstacles there are for the player to walk into.
What I'm wondering is, does every server have this entire map, so that it can, for any set of players distributed anywhere around the game world, keep track of what obstacles they are walking into? Or does each server only deal with a part of the map, and only keep track of the players that are in the part of the game world represented by the server's map?
The way that Terazona was described, I got the feeling that the servers divide the players up pretty much randomly, in which case each server would have to have a map of the whole world to be able to represent the area that any arbitrary player that they are managing is in.
Is that what it does? Or does each server keep track of a part of the map, and only those players that are in that part? If so, what does it do when there are many many people in its segment of the game world? And, how does the map get broken up by the servers? Automatically or does the game designer have to break the world up on behalf of the servers and assign servers to different quadrants of the world map?
I did, but I didn't get very far. I found it boring to have to run around the initial little town performing mindless tasks (take this letter to that guy over there, only we won't tell you where he is so you have to run around all over the place looking for him), and then when I did get out of the town and had to fight a bunch of hyenas or whatever, the combat was just point-and-click-and-wait like the other MMORPGs I have played, and then when they died they dropped *bags* that were supposed to represent hyena teeth. I just found it all very unappealing.
But I'm probably far too critical of these games...
Sounds cool. You lost me at the "java-based" though:)
Question: how does the game world map get distributed amongst the grid servers? Does each one have to have a copy of the entire world, or do they split it up somehow?
Well you are lucky that there are DOZENS of MMORPGs that satisfy your gameplay requirements. I am just looking for ONE which satisfies mine.
For what it's worth, the MMORPGs that I have played are pretty weak in the strategy area anyway. Really there is no reason for a fight to last more than 1 second anyway. It might as well work like this: you click on the spider, the server pre-calculates how much damage it would do to you and you would do to it, and the server does the damage and it's done. There is no reason to have to sit and wait while your avatar hack smindlessly at the spider at a pre-determined rate and the spider does the same to your avatar. If there is no skill involved in the actual fight, then just skip it and go to the results!
Yes, it is true that you can cast spells and such, or switch to a different weapon normally. But I've found that it just leads to a formula which you use over and over again when fighting. You click on the spider, you say attack, when it hits you you heal, you watch the attack while you want for your mana to recharge so you can heal again, etc. You might as well just code all that up into a script that you run whenever you want to attack a spider.
I like real time fighting because it brings a fun arcade-y aspect to the game. It also makes it feel like you're more "in" the world and actually controlling your avatar, instead of just sitting back and watching what could have been a MUD anyway if it weren't for the 3d graphics.
I've tried a few MMORPGs and have found them all to be lacking in the same key area: one's control over one's character is not real-time. This is a generic description of a problem which surfaces in many ways in MMORPGs, most notably in the combat system. I haven't found one yet that allows real-time combat; it's always "click on the guy you want to fight and press the 'attack' button", then sit back and watch. Typically can do things like cast a spell or use a buff or otherwise make strategic changes to the way that your character is fighting, but you can't aim, run around, swing at the monster, etc, as you can with first person games.
The game that comes closest to the combat system I would want is Jedi Academy, in which the multiplayer mode works just like the first-person real-time perspective of the single player game. You do have to aim, you do have to run around and avoid shots, you do have to swing your light saber yourself. I find this to be infinitely more enjoyable than the MUD-like "you hit the spider for 10 points, it hit you for 5 points" back-and-forth that is common on all of the MMORPGs that I have played.
One gets the feeling in playing these MMORPGs that your client view of the world only loosely approximates what is happening on the server. You can make your character run from here to there and find that other people are "sliding" by or popping in and out as you get only sporadic notification from the server of what's really happening. It all gives a very disconnected feel that I really find unappealing about MMORPGs.
There must be some kind of scaleability limitation though because Jedi Academy only supports about 30 players or so at a time in an area that is far smaller than a play area in an MMORPG. I think that if someone could design an MMORPG that played like an FPS, but had all of the depth and breadth of one of these not-so-real-time MMORPGs, it would be ideal.
