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Slashback: Armed, Cracked, Cables 223

Posted by timothy from the timothy-is-out-blowing-things-up dept.
Slashback this holiday evening with just a few quick updates and follow-ups (below) -- I hope those to whom the Fourth of July is a significant holiday are out (responsibly) making things explode.

Nearly anything is better than ribbon cables. aibrahim writes "In the recent /. article about Serial ATA some people wanted to know where SCSI was going, and if Serial ATA could deal with some higher end workstation and low end server requirements. Apparently it has been decided that Serial ATA 2 (pdf doc) and Serial Attached SCSI are the answers."

Because being an American is all about first-person shooters. and i starve writes: "For any of you FPS fans out there who have been champing at the bit to see the newest product of our very own government's attempt at a multiplayer video game since Marine Doom your day has final come. America's Army, which utilizes the Unreal Warfare engine was created and designed by the United States Army and is TOTALLY FREE! go grab it off of File Planet right now!"

Before you hit your "JINGO" button, though, An anonymous reader cautions "In typical Army fashion the release of America's Army is a bust. All the servers are either full or down and the way it's set up, you can't play past the basic training without completing some of the training online. Since you can't connect to any of the servers to complete that training you basically can't play the game at all. What a waste of taxpayer money."

Nobody needs to make any cracks about this. Anonymous Coward writes "According to this CNN Article, [some cracks were] found on Space Shuttle Columbia this week, possibly delaying missions for the remainder of the year. This crack is similar to the crack found on Columbia's sister ships, Atlantis and Discovery. "

Worst pun in relation to this gets no prize.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashback: Armed, Cracked, Cables More

Slashback: Armed, Cracked, Cables

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  • Check out the rules of engagement (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:02PM (#3824329)
    The load will lighten up eventually. Check out the rules of engagement on their site. [americasarmy.com] Will it stop cheating? Not a chance. But maybe they could knock one or two doors down, just for show.

    • Re:Check out the rules of engagement (Score:4, Funny)

      by Patrick13 ( 223909 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:56PM (#3824508) Homepage Journal
      Any and all threats against the server, including attempts to hack, crash, or flood a server, actual or implied, are instant grounds for removal and can result in legal action. Come on, this is the U.S. Army you're messing with! Be smart.

      this made me laugh out loud.

      • Re:Check out the rules of engagement (Score:4, Funny)

        by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday July 05, 2002 @01:35AM (#3825567) Homepage
        You think they're kidding?
        • Q: Why do I keep getting sent to a prison cell?

          A: You have committed a serious ROE (Rules of Engagement) violation. You have been sent to the United States Military Prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. This violation will go on your permanent record. Repeated ROE violations of this degree will result in a player account being temporarily or permanently banned from official servers.

        • Q: What does ROE mean?

          A: ROE stands for Rules of Engagement, which all soldiers must learn and obey while in hostile situations. For America's Army, ROE means not firing upon your fellow U.S. Soldiers, and not attempting to destroy or kill an objective which you are assigned to protect. Every incident of friendly fire will be recorded in your ROE score, including non-fatal shots and grenade damage. If you accumulate an ROE score of over 400 during a single match, you will be kicked off of the server and sent to Leavenworth Prison. Repeated ROE violations will result in your player account being temporarily or permanently banned.

        For those of you who don't realize it, America's Army is operated by U.S. Army Recruiting. If you play it well, you'll probably be hearing from them.

      • Doesn't an attack at a US commercial or governmental
        server make you a terrorist anyway?

        Maybe trying to cheat can give you total immersion to
        this military camp thing.
    • Somehow, mentioning this episode [penny-arcade.com] of Penny Arcade seems appropriate.

  • Heh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Skreech ( 131543 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:03PM (#3824335)

    Crack found in third space shuttle

    You'd think they were getting high enough already...

  • Ribbon cables and the like (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:08PM (#3824348) Homepage Journal
    I have to commend Apple on one thing, it isn't their crap for kernel OSX nor is it their candy-coated, not meant for serious use user interface. The thing that really stands out about Apples is the case design.

    The problem with PC cases is that it is difficult to get into and install components, at least more difficult than it has to be. Apples have the nice fold-out side panel so that opening the box means having all the components open for review right away. All cables are nicely laid so that there isn't the twisting, jumbled, leaning against the CPU and slowly melting ribbon cable problem that afflicts poorly designed PC cases.

