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Fonality launches trixbox Appliance, Asterisk-based VoIP PBX
Like Asterisk? Been waiting to take it to work with you as a VoIP PBX? Enter Fonality's trixbox Appliance, a new small business-grade rack-mounted server good for providing phone service for up to 500 nodes via VoIP, E1/T1, and 48 analog lines. Admins can look forward to the AsteriskNow GUI or the trixbox's own, running atop Linux, (with the usual Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.); users can look forward to the usual intra-office voice systems, including perks like voicemail-to-email, and the like; middle-management can look forward to staying within budget when signing off on the $1000 base price tag. Silly wabbit, trixboxes are for VoIP nerds.
NC State engineer crafts academic cluster with PlayStation 3s
While universities have been cranking out supercomputers and research clusters for some time, an associate professor at NC State is utilizing IBM's highly-touted Cell processor in a slightly different form to craft his own farm. Similar to the Xbox Linux cluster from years past, this concoction consists of eight PlayStation 3 consoles networked together and powered via Linux in order to handle ridiculous amounts of number crunching. Dubbed the "world's first" PS3-based academic cluster, the creation boasts the ability to utilize "64 logical processors," and is set to be used to handle various research tasks when sly CSC students aren't firing up a round of Ridge Racer 7 after hours. Nevertheless, Dr. Frank Mueller noted that the biggest limitation in its current state is the "512MB RAM constraint," but did insinuate that he might try retrofitting additional memory if future tasks deemed it necessary. Still, we can't help but wonder how many spots the Pack could jump in the RIAA's Most Wanted list if this thing became a dedicated torrent server.[Via TWW]
Serverskine - Web Design Account Manager
The whole Moleskine craze has left me somewhat mystified (it's a notebook, it has a pocket, okay, that's cool I guess...). Anyway, here's a different 'skine that makes a bit more sense to me. The guys over at the Sentinel Design Group designed Serverskine for their own use. It's a little application "designed to allow web developers, who deal with many projects at once, quick access to FTP, hosting accounts, domain name accounts and more." Basically it keeps all your account information in the same place and even integrates with Mail.app for quickly sending info to others. It's a niche product, but one that might be very useful to anyone with a bunch of accounts, and best of all it's a free download.[Via FreeMacWare]
The death of console game servers
The fine cranks over at Curmudgeon Gamer have pointed out a somewhat disturbing trend of server shutdowns for some high profile online-enabled games from the last generation. Apparently, the online user base for these games is no longer sufficient to justify the expense for the companies running their servers. It's a little bit troubling to consider that there's an effective time limit for the online features of any console game you buy, and that this limit is totally at the discretion of the publisher. Then again, it's hard to ask a company to continue to devote resources for servers that few people are using and fewer still will likely use in the future. The solution seems obvious to us -- let players host their own servers, either through a PC or through the console itself. The online experience might suffer a bit, but at least interested players will still be able to play online without being a burden on the publisher. Failing that, follow the Curmudgeon's suggestion bring back the direct connection, player-to-player multiplayer that was available on the Dreamcast. Either way, don't take away our online play. Previously: Amplitude servers going offline, 'farewell party' Sunday
New Mac OS X 10.4.9 client and Server builds seeded to developers
A little TUAW birdie has informed us that a new series of Mac OS X 10.4.9 client and server builds have been seeded to developers. The build versions are as follows: Mac OS X v10.4.9 (Intel) Build 8P2132, Mac OS X v10.4.9 (PowerPC) Build 8P132, Mac OS X Server v10.4.9 (Universal) Build 8P2132 Manual Updater, Mac OS X Server v10.4.9 (PowerPC) Build 8P132 Manual Updater. While the client build has a significant list of changes (104 to be exact), the Server build reportedly has absolutely zero. This isn't necessarily indicative of an imminent release, but a lack of changes for at least one build could offer some hope. Unfortunately, we don't have a list of what these changes are right now, so we might wind up knowing just as soon as you do.
Amplitude servers going offline, 'farewell party' Sunday
Before Guitar Hero there was FreQuency. After FreQuency came 2003's sequel Amplitude. Harmonix's Sean Baptiste dropped us a note to let us (let you) know that Sony is pulling the plug on Amplitude's servers this coming Monday, February 26. Baptiste is organizing the final "shindig," currently scheduled for Sunday, February 25, at 7pm EST. All are welcome!Reminder: this will be your last chance to download user-created remixes from the Remix Repository.