As an aside, has anyone beta tested Worlds of Warcraft? It like an excellent execution of the MMORPG genre, but I have yet to read any comments from beta testers on whether or not the fighting is real-time or "faked" like other MMORPGs is...
When they mention the amount of disk space available, that may or may not include the virtual server itself. For example, looking at the linode page, the free space is the space left after the distribution is installed.
Quite true, although they do make that pretty clear on their site. For what it's worth, my fairly tight RedHat 9 setup uses about 350 MB before any user files are considered.
2. Uptime. Providers that claim 99.999% or whatever uptime are simply lying. It's probably the uptime of their network connection, but not individual server - I've had 3 different VPS's over the past two years (Verio, JVDS and Spry), and every one of them has at least once experienced a server problem where it was down for several hours.
I guess we'll have to wait and see how this one pans out for Linode.com. The terms of service do include a refund for each hour that their systems are down outside of the 99.999% or whatever it is that they guarantee. So they do have quite an incentive to keep things running.
3. Proprietary things. Whatch out for provider trying to lock you into their way of doing things. This may be a complicated xinetd/qmail setup that works well with their GUI panel (which you may not care about). Once you get used to their way of doing things, it would be hard to move to another provider who will probably have a different setup.
This is not an issue with UML hosting sites, as you control 100% of the software on the server.
4. Watch out for the price. The vast majority of the hosting companies out there operate as Ponzi schemes - their main source of revenue is the setup and pre-payment fees, but the monthly fee alone isn't enough to sustain their costs. This makes them very eager to keep signing up new customers and not to work hard on retaining them.
Very interesting, I guess this does explain why some hosting services are incredulously cheap.
5. Few hosting providers will upgrade their servers, it's just too much trouble. So if you got a FreeBSD 4.3 or RedHat 7.2, it will probably stay this way despite of what the sales guy may tell you.
Once again, with a UML host like Linode.com this is not an issue at all. You control all of the software on your server and can upgrade whenever you see fit.
6. You don't know what hardware they are using. It is trivial to patch the kernel so that dmesg always reports it's a 2.4GHz Xeon whereas it's really a PII.
I think this is bordering on paranoia. Besides, what difference does it make what the hardware is? All that matters is the performance you get in your virtual host, which is only roughly correlated to the host system's hardware. I'd be happier on a PII with only two virtual hosts than a 2.4GHz Xeon with 100.
7. Most hosting companies don't like to reveal their inner workings. You can most of the time guess whether it is a FreeBSD jail, a Linux UML (those usually list memory limits as part of the price), a Linux VServer (not a lot of those yet, but it's the future most likely) or a proprietary solution like the ViaVerio crap. What this means is that you don't know what security and reliability measures they have in place, don't ever assume anything.
I've found that for most hosting services, it is easy to find this information out. Either it's prominently displayed on the web site's sales literature, or it's available with a little bit of poking into the technical pages of the site, or you can find out just by asking. I don't think they usually hide this information, except maybe for the most bargain-basement of hosting services, who don't have the expertise or time or whatever to document this kind of thing.
8. AUP. A more restrictive AUP is a good thing IMHO. Providers with liberal AUP's are usually w
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I used this program that also came in Compute! that let you type in another program just as a sequence of lines of numbers, each line with a checksum at the end. SpeedScript was like 20 pages or so of raw numbers to be typed into this program. The program would prompt you for each number in sequence and at the end of each line, after you entered the checksum, would either ding to indicate success or buzz to indicate failure, in which case you'd have to type the line again.
I think it took me 4 or 5 hours to type all of SpeedScript in this way. Of course, the program which I needed to use to type in speedscript, was itself a BASIC program which I had typed in directly from the pages of Compute! as well. But I re-used that program over and over again for other big programs like SpeedScript.
I can't imagine why I have fond memories of these times; it sounds like the pain of typing in pages and pages of numbers from a magazine just to have a dippy little 40-column text editor would have been terribly boring. But all I can remember is the excitement of having a text editor on my computer that had so many amazing features (query-replace! holy cow, the concept boggled my mind!), that I typed in myself.