    I'm sure that such cases are available for non-Apples, but having been component shopping this past weekend, I can attest to their dearth. Why must PC cases be stuck so far in the past? Can't we learn anything from our friends (not the software people) in Mt. View?
    • Our friends in Mountain View? You mean Silicon Graphics?

    • Easy Access Cases (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Excellent Cases from Antec - http://www.antec-inc.com

      Easy side access, good airflow, and the power supplies get consistently good reviews.

      I love my Antec case.
      • We got one of the large Antec cases at work, it has about sixteen 5 1/4 inch bays. Dual hot swappable power supplies, hot swappable fans(!), overall a great case. Antec knows engineering, and their cases show it.
        • Nah, I've got one of their not-quite-server-but-too-big-for-a-workstation cases. The hard drive bay is held to the case with ticky-tacky plastic tabs on the front. Except they don't quite fit so the drive bay is not quite solidly mounted to the case. And that same hard drive bay holds the lock mechanism for the side door which means the door is not quite held onto the case. Their engineering is better than some I've seen, but still has lots of room for improvement.
      • I'll second this. Mine is great. The 5.25" devices slied out on rails, the 3.5" device cages can be removed with the flick of a little metal lever. The spare drive rails have mounts on the bottom of the case. The thing came with a power supply with two fans and three additional case fans, plus there was room to add one right in the hard drive cage. The thing actually created a draft down near the floor. And the whole thing is really quite quiet.

        Oh, and both the side pannel and the from lock. This is important since my 15 month old daughter just discovered how much fun power switches are.

    • Uh.

      Two thumbscrews, pull-out mobo tray with detachable front panel connectors. PCI/AGP slots with thumbscrews. Purdy gleaming aluminum and blue case lights. I vote for Lian Li. Although my crappy black "Future Case" suits me just fine.

      I have to bunjee cord my mac's to my desk to prevent them from falling over due to their "convenient" handles.

      *growl*

      I know, I know. I'm going to get modded down for responding to flamebait. Hmph.

      -Sara

  • Government learning from industry .... (Score:5, Funny)

    by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:16PM (#3824372) Homepage
    "In typical Army fashion the release of America's Army is a bust. All the servers are either full or down and the way it's set up, you can't play past the basic training without completing some of the training online. Since you can't connect to any of the servers to complete that training you basically can't play the game at all. What a waste of taxpayer money."

    Wow! I applaud the Army's foray into online gaming, they've cloned every aspect of online gaming, kudos! Tomorrow, there will be a patch, the next day, another one, but that one will break your savegames, but that won't matter, because the master server will still be down....

    (Still pissed I can't find a decent roleplaying NWN server....)

  • Army Game Fix... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Skuld-Chan ( 302449 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:17PM (#3824376)
    look in the install dir /system/tours.ini

    make sure the following sections look like this,

    Dependency(0)=-1
    Dependency(1)=-1
    Dependency(2)=-1
    Dependency(3)=-1
    Dependency(4)=-1
    Dependency(5)=-1
    Dependency(6)=-1
    Dependency(7)=-1
    Dependency(8)=-1

    (farther down)

    TourSeq(0)=0
    TourSeq(1)=0
    TourSeq(2)=0
    TourSeq(3)=0
    TourSeq(4)=0
    TourSeq(5)=0
    TourSeq(6)=0
    TourSeq(7)=0
    TourSeq(8)=0

    There - now you can do all the training offline :)

  • US Army == 666 (Score:5, Funny)

    by krs-one ( 470715 ) <.moc.smuroflgnepo. .ta. .civ.> on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:19PM (#3824382) Homepage Journal
    http://www.pcgameworld.com/company.php/id/666 [pcgameworld.com]

    If you go to that link now, you will find that that is the information about the Army game developers. Conviently, it also has the number 666 as its ID in the database.

    Coincidence? I think not! :)

    -Vic

  • America's Army links, taken from bluesnews.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:27PM (#3824415)
    For those who hate fileplanet, click here [americasarmy.com] for Mirrors.

    3dgamers has it here [3dgamers.com]

  • OK (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:27PM (#3824418) Journal
    Apparently it has been decided that Serial ATA 2 (pdf doc) and Serial Attached SCSI are the answers."

