No joke, I travelled through Thailaind with a buddy who asked the tour leader - using these exact words - "Who will be the next king"? The tour leader became visibly upset, explained to us that they believe their king is immortal and will rule forever, and subsequently shut up during the entire rest of the trip. Just suggestion the king might die one day is considered extremely impolite.
My guess is that it's safe to assume that all PCs are on the internet, even if it's only dial-up. But most consoles are not. Sure some people are online with consoles, but most are in the living room attached to the television I think.
One thing the consoles have that the PC's don't is a policeman (the console producers), who has to license a game before it can be released. Perhaps what is lacking in the PC space is such a policeman (although you can argue that this would have other undesirable consequences too, not least of which would be higher games prices).
Here's the key thing: Game publishers are not doing this to stop piracy, and some have even said so. They are doing this to stop game reselling and trading.
Ah, the argument that the games industry is out to control us. Not that I am so naive as to believe that these *evil* corporations won't go that low, but what bugs me is, why don't they do the same with console titles? Why is it only PC games that they are trying to control this way? They make way more money out of the console market, yet it is the relatively puny PC market that they are trying to squeeze?
Well, that's certainly one way to look at it. Problem is that, while game developers focus on the lucrative console market, the PC versions of their games will suffer in quality (don't believe me? Read the amazon reviews on Black Ops). That is if they even bother to develop for the PC - many game developers simply do not have the technical ability to produce games for the heterogeneous PC platform (PS3 and XBox hardware is pretty much fixed and easy to target).
I want my PC games to be made for the PC. I hate not being able to save my game at any point in time - these "checkpoints" used by console ports are horrendous. I also want to be able to configure my game to take advantage of my PC's hardware - console games are made for a fixed set of hardware, meaning that they rarely support the better graphics capability of modern PC GPU's. I also want PC games to be released after proper QA, not as an afterthought.
Is there a single AAA game developer left that still focuses on PC games? I may be wrong, but I have not seen a big PC-exclusive announcement in ages.
I could just pirate from the internet if I was too poor/cheap to pay for it. Now, while this actually *does not* cut into the sales of the big gaming companies, since the cheap gamer would have never shelled out the money to begin with
So you're saying, if person A is willing to spend 60 bucks on a new game, and he gets the option to either pay 60 bucks or get the game for free, he will always choose to spend the 60 bucks?
By your logic, marketshare % == hacking attempts %. You do realize that many servers run Linux right? According to Forrester Research 48% of businesses surveyed used OSS. If Linux represents even half of that then at least 24% of businesses use Linux. That would mean 24% of all exploits would have to be targetting Linux. Funny I don't see 24% of botnets being written for Linux. The vast, vast majority are written for Windows.
I applaude you attempt to put this issue to rest, but I see two flaws in your logic (besides the obvious assumption that 50% of OSS == Linux, which is probably conservative).
1. More a point of clarity - I did not read the Forrester Research, but do they say 48% of businesses run OSS, or do they say 48% of business servers are OSS? 1 business != 1 server. Bigger businesses may have a disproportional number of servers running, and they may not be OSS.
2. Botnets don't target just servers, they target anything that runs, including desktops. So server share is not necessarily sufficient to determine exploitation potential.
My predecessors used Hibernate figuring they could ignore the database
And there is the problem. Hibernate's designers never claimed that you could ignore the database. In fact, one of the biggest strengths of Hibernate is the fact that it does not hide the database away from you - an area where some other ORM tools (like JDO) falls flat.
... there's only so much that can be done when your codebase assumes that all your objects are always in memory
Hibernate does not promote this view of persistence at all. It has a clearly defined object lifecycle and state model which allows specific control over how your entities interact with the database. Seems like you are blaming Hibernate for the shortcomings of your (or your predecessor's) design.
Hibernate, and ORM in general, gives other advantages. Like being able to do second level caching and clustering with minimal configuration. It also reduces the amount of JDBC (or SQL) code for the most mundane (but also most significant) situations like CRUD, and using a clever combination of lazy-loading and fetching strategies allows you to optimally interact with your database without writing complex lifecycle management code. It makes your application more maintainable by providing a centralized configuration, meaning that you have less work to do when your database schema changes.
