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The real mystery is why anyone who has the slightest clue about technology, would buy or wish to use a computer that runs software you cannot control or replace.

Nobody with a clue "wishes" to use such a computer. They instead suffer through it because such computers are the only affordable ones, possibly because people without a clue are a bigger market. Even on PCs, which computer lets you replace the BIOS?

I thought a "pro" meant anyone who gets paid for his work. I was paid for my work on Thwaite and RHDE: Furniture Fight , two NES homebrew games that I developed using GIMP, Python, ca65, and other pro quality development tools for GNU/Linux.

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic.

I'm a cyclist, and I follow the rules of traffic to the extent that I can. But the metal rims of my bicycle don't have enough surface area to consistently trigger the vehicle-sensing induction loops at intersections. At some intersections in my home town, I've seen even a bicycle and a motorcycle put together fail to trip it. So in the 35 states that haven't passed dead red laws, I don't understand how to follow the law against crossing the street at a red light, other than by not traveling at all.

If you bought a PC game there's no reason you can't all play on the same PC.

One problem is that a lot of major-studio games designed around multiple controllers are released on one or more consoles and never make it to the PC until emulators catch up a decade or more later. This is more common in some genres than others. And a lot of games that do make it to PC have their split-screen mode cut out. The best guess I've seen as to the reason relates to what you suggest next:

Attach the PC gaming rig to the TV in the living room, add USB controllers

I'm under the impression that the number of end users are willing to do this is commercially insignificant compared to online PC gamers. Please see comments like those I linked here. It's a vicious cycle: people don't buy a gaming HTPC because of too few games supporting couch co-op, and major publishers don't fund the development of PC games supporting couch co-op because of too few deployed gaming HTPCs. Or how has the tradition of users being unwilling to set up a PC in the living room changed over the past few years?

There's no practical limit on the number of USB controllers you can attach to one PC

USB game controllers are either HID joysticks or XInput controllers. Unlike XInput controllers, HID joysticks have an inconsistent button layout across brands. Plugging in a console controller and having its buttons already configured is more convenient for users than having to rebind buttons every time you plug in or plug out a HID joystick.

and they do support split screen games

That's true so long as the publisher bothers to allocate money toward a split-screen mode. But I don't see how a PC can support a same-screen multiplayer game that isn't ported to PC (and isn't old enough to be emulated well), or a game whose PC version has had split-screen cut out. Or have those too become less common over the past few years?

I'm always looking for ways to improve my work. Could you try my stuff and offer some constructive criticism?

Pretty much every app I try to install wants access to everything to function. I try to install a simple game, it wants access to my phone history, contacts, email, google accounts, and fuck knows what else.

Android phones were sold in some countries before Google Checkout (now Google Wallet). In countries without Google Checkout, Android Market (now Google Play Store) showed only freeware apps. In order to derive revenue from users in those countries, developers had to put ads in their apps. And in order to compete for users with developers that had embraced adware, other developers had to make their apps free as well. Google Wallet has since expanded to far more countries, but the expectation of a freeware price point in Google Play Store has continued. And the push for ad revenue has led to more targeted ad delivery systems, which need to see more of your PII. See also tlhIngan's comment.

It's not as widespread on iOS because Apple introduces the iTunes Store in each country before selling iProducts there. This means a payment system always precedes the App Store, preserving an international market for paywalled apps.

In any case, if you want to limit your exposure to Android adware that needs to see your PII, turn on "Unknown sources" and install F-Droid, which allows only applications distributed under a free software license. If you're worried about the security implications of turning on "Unknown sources", then turn on "Unknown sources" only when using F-Droid and turn it off when done. There's not nearly as much selection, especially because free and games mix like oil and water, but what you do get has fewer annoyances.

I've never gotten an Android app anywhere but F-Droid. I don't know why anyone would.

Because F-Droid carries only free software, and there are several categories of application that aren't going to be free any time soon. These include (for example) games, applications to view rented movies, and applications to prepare a tax return. What's the free alternative to, say, Sonic the Hedgehog or the Netflix or H&R Block app?