    I'm usually a supporter of ATA hard disks in all but the most high end servers, due to the outrageous cost benefits they offer, but this is just stupid.

    SCSI is a far superior technology, there is no denying that. ATA is a hack ontop of a hack, just barely "good enough" in most cases. Only recently have large ATA RAIDs been available, through people like AXUS, Promise, and 3ware, by placing one controller per disk. Another hack on top of a hack, but very cost effective, and it works well.

    If we are going to change our interface anyway, why not get rid of the SCSI vs ATA argument completely and just stick with one or the other?

    I see no need for a serial SCSI and a serial ATA except for reasons of price descrimination against people who think SCSI is more reliable due to supersitions and tech mythology. The HDAs have been the same in many cases for a long time.

    So why not ditch Serial ATA, or ditch serial SCSI, or ditch both and use a mature technology like Fibre Channel (which is already basically serial SCSI).

    I don't see what this fragmentation gets us.

    • fragmentation (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mrgunntm ( 227903 )
      I kind of like the fragmentation of the different standards. the old ones that are no good will fall away in time, but the new ones will always have advancements making them even more versatile.

      For example, my PC has both an IDE expansion (7 IDE devices) and a SCSI card (2 devices) since they don't interfere with each other, i can have up to 24 devices, which is more than i could have with just IDE ATA expansion cards. I rather like the fact that my SCSI card can do 16 devices all on one cable where i have to add a new IDE channel for every 2 ATA drives i want.
      Both hap there ups and downs, but they are well mached ups and downs. if we only had one interface, then we would have downs that we couldn't get past.

      Imagine if noone ever made the PCI interface, and we had to use hacked together ISA connections for all of our add-ons. Noone complains that a new AGP bus is coming out, and complaints are few for other new interfaces. Anything that is better than what we have is, well, better than what we have.

      I can't wait to get more interfaces. But i will always use the old ones, in conjunction. (I happen to /like/ my Syquest SCSI cartridge drive)

      --
      http://www.i9t.net

    • Re:OK (Score:3, Informative)

      by LoRdTAW ( 99712 )
      here the hell do you get that fibre channel is more mature then SCSI when SCSI is about 8-10 years older then it? True Fibre channel is very flexible allowing 127 devices and speeds of 2Gbps but SCSI is more mature and much more a standard then FC. IDE was actually derived from SCSI back in the day to make a cheaper consumer version of scsi (The ATA protocal is also taken from SCSI as well.) Yes FC is a more flexible and competitive solution to scsi but it was never really accepted as a direct interface to the device itself, instead relying on FC-scsi raid bridges to chain multiple tape and raid systems to single or multiple servers.
      FC disks work in a loop or ring topoligy like token ring. Each drives tx port is connected to the next disks rx port creating a non redundent ring (FL-AL uses a double loop for redundency) so if data in a 10 disk system has to be sent from the host adapter then it has to pass through each disk until it reaches the final drive also if one disk is sending allot of data along the bus then other disks will have to fight for bandwidth. so yea 127 devices sounds great but take into concideration all 127 have to fight for 100 or 200mbytes a sec then it isnt so cool anymore. Serial ATA gives you one dedicated 1500Mbps connection which is said to have a top speed of 150Mbytes/sec. Take that into concideration and create an accelerated raid controller with 8 or more of those disks and you easily could have yourself over 100Mbytes of read/write preformance, maybe even close to 200!

      -not edited for grammer or spelling.
      • Arbitrated loop is limited to 127 targets per loop. Most FC drives have two loops for redundancy.

        FC-based arrays are typically configured in switched environments and have effectively no limit to the number of drives/arrays/hosts connected.

        The primary motivation for looking at alternatives to SCSI (i.e. FC & SAS) is, as the speed of the bus increases, the length of cabling decreases and complexity increases. For FC, we're at 2Gb today and quickly heading to 10Gb. Parallel SCSI today is at U320 & headed to U640; pretty much out of steam.

        SAS & SATA are equivalent; you're getting better cabling options. However, it remains to be seen whether the physical HDD specs match between FC/SCSI drives and their ATA/SATA/SAS counterparts.