And to preempt, yes, these advantages does have a cost. Hibernate's lifecycle and state model does not suit everybody's view of how ORM is supposed to work. The trick is to understand, in your specific situation, whether the cost is off-set by the benefit or not.
...I doubt their main business is going to be operating bitbucket
Probably true
, more likely charging ten thousand bucks a seat for use of a copy of bitbucket inside corporate intranets
I can't speak of bitbucket, but we bought one of their flagship products (JIRA) at something like $100 per seat. Most of their products are very competitively priced, and usually free for open source projects.
, probably with some useless eclipse integration thrown in.
I find their Eclipse plugins to be of excellent quality and a massive productivity booster in our environment. All the devs in my team are using it.
You know, I really don't like the quotes around solution - since I actually have produced a solution that would have prevented this issue, and would be easy to maintain in future if the devs are doing their due diligence properly, I think it's fair to remove those quotes, don't you?
OK, we are obviously debating orthogonal issues. I'm bemoaning Eclipse's lack of choice in using a vendour name to make critical decisions, while you are concerned with the mechanism on how they got the vendour name. I thought your Java stub may provide a way to bypass the vendour, but unfortunately it does not, so in my view it suffers from the same intrinsic problem. But it is technically still way better than reading a DLL field, so fair enough - I retract my statement about your solution not working (in this case). And you can consider the quotes removed.
You still use the vendour name to create the input arguments for your 2nd invocation. How is that any better than
the schoolboy error of accepting arbitrary unvalidated variable input and assuming it is 100% correct, immutable, and altering your whole user experience based on it?
In the previous post, you also said...
When your supported VMs are upgraded by the vendor - you've got a tiny little Java app to update and the rest of the behemoth is never touched.
So even if the Eclipse devs followed your advice, it still would have been broken, because you have to update at least something.
You rant quite a lot about how incredibly bad the Eclipse devs did this job, but your "solution" would have resulted in exactly the same situation.
How's this: write a short Java stub that detects the runtime environment from within the VM and passes back a guaranteed consistent string to the wrapper that then decides how to start the Java VM
I am keen to see the code for this stub. At least point me in the right direction - which API can I use to achieve this?
Added to that - some of the plugins used by Eclipse are not always up to scratch. I've installed various plugins over the years that basically broke my Eclipse, with the only option to de-install the plugin (and sometimes re-install Eclipse).
Vanilla Eclipse has always been rock solid in my experience, ever since version 2 at least when I started using it. And I believe they have done a lot of work in the later releases to lessen the plugin-hell.
Poor planning. Eclipse should not use a 'company' field to be pulling key VM info from.
Generally I would agree, but on this specific issue I don't see how else they would be able to solve this particular problem. The PermGen configuration used by Eclipse is specific to each VM implementation, and the company identification string is one way to determine how to supply it. I would love to hear of another way to achieve this without a proper VM standard on this. It may not even be possible to standardise this across VM implementations given that VM's are not always PC processes in the traditional sense, but I may be wrong on that.
It is similar to an AJAX framework using the browser identification string to determine what flavour of JavaScript is supported - I don't really know how else they can do that either.
A friend of mine works for a company that sells software to a government department a central African country (I want to keep the details vague to avoid incrimination). After completing the contract and delivering the software, reps arrived one day and simply stated "We're not going to pay full price for the software - we're not making as much money out of it as we thought we would." This country does not have much of a justice system to appeal to if you don't have a politician in your pocket, so my friend's company intentionally released code to make the system stop working if the payments are late. AFAIK that fixed the problem.
I'm just curios if these companies were perhaps faced with a similar situation...
Yeah, there is a complete lack of tension. Watching sport (to me at least) is a lot about how players use psychological maneuvers to get their opponent to make a mistake (or do something they would not usually do).
Just imagine the commentary on a comp vs comp chess game:
Jim: Comp1 just made the most optimal move under the constraints of its x-heuristics algorithm...
