What are you talking about, 'only one job'? We run an average of 30-40 jobs on the local supercomputer I manage at any given time. Each job has their own chunk of nodes they run on. We run the machine at an average of 85% load all the time (actually more like 90-95% load when used, plus a few hours of 0% use maintenance each week). We do have failures in individual nodes fairly often, but what do you expect when you've got over 6k dimms in a room?
You're right they are different, but your impression of how a supercomputer actually runs is way off.
Buy non-RIAA music at magnatune.com or similar. Or buy used. Remember, at least right now, the RIAA doesn't get anything from used CD sales. Especially useful if the music you want is older. You could also consider the music swapping sites online, I suspect the RIAA hates them too.
Yep. I used to run a lowbies PvP group in WoW. We could field 10 folks if everyone was online that night, but it was okay because we'd crush with just 5. We'd hit 8-10 man alliance twink squads who claimed we were all hacking.
No, the reality of it is we've played together for years in various games and we're on a teamspeak server calling out your positions, flag locations, etc. Blizz never banned us but I'm sure we were reported over and over and over again.
What that point misses is that in the MMO world there isn't any "I win"... In monopoly, the game ends: there is a winner, and there are losers. But a MMO just goes on. You'd do better with an analogy of a pen&paper RPG where you can bribe the GM with pizza.
Except in a p&p RPG you usually can bribe the GM with game logs, and it is usually considered "okay". Some game systems even encourage rewarding players that do so! Or pick your other ways of describing "contributing": costume, lighting, music, props/models, or even pizza!
In monopoly, for instance, the dude in his mom's basement gets 1 turn for every turn I get. In a MMO, he gets a lot more "turns" (hours spent in game) than I do. In the MMO arena, however, that is considered fair. In monopoly, giving him extra turns would be considered unfair.
Poker might be a better analogy. Hands of poker end, but then there's another hand for play. Of course, someone who is rich (or foolish) will come to the table with more money than the other players. Is this a problem in poker? Answer: sometimes. Thus some (groups or games) may impose a cap (or not play for real money) on how much money you can bring to the table.
Solution (for MMOs): Make RMT and non-RMT servers. Consumers can then decide which they'd rather play on. In addition, the RMT servers need the company that runs them to facilitate the RMT. They already have your cc #, so just tack it on to monthly fees (or deduct off prepaid time).
A lot of ground to make up... like porting Linux to the AMD processors (or Intel, Sparc as mentioned elsewhere)? Look at the top 500 list's operating system breakdown and you'll find a remarkable amount of Linux.
I'd like to agree to be concerned about the bandwidth, but I'm not sure I can be. Looking at my friendly local supercomputer over the last year, I see the most processor-hours used by 64 proc jobs (33%), followed by 32 proc jobs (27%). If jobs keep fairly consistent on the number of processor cores they use, that's only 2 or 4 nodes. Even increasing the number of cores used you still have fairly few nodes connected to run any given job.
If you spread your data (partition/generate your grid wisely!) and schedule (becoming important in large networks) in a smart way you can make most of your communication happen on a single node, rather than between nodes, and between neighbors rather than across the whole tree.
The most amusing thing to me was that Turbine apparently forgot how to do physics. Their first MMO, Asheron's Call had real collision detection and physics. Sure it was simplified, but it worked. Players could and did form walls to keep monsters from reaching the squishies (non-melees). Or sometimes it was an archer/mage wall, because they didn't suffer from sticky melee, so couldn't be shoved around by their target trying (and failing) to move through them.
On non-PvP servers, players could pass through players -- no griefing by blocking the door. On PvP servers however, players could pass through each other. Of course that problem leads to all sorts of exploits to bypass doors where one guy gets smashed against the door, then logs off. Other toons fill his spot, then he logs back in and gets pushed to the first available space... on the far side of said locked door.
Your average computer user thinks they have "a gigga hurts of ram." They have no idea if the processor inside their machine is an Intel or an AMD. All this 'amd64' or 'i386' stuff is nothing but garbage in garbage out to them.
Distros who want to be newbie friendly should offer one download option: "Here's the (plain old i386) image that will work in the most places possible." Bury an "advanced users click here" in the page. Or even just change your file structure to reflect.../i386/ (rather than -i386-) for the newbies. Advanced users already know that means "hey there's probably things other than 32-bit Intel 80386 compatible builds available" and will go up one directory to see what's available. Newbies will use what they see.