        It's not just a marketing difference between the two.
      • If you would have payed attention, I was comparing Fibre Channel to the brand new Serial SCSI and ATA, not to traditional SCSI and ATA.
      • I believe the post you were commenting on was referring to Fibre Channel as a mature technology as compared to serial ATA or serial SCSI. Fibre channel is by far and away faster than any other disk arrangements out there, and trumping out the silly FC-AL arguments is old. fibre channel switches do the same for your FC array as a true switch does for your network, compared to a hub. a fully switched mesh for your drives? at 2GB/sec ? I'll take it.

        for that matter, the logic for a FC drive isn't that much worse than a SCSI drive, so you can just pick up the same drives as FC disks... we have piles of them for sun boxes, and they work very well.

        FC-SCSI bridges are mostly used for lower-end storage devices, to cut down on cost. they have some value in the sense that you can have multiple scsi controllers accessing the drives in an enclosure(usually a proprietary setup, but useful) and then backending FC onto that. this allows for massive redundancy and we all know how much it sucks to have a controller blow at 4 am with no backup!

        FC-SCSI bridges are also used for things like tape archives, cheap storage boxes, etc, when you're looking for a way to use that DLT library with your spiffy new SAN.

        Don't mock what you don't understand, please.

      • Re:OK (Score:3, Informative)

        by ivan256 ( 17499 )
        Yes FC is a more flexible and competitive solution to scsi but it was never really accepted as a direct interface to the device itself, instead relying on FC-scsi raid bridges to chain multiple tape and raid systems to single or multiple servers.

        The fibre channel protocol for storage is basically SCSI. SCSI commands are encapsulated in a fibre channel frame. The only reason that Fibre Channel isn't used as a direct interface to the device is that there really aren't many devices out there with Fibre Channel on them. This is likely because Fibre Channel has so many features that the interface is very expensive, and since it's just encapsulated SCSI anyway, it's much cheaper to have a single interface bridge. This is why we have serial ATA for cheap systems instead of just using (serial) Fibre Channel.

        FC disks work in a loop or ring topoligy like token ring. Each drives tx port is connected to the next disks rx port creating a non redundent ring (FL-AL uses a double loop for redundency) so if data in a 10 disk system has to be sent from the host adapter...

        Nobody does this. There are three topologies for Fibre Channel: Arbitrated Loop, Point to Point, and Fabric/Switched. Even if people did use the arbitrated loop topology, it doesn't quite work how you described. There is no fighting for bandwidth (That's what the "arbitrated" part is for), and there is no proceesing of other devices data from the loop. It's basically just repeated. In real life, however, only the point to point and switched topologies are used.

        127 devices sounds great but take into concideration all 127 have to fight for 100 or 200mbytes a sec then it isnt so cool anymore.

        First of all, in switched mode, there are considerably more then 127 devices supported. The device ID on the fabric is 16 bits, and each storage unit is speaking SCSI, so there can be 256 LUNs per device. That's alot of disks. Secondly, most fibrechannel switches have way more then 2Gb/s backplane bandwidth. so you're only fighting for that 100-200MB/s if multiple machines on the storage network are trying to access the same storage. Third, in a single system situation, you're not going to have hundreds of disks, and finally, if you did you'd have the same problem with serial ATA.
    • the reason we have both is money vs. performance.

      If they go with SCSI, many drive(i.e. nearly all IDE drives) won't qualify to be SCSI, and thats to expensive.
      If they go with ATA, people who need the performance increase will be pissed, and sue.

      "I see no need for a serial SCSI and a serial ATA except for reasons of price descrimination against people who think SCSI is more reliable due to supersitions and tech mythology. "

      It would be wiser if you didn't expound your ignorance so loudly.

      SCSI uses less processor, transfers more data, and can be use up to 12 meters of cable, you can put significantly more devises on a bus, and the fastest SCSI disk is faster then the fastest ATA disk. It is not superstition, it is fact.

      I have written code for SCSI and ATA, So I have experience with these issues.

      You want medium quality, and low costs, thats fine, but some people want high quality and are willing to pay for it.

      You know what really cracks me up? some over clocker who spends 3 days to get every cycle possible, spend 100 bucks on a cooling system, and still runs an IDE system.

  • Been playing the Army Ops from morning (Score:4, Funny)

    by cOdEgUru ( 181536 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:33PM (#3824436) Homepage Journal
    Its commmendable that they got it out pretty early, rather than making us wait for years (Duke Nukem). But there are a couple of things which are a bit funny.

