Slashdot Mirror

I wonder why video game developers haven't resorted to traitor tracing by distributed copies of the program with the subroutines and variables in different orders for each copy. In early 2010, I did a little experiment on a homebrew NES game I made called Concentration Room. I added a preprocessor that would randomize the order of variable declarations between lines and subroutine definitions within a file. Even with an executable on the order of 16 KiB, I was able to theoretically generate more unique, identically functioning copies than the number of atoms in the universe. Squared.

How do shorts work?

They keep your private parts in place and warm under your shirt.

Now to others interested in your original question: You can short a stock by borrowing shares from someone else and selling them. To set up a short position, you'll likely need to upgrade your brokerage account to a tier allowing short selling, and you'll need to keep a lot of margin in that account that can be liquidated in case the stock pays dividends or its price rises. The process is described Wikipedia and Personal Finance Stack Exchange.

Short sales of real estate are unrelated, being more similar to foreclosure of an underwater property.

Apk retired slashdot trolls dk and amijo on clarityray nullifying any adblocking browser addons https://pineight.com/mw/index.... and when dk tried hostman he pointed out hostman cannot do things his program does but hostman performs 1 function faster due to using others' code not their own (sqlite database) and how to work around it.

Would Beetlejuice announce his retirement?

I'd love it if all copies of The Communist Manifesto came pre-Fisked

As would I with APK posts. In fact, I feel so strongly about it that I opened a page on my wiki to collaboratively Fisk APK's claims about hosts.

Apk left slashdot. He got what he wanted using slashdot to do it and wrote about it here at the bottom https://pineight.com/mw/index.... and judging by the results there I agree with him as they are the same as here with someone even editing out his posts not wanting them to be seen but tepples replaced them restoring them.

I have a feeling APK retired at the end of 2015, after nobody could soundly prove him wrong.

See subject: Are you saying HE didn't think they were deleted? Admen KNOW how to work forums (sliding etc.) & want proof of their nefarious bs from someone championing them too?

OK, read (on "optional uncrippling" in AlmostALLAdsBlocked the souled-out one EVERYONE knows about now) ->

"majority of users are never going to change the ad blocker settings" - http://lauren.vortex.com/archi...

Admen KNOW it!

There's your proof, & I always provide it (sometimes stronger than others, but deceit from the deceitful (admen 1/2 truths)? HARD to ferret out!)

APK

P.S.=> Prove me wrong - tepples sees it as I do here even putting up a site to DISPROVE me validly & nobody has like here too & yes, they admit impersonating me there (doing it here) AND my posts were deleted too (like here or what seems thus) https://pineight.com/mw/index.... - need more? Ask... apk

That's why I opened up a separate discussion off Slashdot for people to try to prove APK wrong.

That starts with configuration stuff like just plugging in a controller and start gaming without ever needing to touch anything

If the connected controller is a standard HID joystick rather than the Xbox 360 Controller, then how does a game know in which order the buttons appear without asking the user to "press the button for jump", "press the button for attack"? Or do games report "zero controllers connected" if only standard HID joysticks, not Xbox 360 Controllers, are connected?

at one point it was not unusual that the certification fees for certain gatekeepers in the video game space to outstrip an entire indie game's budget.

Did these gatekeepers' names happen to start with MI, NI, and SO, and end with FT, DO, and NY? If so, then there's one persistent Slashdot user who thinks these gatekeepers are the only thing keeping the video game industry from another Crash of 1983. I've collected a list of arguments in favor of such a developer entry barrier. And in any case, a PC release was always a workaround.

There is a fourth one - phishing. You might call it a variant of typo-squatting, but actually it is not.

Phishing is similar to typosquatting in that the user is being redirected to the wrong domain. I agree that an organization-validated cert protects against this, especially among novice users who can't be trusted to stick to bookmarks. But a domain-validated cert might be enough if credentials aren't valuable enough to allow rapid irreparable damage before blocking the account, such as a forum or wiki account compared to a bank account.

There is a fifth attack vector - though none of the business of website owners or visitors. But EFF has made it their business to complain about it. It is the dragnet surveillance by TLAs. HTTPS prevents that too. "Let's Encrypt" sounds like an attack on that attack.

This counts as passive sniffing and occasionally MITM.

both - banks' padlock icon and Joe Sixpack's website's padlock icon look the same to me.

On Pin Eight, which uses a domain-validated certificate, Firefox shows me only a green lock. On Chase, which uses an organization-validated certificate with EV extensions, Firefox shows me a green lock plus "JPMorgan Chase & Co." in green.