So to phrase it as someone else did: if she knows she has a 64-bit AMD processor (not to mention her references to partitions, etc) she isn't a newbie. She knows enough to be dangerous, without knowing enough to realize she's being so.
The real problem is she installed 64-bit without understanding the implications of such. Aka: buggy. If she'd have installed pure 32-bit, it probably would have just worked. Ditto the wine-wrapped picasa.
They expect anyone who pays for the $199 lifetime membership to play for about as many months as anyone who pre-orders and gets the $10/month for life payment plan. At least, assuming the corporation is acting rationally. Otherwise they're either overcharging or undercharging, both of which are a non-ideal state.
Judging how long they run a game on pure "is it profitable" isn't what they'll be doing. They'll judge it on opportunity-cost as well. In order to keep their people working on LOTRO, they're going to give up working on something else. The question is, do they make more money keeping a "profitable" but limping-along-game alive, or do they pull the plug and try something new?
I don't think I can agree it is just another MMO. I did play some of their open beta, but I've not ordered and don't expect to order the game. The ease of leveling leads me to suspect that they are going to be trying to push the story aspect quite a bit harder than most games have. Given that, when they're out of story (and their license for the material is going to dictate this more than anything else), it is time to shut down the game.
Everyone keeps bringing this up as a point "they just want to keep you hooked and paying."
I'm not sure that's the case with LOTRO. The $199 lifetime membership, while steep, has to be a break-even point for Turbine. The other pre-order option is a $10/month lifetime rate, which lets you calculate that at $199 they expect you to play for about 20 months over the lifetime of the game. They've already built in an end to the game. The fact they give a lifetime membership tells you that much. If they are really smart, they're going to run the MMO through the story of ME, and then close it down shortly after the war.
Given a usual rate of expansions (free or paid), you can estimate the story will finish in 3-5 years. In which time the graphics will have started looking fairly dated. Either they'd have to go back and refresh them (lots of art and dev time)... or they could be in their twilight and say, "story's about to be over folks, we're not doing that sorry! But look at our next project: B5 Online!"
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Especially given this is Turbine aka "exploit early, exploit often." They've had one semi-successful games and two flops, one of which closed just after three years.
Have you considered that concentrating themselves at wired may be the most useful thing for them to do? Much like the incompetent sysadmin who you'd rather sit in their office and look at porn than try (and fail) to do actual work on important systems.
Lucasarts (* or whatever they are now) really needs to put out another good game in the X-Wing series. TIE-Fighter was great back in the mid 90s. And X-Wing Alliance was great. It looks reasonably nice these days if a bit old. Too bad your wingmen are still stupid as ever in it.
There are some applications that would kill to have a 4 gig solid-state disk widely available that didn't have the limited-writes of flash. I'm thinking of supercomputing specifically. Network booting isn't good when you're talking thousands of nodes, but neither is magnetic spinning disk. Flash would be okay if you really could tightly control your operating system's behavior (Linux could probably handle it, Solaris is a maybe, and OS X is right out).
Worked fantastic for the one bad part from Lego I have ever received. That ranges from the early 80s through today, and yes I still get bricks in fairly high quantity.
I suspect your real problem is that your son has bricks which are not actually Lego bricks. Mega blocks and others try to be like Lego but the quality just isn't there in their bricks. I've been kicking a few out of my collection recently that I found while sorting.
I'd rather they throw away 18 out of every million pieces than raise the cost what it'd take to get down to 1-2 defects per million. Plus if I remember right from the lego history book, the bricks that are defective can be re-molded.
It sure isn't quality. A friend of mine downloaded the free trial they have. He played for an hour or two then uninstalled it because it was that bad. I hit it back in open beta and concluded I wouldn't be buying it.
And how old were any of the non-hobbits who were part of the fellowship of the ring? I'm seeing ages cited that are probably 4-5 times the hobbits age, or far, far more for Legolas.
The same problem happens in D&D campaigns too. You start at 1st level as a X year old foo. You go explore a dungon or few and suddenly you're 5-6th level and more powerful than anyone in the podunk town you started in. How long has passed? Maybe a month? A past DM of mine ran a game that spanned a couple RL years, but in terms of in game years, it was less than one. Probably only a half-year actually. The game ran from starting at 6th to ending at epic around level 25+.
FF is actually pretty good about the age thing in some of their games. FF Tactics comes readily to mind... You in fact start as a total peon with a promising royal military future. Then you lose it and have to start fighting for yourself. Most folks who join you aren't out-and-out gods (other than Cid of course). Actually nobody who joins you is ranked much of anything other than a generic "knight" type rank. Even when Cid joins you, he's lost his rank so despite being "powerful" he comes into the party in a reasonable way.