    After picking up your rifle, if I head off straight to the firing range, boom, the game brings me back in to face the seargeant. After this has happened a couple of times, I kinda loitered around the place after picking up my rifle, And bingo!, the Seargent asks me to move my butt, and I am placed in front of the firing range.

    Interestingly, if you pick up your rifle, load up a clip and decide to get rid of the snappy sergeant, then you still could. But a moment later, you are in a 4x4 cell with a cot and a couple of books and could pretty much hear some one playing some musical instrument in the next cell. I guess there were others who tried the same thing.

    So there are a couple of issues like the server being unresponsive (thousands of wannabe soldiers trying to connect) and the game not being as colorful as the unreal series. But hey, the realism of the game is what gets me. That and the fact that I scored 36 out of 40 in the Test Firing range. Do you think the US Army would hire sharpshooters based on this score ? :)
  • Uncle Sam wants you to go and frag those biznatches!
  • From the serial SCSI faq [serialattachedscsi.com]
    It will provide universal interconnect with Serial ATA, while offering logical SCSI compatibility ... Serial Attached SCSI customers do have the option of using lower cost Serial ATA devices in a native Serial Attached SCSI environment (upwards compatibility is supported).

    They're using the same physical layer as Serial ATA and doing SCSI on top. A new computer industry standard does the opposite of gratuitous incompatibility (gratuitous compatibility?) and probably makes things *more* convenient. What a pleasant surprise!

  • Just how realistic is it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by flacco ( 324089 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:52PM (#3824498)
    For example, will I be able to shoot myself in the foot and get off the front line if I get scared?

  • America's Army... (Score:3, Funny)

    by I Want GNU! ( 556631 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:54PM (#3824501) Homepage
    The government of the United States presents this great first person shooter to you, bundled with your own personalized version of Magic Lantern! I mean, all you're doing is going around shooting people, it's not like they'd want to spy all over your computer. Just don't tell Osama, I hope he downloads it and they catch him!

  • Not that I endorse it (Score:3, Funny)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @08:56PM (#3824505) Homepage
    > words such "gay" or "jew" will not be tolerated

    This is going to be weird for most FPS fans. From personal experience, thats like, 90% of the vocabulary used in Quake 3 online.

    Where are the parents? Or maybe they dont care. :(
    • This is going to be weird for most FPS fans. From personal experience, thats like, 90% of the vocabulary used in Quake 3 online.

      Where are the parents? Or maybe they dont care. :(

      As an avid quake3er, I can attest to this, as I am one of the biggest offenders out there. I pay $70 for crappy DSL that won't get me under 100 ping on any server in the known universe, and I cannot swear at all around real people. SO I take my frustrations out on the unsuspecting "virtual people" on Jolt1 in the UK. I'm trying to knock off some of the more filthy things, but some of my favorite things to say are:

      "That was worse than giving Chewbacca a blowjob!" when my team gets owned 8 - 0 ...and pretty much anything with 'crap' in it, such as:
      Craptastic, craptacular, crapulous, crappity crap crap crap, etc. :)

      As for my parents, well seeing as I am 26, they live on the other side of town. And when dad is stuck in rush hour, mom is cooking dinner, and junior is "doing his homework," I'll bet the parents are trusting their kids to be polite and not looking over their shoulders every minute of every day.

      When I have kids and internet access, you're darn right I am going to filter and log all kinds of crap, and moderate my children's usage whenever necessary... but who has time to sit over their kid's shoulder while gaming to make sure they don't say "You stupid jew fag!" :P

      -[H]olyGeekboy
  • If this really is a true simulation of the US military, wouldn't that mean it might give away information on our army to anyone in the world that might want to know this intelligence? This worries me, I hope they didn't include any sensitive information in it.

    • Good point but... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ObviousGuy ( 578567 )
      If you fear bin Laden or Al Queda I think you're taking the threat a little too seriously. Since the attack on Tora Bora [washingtonpost.com] there simply haven't been any new bin Laden videos [defenselink.mil] with actual new footage of the man himself [snopes2.com].