On a related note, I recently recovered all of the contents off of the lone C-64 5.25 in floppy that I saved from my junior high/high school days of the late 80's. The disk had been sitting in between the pages of a programming book for around 15 years.
... no wonder I'm an emacs freak!
I found a very nice person who had a Commodore 1571 disk drive hooked up to his PC and was able to get the files off. I was really impressed that after sitting around for 15 years, the data was all completely readable.
I was also amazed to learn that when I was in junior high I was using a program called "SpeedScript" which I had typed in from a Compute magazine, and it had, to some degree, EMACS KEY BINDINGS!!! Holy crap, I had no idea that the emacs seed had been planted in my brain so early on
According to the front page of the site you linked to, Volity:
* "Leverages XML technology"
* Has a reference server "written in Perl"
This is not a serious development platform.
It's funny, you can string together English sentences as if you were intelligent but the things you say are completely and utterly stupid. Curious.
I'm skeptical that Dell, HP, Compaq, and IBM are rebadging Clevo laptops. I know that Sager, Winbook, ProStar, and many, many other smaller laptop brands are just rebadged Clevos, but I highly doubt that the same is true for the big names you mentioned. You can tell that the small name laptops are all rebadged because the models all look identical except for the badge. Dell's notebook look quite custom, same for HP, Compaq, and IBM. I think that they really manufacture their own laptops.
... I've upgraded memory, CPU, and hard drive on this thing, it's still decent for simple stuff and non-3d games ...
Didn't Clevo used to be Kapok? I am still using the Kapok that I bought in 1998. It was rebranded as a ProStar but never re-badged. The only emblem on it simply says "Notebook". It's been a real champ and stood up to alot of abuse in the past 5.5 years
This was one of the dumber and less funny April Fool's postings. Bleh.
Sorry. *Is* juvenile. Whatever.
That site, and your response, are juvenile.
Yes, and I can spell too. You are a legitimate loser.
You are correct, the DIRECTiVo is lacking a few of the features of Series 2 TiVos, and Series 2 TiVos are not as hackable as Series 1.
However, the fundamental purpose of a DVR is to record and playback programs, and the rest is all gravy. The vast majority of people will find that DIRECTV's DVR is far and away the best because they don't need or don't care about those other features.
I agree that it would be great if DIRECTiVo's could do all that Series 1/Series 2 standalones can do, and if all of our platforms were more open to video extraction. But the core competency of TiVo standalones and especially DIRECTV's TiVo-based DVR is vastly superior to all others, and when it comes down to it, that is what matters the most to most people.
I feel the need to reiterate that although I work for TiVo, my opinions are entirely my own.
If only because DIRECTV's DVR (aka DIRECTiVo) totally kicks the ass of whatever cheap and lame knock-off Dish uses.
True, DIRECTV's HD DVR is not quite out yet, but I do know that Dish's HD DVR sucks royally, and that the DIRECTV offering is worth the wait.
Disclaimer: I work for TiVo, and my opinions are my own.
Thank you very much for those pointers. If I get enough energy, I will print those out and take them back to the museum for the benefit of the curator.
My friends and I went to the NASA Ames Research Center Mars museum at Moffett Field yesterday and it was pretty cool, in a museum-for-kids kind of way. But there was one fact on display that I simply could not understand, and that the curator on duty could not help me with. I told my friend that I would ask Slashdot, where someone was sure to know, and was only joking, but now that this story has been posted (and although it's only loosely related), what the heck ...
The description of the rover module that is going to be deployed on one of the upcoming Mars missions states that it is designed to last for 3 months or until its solar panels become covered in Mars dust and it can no longer get the solar power that it needs. The question is, if they are going to send up a multi-multi-million dollar craft, why not put some simple wipers on the solar panels so that they can wipe off the dust and get some more use out of the thing?
The curator said that "five hundred people" before me had asked the same question, and that he had never been able to figure out the answer. And of course there MUST be a good reason for this; my closest guess is that the robot wouldn't last for more than 3 months anyway and so they don't bother to include the extra expense and complexity of a motorized wiper system just to keep its solar panels clean for longer than it is expected to live. But there must be a better reason than that, no?