Go ahead and reuse this or any of my past signatures.

The last time I compared Eevee's "fractal" article to ManiacDan's "hardly" rebuttal, I found that PHP's alleged problems fit into two categories: those that can be easily worked around with coding standards, and about a half dozen real issues.

PHP 7 has completely addressed one of the real issues, namely parse errors in include being fatal, by introducing engine exceptions. Function argument and return value type hints add some of the benefits of Python-style strong typing to PHP. And though associativity on ?: is still on the less useful side for reasons of backward compatibility, the new null coalesce operator ?? is on the proper side for chaining.

If your shirt is long enough, who needs pants anyway?

it appears that OS-level hosts file ad-blocking is already detected by the more sophisticated adblock detectors.

But how would such a detector reliably detect the difference between /etc/hosts and DNS blocking performed by an ISP in a country with mandatory censorware laws?

Oh wait, I can think of two ways. One is that /etc/hosts blocks only one hostname at a time, not randomly generated names in a domain. The other is DNS resolution time, as several queries of a multi-million-line APK-scale hosts file will take several seconds to complete, unless the operating system's resolver uses an efficient data structure (which none do as far as I know).

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The news you'll never see on ABC (owned by Disney)

But will you see it on other TV outlets (owned by Disney's colleagues in the MPAA)? NBC is Universal, CNN is Warner Bros., CBS is Paramount (through National Amusements), and Fox is, well, Fox.

I think some updates have removed read write ability on my hosts file.

Windows Defender in Windows 8 and later treats .../etc/hosts as a protected file because some malware has operated by redirecting facebook.com to a phishing site. If you want to manage the hosts file yourself, exclude it from Windows Defender.

But hosts files do have other disadvantages. For one thing, the syntax doesn't allow wildcards or explicit NXDOMAIN. For another, most operating systems' built-in resolvers use an inefficient linear scan for every resolve call rather than loading the file into an efficient data structure such as a Bloom filter, and they don't allow each of a machine's users to maintain a separate blocking list. Finally, iOS and Android don't even let the user edit the file at all unless the user wipes and roots the device and voids its warranty.

https://pineight.com/mw/?title...

the midrange iPad has better specs than this thing and a better operating system.

Until you need to use that one app that isn't ported to iPad, possibly because Apple won't let its developer distribute such a port through the App Store.

In this sense, APK is Alexander P. Kowalski, the self-proclaimed "Lord of Hosts" who advocates using /etc/hosts as the workhorse of web content blocking for security and efficiency. He wrote a proprietary hosts file aggregator application for Windows called APK Hosts File Engine, and he likes to remind us that hosts-based blocking is faster than browser extensions because it runs in kernel mode and that MalwareBytes recommends it. He has his own peculiar style of writing involving lots of boldface type, use of & instead of "and", and other quirks, and posts copypasta ads for APK Hosts File Engine on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.

But I don't see the similarity between APK's writing and Narcocide's.

When the mobiles grow an analog stick and some buttons maybe.

Go look at some JXD tablets.

Until then,nintendo games are absolutely unplayable on mobiles for the most part

True, a literal translation to an on-screen gamepad is unplayable, as I discovered when I tried to play Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure (free version) from Google Play Store on my Nexus 7 (2012) tablet. It's a very Super Mario-style platformer, and I kept whiffing (pressing outside the active area of any button) until I paired a keyboard and used that. The flat sheet of glass that is a modern mobile device's input is even worse for this purpose than the widely panned Turbo Touch 360 by Triax, whose touch surface at least provides tactile position feedback through being recessed and having ridges. Plus the Turbo Touch still has traditional physical action buttons.

But a game that uses a mouse, trackball, spinner, or stylus on another platform can be straightforwardly adapted to touch control. This includes shmups (try AirAttack HD), point-and-click adventures (such as those that run in ScummVM), switching-type block puzzle games (such as FreeCell or Klotski or Bejeweled or Puzzle League), shooting galleries (try Fruit Ninja), and even reportedly first-person shooters. Furthermore, some fans of Android and iOS gaming have assured me that games designed for a gamepad can be reengineered to use the seven gestures that are available under each thumb: tap, long press, swipe up, swipe down, swipe left, swipe right, and long swipe. Map these to the two halves of the screen for fourteen actions in all, the same as the number of buttons on an original PlayStation 1 controller.