Joe: I agree Jim. He must be trying to optimize the variables of his problem.
Jim: I see comp2 is taking his time choosing between two different but equally scoring outcomes. I wonder if the random number generator used is pseudo or quasi-random?
Living in South Africa, which is a race obsessed nation, I hear this types of arguments a lot. So, I will naively assume you are not a troll but just a misguided individual.
Yes, it is true that Africans score lower on general IQ tests, and that Ashkenazi Jews, Indians and Chinese people score generally higher. (I will make the dangerous assumption here that IQ is in fact some effective, neutral measurement of intelligence, which it is not).
However, before we start taking out the "genetically superior" card, we must take a scientific look. There are multiple reasons why the IQ results may be skewed this way:
1) Genetics (wired into your DNA)
2) Environmental (education, culture, traditions, availability of proper nutrition)
Now, in order to test which one of the above has the biggest effect, you need to setup an experiment where you remove the environmental effects.
Scientists have done this by studying the IQ levels of people of different races in similar cultural settings. For example, they compared the IQ of African children of American soldiers serving overseas like Germany (who goes to the same schools as their white American counterparts, and live in the same cultural environment). Scientist also studied the IQ results of African children living in middle class societies in America and elsewhere.
The result? Children of African ancestry have the same IQ as children of European ancestry when you eliminate environmental factors. So, the difference in IQ is not genetic.
I think its important to note that Nicholas does not say that Financial Maths is hocus pocus - he says that the way banks put all their faith in them puts them at risk. He has an excellent analogy about a pilot flying a plane with instruments that are 99% correct - he reckons, this pilot must also look out of the window every once in a while and not fly blindly by his instruments.
I work at a bank, and there is certainly no talk about dropping or revising the use of financial maths. In fact, the result of this crises will probably be more strict controls over the maths used by traders, which will probably make a "quant" even more valuable as a tradesman.
I seriously doubt this is the last we'll hear of Jack Thompson
Jack Thompson's antics has already discredited him as a lawyer (at least where it matters). This news is not important to the gaming industry in any significant manner.
The fundamental question of whether video gaming will be regulated by the right is not a matter of Jack Thompson, but in how the US constitution is upheld by the powers that be.
Ironically, Norway is a large exporter of oil (about 20% of GDP is oil/gas export). So while this token programme should be applauded, perhaps they could look at reducing how they help choking the rest of the world too?
The absolute accuracy of the test is not that important - what is important is the accurancy vs. the ratio of the population that will go for the test that can reasonably be expected to test truely positive. If a pregnancy test is 97.4% accurate, and 50% of women who think they are pregnant is in actual fact pregnant, then the chance of a false positive is much much lower than in your HIV test case. So yes, in that case the pregnancy test is very useful.
99% accurate means 1% false positives. In countries with low HIV infection rates like most of the first world, that 1% basically makes the test pretty useless.
In Africa, where HIV rates are closer to 10% of the general population, this type of test actually has value.
I love it when religious people likens disregard for their religion with racism. Racism is the act of discriminating against a person's race, something over which he had no choice and for which there exists no scientific evidence that he is different from you in any way beyond the colour of his skin.
Religion is a personal choice, so it says something about your individual person. Hence, stereotyping on that basis is quite fair.
I am not a geneticist, but if I recall correctly according to Dawkins' Selfish Gene theory a gene is defined as a replicating entity that have selection pressure acting upon it. He specifically excluded it to mean a specific part in the DNA sequence - a single gene can be encoded with many different proteins all over the DNA sequence, as long as it replicates as a unit.
Slashdot Mirror
When the king dies, which won't be far off...
No joke, I travelled through Thailaind with a buddy who asked the tour leader - using these exact words - "Who will be the next king"? The tour leader became visibly upset, explained to us that they believe their king is immortal and will rule forever, and subsequently shut up during the entire rest of the trip. Just suggestion the king might die one day is considered extremely impolite.
My guess is that it's safe to assume that all PCs are on the internet, even if it's only dial-up. But most consoles are not. Sure some people are online with consoles, but most are in the living room attached to the television I think.