Buggy is a generic term for not working (like crashing or showing a black screen and no idea what to do)

Some more obscure games might not work because they use unusual mappers (configurations of hardware on the circuit board). An NES emulator has to emulate not only the components inside the Control Deck and the ROM chips but also the "bank switching" components that select which part of the ROM to read. Or you might have a bad dump, either with incorrect ROM data or configured to use the wrong mapper. Do games with simpler mapper hardware like Thwaite and RHDE work?

I think one emulator worked nice after setting up keyboard or gamepad keys the ugly way and launching it from command line every time but I can't tell which it was.

Let me guess: Probably Mednafen or the old version of FCE Ultra. You see command-line emulators because the skill set to develop an emulator and the skill set to develop a graphical front-end aren't always inside the same person.

But at least one advantage of SDL under Linux over SDL under Windows (and other DirectInput wrappers) is that SDL under Linux handles the LT and RT buttons of an Xbox 360 controller as separate axes.

On linux you have a great variation between xorg, pulseaudio versions, plus shit like gcc and libc etc. so I'm sure some people have shit working in 2010 already and some other have crap in 2013.

There's variation among Windows versions as well, as you pointed out. I'm just glad FCEUX works well enough for me on Ubuntu 12.04 on a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 (Atom subnotebook) that I can take it with me and write NES programs while riding the bus to and from work.

when I wanted to play NES games under linux, the emulators I found in apt-cache search were garbage or unusable. Best one had garbled sound, others were buggy, command-line only, unconfigured etc.

As a developer of homebrew NES games that have been published on cartridge, I'd say the best NES emulators under Ubuntu are probably these:

• FCEUX (SDL version, no debugger): sudo apt-get install fceux
• FCEUX (Windows version, with debugger): sudo apt-get install wine then get the executable from FCEUX.com

Both have a GUI for loading ROMs. Sound in FCEUX (Windows version) was garbled in the version of Wine included in 10.04, but by 12.04 it became usable. (The SDL version always worked fine.) What did you mean by "buggy" and "unconfigured"?

Do device "owners" really want phones that "accept only applications approved by the company".

Yes.

As BasilBrush and CronoCloud have explained here several times, the majority of people are not geeks and don't want to have to spend time doing their own vetting of safety, usefulness, and battery efficiency of apps. Instead, they choose to delegate this vetting to Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc. I've summarized the purported advantages of closed platforms.

What exactly is missing so crucial from iOS?

I've compiled a list based on Apple's guidelines. For example, Apple provides no public API to create anything like MozStumbler or WiFi-Where. Nor does Apple allow for development of a web browser that supports WebGL.

There's a concept called analysis paralysis. With too many choices, one is likely to be unable to arrive a decision for fear of making one that he will regret. Experiments show that people buy less when more is available. I think this so-called paradox of choice explains part of why certain computing platforms, such as iOS and game consoles, thrive despite their restrictions or even because of them.

Besides, Jews and Christians have ample evidence in their scriptures that humans suck at decision making. Start with Jeremiah 10:23.

I honestly don't understand why people would buy a "smart" TV instead of a monitor, surround sound speakers, and plug it in to a laptop or computer.

Because not having a huge noisy tower next to the TV is more spouse-acceptable than having one. Because people don't have to keep it updated with Windows updates and antivirus updates. Because a computer's out-of-the-box interface is designed to be navigated from a desk with a mouse and keyboard rather than from a recliner with a traditional TV remote control. Because people have trouble plugging in a cable box and a BD player, let alone a computer. Because some people have tried to build a home theater PC and had a poor experience. And finally, because of tradition. Other people have weighed in on this.

Perhaps games could display a generic controller. Granted, the order of HID controllers' buttons varies greatly, but if games can phone home for digital restrictions management, they can certainly phone home to tell the developer which make, model, and VID/PID of HID controllers are most popular.

Perhaps games could display a generic controller. Granted, the order of HID controllers' buttons varies greatly, but if games can phone home for digital restrictions management, they can certainly phone home to tell the developer which make, model, and VID/PID of HID controllers are most popular.