Rotten Tomatoes has been a subsidiary of Flixster since 2010, which was in turn purchased by Warner Bros. in 2011.

But does Warner Bros. Pictures have any more influence over Rotten Tomatoes than it has over CNN?

Browser-based add-ons avoid even the transition from user mode (the browser) to kernel mode (the IP stack) to look up the host. And unlike most operating systems' IP stacks, a browser-based add-on can use an efficient approximate cache for 0.0.0.0 entries.

A creature with four legs is still at a disadvantage when it comes to industrialization.

Would the same be true of a creature with two arms that double as legs?

console peasants telling me why consoles are great... I'd love to hear you so much as try

I've tried to sum up Team Peasant's strongest arguments in an article titled Consoles are easy. In case you don't want to click through, what consoles lose in flexibility they gain in ease:

Let me guess: you said "and two controllers" specifically to rule out 3DS use.

Copyright gives Nintendo the right to choose whether its own works shall be delivered in formats suitable for multiplayer use in a coffee shop. You could always choose to play games other than those published by Nintendo, such as RHDE.

I own two kinds of "random gamepad": several brands of "generic human interface device" and Xbox 360 game controllers. Both work in SDL on Xubuntu 14.04. The biggest practical problem, whether on Windows or on GNU/Linux, is button layout Babel for anything that's not an Xbox 360 game controller.

The game world is so dependant on proprietary software. [...] It just reinforces this idea that proprietary bits are OK

How would you recommend to fund the development of free games with AAA-class production values? Or would you prefer that the engine be free and the assets (models, textures, maps, audio, and scripts) be proprietary?

AAA games, players for rented movies, and tax preparation software are three classes of software for which the free software community has failed to produce a viable business model.

But I'd have just pointed at pants. Those are ubiquitous too. How many people do you know that could make a pair? Or even repair them? Hem them? Replace a button?

Then I guess I must be in a minority. I've replaced buttons on store-bought clothes. I've even made my own pants, but they have a drawstring closure instead of a button closure because I haven't learned buttonholes yet. And before I learned pants, I was making ankle-length shirts to wear.

Well... Mario Maker launched last week.... I'd say the number of average people designing game levels has quite possibly spiked to an all time high. ;)

For one thing, this is Nintendo catching up to where Sony was years ago with LittleBigPlanet. For another, around the launch of Super Mario Maker, Nintendo went on a DMCA takedown streak on YouTube, handing out copyright strikes to uploaders of TAS and Kaizo videos.

Common Knowlege

As they say on Wikipedia: [citation needed]

Do you know of any PC gamers that play same screen multiplayer on their PC?

That can be taken either of two ways. Do I know of people with a PC connected to a TV? Yes, and I imagine that a substantial percentage of them game.

The other way is an implicit assumption that my personal friends and relatives form sample large enough to be valid. Do I personally have any friends or relatives who play same-screen multiplayer games on a PC? No. But I do have a cousin who routinely connects a PC to the living room TV to watch Netflix. Nor do I have any friends or relatives who own a PlayStation 4 or PlayStation Vita. I haven't even seen a Vita on the city bus. Even if Slashdot is a biased sample, it's still a much larger sample than my personal monkeysphere.

Write a game by yourself or with others that is good enough.

I am currently doing just this for a different, non-PlayStation platform. The one problem is that I'm unsure quite what you mean by "good enough".

so what are you waiting for?

I am waiting for my present paid video game project with another company on a non-PlayStation platform to be completed.

You save when buying a console, lose money over time when buying 100's of games.

That's fine for people who live alone, not quite so fine for a parent with multiple gamers in the house. Say you see one game for a console and another game for a PC. The console game allows up to four players on a single TV, while the PC game requires you to buy a separate copy of the game for each player and run each copy on a separate PC. Which game do you buy? Also, time is money, and a lot of people don't want to waste time troubleshooting GPU driver issues, reconfiguring buttons whenever a USB gamepad is plugged in or out, and the like.

I've summed up more of the Peasants' talking points in this article, and I'd be interested to see what I left out.

I agree with the points that the "value" of PCs purely as a gaming platform is relatively low in comparison to the value of a console. From purely this perspective, the PC is more of a quality gaming experience rather than a value one. Although, there is an argument that could be made that the PC has a vibrant modding community which extends the values of games, such as Skyrim, much beyond their normal lifetime. This is one area where the PC adds value that the console lacks. Plus, PC games drop in price much quicker than console games do.

