Re:Does adding every ingredient make it better?
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
No, but consider the competition. C++ is insanely complicated and broken, and is popular. Perl is insanely broken and complicated, and it is popular.
Anyway, anonymous higher order functions and generics are two really glaring deficiencies in Java, C#, and many other modern OO languages, so adding them is a step in the right direction. It's not as if these are minor, useless features.
> Is this their plan to "lock in" universities to teaching microsoft programing to all levels, because it will take > 4 years of classes just to cover it all?
That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
The format is not that bad, and Adobe has a document describing it in detail. It only took me a week or so to learn how to generate my own, and I was a much worse programmer then...
Security is not just a thing that software has or doesn't have. In order for us to answer this question, you need to tell us what you do and don't want people to be doing. How well the software addresses that distinction is what a specific instance of "secure" is.
You need a static IP address, for real. Without it, you'll need to resort to some other method. The registrar needs to list the primary DNS server for your domain, and if you're doing your own DNS then that IP needs to be static, because it's not easy to change.
Otherwise, you *can* in fact do primary DNS for a domain using the domain itself. There's a bit of a "chicken and egg" problem here -- in order to register a domain you need to provide primary and secondary DNS for it, and in order to provide a DNS server you need to own a domain name. I somehow made this work with my domain names many years ago, but I don't remember how.
The easiest way is probably to get someone else (your ISP, your registrar) do DNS for you. They know how to do it and it doesn't really cost that much.
every 1 out of 2 or 3 female characters is being played by a male player, while every 1 out of 100 male characters is being played by a female player
In order to draw the conclusions that they want to draw from this statistic, we also need to know the ratio of male to female players, and ratio of male to female characters. Otherwise, the skew is easily explained by a mostly male population!
> To illustrate, a standard Pentium III, without the requisite array of cooling fans, sucks down around 30W when running at > full speed. Run that sucker for 24 hours, and you've run up a bill of 0.72 kilowatt-hours, or about 3.6 assuming 5/kW/H.
In order for this to illustrate anything more than the cost of leaving your computer on all the time, you would also need to give figures for a PIII running idle.
Use HTTP and wget from the other machine. Since you don't care about your data being intercepted, you might as well be up front about it!
Use scp with a faster cipher, like "none". But unless you're on a slow machine and a fairly fast network, I'd be surprised if the encryption is really the bottleneck. Have you looked at 'top'?
If you take "under god" out of the required pledge of allegience, then you are making assumptions "loose (sic) their value."
If you change assumptions, then you "deny people their rights."
What the hell does this mean? How does not saying "under god" make anyone (other than the government) lose their "rights"?
I have a saying about things like this copyright assignment jazz: "standard forms are for other people." If you've got a good paper, you have negotiating power. Tell the journal they can't have your paper unless you retain the copyright...
Have you tried this? There are two different parts of the machine here: the program committee, who decides what papers are accepted, and the publishing company, who handles the forms. I've never tried it, but the publishers don't really care much about the papers, so it's pretty hard to hold them hostage. I've you've done it and were successful, I would be interested in hearing about how that worked.
There are two practical problems with this. First, the journals are the life-blood of academics. If you're a graduate student or new professor, you are really a slave to the journal's whim, because it's "publish or perish." Even if you're a tenured faculty member with nothing to lose, your co-authors might. In fact, there was even an initiative of loads of tenured faculty calling for a boycott of many major journals unless they opened up their archives to everyone for free (you may have read about it on slashdot a few years ago), but the journals called their bluff and it fell through. Second, there is the cultural problem that most disciplines simply don't look on the web for electronic copies of publications. There needs to be such a culture to create enough demand to make it worthwhile for universities or researchers to defy the journals and set up such archives.
The PLoS is really important. More important than "open source", and it should be on the front page of slashdot.
Listen: Right now, basically everything published in a journal in the last 50 years is *owned* not by scientists but by publishers. You might not realize this if you never published, but journals and conferences make you *assign the copyright* for your paper to the publishing company. Not license it to them for publication (this would be reasonable), but *give* them the copyright and lose your own rights to publish and distribute the work. Here's a sample agreement from the IEEE.
This is seriously fucked up. It means that, if the publishers wanted, they could close up shop and never let anybody see the archive of scientific papers again. It means they can sue you if you publish your own paper on your web page, or make copies of it for a class you teach!