I can't qualify it as the best of without one of X-wing, TIE Fighter, or X-wing: Alliance. XvT excluded because it was a sucky PoS that didn't play like any of the others -- ships flew "wrong" compared to the other three games in the series. I suppose they are all too graphically "old" to include. To me that says, "time for a new X-wing series game!" but sadly I seem to be the only one.
I know my Jag got a ton of play time back in late high school and early college days for me. (roughly: 1995-1998) Rayman, Alien vs Predator, Tempest 2000, Raiden, and Cannon Fodder were all favorites that saw lots of use. Baldies (CD) was cute and fun when it didn't crash on you. Yeah, there were a bunch of stinkers ("Highlander" comes to mind rapidly. Myst as well because the UI on a low-res TV was so awful.)
Besides, it is worth owning one for the VLM alone. When 5 years have passed I expect to pick up a used Xbox360. No games, just the console and a controller and the VLM3.
I also (in general) really like the Jag controllers. Yes the number key pad is annoying, but they're large enough to be comfy for a long play session and are fairly durable. They will pull out at a slight tug, but I'd rather have the controller fall out than the console get pulled off whereever it was sitting, particularly some of the places I had it balanced in my dorm rooms.
The responsibility for what a child hears/sees/plays falls to the parent and/or legal guardian of that child. Not the federal nor state nor county nor city government (unless they are acting as legal guardian of, for example, an orphan).
Besides, if you want to talk about soft-corn porn or hard-core violence, you'd be much better served by going after the RIAA's mega-stars and cartoons. Or maybe that evil, bulletproof-nudity D&D thing.
Or feel free to stick your head in the sand and cry "save the children."
Erosion of the rights of the people is erosion of the rights of the people reguardless of if it is guns, abortion, or games (read: freedom of speech/expression).
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What are you talking about, 'only one job'? We run an average of 30-40 jobs on the local supercomputer I manage at any given time. Each job has their own chunk of nodes they run on. We run the machine at an average of 85% load all the time (actually more like 90-95% load when used, plus a few hours of 0% use maintenance each week). We do have failures in individual nodes fairly often, but what do you expect when you've got over 6k dimms in a room?
You're right they are different, but your impression of how a supercomputer actually runs is way off.
Buy non-RIAA music at magnatune.com or similar. Or buy used. Remember, at least right now, the RIAA doesn't get anything from used CD sales. Especially useful if the music you want is older. You could also consider the music swapping sites online, I suspect the RIAA hates them too.
Key phrase from TFA:
"Their predictions of higher energy density capacitors are encouraging, but have yet to be experimentally tested."
Call me when they're being produced in something resembling quantity. Yeesh.
Yep. I used to run a lowbies PvP group in WoW. We could field 10 folks if everyone was online that night, but it was okay because we'd crush with just 5. We'd hit 8-10 man alliance twink squads who claimed we were all hacking.
No, the reality of it is we've played together for years in various games and we're on a teamspeak server calling out your positions, flag locations, etc. Blizz never banned us but I'm sure we were reported over and over and over again.
What that point misses is that in the MMO world there isn't any "I win"... In monopoly, the game ends: there is a winner, and there are losers. But a MMO just goes on. You'd do better with an analogy of a pen&paper RPG where you can bribe the GM with pizza.
Except in a p&p RPG you usually can bribe the GM with game logs, and it is usually considered "okay". Some game systems even encourage rewarding players that do so! Or pick your other ways of describing "contributing": costume, lighting, music, props/models, or even pizza!
In monopoly, for instance, the dude in his mom's basement gets 1 turn for every turn I get. In a MMO, he gets a lot more "turns" (hours spent in game) than I do. In the MMO arena, however, that is considered fair. In monopoly, giving him extra turns would be considered unfair.
Poker might be a better analogy. Hands of poker end, but then there's another hand for play. Of course, someone who is rich (or foolish) will come to the table with more money than the other players. Is this a problem in poker? Answer: sometimes. Thus some (groups or games) may impose a cap (or not play for real money) on how much money you can bring to the table.
Solution (for MMOs): Make RMT and non-RMT servers. Consumers can then decide which they'd rather play on. In addition, the RMT servers need the company that runs them to facilitate the RMT. They already have your cc #, so just tack it on to monthly fees (or deduct off prepaid time).
