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Games

An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71

Posted by Soulskill from the hate-to-see-the-power-bill dept.
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."
Government

Voting Machines and 'Calibration Drift' 217

Posted by Soulskill from the if-it's-not-one-thing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tuesday saw elections for school boards and city officials throughout Kansas. In Saline, ES&S voting machines in several locations were 'mis-calibrated,' and when the voter touched next to one candidate's name, the 'x' appeared next to another one. One person I talked to said he tried to vote three times before going to the 80-something-year-old election worker, who told him 'It was doing that earlier, but I thought I fixed it.' From the story in today's Salina Journal: 'The iVotronic machines used in Saline County are sold by Elections Systems and Software. In October, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law notified 16 secretaries of state, including Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, that the machines are known to record votes to the wrong candidate.' The county does calibrate the machines the day before each election, but, '... in conversations with ES&S on Thursday, [the county clerk] was told that the calibration might change during the day. "What they've seen is calibration drift on a unit," Merriman said. "They're fine in the morning, but by afternoon they're starting to lose their calibration."' There was also coverage of the problems when they occurred two days ago."

Comment Re:wow,big mistake. (Score 1) 638

by Ixan (#24436971) Attached to: Blizzard Tries To Forbid Open Sourcing Glider

1) Don't let anyone mine/pick anything that there skill level makes gray to them.

You obviously haven't raided much. The repair bot requires adamantite bars, which among other places comes from Adamantite Deposit, grey at level 70.

2) put some random drift into movement.

You ever been to barrens? Ever done barrens without autorun?

3) limit the price you can sell something for on the AH to 10 times what a vendor would pay

Then you'll have to nerf gold rewards from quests, loot, dailies etc and hence accomplish nothing but removing a couple of zeroes from everything.

4) don't allow the transfer of more then 100GP a time. Maybe a one time unlimited amount per month.

Let's skim the surplus and divert it to the orphanage

All of these would be pretty trivial to implement.

Just like linked auction houses, cross-realm battlegrounds, character transfers, pve->pvp transfers and so on.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

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