Computer scientists, being handy with the web, typically publish their papers and then put them up on their websites, playing "civil disobedience." (Some journals have even caved to this, and part of the copyright assignment you actually get licensed to put the paper on your web page.) That means there's already a sort of PLOS for computer science: an index of Computer Scientists' web pages and publications at citeseer.
The culture in other sciences, like biology, is really different. These guys write, sign the form, and then pay for a few paper copies of the article that they can give out if requested.
The way it's happening in CS is one way to free science. It seems to be working. But for those who don't actively maintain web pages and don't have a culture where the web is the place to go to look for papers, the PLoS seems like a good way to make this happen. I really, really hope it succeeds.
Bad bad bad bad!! bad bad bad bad ... !!!
on
Even Grues Get Full
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· Score: 1
Userfriendly is so boring!!! AAaaaaaagh!
Even slashdot comments are funnier than that shit.
Working together is great, as long as everyone comes away understanding the answers.
In the undergrad algorithms class at CMU some of the assignments are "presentations," where a group of students solves problems together, then presents the answers in front of a professor or TA. At the time of the presentation, the TA picks the question that a student will answer randomly, so that it's in his interest (and his group's interest) to understand the answer to each question.
This is actually *easier* than grading (at least, it's more interesting), and I think it makes cheating pretty much impossible.
It's called "Sonic Hedgehog," and it's quite old. There are lots of things with funny names in biology, especially bacteriophage, which there are billions of in the world. Some "philatelist" programs do little more than catalog and name phage.
Hey, there is even a mitochondrial protein named after my slashdot username: tom7.
1. On face value, they seem to be saying, "Our source code was stolen from us, so we need to rewrite it."
This doesn't make sense. Obviously, they still have a copy of the source code---if they don't, they can just download it from any of the million mirrors on the internet. Admittedly, this is much worse than copying mp3s or even the full HL2 CD when it is released, and it may even be misappropriation of trade secrets, but it's still not stealing. They still have the code.
2. Maybe they really mean, "There are significant secrets in the code which, if revealed, make our product not viable."
Perhaps. What might those secrets be?
2a. The format of the network code.
Reasonable. This is what people mean when they talk about how the release of the source code means in-roads for cheaters. But obfuscating the network code is not a four-month job. They only need to change basic things like the packet layout and their fake encryption or whatever. (Aside: IMO the best way to deal with current forms of cheating is to simply release frequent updates to the protocol and binaries. Reverse engineering is a lot slower than "forward" engineering, so exploit that asymmetry.)
2b. The CD key code.
Seriously, the CD key code is rarely any more useful as a C function than as a compiled binary. People debug key checkers and write keygens in like, a day. Unless they have some seriously new regime here, that's not a reasonable cause for 4 months. (Aside: If they used RSA and a key was just a digital signature (of some token), then cracking keys would be really, really hard, like, net you an instant PhD hard. Also, revealing the keycheck algorithm would do nothing for hackers. It would probably make keys a bit longer, though.)
2c. Buffer overflows and other exploitable bugs, or deliberate backdoors.
Maybe. But if they know about them, maybe they should just get rid of them? If they're thinking of auditing for them, maybe they should have done that even if the source wasn't copied? In truth, I bet having the source code out there will incite a lot of the bugtraq attention-seeking white-hats to audit the code for them. HL2 is a pretty high-profile piece of software.
2d. GPL violations.
Ha, well, yeah. Apparently there are some of those in the code, though I don't know the specifics.
3. Maybe they really mean, "We forgot how long it takes to actually polish a product and ship it. We were going to delay again at the cost of the fan community's ire, but now we can shift that blame onto hackers!"
This is my guess: like a defeated player complaining about lag, they're just shifting the blame.
SSL's main vulnerability is to man-in-the-middle attacks, which is precisely what aimbots usually do. It's especially vulnerable if you are *deliberately* trying to connect through a proxy, in fact, it's trivial.
I hadn't thought of that, but, I also hadn't noticed any aspect-ratio issues in any of the other FPS games I play at 1280x1024. Certainly any distortion is better than the sampling that my monitor does when game pixels aren't in 1:1 correspondence with screen pixels, which looks really, really bad!
Fortunately in 3D engines it's a simple matter of applying a different viewport transformation to stretch the image to different aspect ratios, so this could just be an "advanced" option for those who care about it.