Maybe. Or maybe it's Portal 2 before there was a Portal 2. Judge for yourself.

The problem with any nondeterministic compiler is that it prevents use of diverse double-compiling, a method to detect the sort of compiler backdoor described by Ken Thompson in "Reflections on Trusting Trust". You'd have to bootstrap the compiler with nondeterminism turned off (and with GUIDs, timestamps, and multithreaded allocation of symbols for anonymous objects turned off too) in order for the DDC bootstrap construction to converge.

In any case, I've implemented a technique like this on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I wrote a preprocessor that shuffles the order of functions in the file, the order of opcodes within a function that don't depend on each other's results, and the order of global variables (or the order of fields in an object). One reason I implemented it was to use one variable as another's canary to make buffer overflows easier to detect in an assembly language program. The other is watermarking the binary so that I can tell who leaked a particular copy of the beta version to the public. If you're interested, you can find my shuffle tool in the source code of Concentration Room.

"A keep out sign" is a good way to describe WEP, which acts as a speed bump to demonstrate evidence of unauthorized use. In theory, a breach is prima facie evidence of an intentional offense under state theft of service laws, the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or foreign counterparts. And I used to use WEP with a MAC whitelist. But as home ISPs start instituting caps, and governments start holding operators of open APs liable for the traffic that goes over them, you may need to improve technical measures to shut out WEP crackers who would use your bandwidth to trade images glorifying child abuse or to perform mass copyright infringement.

The problem is that, unlike with Android, no one seems particularly interested in their platform--neither hardware manufacturers nor 3rd party developers.

Say a video game developer that is a home-based family business is working on a controller-friendly game. For which platform should it develop this game? Has Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony made the developer approval and game approval process more straightforward than Steam Greenlight?

The problem is that one of the core principals of the console is that it has specific hardware to design for.

Another is that a console's monitor is more likely than that of a PC to be big enough to fit four people around.

The NES PPU takes shortcuts that produce characteristic artifacts in the composite signal. Some games, such as Blaster Master, rely on these artifacts to create more apparent colors than are actually there. Some emulators, such as Nestopia, have an NTSC filter that emulates these artifacts; others don't. Not emulating the artifacts makes your game look like it's being played on a PlayChoice or an emulator.

It's not an infringement to run homebrew games like Thwaite in an emulator. Nor is it an infringement to back up your own cartridges using a cart reader like this for the purpose of playing them in an emulator, so long as you do not distribute the dumps. (Assuming US law, 17 USC 117(a)(1).) But by the logic of the ruling in UMG v. MP3.com, it is an infringement to download a commercial game's ROM image through the Internet even if you own an authentic cartridge.

not earning money != losing money

Not earning money is an opportunity cost. When compared to other things that a company could be doing with its resources, not earning money is losing money.

First off, I'm not saying voting would be ideal in all games.

I understand. I'm just trying to find counterpoints to the talking points that console fanboys have used against the promotion of PC gaming. They try to spin the lack of mods as an advantage.

One-on-One and voting is a mute point as in that case you quit the match instead.

I've played one-on-one games on Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection against Tetris DS players who used Action Replay to, say, get all I pieces. If you disconnect in a one-on-one stranger match, you get a loss on your record, and the cheater gets a win. In Mario Kart DS, on the other hand, I didn't see quite as much cheating, but I saw plenty of people complaining about snaking, a novel use of the game's drift mechanic to gain speed on straightaways.

Prior to HDMI you needed VGA or DVI and then had to figure something else out for audio. And even once you got HDMI you needed a computer that had an HDMI card.

Some TVs, such as my Vizio VX32L, have an analog audio input by one of the HDMI video inputs. This is designed for use with DVI-D to HDMI cable, as I mentioned in this table.

And for a lot of us the computer we use with the TV is our previous computer

Good point. Adding to my list of counterarguments.

Prior to HDMI you needed VGA or DVI and then had to figure something else out for audio. And even once you got HDMI you needed a computer that had an HDMI card.