Sorry. It's because I subscribe to Slashdot and so I see the stories before they are posted. I type out my comments in an emacs buffer and then copy-and-paste them into the Slashdot submission, and because I tend to type newlines at the end of my lines as I enter them into the emacs buffer (programming habits die hard), I end up copying the newlines into the Slashdot submission as well. Sometimes I catch this before it is too late, but this time I was in a hurry as I received a phone call as I was trying to do the copy and paste. Sorry about that ...
I have always wondered what the world would be like if a company with
...
better technical leadership had been handed the PC operating system
monopoly by IBM oh so many years ago. Perhaps it would not have been
possible for that company, whoever they might have been, to achieve the
level of domination that Microsoft achieved because such a company might
have put too many resources to the task of technical innovation and left
the business (i.e. monopolization) side of things to falter. It is quite
possible that the only company which could achieve the kind of dominance
that Microsoft has achieved would be one which, like Microsoft, cannot
innovate or excel technically, because it would take too many resources
away from the business side of things to focus on the technical.
I guess this would mean that the companies which achieve monopoly status
are by definition technically inferior? This would certainly seem to be
the case
Some people would argue that Microsoft is not a monopoly because it does
not in fact have 100% complete control over the operating system market.
But Microsoft does have a monopoly in one *very* important market -
operating systems capable of running Microsoft Windows software. You
see, I think that the fact Microsoft's operating system's are the only
ones which literally trillions of dollars worth of software can run
on means that Microsoft is by definition monopolizing an absolutely
enormous market. While it may sound flippant to say that Microsoft
has a monopoly on Microsoft operating systems, I think there is something
really important behind this. No one company should be the producers
of a commodity which so many other companies depend upon to sell their
product. It's not healthy for the market and it's certainly not to the
benefit of consumers.
I probably wasn't very clear when I asked my question. Or maybe my question didn't make any sense.
...
Maybe I could illustrate the problem I am wondering how Terazona solves, and you can tell me how you solve it (or at least give me a general idea)
The world includes models of objects which the player interacts with. Let's say a player is in a certain location and wants to walk north. But they can't because a tree is in the way. Whatever server is keeping track of the player's movements and doing collision detection or whatever, has to know that there was a tree there. So the server has to have a map of at least the part of the world that the player is currently in, to know what obstacles there are for the player to walk into.
What I'm wondering is, does every server have this entire map, so that it can, for any set of players distributed anywhere around the game world, keep track of what obstacles they are walking into? Or does each server only deal with a part of the map, and only keep track of the players that are in the part of the game world represented by the server's map?
The way that Terazona was described, I got the feeling that the servers divide the players up pretty much randomly, in which case each server would have to have a map of the whole world to be able to represent the area that any arbitrary player that they are managing is in.
Is that what it does? Or does each server keep track of a part of the map, and only those players that are in that part? If so, what does it do when there are many many people in its segment of the game world? And, how does the map get broken up by the servers? Automatically or does the game designer have to break the world up on behalf of the servers and assign servers to different quadrants of the world map?
Am I making any sense at al?!?
I did, but I didn't get very far. I found it boring to have to run around the initial little town performing mindless tasks (take this letter to that guy over there, only we won't tell you where he is so you have to run around all over the place looking for him), and then when I did get out of the town and had to fight a bunch of hyenas or whatever, the combat was just point-and-click-and-wait like the other MMORPGs I have played, and then when they died they dropped *bags* that were supposed to represent hyena teeth. I just found it all very unappealing.
...
But I'm probably far too critical of these games
Sounds cool. You lost me at the "java-based" though :)
Question: how does the game world map get distributed amongst the grid servers? Does each one have to have a copy of the entire world, or do they split it up somehow?
Well you are lucky that there are DOZENS of MMORPGs that satisfy your gameplay requirements. I am just looking for ONE which satisfies mine.
For what it's worth, the MMORPGs that I have played are pretty weak in the strategy area anyway. Really there is no reason for a fight to last more than 1 second anyway. It might as well work like this: you click on the spider, the server pre-calculates how much damage it would do to you and you would do to it, and the server does the damage and it's done. There is no reason to have to sit and wait while your avatar hack smindlessly at the spider at a pre-determined rate and the spider does the same to your avatar. If there is no skill involved in the actual fight, then just skip it and go to the results!