However, everything in your article smacks of cherry picking. For example, It completely ignores the valid argument that a PC/laptop can and would be used for much more than gaming (i.e. work, homework), GPU driver issues really are a thing of the past (both ATI and AMD have push notification for new drivers), and that the vast majority of games now come with Xbox controller support which is easily added to a PC (No need for fiddling with controller settings). It also ignores the fact that you can get a PC comparable to the latest game consoles for under $1000. Yes, you can spend a ton of money on a nice GPU, but even the average GPUs today (i.e. R9 270) are more powerful than the latest consoles.

I'm not arguing that any particular product is right for a family on a budget. It's up to each family to decide their priorities. But, if I was on a tight budget and I wanted the best value, I would buy something that does more than just gaming.

I'm curious to see the data set that you're pulling from.

Citations: Geek.com (2011); Softpedia (2012); Humble Bundle (October 2014)

Generally it's a small percentage of Linux users who actually pay for software, most prefer to use Open Source/free software.

The business case for developing free software for productivity has not historically extended to video games.

The Windows Phone market share is larger than the Linux Desktop market share

It may also be easier to port a Mac game to X11/Linux than to port a Windows game to Windows Phone. An existing OpenGL engine for OS X will likely work on X11/Linux with few changes. Porting a mouse and keyboard game to Windows Phone forces the developer to completely redesign the input system for a 5" touch screen and, if the game is real-time, rebalance all game interactions for the limits of touch input. Porting a Mac game to X11/Linux does not, as both platforms use a mouse and keyboard.

and the games/apps for phones are considerably less complex than those of their desktop counterparts

Are touch-driven games for Windows Phone "considerably less complex than" touch-driven UWP games for Windows 8.1 and 10? Is it hardware power, or is it touch input?

You save when buying a console, lose money over time when buying 100's of games.

That's fine for people who live alone, not quite so fine for a parent with multiple gamers in the house. Say you see one game for a console and another game for a PC. The console game allows up to four players on a single TV, while the PC game requires you to buy a separate copy of the game for each player and run each copy on a separate PC. Which game do you buy? Also, time is money, and a lot of people don't want to waste time troubleshooting GPU driver issues, reconfiguring buttons whenever a USB gamepad is plugged in or out, and the like.

I've summed up more of the Peasants' talking points in this article, and I'd be interested to see what I left out.

I know I'd want a guy who's voluntarily played Russian Roulette to occupy the presidency.

What's wrong with a little bit of gambling with a toy gun?

To that end, a number of municipalities have instituted "dead on red" statues

And a number have not. Or should cyclists make a point of moving to one of the states that have?

When cyclists start obeying the rules of the road

Do the rules of the road state or imply that an authorized user is entitled to a green light in a reasonable time? If so, then the road itself isn't obeying the rules of the road. Not all U.S. states have a law allowing cyclists to cross against a clearly malfunctioning red traffic signal.

Have they not also ruled that the Congressional scheme of passing copyright extensions every 20 years is absolutely fine?

In its opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft , the Supreme Court recognized this possibility of circumventing "for limited Times" in the copyright clause but that the plaintiff had not established a pattern of "legislative misbehavior". Congress has enacted only two substantial copyright term extensions since World War I (in 1976 and 1998), and a third extension in the coming decade may establish "legislative misbehavior" more clearly.

But the root of the problem is movie studios' in-kind donation of campaign publicity through their co-owned news outlets. Now let me go donate to the Lessig campaign.

As I wrote in my article about PHP, some very simple coding standards analogous to those described in Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts will work around most of the stuff described in the "fractal" article. This left six distinct points, some of which PHP 7 addresses to an extent.

• Number-like comparison of strings can never be fully turned off. PHP 7 type hints diminish this somewhat, as you at least know what types you are getting in and out of a function.
• Parse errors are fatal rather than causing include_once to throw an exception the way Python's import does. PHP 7 converts many fatal errors to engine exceptions.
• Inconsistent naming conventions and duplicate functionality. PHP 7 removes some of the duplicate functionality.
• Associativity for the ternary ? : operator is on the less useful side. PHP 7 adds an additional null coalescing operator ?? whose associativity is on the useful side.
• No keyword arguments. PHP 7 does not change this.
• No file-level selection of old or new semantics the way Python has from __future__ import some_feature.

I'll just stick with iOS, which doesn't have app bloat.

And which doesn't have several categories of apps at all. If you find yourself needing an app in one of those categories, you'll end up right back on Android.

Why do you ask a question you already know the answer to?

