PAX [registration] Is Still Coming
Let the continuation of the registration conversation commence. Regardless of agreeing or disagreeing with your fellow posters, be civil and respectful of each other.
FYI, page 14 of this thread has some Q&A with Robert Khoo. Valuable information there.
Historical badge sale time spreadsheet link
All your guesses are still wrong, until they aren't
FYI, page 14 of this thread has some Q&A with Robert Khoo. Valuable information there.
Historical badge sale time spreadsheet link
No registration on May 21, via the following tweet:
All your guesses are still wrong, until they aren't
zerzhul on
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This discussion has been closed.
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Attendee: Prime 12,13,14 East 13
https://twitter.com/search?q=Showclix Fallon&src=typd
e.g.
etc.
Jimmy Fallon Twitter: 1,200,000 followers (https://twitter.com/FallonTonight)
Official_PAX Twitter: 157,000 followers (https://twitter.com/Official_PAX)
It's OK to blame Jimmy Fallon.
</sarc>
The big difference is that the Fallon Show Twitter probably has a lot of people following that would never make time to go see the show. On the flipside, if you are following PAX_Official there is a decent chance you want to go to their primary show of the year.
Just sayin'.
I'm going to defend Showclix and PA here, at least on the infrastructure side. This whole "they're too lazy to build it right" crowd got a little loud at the end of the last thread, and it's unwarranted.
The quote that drew my attention:
I'll go ahead and help people with this perception of how "easy" it is to fix and how not hardening the network to any and all attacks clearly shows nobody "cares". Let's do a cost analysis:
PA-5050 firewall (because application awareness is a requirement for this type of scenario): $110,000
F5 11K series LTM: $140,000
L3 OC48 Wave Circuit: Anywhere from $120,000 to $300,000 per month depending on wholesaler
Oh, and let's not forget that you can't have single points of failure, so you have to treat all this gear like Noah's Ark and get 2 of each.
That's a grand total of $740,000 - at a MINIMUM. And that's just the back-end network infrastructure, not even server upgrades. It also doesn't touch on the fact that if you're going to spend that much money on those pieces, you've gotta go 10 gig fiber throughout your core, which means you're also looking at Nexus 7K series switches in the core, 5K's on the distro layer, and 2K FEX extenders downstream of that because the 6509's they're undoubtedly using right now likely go downstream to 3750's that can only support 1 gig across the ports w/ 2 10 gig channels. Your project is now well into the millions.
And remember that 'Noah's Ark' line I made earlier? Yeah, this only accounts for one datacentre's worth of costs. One datacentre = a single point of failure, so you can go ahead and double all *those* costs, because you need a second facility just in case the first one catches fire. It's not only infeasible to expect a company - ANY company - to absorb that sort of a CapEx hit just to satisfy demand for one event, it's downright suicidal from a business perspective.
Think of PAX like a one-time DDoS attack. Most companies combat that by hiring Spamhaus or by purchasing an outside-the-perimeter IPS to drop the sessions. They can't do that in this instance because the traffic is legitimate. There's really no way to fix this. For those of you who use (or used to use) Woot, think of it like their bags of crap. They didn't WANT their sessions to grind to a halt every time one came up, but there was no fiscally responsible way to resolve it. Same situation here.
Oh God, I eventually got 8 of those damned things. Its a good example. You had to be in the right place, at the right time, monitoring everything and having a back up (phone, work computer, remote to home computer, etc).
That said, I think for a while they had a really creative way of letting people order them. They came up with little flash/java games you could win which would bring you to a randomized product code on their page. The code would only be good for a small-ish (less than 100) bags of crap. That way, they could limit the flow of people into the system two-fold. You move the traffic to a resource that is easier to manage (up stream bandwidth in this case) instead of putting the load on your transaction servers. Then again, I don't see a web comic investing in a custom solution and as long as a third party manages ticket sales, we will probably never see this level of innovation of process.
From the link in that tweet:
So it's quite possible that hundreds of thousands of Jimmy Fallon fans were F5-ing the Showclix site today well before they officially announced the availability, just as all of us are F5-ing the PAX site.
[addendum]
And actually that's a good example of why the PAX organizers don't give anyone a specific date that tickets will be made available. Doing so would only exaggerate the site stability issues laid out by Quintious above.
What you're talking about is farming out the responsibility to AWS/EC2 or Rackspace. Also not a viable solution. For one, the startup costs associated with farming out to that is quite high. For another, not a one of those cloud services firms ever actually honours their SLA's. You're going to get no guarantee of uptime that you can count on. All of them promise 5 9's, and with all of them you're lucky if you get 97 under load, to say nothing of the absurd burst rates you get hit with. And when something goes down - not if, when - support is basically non-existent. You also end up having to hire out or contract out a cloud services architect to make the whole thing work because it's not simply a matter of pushing out an application into AWS and watching it go. I get that you cloud SE's have to tout the wonder of the cloud day in and day out as though it's the greatest technological revolution since bits and bytes, but for those of us with years of actual field work that have worked in actual cloud integration and seen what the reality is vs. the sales pitch, we know how the story really plays out.
Oh my Dayum
Oh my goodness
They goin' Ham
I don't know about you, but I ALWAYS blame Jimmy Fallon for everything. I think my boss is getting tired of it TBH...
PAX PRIME 2018 Status: Badges [√] Room [√] Waiting [ :x ]
PoGo Trainer Code:4505 8413 2232
I most certainly hope not.
PAX East: 2013
PAX East 2016:
[ X ] Badge [ X ] Hotel [ X ] Plane Ticket
For your eyes only...
Already covered in the last thread. Sparked quite a few pages of debate.
PAX East: 2013
PAX East 2016:
[ X ] Badge [ X ] Hotel [ X ] Plane Ticket
Pointless signature checklist [x]
oh very sorry did not know!
Actually, it was pretty civil. As for confirmation, you might want to look here for Tube's response, which I guess is as about as close to confirmation as you'll get:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/189272/prime-2014-registration-anticipation/p92
Hey, these threads have been moving like crazy the past few days :P
I hope you're right, but that dang e-mail about hotel reservations is what's killing my optimism. It seems to suggest that it will be some time after Thursday. =/
Attending: PAX Prime 2016
Twitter @Pogoplay
Yeah and this was in the other thread
Edit to add: I'm a dick sorry, tired and grumpy and my arthritis is flaring up from all this bloody time at a keyboard
I have been sort of desperately trying not to think about it...but I have a morale event Friday morning with my group (very large group), it's a movie event. There are four different movies starting at staggered times between 9AM and 11AM. So basically, I'm terrified, ROTFLOL! I'd be hard-pressed to even have the phone up, and the thought of waiting until the tweet goes out now seems double-cruel. Bah.
Hoping for tomorrow instead helps my spirits. All the rules are different this year, perhaps the dates the hotels go up are also different!
Have you tried explaining it would be better for your own morale to simply skip the movie and F5 all day?
PAX Prime attendance: '07, '08, '09, '10, '11, '12, '13, '14, '15, '16