Interact-TV unveils MyTellyHD Linux-based media server
While Interact-TV is no stranger to the media center arena, the company is taking a diversion from its previous PMP / storage-based offerings to unveil a fully-featured Linux-based media center for your AV rack. Aside from sporting a sleek, almost space-aged design, the unit can play back / save DVDs to your video library, automatically lookup DVD cover art and meta data, burn recorded TV shows to DVD, import video files from a networked PC, output in 480i or 720p, and handle AVI, DivX, MPEG1/2/3/4, WMV, JPEG, Cinepak, DV, QuickTime, RealMedia, H.263, and H.264 formats. Moreover, this box offers up a thorough audio / photo management system, one-touch recording as a PVR, and access to a bevy of extraneous information via the Telly Portal. As if this weren't enough, you'll also find an upscaling DVD player within, and if you're curious about the components running the show, there's 512MB of RAM, up to a 400GB hard drive, dual-layer DVD burner, six-channel audio, component / S-Video / composite outs, NTSC TV tuner, IR trackball remote, optional wireless keyboard, gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, USB 2.0, and a complete lack of fans due to the passive cooling system. Vista may be getting most of the limelight on this day in particular, but the MyTellyHD packs quite a wallop for a low-key Linux HTPC, and considering the fairly low $899 starting price point, there's not much to grumble about on this one.
The Burning Crusade: Lag and Instability
The vast amount of coverage I have seen on The Burning Crusade rollout has been positive. I'm having very negative experiences. For the first time since I started playing Warcraft I got to bed early last night. Not because a raid got cancelled, or because I was tired, but because I couldn't actually do anything.Every quest spawn in Outlands was camped. As a warlock, I'd typically get a couple DoT's on a mob, and some warrior would charge it. DoT's don't tag mobs until they do damage. It was taking, oh, 20-30 seconds for DoT's to tick because of the breathtaking lag. So I'd do about half the damage on the mob, the warrior would do the other half and get all the quest credit. Excellent. At least I was still out mana for the cast.So I rolled a new Draeni. Every quest spawn in the Draeni starting zone was camped. As a mage, I'd typically get 8 seconds into a 10 second frostbolt cast (did I mention it was laggy?) and a shaman would earth shock the mob, and I'd kill it half and get no credit. Nobody wanted to group, because of the XP penalty. The Outlands and the new starting zones are all on the same server. How do I know that? They all crash together. So I went back to my warlock, back to Outlands, and decided to get a guild group together to try the Ramparts. We zone in, the server crashes. Twice. Before the first pull.Then I get clever. I go to bed early, use flextime for the early in-early out and get home at 4. That would give me 3 hours of playtime before prime time. And they rebooted the servers this afternoon. I got 20 minutes in before the waves of crashes started again. I'm moving one of my level 60's over to a different server. A server that isn't crashing the outlands over and over and over again. Maybe I'll hit 70 there. Because it's not happening on my main server. So far this patch has been a uniformly horrible experience for me. Anyone else having bad experiences? Vent (but keep it civil) below.
Seagate unveils "world's fastest" 2.5-inch 15k RPM hard drive
Ah, companies and their bragging rights. Looks like today's self-proclaimed champion is none other than Seagate, as the firm has claimed that its newly-unveiled 2.5-inch Savvio hard drive spins quicker than any other drive on the block. The Savvio 15K expands upon the existing 2.5-inch "SAS enterprise hard drive series" with a pair of new 15,000 RPM models that could theoretically fit inside a laptop, but are clearly designed for blade servers and enterprise applications. As expected, these drives are built on perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR), and are only available in sizes of 36GB and 73GB, which is (understandably) smaller than the 146GB option in the 10K Savvio. Seagate claims that these diminutive speed demons consume 25-percent less power than the company's 3.5-inch Cheetah 15K.4 drives, offer 10-percent faster seek time, and provide 40-percent faster sustained data transfer rates. Seagate declined to mention hard details in regard to pricing, but did state that customers would face "a premium" for the newfangled speed, but hey, you gotta pay to play.
Cyberlink unveils streaming media software: Digital Home Enabler Kit
While most folks would probably take the hardware-based media streaming approach to get computer / HDD-based media onto their snazzy HD sets, Cyberlink is offering up a reasonable software-based alternative for those looking to pass media around from PC to PC (or HTPC). By installing Cyberlink's Media Server on your media-packed computer, it provides a hassle-free way to open up your files to the home network and share them easily with other connected users. Aside from allowing any UPnP-certified player to locate media across the network, it also supports multiple simultaneous users so long as each connected PC is outfitted with a copy of the firm's SoftDMA application. Although nothing here is truly revolutionary, it does offer up a fairly straightforward approach to achieving the "digital home," and you can pick this up (or download, actually) for $79.95 right now, which will include two SoftDMA licenses to get you going.