Some TVs, such as my Vizio VX32L, have an analog audio input by one of the HDMI video inputs. This is designed for use with DVI-D to HDMI cable, as I mentioned in this table.

And for a lot of us the computer we use with the TV is our previous computer

Good point. Adding to my list of counterarguments.

Some people use Android because they do care about technology and because they don't want to put up with problems inherent in iOS, like these:

Each platform has its own problems up with which the user must put. My particular set of tolerable problems happens to match Android. BasilBrush's happens to match iOS.

I've looked into it. I haven't tried APK's tool myself, seeing as I use Xubuntu on my primary laptop, but I do mention it on my page about a suggestion to improve operating systems' hosts file processing.

A 4TB drive would bother with compression why exactly?

To minimize how much it has to erase when moving data around during a write. This improves the benchmark of "sectors written per second" because fewer sectors have to be erased during compaction. And because most people buying this drive aren't "trying to break the media". If you're worried that an untrusted user with an account on a multi-user system could cause too many erases in too short of a time, could you make an example of your worst case using a workload that resembles a file system's write pattern? If it's too big for Slashdot, feel free to reply here.

Is there a public log of important changes to the Guidelines that I should be reading?

[Link to PDF]

From the last page of the linked document: "Copyright 2010 Apple". I was aware of the leaked 2010 edition of the Guidelines, but I just wondered if someone had been publicly keeping track of the changes between then and May 2014. Some Slashdot users have given me a hard time for not having updated my analysis of the 2010 Guidelines to track changes to Apple's policy since then.

Also, using a smartphone as a Wi-Fi diagnostics tool is pretty niche.

It's a niche that Apple has made a business decision not to serve, and it's not the only such niche.

it has all the basic functionalities a smartphone needs

Until your functionality needs end up growing to encompassing one of the forbidden categories.

And most recently I wrote a terminal driver for the Nintendo Entertainment System that wraps a 6502 proportional font library that I had written a few years ago. I'm using it to print the results of testing software floating-point arithmetic code in my port of Cookie Clicker to the NES.

That was including a short tty driver I hacked up for the GBA.

As I understand this and other comments that you have posted recently, PC is 80 percent of the market. Is it reasonable for a developer of video games for PC expect its customers to fit two to four players around one PC's monitor? And what should a PC game do to automatically adapt to the different button layouts among PC game controllers?

The sort of monster who is porting it to a retro video game platform despite having only 77K heavenly chips.

Good. Then I can play Luminesweeper on my Game Boy Advance.

You want to say all our games are flappy bird? The best graphics are on the PC... not the console.

In the paragraph beginning "For mobile devices..." I wasn't referring to PCs or graphics at all. I was comparing input on Android devices to input on the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita. Android has tended to ship on devices whose only input is a touch screen, and this limits what genres it can pull off effectively without additional input hardware that a developer can't assume that the player already owns.

As to big picture mode... why do I have to play it on my big screen tv for it count?

So that the bodies of players 2, 3, and 4 can physically fit around your monitor.

What if I have a console and I use a small tv?

No, that just means you probably aren't interested in multiplayer. The PC is fine for single-player and for multiplayer with pickup groups of strangers who live elsewhere. It just hasn't proven itself for local multiplayer.

I'd also like to be able to lift my feet a bit higher and climb over small walls, rocks etc.

Climbing I'll give you, but what feet?

It sort of reminds me of Bill Meyer's negative space cipher.

You can plug PS3, PS4 and wired 360 controllers without any hardware adaptors and most modern games work just fine with them.