Because I don't know the answer. Plenty of Slashdot users have expressed interest in living room PCs.

Didn't I just read that game consoles are going to be eclipsed by tablets in the next couple of years, in terms of horsepower? Aren't those people just playing games on their PC or on a tablet?

A tablet's input device is a flat sheet of glass. It's fine for games that would have otherwise used a mouse, such as a space shooter like AirAttack HD. It's also good for what are essentially racing games that use only one button, like Rayman Jungle Run. But for games originally designed for a gamepad, there's no way to tell where your thumbs are relative to the on-screen controls at the side while you are looking at the action in the center. It's even worse than the widely panned Turbo Touch 360, which at least has a recessed touchpad with ridges and physical A and B trigger buttons. When I tried the free subset of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7, I kept "whiffing", or pressing outside the active areas of the on-screen gamepad, and missing jumps. This continued until I paired a Bluetooth keyboard, after which the game worked fine.

Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones? The last time I checked, I couldn't find any sales numbers for these external gamepads, which disappoints me because there's no other way to assure game developers that there's a market for games supporting them.

As for PC, some people choose consoles because they're easier so long as one is happy with vanilla versions of games from major labels.

I've played Halo 2 on my PlayStation and Halo 5 on my Dreamcast. Whether you can play them on RPi2 depends on what audio codecs Windows 10 IoT Core supports.

Ok my last reply got modded down as a troll. But here is the whole story, the core kernel used in win 10 is very good indeed. BUT and this is a very big one, hardware support is slowly cutting out anything over 5 years of age. The WDDM 1.1 support is very limited so things like most of atom chips from 2010 are being axed. Good luck getting a pi to run directx 11 let alone 12. I am sure that pi is not going to compete with the Xbox ecosystem so essentially it will take a complete freeze over in hell before Microsoft lets it's OS compete on embedded game platforms. Especially when you consider that the main purpose of win 10 "free upgrade" is to convince the consumer to use Microsoft cloud and integrate an xbox with their new Win10 pc!

I've played Halo 2 on my PlayStation and Halo 5 on my Dreamcast. Whether you can play them on RPi2 depends on what audio codecs Windows 10 IoT Core supports.

Sad news for you guys Windows 10 without third party codec add ons sucks big time. Without VLC it is useless for many video and audio streams. Unless your favourite gamerz masterpieces are HTML5 coded written in which case you will need to somehow use the edge browser engine to access any codec other than the standard ms.wav and the same ol' same ol' wma and wmv crap codecs.

Again you will need to use nothing but DirectX for your games. Everything is right with the world and is going as planned in Redmond, very soon all the competition will die and Sourceforge will be removed from the planet so no-one will be able to write anything other than DirectX software! MUHAHAHAHA!

I've played Halo 2 on my PlayStation and Halo 5 on my Dreamcast. Whether you can play them on RPi2 depends on what audio codecs Windows 10 IoT Core supports.

There never was an original intent to "intellectual property" as you think it does because it doesn't exist in the US. Instead, we have patents, copyrights, and trademarks, three different sets of laws with three different purposes.

I agree that the term is misused, but I disagree that the concept "doesn't exist in the US." It's been in the United States Code since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 added 47 USC 230.

in most of the western world that you can build a gaming PC for less then a console.

A PC capable of PS3-level settings including a Windows license for less than a PS3, and a PC capable of PS4-level settings including a Windows license for less than a PS4? I'd like to see those builds.

Probably 60 or 70 other things I'm forgetting as well.

Consoles, on the other hand, have ease of use, ease of choice, guaranteed compatibility, a living room friendly case, and far less multiplayer cheating.

Thanks for clarifying. It's just that I've heard a lot of the suggestions, tried them, and found them not to work.

Indiana passed such a law about a year ago, as have several other U.S. states. Mostly I'm asking on behalf of residents of those jurisdictions that have not. Or do all of them penalize cities for allowing a stuck signal set to happen?

Anyway, console plus mid range PC is at the cost of high end PC.

The advantage of this is that you can have the console in the room with the large monitor and the mid-range PC in the room with the desk, plus all the other usability advantages of consoles.

I thought many things also required an additional xbox subscription to get updates or do multiplayer.

Only multiplayer requires the Xbox Live Gold subscription on Xbox One. Updates are included in the Xbox Live Silver, available without charge to all owners of unbanned Xbox One consoles. Noninteractive video streaming apps such as Netflix required a Gold subscription on Xbox 360, but this was phased out on Xbox One.