Realm Splitting?
According to a post by Tseric on the World of Warcraft General Forum Blizzard may decide that certain largely overpopulated worlds need to be split, and Blizzard has created a mandatory world split procedure and is testing it on Hellscream. The way the process would work is that a user would log on, be prompted to choose one of two worlds, and when split day happens will be moved. Players that don't choose a world to move to would be moved to the same world as their guild master, if they aren't in a guild they'd be moved with the rest of their arena team, and if they aren't in either a guild or an arena team Blizzard will pick. Also, Blizzard may override your choice of a destination if the problem that caused the split isn't being resolved.They've got some good reasons for doing this, but I can see a lot of very bad things coming out of this. Guilds getting split up, friends getting split up, guild alliances getting torn apart. The reaction in guild chat when someone brought it to our attention was very negative, but I'm torn. I've seen what long queue times do to gameplay and raid attendance. What do you think? Do the good results outweigh the consequences of moving people around?
Microsoft launching Windows home server product at CES
We know there's been a bit of speculation this way or that as to whether Microsoft would launch a home (media) server version of Windows to accompany its alread home media serving-centric Media Center (and Vista Ultimate) Windows builds, but we can finally say with some certainty that they will. A trusted source confirmed with us what ZDNet is referring to as "Windows Home Server". We don't yet have a final working name (it's internally codenamed Q and Quattro, as we understand), exact launch details, or real ideas of how it's going to operate, we know it'll be announced by Microsoft at CES. Our gut tells us it's going to turn out like an end-user version of Windows Storage Server 2003, which is a slightly obscure embedded-devices / network storage Windows build intended specifically for headless network-accessible NAS and SAN devices. Then again, maybe they'll release the server OS for desktops of all shapes and sizes so we can all have something to do with our old junker PCs that might still be a little too good to take over duty as a m0n0wall box. Either way, as we said, we know it's coming, it'll be announced at CES, and we're a little stoked that maybe Microsoft will have something here that'll take some of the common annoyances out of home media and data serving.
CrushFTP server goes UB
Setting up FTP services on your Mac can be as simple as checking the "FTP" box in Sharing Preferences, if you don't care about anonymous access or maintaining a user list separate from your regular accounts. It can be as full-featured as running Rumpus or Mac OS X Server (both over $200), or as free as PureFTPd Manager (with an excellent walkthrough at MacDevCenter). Seems like there's an open middle of the market, no?Now, the venerable CrushFTP has been revised to version 4.0; it offers a midrange, Universal Binary (and cross-platform Mac/Win/Linux) FTP server priced per connection ($30 for 10 concurrent users). Crush offers a fairly sophisticated console and Web management UI; both SFTP and WebDAV services along with FTP (great for rolling your own .mac replacement); granular bandwidth, user/group, and time window controls; automatic compression; and resumable downloads. If you're not interested in the nitty-gritty of PureFTPd config or the high cost of the pro solutions, the new Crush might be worth a look.[via MacNN]
WoW Insider Best of 2006: Server, Class, and Guild
The year is almost over, and that means it's time for us to take a look back, and pick some of the best (and worst) of Azeroth in 2006. This year saw a lot of innovation, a lot of whining, plenty of killing (both PVE and PVP), and almost saw the new expansion (we have to save something for next year, right?).Last week, we took your nominations for ten different categories. Over the weekend, the WoW Insider staff deliberated. I'd like to say there was a lot of arguing back and forth, and even some throwing of items around the room at each other, but truthfully things went pretty smoothly (everyone agreed I was right). And so, without further ado, today we present the Server, Class, and Guild of the Year for 2006. Click the link below to see the winners.And come back every day this week, as we award all the other categories, including Player of the Year, Best (and Worst) Blizzard Move of the Year, and even NPC Friend and Enemy of the Year.