Very sleazy... essentially, Microsoft makes your page present useless dialogs "Press OK to continue loading." (with no possibility to cancel the control), which no web developer would possibly want. Then, they add a new attribute "NOEXTERNAL" (which might as well be called "DOESNOTVIOLATETHEPATENT") that turns off the prompt. Basically, they shift the legal responsibility onto the web page developer, while essentially ensuring that "NOEXTERNAL" becomes "just one of those things" that you always put, no matter what.
Anyway, hurting Microsoft with software patents is a good way to get an ally in the fight against them!
Well, that's not technically true. There are some high-end speakers that are driven (or at least corrected) by a servo rather than an electromagnet, and those servos could easily be digital. And, of course, you could just imagine tamper-proof hardware.
Anyway, I agree with you in principle. But the industry is actually moving towards these sorts of things, and while I think we'll always be able to practically rerecord audio, these new encrypted DVI video connections are a bit scarier...
Remember when you buy: "Secure" means secure for the recording industry, not for you!
Yeah, I agree. There are so many games out there that I don't have time to waste if it's going to be buggy. Case in point: I couldn't get the demo for XIII to work at my LCDs resolution (note to game developers: just support every reasonable resolution!! It's not hard. At a very minimum, support standard LCD resolutions like 1280x1024, because it will look like shit if it has to up-sample to display on a LCD!), and my mouse was like 100x more sensitive than it should have been, making it impossible to aim at anything. Despite that the demo did look cool, but in general it drove me away more than it attracted me. Rabid fans will love the game when it finally comes out no matter what, and, believe it or not, nobody else is actually sitting around checking the website every day to see if there's any new news. We can wait!
This was a terrible, terrible article. I waded through a bit of the "interview" (maybe it should be called, "Please repeat your "mission statement" and "marketing catchphrases" for us, several times) because I thought the article would eventually be testing the limits of data recovery: throwing disks on the floor, burning them, overwriting the data, etc. You know, something interesting.
But it wasn't. And the article was filled with so many technical inaccuracies and miswordings ("There are very few "low-level" programmers left worldwide. And from those who program in low-level code like DOS, only a handful can do it at a professional level." ?!?!???) that it was clear neither party actually understood anything about data recovery.
It was just a fucking advertisement, and a completely uninteresting one at that. Shame on you, slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but consider the competition. C++ is insanely complicated and broken, and is popular. Perl is insanely broken and complicated, and it is popular.
Anyway, anonymous higher order functions and generics are two really glaring deficiencies in Java, C#, and many other modern OO languages, so adding them is a step in the right direction. It's not as if these are minor, useless features.
> Is this their plan to "lock in" universities to teaching microsoft programing to all levels, because it will take
> 4 years of classes just to cover it all?
That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
The format is not that bad, and Adobe has a document describing it in detail. It only took me a week or so to learn how to generate my own, and I was a much worse programmer then...
Security is not just a thing that software has or doesn't have. In order for us to answer this question, you need to tell us what you do and don't want people to be doing. How well the software addresses that distinction is what a specific instance of "secure" is.
You need a static IP address, for real. Without it, you'll need to resort to some other method. The registrar needs to list the primary DNS server for your domain, and if you're doing your own DNS then that IP needs to be static, because it's not easy to change.
Otherwise, you *can* in fact do primary DNS for a domain using the domain itself. There's a bit of a "chicken and egg" problem here -- in order to register a domain you need to provide primary and secondary DNS for it, and in order to provide a DNS server you need to own a domain name. I somehow made this work with my domain names many years ago, but I don't remember how.
The easiest way is probably to get someone else (your ISP, your registrar) do DNS for you. They know how to do it and it doesn't really cost that much.
I feel like not listening to RIAA-feeding ratio stations. There is plenty of royalty-free music out there.
every 1 out of 2 or 3 female characters is being played by a male player, while every 1 out of 100 male characters is being played by a female player
In order to draw the conclusions that they want to draw from this statistic, we also need to know the ratio of male to female players, and ratio of male to female characters. Otherwise, the skew is easily explained by a mostly male population!
> To illustrate, a standard Pentium III, without the requisite array of cooling fans, sucks down around 30W when running at
> full speed. Run that sucker for 24 hours, and you've run up a bill of 0.72 kilowatt-hours, or about 3.6 assuming 5/kW/H.
In order for this to illustrate anything more than the cost of leaving your computer on all the time, you would also need to give figures for a PIII running idle.
The solutions are:
Use HTTP and wget from the other machine. Since you don't care about your data being intercepted, you might as well be up front about it!
Use scp with a faster cipher, like "none". But unless you're on a slow machine and a fairly fast network, I'd be surprised if the encryption is really the bottleneck. Have you looked at 'top'?