Gamepads on PC have at least four problems I can think of:

• Do the Dual Shock 3 and 4 work with the gamepad drivers included with Windows, or do they require a third-party driver? At least under Android, this third-party driver for the Dual Shock 3 is a paid app that doesn't even work with all Android devices, so the developer had to release a second app just for testing compatibility. And because Windows requires all input device drivers to be kernel mode, and 64-bit Windows requires all kernel-mode code to be digitally signed with a commercial kernel-mode code signing certificate from a certificate authority approved by Microsoft, how is this third-party driver signed?
• DirectInput and other APIs for reading HID joysticks return the button states as a numbered list. The game can't tell in what order the buttons are listed unless it looks up the gamepad's name or VID/PID in a massive database. And this is why...
• A lot of modern games work only with Xbox 360 controllers because they use the XInput API, which works only with controllers licensed by Microsoft. In fact, games sold as Windows Store apps aren't even allowed to use the DirectInput API that every non-Xbox 360 USB gamepad uses.
• A lot of modern games don't work with gamepads at all because the publisher wants to sell three copies to a household with three desktop PCs instead of one copy to a household with one home theater PC and three gamepads.

I'm sure these problems have solutions, and I'd appreciate help figuring it out other than "just buy a console; the games are better because developer approval keeps out the riff-raff".

Having to activate your cell phone, get blaring light in your eyes rather than the dim theater room

The cell phone screen has it's own lighting

For one thing, this lighting is too bright. For another, the phone can't detect that you want to use it as a television control until you press the home button and navigate to the television control app. For a third, someone else in your household can't use it while you are using the phone.

So the "problem" you are describing there becomes completely moot.

And the fourth problem, which touch-screen television controls share with touch-screen video gaming, is unusability while looking away. Despite the name, touch screens provide no touch cues to the user, unlike a physical remote with discrete buttons that you can feel. Your touch-screen smartphone or tablet requires you to look away from the TV instead of finding the bump on the 5 and navigating from there.

Ugh. Hosts file blocking is stupid. In point of fact, there are very few legitimate uses of the hosts file, and this is not one of them. AdBlock is the right tool, because it can actually filter based on the URL, not just the domain. It also blocks the request much sooner in the process. Why bother doing a DNS request at all for something you are going to block? Also, after the DNS search ends, the computer will still attempt to connect to that address and retrieve the content requested. I don't mean to imply that DNS-level blocking is never appropriate, but if you're going to do that, the most appropriate option is to use a fucking DNS server, so that your changes to domain name resolution are centralized and available to the entire network. It will also let you return NXDOMAIN instead of an IP address, which is much closer to what you want.

But really what you want, if the subject is ad blocking, is not to block the domain, but the content being served from that domain. The quote "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong." is perfectly descriptive of both the historical and current use of the hosts file. It happens to be an accessible place for you to throw your monkey wrench in, but it's not what that's for and it does it badly by any measure. Massive APK-style hosts files have truly terrible performance: either they're indexed in memory, which becomes painful probably at about the 1 GB mark, or they are stored (unindexed, at least on Windows) on disk, and read line-by-line whenever you need to do a DNS search. Keep in mind that unless a match is found the entire hosts file will be read, and then a DNS request will be sent. Also keep in mind that fetching things stored in memory on the local network is at least 10x faster than disk access.

For more information on appropriate uses of the hosts file, see here. Note that they don't have anything to do with content blocking, because DNS is the wrong tool for that.

Hosts do more with less (1 file) at a faster level

That'd be true if the hosts file processor in operating systems were actually efficient. I proposed an implementation involving a Bloom filter on my page about efficient implementation of a DNS blacklist. But in the operating systems deployed on most deployed PCs, a linear search through a multi-megabyte hosts file takes a while.

(ring 0)

Whether a resolver runs in supervisor mode (ring 0) or user mode (ring 3) makes little difference. It's about how efficient the resolution is, and most resolutions take longer than a context switch. There's no guarantee that it actually runs in ring 0; microkernels hand off hostname resolution to a user-space process. One example of this across multiple platforms is running a recursive resolver on localhost. Another is the possibility of storing the hosts file on a file system implemented in userspace (such as FUSE, Samba, or the like). What this ultimately means is that a well-coded user-space resolver can query a hosts file faster than a popular kernel's built-in linear search can.