In the US at least, about 70% of consoles are connected to the internet, which makes the internet-connected console games market still much bigger than the PC market. http://www.ps3blog.net/2010/04/13/ps3-has-biggest-percentage-of-internet-connected-consoles-in-the-us/
One thing the consoles have that the PC's don't is a policeman (the console producers), who has to license a game before it can be released. Perhaps what is lacking in the PC space is such a policeman (although you can argue that this would have other undesirable consequences too, not least of which would be higher games prices).
Here's the key thing: Game publishers are not doing this to stop piracy, and some have even said so. They are doing this to stop game reselling and trading.
Ah, the argument that the games industry is out to control us. Not that I am so naive as to believe that these *evil* corporations won't go that low, but what bugs me is, why don't they do the same with console titles? Why is it only PC games that they are trying to control this way? They make way more money out of the console market, yet it is the relatively puny PC market that they are trying to squeeze?
Well, that's certainly one way to look at it. Problem is that, while game developers focus on the lucrative console market, the PC versions of their games will suffer in quality (don't believe me? Read the amazon reviews on Black Ops). That is if they even bother to develop for the PC - many game developers simply do not have the technical ability to produce games for the heterogeneous PC platform (PS3 and XBox hardware is pretty much fixed and easy to target).
I want my PC games to be made for the PC. I hate not being able to save my game at any point in time - these "checkpoints" used by console ports are horrendous. I also want to be able to configure my game to take advantage of my PC's hardware - console games are made for a fixed set of hardware, meaning that they rarely support the better graphics capability of modern PC GPU's. I also want PC games to be released after proper QA, not as an afterthought.
Is there a single AAA game developer left that still focuses on PC games? I may be wrong, but I have not seen a big PC-exclusive announcement in ages.
I could just pirate from the internet if I was too poor/cheap to pay for it. Now, while this actually *does not* cut into the sales of the big gaming companies, since the cheap gamer would have never shelled out the money to begin with
So you're saying, if person A is willing to spend 60 bucks on a new game, and he gets the option to either pay 60 bucks or get the game for free, he will always choose to spend the 60 bucks?
By your logic, marketshare % == hacking attempts %. You do realize that many servers run Linux right? According to Forrester Research 48% of businesses surveyed used OSS. If Linux represents even half of that then at least 24% of businesses use Linux. That would mean 24% of all exploits would have to be targetting Linux. Funny I don't see 24% of botnets being written for Linux. The vast, vast majority are written for Windows.
I applaude you attempt to put this issue to rest, but I see two flaws in your logic (besides the obvious assumption that 50% of OSS == Linux, which is probably conservative).
1. More a point of clarity - I did not read the Forrester Research, but do they say 48% of businesses run OSS, or do they say 48% of business servers are OSS? 1 business != 1 server. Bigger businesses may have a disproportional number of servers running, and they may not be OSS.
2. Botnets don't target just servers, they target anything that runs, including desktops. So server share is not necessarily sufficient to determine exploitation potential.
My predecessors used Hibernate figuring they could ignore the database
And there is the problem. Hibernate's designers never claimed that you could ignore the database. In fact, one of the biggest strengths of Hibernate is the fact that it does not hide the database away from you - an area where some other ORM tools (like JDO) falls flat.
... there's only so much that can be done when your codebase assumes that all your objects are always in memory
Hibernate does not promote this view of persistence at all. It has a clearly defined object lifecycle and state model which allows specific control over how your entities interact with the database. Seems like you are blaming Hibernate for the shortcomings of your (or your predecessor's) design.
Hibernate, and ORM in general, gives other advantages. Like being able to do second level caching and clustering with minimal configuration. It also reduces the amount of JDBC (or SQL) code for the most mundane (but also most significant) situations like CRUD, and using a clever combination of lazy-loading and fetching strategies allows you to optimally interact with your database without writing complex lifecycle management code. It makes your application more maintainable by providing a centralized configuration, meaning that you have less work to do when your database schema changes.