Ahaha, that's a good one. You're saying:
If you take "under god" out of the required pledge of allegience, then you are making assumptions "loose (sic) their value."
If you change assumptions, then you "deny people their rights."
What the hell does this mean? How does not saying "under god" make anyone (other than the government) lose their "rights"?
Perhaps another reason "PHBs" might be heading to other sources than the IT staff is because the IT staff treats them with such contempt?
I have a saying about things like this copyright assignment jazz: "standard forms are for other people." If you've got a good paper, you have negotiating power. Tell the journal they can't have your paper unless you retain the copyright ...
Have you tried this? There are two different parts of the machine here: the program committee, who decides what papers are accepted, and the publishing company, who handles the forms. I've never tried it, but the publishers don't really care much about the papers, so it's pretty hard to hold them hostage. I've you've done it and were successful, I would be interested in hearing about how that worked.
There are two practical problems with this. First, the journals are the life-blood of academics. If you're a graduate student or new professor, you are really a slave to the journal's whim, because it's "publish or perish." Even if you're a tenured faculty member with nothing to lose, your co-authors might. In fact, there was even an initiative of loads of tenured faculty calling for a boycott of many major journals unless they opened up their archives to everyone for free (you may have read about it on slashdot a few years ago), but the journals called their bluff and it fell through. Second, there is the cultural problem that most disciplines simply don't look on the web for electronic copies of publications. There needs to be such a culture to create enough demand to make it worthwhile for universities or researchers to defy the journals and set up such archives.
The PLoS is really important. More important than "open source", and it should be on the front page of slashdot.
.
.
Listen: Right now, basically everything published in a journal in the last 50 years is *owned* not by scientists but by publishers. You might not realize this if you never published, but journals and conferences make you *assign the copyright* for your paper to the publishing company. Not license it to them for publication (this would be reasonable), but *give* them the copyright and lose your own rights to publish and distribute the work. Here's a sample agreement from the IEEE
This is seriously fucked up. It means that, if the publishers wanted, they could close up shop and never let anybody see the archive of scientific papers again. It means they can sue you if you publish your own paper on your web page, or make copies of it for a class you teach!
Computer scientists, being handy with the web, typically publish their papers and then put them up on their websites, playing "civil disobedience." (Some journals have even caved to this, and part of the copyright assignment you actually get licensed to put the paper on your web page.) That means there's already a sort of PLOS for computer science: an index of Computer Scientists' web pages and publications at citeseer
The culture in other sciences, like biology, is really different. These guys write, sign the form, and then pay for a few paper copies of the article that they can give out if requested.
The way it's happening in CS is one way to free science. It seems to be working. But for those who don't actively maintain web pages and don't have a culture where the web is the place to go to look for papers, the PLoS seems like a good way to make this happen. I really, really hope it succeeds.
Userfriendly is so boring!!! AAaaaaaagh!
Even slashdot comments are funnier than that shit.
Working together is great, as long as everyone comes away understanding the answers.
In the undergrad algorithms class at CMU some of the assignments are "presentations," where a group of students solves problems together, then presents the answers in front of a professor or TA. At the time of the presentation, the TA picks the question that a student will answer randomly, so that it's in his interest (and his group's interest) to understand the answer to each question.
This is actually *easier* than grading (at least, it's more interesting), and I think it makes cheating pretty much impossible.
Grad student.
It's called "Sonic Hedgehog," and it's quite old. There are lots of things with funny names in biology, especially bacteriophage, which there are billions of in the world. Some "philatelist" programs do little more than catalog and name phage.
Hey, there is even a mitochondrial protein named after my slashdot username: tom7.
OK, let's take a look at this.
1. On face value, they seem to be saying, "Our source code was stolen from us, so we need to rewrite it."
This doesn't make sense. Obviously, they still have a copy of the source code---if they don't, they can just download it from any of the million mirrors on the internet. Admittedly, this is much worse than copying mp3s or even the full HL2 CD when it is released, and it may even be misappropriation of trade secrets, but it's still not stealing. They still have the code.
2. Maybe they really mean, "There are significant secrets in the code which, if revealed, make our product not viable."
Perhaps. What might those secrets be?
2a. The format of the network code.
