Comment ASUS RT-16N / DD-WRT (Score 5, Informative) 334
I recently put an RT-16N in service in my office running DD-WRT. As the the Internet sez, the stock firmwire is crap, but this thing flies while running DD-WRT.
An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71
An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting:
"At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."
Comment Re:Firefighting (Score 1) 735
I've been the poor schmo carrying the pager. (Government job: Didn't get paid to carry the pager, but, if I got called in, was paid for a minimum of 2 hours regardless of how long I was there and the time was either OT or part of my 40 hours.) I'm currently a volunteer EMT in my local FD and have many friends who are career firefighters. The lawyer is *SO* off-base with his analogy. Paid FFs are paid for their time in station. They are not paid for the small (depending on location) percentage of time that they are off saving the world. They're paid to train, watch TV, train some more, sleep, train just a bit more, and -- yeah -- respond when the tones go off.
As a volunteer, I carry a pager. If it goes off (EMS-side), I respond if I can. If I can't, someone else has it covered. I put in my 40 for The Man. Then I put in another 10-15/wk because I want to. My brothers who volunteer at my station and are career down the road do the exact same thing. I get paid for when I'm ON-DUTY. They get paid for when they're ON-DUTY. For me, on-duty is sitting at my desk coding. For them, on-duty is either available-in-quarters, available-in-district, training, or on the scene. Their 40 is a bit different than mine. The point, though, is that duty hours are duty hours.
As a volunteer, I carry a pager. If it goes off (EMS-side), I respond if I can. If I can't, someone else has it covered. I put in my 40 for The Man. Then I put in another 10-15/wk because I want to. My brothers who volunteer at my station and are career down the road do the exact same thing. I get paid for when I'm ON-DUTY. They get paid for when they're ON-DUTY. For me, on-duty is sitting at my desk coding. For them, on-duty is either available-in-quarters, available-in-district, training, or on the scene. Their 40 is a bit different than mine. The point, though, is that duty hours are duty hours.
Comment Re:As a matter of accounting.... (Score 5, Insightful) 205
There is a fundamental difference between an ATM and a voting machine, though. In an ATM, you MUST keep track of the user who was standing at the machine doing the transaction. With a voting machine, you MUST NOT keep track of who is standing at the machine at any given time. Doing so could leak information about how that person voted.
And, as has been proven, a company that can do one well can real screw up the other (hint: begins with a 'D' and rhymes with "re-told").
-J
And, as has been proven, a company that can do one well can real screw up the other (hint: begins with a 'D' and rhymes with "re-told").
-J
Robot Swarm Shifts Heavy Objects 142
holy_calamity writes "A swarm of robots has been demonstrated that can get together to transport an object too heavy for a single bot. Each robot is loaded with the same simple set of behaviors but more complex intelligence emerges from a group interacting. Two videos show the robots in action, and using a more complex behavior necessary when they're set to short sighted mode and can't see the target location from the starting point."
Charter Flight Websites / Services? 1020
X86Daddy asks: "TSA's latest announcement banning all fluids (toothpaste even) from carry-on luggage is the icing on a very sour cake. Many passengers are growing tired of the invasive security screenings, the increasing prices, lost and stolen luggage, and the decreasing quality of service with commercial flights in the United States. However, given the geographical size of this country and the lack of rail options, flight remains the only practical method of travel for most destinations. Can anyone suggest alternative flight services? Are there websites that connect Cessna or other small scale air charter services with interested passengers? I've found CharterX and CharterHub but they seem more geared toward executives looking for jets. Does anyone have experience traveling this way? Is the price point a lot higher, making this a dumb idea (just resign myself to buying toiletries at every destination and prepare for the mandatory anal probes in '07)?"
The Next Three Days are the x86 Days 589
Pinky wrote in to note that "Today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this:
2/8/6
3/8/6
4/8/6
like the x86 computers :-)" And yes folks, in the August news cycle vortex, even this strikes my fancy. In recent years we've seen numerical giants like 3/1/4, 6/6/6 and 1/2/3, but now really, what do any of us have to look forward to? Is our future dull and meaningless without cool numbers in dates? Oh the humanity of it all ...
Comment Re:how do you upgrade persistent objects? (Score 1) 143
First, the object has to have been designed with upgrade in mind, so that you can transfer data from the old object to the new. Given that, here's how the upgrade occurs:
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The upgrader stuns the old object by waiting until the old object is idle and demanding a fault capability to it. At this point, the old object is frozen and cannot be invoked by anyone else.
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The upgrader now clones the process nodes of the old object's process. In effect, we have just copied the old object into a new process.
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The upgrader now installs into the old process a new address space: the address space for the new object. It then sets the old process registers to the appropriate startup values to give the new object a chance to initialize itself. It also places a capability to the old object into a well-defined register in what is now the new object's process. Note that we've now effectively done a complete brain transplant on the original process. All holders of the old object still have capabilities to this process, which is now obeying new code.
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The upgrader now lets the transplanted process start running. During initialization, the new object uses its capability to the old object to transfer any necessary data from the old object and then tells the old object to destroy itself.
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Finally, the new object returns to the null capability, becoming available for new invocations.
It all sounds much more complicated than it is. Most of this can be built in a library.
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