AMD shows off Barcelona server chips, garners mixed reviews
With Intel giving its shareholders some awfully great news to savor over the holidays, AMD had to hit back with some news of its own, but you'll definitely get a different vibe from reading ExtremeTech's take on the firm's recently showcased Barcelona than from the horse's own mouth. While AMD parades its 65nm chip as "the world's first native quad-core x86 server processor," and boasts about its "significant advancements in performance per watt capabilities," we've reason to wonder if things aren't a bit sugarcoated. While the wafer was demonstrated as utilizing "all 16 cores" and being a seamless upgrade from "dual-core to quad-core", hard facts (read: the much anticipated benchmarks) were curiously absent. Aside from injecting onlookers with more of the same technical minutiae we've seen over the past few months, AMD didn't exactly flesh out a lot of new details to chew on, but ExtremeTech's reference system "was the loudest they'd ever had in their office," and sucked down nearly 600 watts of power with just two HDDs and a single graphics card. So while we're firmly withholding judgment until its officially released, we'd say AMD still has a bit of tweaking to do before the competition rolls in.UPDATE: Looks like we mistook the quad-core Opteron and the Quad FX (announced on the same day, nonetheless) chips as one in the same, when (thankfully) they're not, but those eying the recently-released FX-based desktops may want to think about how much noise they're willing to put up with before throwing down on a new machine.Read - AMD Press ReleaseRead - ExtremeTech's Hands-on Testing
Xserve shipping next month with quad Xeon 64-bit action
Remember that new Apple Xserve we heard about in August? Yeah, the new one with the two dual-cores under the hood? Well, those up to 2TB of storage and up to 32GB of RAM rackmount servers have just gone on sale and will begin shipping next month. Of course, the very barebones configuration is $3,000, while that 32GB of RAM will add an extra $23,700 to your order. Just something to consider.[Thanks, Clint M. and Evan D.]
IBM looking to release 5GHz Power6 server chip
We concur, 5GHz isn't nearly as impressive as IBM's 500GHz microprocessor, and can't hold a candle to the Blue Gene / L supercomputer, but the company is hoping to at least give the likes of AMD, Sun Microsystems, and Intel a run for their money in the oh-so-competitive server market. While it has already been confirmed that Intel's got quad-core on its mind for next year, and AMD's possibilities are wide open now that its chips are comfortably resting within Michael Dell's boxes, IBM has some stiff opposition to topple. While its current Power5+ server chip tops out before hitting the 3GHz mark, Big Blue plans on pushing the Power6 processor to 5GHz thanks to the "65-nanometer process geometry," 75Gbps buses, and voltage thresholds "as low as 0.8 volts." For those keeping track, IBM is doubling the frequency in its new chip and cutting energy requirements by making the CPU "more efficient with improvements such as computing floating point decimals in hardware instead of software." While there's no telling how much these mighty Power6 chips will dent that IT budget, the chips are currently on track for a "mid-2007" release -- but we all know how reliable these corporate giants and their claims are aren't.
AMD shows off their "Barcelona" quad-core chip designs
If you're not super excited by technical chip jargon like "advanced branch prediction" and "sideband stack optimizer," you might want to skip this one over, but for you chipheads out there, AMD has just unveiled the nitty gritty specs behind their forthcoming Barcelona quad-core processors. Built on a 65nm SOI process, the new chips will take the place of AMD's Opteron line, and will power workstations and servers sometime mid-2007 before the technology trickles down to consumer versions of the chips. AMD couldn't help but take a little pot-shot at Intel for their quad-core systems, which they claim are just two dual-core CPUs packed together, but we're pretty sure most consumers are going to be more concerned with performance, price and performance per watt than semantics. AMD hasn't provided any benchmarks yet, but we'll all be watching closely, since they're currently playing catchup to Intel on most of those fronts.[Via Slashdot]
Medal of Honor hype on IGN
IGN has a huge blow-out on the upcoming PSP Medal of Honor Heroes. They have one written-by-a-marketing-team write-up that features profiles of the in-game characters: Generic McAmerican, Jimmy Paterson, William Holt and John Baker. Snore... The other is an interview with the game's producer, Peter Choi. It very similar to a previous interview, but it's great to know that he understands some of the things PSP fans are looking for from a game: 32 player online (Infrastructure) multiplayer. I can't stress enough how awesome that sounds. "The game is also optimized to have very short load times, which is hugely important for gamers on-the-go." (Yes!) "User Hosted Server feature along with official EA Nation Server games, are both fully customizable and have very detailed leaderboards and stat tracking." (Yes!) If all that hype wasn't enough for you, then you might want to check out the newest trailer for the game. It looks a lot like the previous videos, but with even sharper, prettier graphics.
Thottbot will be fine
Just in case you were worried that all the comments you had put into Thottbot were gone, don't be. We've heard from the man himself and everything is going to be fine.In an email, Thott says "Some of the back end stuff lost its mind and kept reporting threads as non-existent. The site calmly accepted this and created a new thread start each time someone posted a comment. Now there are multiple thread starts for each page. Once I write something to merge them all it'll be back to normal."Great to hear that one of the best WoW resources on the Internet is safe and secure. Where else could you learn how Goblin Rocket Fuel can lead to online romance between an engie and an alkie? (second comment)