A lot of ground to make up... like porting Linux to the AMD processors (or Intel, Sparc as mentioned elsewhere)? Look at the top 500 list's operating system breakdown and you'll find a remarkable amount of Linux.
I'd like to agree to be concerned about the bandwidth, but I'm not sure I can be. Looking at my friendly local supercomputer over the last year, I see the most processor-hours used by 64 proc jobs (33%), followed by 32 proc jobs (27%). If jobs keep fairly consistent on the number of processor cores they use, that's only 2 or 4 nodes. Even increasing the number of cores used you still have fairly few nodes connected to run any given job.
If you spread your data (partition/generate your grid wisely!) and schedule (becoming important in large networks) in a smart way you can make most of your communication happen on a single node, rather than between nodes, and between neighbors rather than across the whole tree.
The most amusing thing to me was that Turbine apparently forgot how to do physics. Their first MMO, Asheron's Call had real collision detection and physics. Sure it was simplified, but it worked. Players could and did form walls to keep monsters from reaching the squishies (non-melees). Or sometimes it was an archer/mage wall, because they didn't suffer from sticky melee, so couldn't be shoved around by their target trying (and failing) to move through them.
On non-PvP servers, players could pass through players -- no griefing by blocking the door. On PvP servers however, players could pass through each other. Of course that problem leads to all sorts of exploits to bypass doors where one guy gets smashed against the door, then logs off. Other toons fill his spot, then he logs back in and gets pushed to the first available space... on the far side of said locked door.
Is more along the lines of what he's thinking. Not that it isn't a technically cool accomplishment.
Your average computer user thinks they have "a gigga hurts of ram." They have no idea if the processor inside their machine is an Intel or an AMD. All this 'amd64' or 'i386' stuff is nothing but garbage in garbage out to them.
.../i386/ (rather than -i386-) for the newbies. Advanced users already know that means "hey there's probably things other than 32-bit Intel 80386 compatible builds available" and will go up one directory to see what's available. Newbies will use what they see.
Distros who want to be newbie friendly should offer one download option: "Here's the (plain old i386) image that will work in the most places possible." Bury an "advanced users click here" in the page. Or even just change your file structure to reflect
So to phrase it as someone else did: if she knows she has a 64-bit AMD processor (not to mention her references to partitions, etc) she isn't a newbie. She knows enough to be dangerous, without knowing enough to realize she's being so.
The real problem is she installed 64-bit without understanding the implications of such. Aka: buggy. If she'd have installed pure 32-bit, it probably would have just worked. Ditto the wine-wrapped picasa.
They expect anyone who pays for the $199 lifetime membership to play for about as many months as anyone who pre-orders and gets the $10/month for life payment plan. At least, assuming the corporation is acting rationally. Otherwise they're either overcharging or undercharging, both of which are a non-ideal state.
Judging how long they run a game on pure "is it profitable" isn't what they'll be doing. They'll judge it on opportunity-cost as well. In order to keep their people working on LOTRO, they're going to give up working on something else. The question is, do they make more money keeping a "profitable" but limping-along-game alive, or do they pull the plug and try something new?
I don't think I can agree it is just another MMO. I did play some of their open beta, but I've not ordered and don't expect to order the game. The ease of leveling leads me to suspect that they are going to be trying to push the story aspect quite a bit harder than most games have. Given that, when they're out of story (and their license for the material is going to dictate this more than anything else), it is time to shut down the game.
Everyone keeps bringing this up as a point "they just want to keep you hooked and paying."
I'm not sure that's the case with LOTRO. The $199 lifetime membership, while steep, has to be a break-even point for Turbine. The other pre-order option is a $10/month lifetime rate, which lets you calculate that at $199 they expect you to play for about 20 months over the lifetime of the game. They've already built in an end to the game. The fact they give a lifetime membership tells you that much. If they are really smart, they're going to run the MMO through the story of ME, and then close it down shortly after the war.
Given a usual rate of expansions (free or paid), you can estimate the story will finish in 3-5 years. In which time the graphics will have started looking fairly dated. Either they'd have to go back and refresh them (lots of art and dev time)... or they could be in their twilight and say, "story's about to be over folks, we're not doing that sorry! But look at our next project: B5 Online!"
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Especially given this is Turbine aka "exploit early, exploit often." They've had one semi-successful games and two flops, one of which closed just after three years.
Mythical Man Month. Read it and you can avoid making silly statements like, "just hire more developers."
I'm under 30, but I'm not sure I'd have heard of him if I hadn't lived in England for a couple of years.