Reasonable. This is what people mean when they talk about how the release of the source code means in-roads for cheaters. But obfuscating the network code is not a four-month job. They only need to change basic things like the packet layout and their fake encryption or whatever. (Aside: IMO the best way to deal with current forms of cheating is to simply release frequent updates to the protocol and binaries. Reverse engineering is a lot slower than "forward" engineering, so exploit that asymmetry.)
2b. The CD key code.
Seriously, the CD key code is rarely any more useful as a C function than as a compiled binary. People debug key checkers and write keygens in like, a day. Unless they have some seriously new regime here, that's not a reasonable cause for 4 months. (Aside: If they used RSA and a key was just a digital signature (of some token), then cracking keys would be really, really hard, like, net you an instant PhD hard. Also, revealing the keycheck algorithm would do nothing for hackers. It would probably make keys a bit longer, though.)
2c. Buffer overflows and other exploitable bugs, or deliberate backdoors.
Maybe. But if they know about them, maybe they should just get rid of them? If they're thinking of auditing for them, maybe they should have done that even if the source wasn't copied? In truth, I bet having the source code out there will incite a lot of the bugtraq attention-seeking white-hats to audit the code for them. HL2 is a pretty high-profile piece of software.
2d. GPL violations.
Ha, well, yeah. Apparently there are some of those in the code, though I don't know the specifics.
3. Maybe they really mean, "We forgot how long it takes to actually polish a product and ship it. We were going to delay again at the cost of the fan community's ire, but now we can shift that blame onto hackers!"
This is my guess: like a defeated player complaining about lag, they're just shifting the blame.
SSL's main vulnerability is to man-in-the-middle attacks, which is precisely what aimbots usually do. It's especially vulnerable if you are *deliberately* trying to connect through a proxy, in fact, it's trivial.
I hadn't thought of that, but, I also hadn't noticed any aspect-ratio issues in any of the other FPS games I play at 1280x1024. Certainly any distortion is better than the sampling that my monitor does when game pixels aren't in 1:1 correspondence with screen pixels, which looks really, really bad!
Fortunately in 3D engines it's a simple matter of applying a different viewport transformation to stretch the image to different aspect ratios, so this could just be an "advanced" option for those who care about it.
Very sleazy... essentially, Microsoft makes your page present useless dialogs "Press OK to continue loading." (with no possibility to cancel the control), which no web developer would possibly want. Then, they add a new attribute "NOEXTERNAL" (which might as well be called "DOESNOTVIOLATETHEPATENT") that turns off the prompt. Basically, they shift the legal responsibility onto the web page developer, while essentially ensuring that "NOEXTERNAL" becomes "just one of those things" that you always put, no matter what.
Anyway, hurting Microsoft with software patents is a good way to get an ally in the fight against them!
Well, that's not technically true. There are some high-end speakers that are driven (or at least corrected) by a servo rather than an electromagnet, and those servos could easily be digital. And, of course, you could just imagine tamper-proof hardware.
Anyway, I agree with you in principle. But the industry is actually moving towards these sorts of things, and while I think we'll always be able to practically rerecord audio, these new encrypted DVI video connections are a bit scarier...
Remember when you buy: "Secure" means secure for the recording industry, not for you!
Yeah, I agree. There are so many games out there that I don't have time to waste if it's going to be buggy. Case in point: I couldn't get the demo for XIII to work at my LCDs resolution (note to game developers: just support every reasonable resolution!! It's not hard. At a very minimum, support standard LCD resolutions like 1280x1024, because it will look like shit if it has to up-sample to display on a LCD!), and my mouse was like 100x more sensitive than it should have been, making it impossible to aim at anything. Despite that the demo did look cool, but in general it drove me away more than it attracted me. Rabid fans will love the game when it finally comes out no matter what, and, believe it or not, nobody else is actually sitting around checking the website every day to see if there's any new news. We can wait!
Just don't buy any "digital" speakers.
Yeah, the Half-life 2 source code is safe and sound, now.
This was a terrible, terrible article. I waded through a bit of the "interview" (maybe it should be called, "Please repeat your "mission statement" and "marketing catchphrases" for us, several times) because I thought the article would eventually be testing the limits of data recovery: throwing disks on the floor, burning them, overwriting the data, etc. You know, something interesting.
But it wasn't. And the article was filled with so many technical inaccuracies and miswordings ("There are very few "low-level" programmers left worldwide. And from those who program in low-level code like DOS, only a handful can do it at a professional level." ?!?!???) that it was clear neither party actually understood anything about data recovery.
It was just a fucking advertisement, and a completely uninteresting one at that. Shame on you, slashdot.