Yes, it is true that you can cast spells and such, or switch to a different weapon normally. But I've found that it just leads to a formula which you use over and over again when fighting. You click on the spider, you say attack, when it hits you you heal, you watch the attack while you want for your mana to recharge so you can heal again, etc. You might as well just code all that up into a script that you run whenever you want to attack a spider.
I like real time fighting because it brings a fun arcade-y aspect to the game. It also makes it feel like you're more "in" the world and actually controlling your avatar, instead of just sitting back and watching what could have been a MUD anyway if it weren't for the 3d graphics.
I've tried a few MMORPGs and have found them all to be lacking in the same key area: one's control over one's character is not real-time. This is a generic description of a problem which surfaces in many ways in MMORPGs, most notably in the combat system. I haven't found one yet that allows real-time combat; it's always "click on the guy you want to fight and press the 'attack' button", then sit back and watch. Typically can do things like cast a spell or use a buff or otherwise make strategic changes to the way that your character is fighting, but you can't aim, run around, swing at the monster, etc, as you can with first person games.
...
The game that comes closest to the combat system I would want is Jedi Academy, in which the multiplayer mode works just like the first-person real-time perspective of the single player game. You do have to aim, you do have to run around and avoid shots, you do have to swing your light saber yourself. I find this to be infinitely more enjoyable than the MUD-like "you hit the spider for 10 points, it hit you for 5 points" back-and-forth that is common on all of the MMORPGs that I have played.
One gets the feeling in playing these MMORPGs that your client view of the world only loosely approximates what is happening on the server. You can make your character run from here to there and find that other people are "sliding" by or popping in and out as you get only sporadic notification from the server of what's really happening. It all gives a very disconnected feel that I really find unappealing about MMORPGs.
There must be some kind of scaleability limitation though because Jedi Academy only supports about 30 players or so at a time in an area that is far smaller than a play area in an MMORPG. I think that if someone could design an MMORPG that played like an FPS, but had all of the depth and breadth of one of these not-so-real-time MMORPGs, it would be ideal.
As an aside, has anyone beta tested Worlds of Warcraft? It like an excellent execution of the MMORPG genre, but I have yet to read any comments from beta testers on whether or not the fighting is real-time or "faked" like other MMORPGs is
For what it's worth, I'm a computer nerd and I could not care less how the mass media portrays me. Why should I? Why do you?
OK, now I am not sure WHO is right but I am pretty sure that your ad-hominem attacks ("what tree did you fall out of", etc) are stupid.
Whoops, sorry Compugeek, but after reading the articles linked to in the parent post I now think that you were wrong all along ...
For what it's worth, it sounds to me like not only are you better informed, but you are also correct.
Quite true, although they do make that pretty clear on their site. For what it's worth, my fairly tight RedHat 9 setup uses about 350 MB before any user files are considered.
I guess we'll have to wait and see how this one pans out for Linode.com. The terms of service do include a refund for each hour that their systems are down outside of the 99.999% or whatever it is that they guarantee. So they do have quite an incentive to keep things running.
This is not an issue with UML hosting sites, as you control 100% of the software on the server.
Very interesting, I guess this does explain why some hosting services are incredulously cheap.
Once again, with a UML host like Linode.com this is not an issue at all. You control all of the software on your server and can upgrade whenever you see fit.
I think this is bordering on paranoia. Besides, what difference does it make what the hardware is? All that matters is the performance you get in your virtual host, which is only roughly correlated to the host system's hardware. I'd be happier on a PII with only two virtual hosts than a 2.4GHz Xeon with 100.
I've found that for most hosting services, it is easy to find this information out. Either it's prominently displayed on the web site's sales literature, or it's available with a little bit of poking into the technical pages of the site, or you can find out just by asking. I don't think they usually hide this information, except maybe for the most bargain-basement of hosting services, who don't have the expertise or time or whatever to document this kind of thing.