Have you considered that concentrating themselves at wired may be the most useful thing for them to do? Much like the incompetent sysadmin who you'd rather sit in their office and look at porn than try (and fail) to do actual work on important systems.
Lucasarts (* or whatever they are now) really needs to put out another good game in the X-Wing series. TIE-Fighter was great back in the mid 90s. And X-Wing Alliance was great. It looks reasonably nice these days if a bit old. Too bad your wingmen are still stupid as ever in it.
There are some applications that would kill to have a 4 gig solid-state disk widely available that didn't have the limited-writes of flash. I'm thinking of supercomputing specifically. Network booting isn't good when you're talking thousands of nodes, but neither is magnetic spinning disk. Flash would be okay if you really could tightly control your operating system's behavior (Linux could probably handle it, Solaris is a maybe, and OS X is right out).
Ask them to replace the parts. They will. Usually, they won't even charge you for it, nor require the bad part back.
a sp
http://www.lego.com/eng/service/replacementparts.
Worked fantastic for the one bad part from Lego I have ever received. That ranges from the early 80s through today, and yes I still get bricks in fairly high quantity.
I suspect your real problem is that your son has bricks which are not actually Lego bricks. Mega blocks and others try to be like Lego but the quality just isn't there in their bricks. I've been kicking a few out of my collection recently that I found while sorting.
I'd rather they throw away 18 out of every million pieces than raise the cost what it'd take to get down to 1-2 defects per million. Plus if I remember right from the lego history book, the bricks that are defective can be re-molded.
It sure isn't quality. A friend of mine downloaded the free trial they have. He played for an hour or two then uninstalled it because it was that bad. I hit it back in open beta and concluded I wouldn't be buying it.
And how old were any of the non-hobbits who were part of the fellowship of the ring? I'm seeing ages cited that are probably 4-5 times the hobbits age, or far, far more for Legolas.
The same problem happens in D&D campaigns too. You start at 1st level as a X year old foo. You go explore a dungon or few and suddenly you're 5-6th level and more powerful than anyone in the podunk town you started in. How long has passed? Maybe a month? A past DM of mine ran a game that spanned a couple RL years, but in terms of in game years, it was less than one. Probably only a half-year actually. The game ran from starting at 6th to ending at epic around level 25+.
FF is actually pretty good about the age thing in some of their games. FF Tactics comes readily to mind... You in fact start as a total peon with a promising royal military future. Then you lose it and have to start fighting for yourself. Most folks who join you aren't out-and-out gods (other than Cid of course). Actually nobody who joins you is ranked much of anything other than a generic "knight" type rank. Even when Cid joins you, he's lost his rank so despite being "powerful" he comes into the party in a reasonable way.
I can't qualify it as the best of without one of X-wing, TIE Fighter, or X-wing: Alliance. XvT excluded because it was a sucky PoS that didn't play like any of the others -- ships flew "wrong" compared to the other three games in the series. I suppose they are all too graphically "old" to include. To me that says, "time for a new X-wing series game!" but sadly I seem to be the only one.
I know my Jag got a ton of play time back in late high school and early college days for me. (roughly: 1995-1998) Rayman, Alien vs Predator, Tempest 2000, Raiden, and Cannon Fodder were all favorites that saw lots of use. Baldies (CD) was cute and fun when it didn't crash on you. Yeah, there were a bunch of stinkers ("Highlander" comes to mind rapidly. Myst as well because the UI on a low-res TV was so awful.)
Besides, it is worth owning one for the VLM alone. When 5 years have passed I expect to pick up a used Xbox360. No games, just the console and a controller and the VLM3.
I also (in general) really like the Jag controllers. Yes the number key pad is annoying, but they're large enough to be comfy for a long play session and are fairly durable. They will pull out at a slight tug, but I'd rather have the controller fall out than the console get pulled off whereever it was sitting, particularly some of the places I had it balanced in my dorm rooms.
The responsibility for what a child hears/sees/plays falls to the parent and/or legal guardian of that child. Not the federal nor state nor county nor city government (unless they are acting as legal guardian of, for example, an orphan).
Besides, if you want to talk about soft-corn porn or hard-core violence, you'd be much better served by going after the RIAA's mega-stars and cartoons. Or maybe that evil, bulletproof-nudity D&D thing.
Or feel free to stick your head in the sand and cry "save the children."
What's that quote? Ah yes, good old Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
Erosion of the rights of the people is erosion of the rights of the people reguardless of if it is guns, abortion, or games (read: freedom of speech/expression).