Hosts files yield more speed (blocks ads and hardcodes favorite sites - faster than remote DNS)

One problem with hardcoding favorite sites comes when the IP address for a favorite site changes. That's what the expiry time on each record in a DNS zone was supposed to fix.

Why focus so much attention on split screen multiplayer? I mean why?

Right now? Because it's the subject of this Slashdot article.

tetris clone

I moved on years ago from that...

pygame prototypes

...to that.

I've spent the past several years working on an article summarizing the arguments for and against split-screen that I've seen on Slashdot and elsewhere. The big problem I can see is that startup studios have a hard time getting onto a platform that allows single-screen multiplayer: desktop PCs by and large aren't in the living room (with a few exceptions that Hairyfeet will probably explain), Steam Machines aren't out yet, OUYA flopped, and the major consoles require developers to have the sort of experience that one can only gain by moving to a place like Austin, Boston, or Seattle.

Parameterized statements are fine if the number and order of parameters in a particular query won't change from one execution to the next. But what's the alternative to calling the database connection's escape_string method if an application needs to include a variable number of values in a query? An example is the list on the right side of SQL operator IN. What I did back when I still used MySQLi was make a single function that turns an array into a correctly escaped and parenthesized IN list using the database connection's escape_string method, and then I use this function for every IN and only IN. Is there a better practice, other than porting the whole lot to PDO MySQL all at once?

But which of the four is the X button?

If you refer to the fact that A and B are swapped and X and Y are swapped between the Super NES and the Xbox, the Xbox was not the first. Xbox inherited this layout ultimately from the Sega Genesis, which predates the Super NES.

Eh, that doesn't really fit many games on Steam though. Local multiplayer is a rare thing on PC games. Damn shame.

I've been collecting links to Slashdot comments that recommend local multiplayer PC games. Mostly the problem has been that very few people are willing to either A. carry a desktop PC back and forth between the desk and the living room or B. buy and maintain a second computer that lacks consoles' advantage in ease of use.

Would my completed playable games and video of a work in progress be a plus or a minus?

Definitely a plus. Seeing some sort of coding project through to completion is important, at least in my opinion, and the more the better. There are simply things you can't really learn any other way except through experience. If you've completed projects, then you know what I'm talking about - all those little details that can potentially swamp an elegant theoretical design with all-too-inconvenient reality.

I needed roughly $10K or so to move if I recall correctly [...] over fifteen years ago

Thank you. You're the first to actually put a ballpark dollar amount on this, compared to others who say "if you can't figure out on your own how relocation works, you don't deserve a job."

Also, having a finished product on your resume demonstrates that you can actually finish products that you start.

Would my completed playable games and video of a work in progress be a plus or a minus?

With my computer, I can just start programming, release my program, and other people can run it as they please.

The problem here is that a lot of people are "scared of computers" to the point of not feeling the need to buy a second computer to keep hooked up to the TV. So when they have friends over to play a video game, instead of playing the PC game you developed and self-published as you describe, they drag out a console and play a game from a more established developer.

I've written an essay about why I think people continue to buy consoles.

They bring their laptops.

That has drawbacks: everyone having to drive back home to get the laptops (or, alternatively, having to preplan the LAN party which destroys spontaneity), having to buy multiple copies of a game, and the possibility of not everyone already owning a gaming laptop as opposed to one with a pre-Ivy Bridge Intel CPU used as a secondary Office-and-Facebook computer alongside a desktop PC. I explain further here.

Or I use a cheap wireless HDMI streamer.

How does that work? Can it combine multiple PCs' displays into one stream that gets sent to the television? I'd appreciate an explanation.

For much of the last console cycle, "multi-platform" meant "360 and PS3". These days, it's a brave developer who doesn't include the PC in their line-up.

Does this apply to games intended to be played by players holding gamepads and looking at the same large monitor, or did you mean only single-player and online games? Case in point: the PC version of Mortal Kombat (2011) was delayed for two years, and a lot of other fighting and party games seem not to get a PC port at all.

[iOS] games these days seem to split between paywalled crudware

Paywalled in what sense? Are the majority of PC games free-to-play now?