      On the other hand, America's enemies are not simply limited to crazy Arabic peoples [umd.edu] bitter about America's hegemony. They include a very wary China [cia.gov], a not quite mentally stable North Korea [prideofkorea.com], and a beaten but not cowed Iraq [cnn.com]. The thing is, though, that they likely already have our secrets [fas.org]. So basically, it's way too late to worry about the possibility that this game is going to give away military secrets.
      • I agree that it is frightening about the nuclear secrets. Still, China having them wouldn't do too much in my opinion, since they already have enough nukes in my opinion. I guess some nukes might be stronger, but I sort of thing of nukes as nukes. Plus, there is the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that will keep most nuclear countries (China mainly) from attacking us (aside from North Korea). Hopefully India and Pakistan will soon catch on to MAD before blowing each other up.

        I think that conventional war tactics are the more likely ones to be used in wars with this type of country if we have a war with them.
  • it's called Fibre Channel [cinonic.com]. 'SAS' digresses. SCSI should rightfully die as a transport. Fibre channel already transports SCSI-3, TCP/IP, and others over a single pair loop configuration similar to ethernet. 'Infiniband' will be the forth coming 10GB general replacement for Fibre Channel...

    Serial ATA is of course a joke. What should be done is to standardize a basic non-SCA cabling scheme and spec for 'consumer' rated Fibre Channel, instead of going on with this ridiculous ATA bullshit. (Like SCSI should have been standardized on years ago.)
    • it's called Fibre Channel [cinonic.com]

      Fibre channel? I don't think so. Fibre channel is dying out, and is being replaced by GigE and Gig10E. Fibre channel suffers tremendously from lack of standards, low production volume and high costs.

      • Dying out? Don't think so. The FC transport being spoken about is FCP or SCSI over fibre channel. Block transfer, not file transfer.

        iSCSI is the competing block transport over TCP/IP is the competing technology over Gig-E. Not really a market reality. IBM pulled their iSCSI Array off the market and other vendors such as SUNW are rethinking their iSCSI strategy.

        However, there's lots going on in Fibre Channel. Take a look at http://www.spinnakernet.com/news/infostor/san_to_n as.html
        for a look at Storage Area Networks, Network Attached Storage, and storage virtualization.
      • Fibre Channel is dying out? Huh? Do you actually deal with high-end storage?
        • first or all, 2Gb FC is already being used, with 10Gb on the way. That's plenty if you use it correctly.
        • Don't forget that current SAN design involves FC Switched Fabric, which is to FC-Arbritrated Loop as a Ethernet Switch is to a Hub. (No, you can't have one, unless you sell your car first.)
        • in current FC disk subsystems, the disks use FC-AL for their local connection. That's more than enough bandwidth for an array of physical disks, and high-end controllers support multiple loops.
        • Comparisons between FC-AL and Token Ring are only superficially correct. At the bit level, there's far less overhead, and no token-passing delays.
        • This has been said earlier, but bears repeating: FC is a transport-level standard. At the physical level, it can run on copper (short runs), or fibre. At higher levels, it commonly carries SCSI-3 and IP, but could carry anything else e.g. IPX, SNA, MIDI, whatever, if someone implements it.

        Gigabit Ethernet is not currently a replacement for FC by any means, I'm afraid, unless you discount the whole SAN concept. I think I still have a few years left before I need to think about switch careers (again)...

        • Thank you for trotting out the cluestick.
        • Do you actually deal with high-end storage?

          Yes, actually I just finished installing a 10 TB EMC setup. While it uses FC internally, there is no block mode transfer to external applications in this setup, and everything outside the EMC equipment is GigE. The fact is that NAS is much more widely used than SAN, and a pure NAS installation does not use FC. In addition NAS vendors are encroaching on the SAN market by adding SAN features to their ethernet transport layers. With the commodity pricing of GigE (and soon 10GigE) I expect that what we currently know as SAN will disappear. As that happens so will FC.

      • Fibre channel? I don't think so. Fibre channel is dying out, and is being replaced by GigE and Gig10E. Fibre channel suffers tremendously from lack of standards, low production volume and high costs.

        GigE is based on fibre channel. The physical layer was lifted directly from the fibre channel spec. Ethernet doesn not have the features necissary to be a good storage interconnect. Fibre Channel has many, well defined standards. There is a high production volume. (Almost every enterprise storage solution available has FC)

        Fibre Channel is not a good alternative for Serial ATA. Fibre Channel supports way too many things, and the average interface chip is larger then most x86 northbridges. Hardly cost/power/space effective.

  • It's ok... the army is allowed to do that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SailorFrag ( 231277 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @09:28PM (#3824584) Homepage
    I find this an interesting contrast to the past few years where people have tried various things ranging from restricting sales of violent games (especially FPSs) to banning them outright, with claims that they were causing kids to want to kill each other.

    So the US Army comes along and makes a violent FPS. Why aren't they complaining? Apparently it's bad if Id does it, but it's alright for the army.

    Who are they expecting needs to be faught against, anyway?

  • Army HW Support (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jeepsta ( 585345 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @09:33PM (#3824597)
    Ok so now I cant even play this game b/c my voodoo card is unsupported. Seems you cant use any voodoo 1/2/3 cards....bullshit! So I guess i wont try it out.

    • Re:Army HW Support (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Maybe because Voodoo cards are absolutely and undeniably crap? nVidia and even Matrox killed those worthless lines of "graphics" cards years ago. Sure, the Voodoo was neat when they hit the market at first, but as soon as nVidia showed up, the Voodoos were just braindead piles of junk in comparison.

      No offense, dude, but complaining that a new game doesn't support your shitty Voodoo card holds about as much weight as me complaining that my old audio cassette recorder I used with a TRS-80 back in the day to store my programs isn't supported by Win2K on my P4. Maybe if 3dfx hadn't taken so many years to even make a stab at fully supporting a standard like OpenGL (instead of their f'ing moronic "glide" shit with the first few Voodoos), they wouldn't have been slaughtered by the companies that had a clue from the start.
      • Dont get my wrong.....I do agree with you. They are crap, but there are a bunch of people out there that still have them. Even if the game ran like shit it would still be nice to be able to see it in action. Being the college student that I am, I just dont have $300 - $400 just hanging around to throw at a nice video card. I would just like to see some support for the VooDoo cards even though they are crap.

        • Re:Army HW Support (Score:2, Insightful)

          by bogie ( 31020 )
          get a GF4MX for $73 or better yet a Radeon 8500 from Newegg for $99. Heck even a GF2Ti is only ~$60. Buy any one of those cards and you can play any game out there now. Even the older GF2 plays UT2003 well at 800x600 Medium detail.
          If you want to be a gamer you gotta spend money sometime.
        • A nice video card costs $50-$150 dollars.
    • Thats fine. you want to stick with older techology, no one will force you to play.
      I'm sure you won't miss doom 3 either.
  • What happened, did the astronaut's bend over wear'n plumber's pants?

  • More about the art director... (Score:5, Informative)

    by writermike ( 57327 ) on Thursday July 04, 2002 @10:06PM (#3824680)
    For what it's worth, I know the art director on the Army Game project very well. Luke Ahearn is a real class act and will listen to any concerns you guys have.

    I used to work with him several years ago when he ran Goldtree Enterprises. They created Cylindrix and Dead Reckoning. They also released a number of FRPG utilities to help GMs run games. The web site is still online [goldtree.com].

    Review of Cylindrix [gamespot.com]

    Review of Dead Reckoning [gamesdomain.com]

    It's really a pleasure to see the fruits of labor finally. Army Game has been pretty hush-hush since Luke left New Orleans for the project.
  • This is actually a ploy to pluck out people who the US government thinks are a security risk - what better way than with a video game? you can assess players tactical ability, skills, reflexes, and more importantly, what makes them tick. Also they are in league with microsoft :)
  • I'm having a helluva time downloading it. All the mirrors I can find are swamped too. I've managed to pull maybe 80 meg of it to a machine at work that's hanging off a T3, but even that's been painful. The servers keep dropping the connection, and if it wasn't for resumable downloads, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

    Anybody know of a "reliable" mirror?
  • You don't have to wait in line at FilePlanet. Use the mirrors [americasarmy.com].
    • the mirrors at

      shacknews [shacknews.com] are quite good, and not overloaded.

      Also, instead of using Gamespy Arcade to find servers to play on, plain old Gamespy [gamespy3d.com] works better and isn't full of ads in your face. Unfortunately the protocol is closed ("powered by gamespy") or something so All Seeing Eye doesn't work with it.
  • http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=army_download [nvidia.com]

    I've had the best luck with the split files.
    Search for These files on Kazaa:

    Army.1 (19.5MB)
    Army.2 (19.5MB)
    Army.3 (19.5MB)
    Army.4 (19.5MB)
    Army.5 (19.5MB)
    Army.6 (19.5MB)
    Army.7 (19.5MB)
    Army.8 (19.5MB)
    Army.9 (19.5MB)
    Army.10 (13.5MB)
    Merge.bat (1KB)

    run the merge batchfile to combine downloads
    • Except that there are 11 split files. 10 isn't the last one. There's an 11th (~13.5 meg) which isn't linked to on the nvidia web page, but is there nonetheless.

      Don't believe me--take a look at Merge.bat.

      *IF* you can get through to their ftp server you can get all 11. So far I've had mixed luck with it. Right now I just need to get the tail end of 3 and I'm done, but I've been hand-coddling the connection, noting when it has totally stalled and cut it to resume, etc. Royal pain in the ass.

      • Good eye!
        I didn't catch that missing 12th file (army.11)

        The file is on their site, but the link is missing.

        Here it is: [nvidia.com]
        http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/Army/Split_ fi les/Army.11

        If you keep having trouble with the mirrors, try a peer2peer search.
        The files are already showing up on Kazaa.
  • I have never seen a video game so aptly demonstrate what goes terribly wrong when you try to get anything done with an overfunded bureaucracy. Kudos to the developers! :)

    Actually from what little I can tell from the training missions (since I can't get on an fscking server), it looks like it could be really good. If only they had either:

    1) insured that there were plenty of good servers
    2) dropped the silly requirement of playing one map before you could play the others

    Should be interesting to see how they handle this. I'm sure it will be handled in an amply bureaucratic and ineffective way.

  • subscriptsions (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Twillerror ( 536681 )
    For all of you out there that aren't signed up for slashdot subscription ( I'm one them ) it's time to relize the benefit of the model.

    I'm a subscriber to gamespot complete. As a member I get access to their download network. Honestly I forget the name of the provide, someone please respond with it.

    Anyways, I was queued for the download before it was released. The second is was, I was first in line for it. I got home for my 4th festivities to find it waiting for me.

    Just think of it as a magazine subscriptions with benifits. Sign up for you favorite site!!, put your $ where you mouth is
  • Interestingly, it appears that the Army game uses Ogg Vorbis for sound...
    In the system folder of its directory I see the files vorbis.dll and vorbisfile.dll.
    If that's the case, I think it's pretty cool...
    Now if only they dropped the whole Windows thing :)

  • get some perpective (Score:2, Informative)

    by stud9920 ( 236753 )
    What a waste of taxpayer money
    Yeah ! That game cost like what ? One million dollars (flame me, it may be five as far as I care)?

    With that money they could have killed extra terrrorists ! They could have bought 1000 murderous machine guns, 1/1500th of a bloody B2 bomber [businessweek.com], 1/20th of an Apache helicopter [outpost-of-freedom.com] or 1/736th of an intercontinental nuke [villainsupply.com].

    I mean, get some perspective. That's even less money they can spend killing people or they can use to fund terrorists [msnbc.com]
  • is IP, of course. See the IP Storage set of standards-in-development that includes iSCSI (IPS charter here [ietf.org]).
    Etherhet cabling is much cheaper than all the other stuff out there, and with 10G Ethernet just standardized, it goes faster too.
  • I can't/am too lazy to find an article now but it's interesting how they set it up so your always on the US army team and the other team is always the terrorists. Intestesting how that actually adds to the realism in a way because in the eyes of both teams they are always the good guys defending their country and their way of life against the evil forgein terrorists.

    On a side note I think actually making the game is a brilliant move by the army. From the sounds of it it cost somewhere around 5-7 million which is fairly small compared to most advertising campaigns. Combine that with the fact that it is free HUGE numbers of people will download it and it could easily become the most widely played FPS considering the fact that it is a retail quality game and it's free. Imagine Toyota put out a Need for Speed style racing game like this? Just by putting their name at the begainning like any game company does they will get a lot of loyalty from geeks everywhere which will be certainly be a lot more effective than any ad campaign. People tend to like you a lot more when you are directly giving them something very entertaining for free that usually costs money, than when you are just shoving ads in their face.

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