And to preempt, yes, these advantages does have a cost. Hibernate's lifecycle and state model does not suit everybody's view of how ORM is supposed to work. The trick is to understand, in your specific situation, whether the cost is off-set by the benefit or not.
...I doubt their main business is going to be operating bitbucket
Probably true
, more likely charging ten thousand bucks a seat for use of a copy of bitbucket inside corporate intranets
I can't speak of bitbucket, but we bought one of their flagship products (JIRA) at something like $100 per seat. Most of their products are very competitively priced, and usually free for open source projects.
, probably with some useless eclipse integration thrown in.
I find their Eclipse plugins to be of excellent quality and a massive productivity booster in our environment. All the devs in my team are using it.
You know, I really don't like the quotes around solution - since I actually have produced a solution that would have prevented this issue, and would be easy to maintain in future if the devs are doing their due diligence properly, I think it's fair to remove those quotes, don't you?
OK, we are obviously debating orthogonal issues. I'm bemoaning Eclipse's lack of choice in using a vendour name to make critical decisions, while you are concerned with the mechanism on how they got the vendour name. I thought your Java stub may provide a way to bypass the vendour, but unfortunately it does not, so in my view it suffers from the same intrinsic problem. But it is technically still way better than reading a DLL field, so fair enough - I retract my statement about your solution not working (in this case). And you can consider the quotes removed.
You still use the vendour name to create the input arguments for your 2nd invocation. How is that any better than
the schoolboy error of accepting arbitrary unvalidated variable input and assuming it is 100% correct, immutable, and altering your whole user experience based on it?
In the previous post, you also said...
When your supported VMs are upgraded by the vendor - you've got a tiny little Java app to update and the rest of the behemoth is never touched.
So even if the Eclipse devs followed your advice, it still would have been broken, because you have to update at least something.
You rant quite a lot about how incredibly bad the Eclipse devs did this job, but your "solution" would have resulted in exactly the same situation.
How's this: write a short Java stub that detects the runtime environment from within the VM and passes back a guaranteed consistent string to the wrapper that then decides how to start the Java VM
I am keen to see the code for this stub. At least point me in the right direction - which API can I use to achieve this?
Added to that - some of the plugins used by Eclipse are not always up to scratch. I've installed various plugins over the years that basically broke my Eclipse, with the only option to de-install the plugin (and sometimes re-install Eclipse).
Vanilla Eclipse has always been rock solid in my experience, ever since version 2 at least when I started using it. And I believe they have done a lot of work in the later releases to lessen the plugin-hell.
Poor planning. Eclipse should not use a 'company' field to be pulling key VM info from.
Generally I would agree, but on this specific issue I don't see how else they would be able to solve this particular problem. The PermGen configuration used by Eclipse is specific to each VM implementation, and the company identification string is one way to determine how to supply it. I would love to hear of another way to achieve this without a proper VM standard on this. It may not even be possible to standardise this across VM implementations given that VM's are not always PC processes in the traditional sense, but I may be wrong on that.
It is similar to an AJAX framework using the browser identification string to determine what flavour of JavaScript is supported - I don't really know how else they can do that either.
A friend of mine works for a company that sells software to a government department a central African country (I want to keep the details vague to avoid incrimination). After completing the contract and delivering the software, reps arrived one day and simply stated "We're not going to pay full price for the software - we're not making as much money out of it as we thought we would." This country does not have much of a justice system to appeal to if you don't have a politician in your pocket, so my friend's company intentionally released code to make the system stop working if the payments are late. AFAIK that fixed the problem.
I'm just curios if these companies were perhaps faced with a similar situation...
HAHAHAHA! Take that you Nigerian piece of SH ...
Oh wait a minute...
Yes, but here they are getting their customers to pay for it.
Yeah, there is a complete lack of tension. Watching sport (to me at least) is a lot about how players use psychological maneuvers to get their opponent to make a mistake (or do something they would not usually do).
...
Just imagine the commentary on a comp vs comp chess game:
Jim: Comp1 just made the most optimal move under the constraints of its x-heuristics algorithm
Joe: I agree Jim. He must be trying to optimize the variables of his problem.
Jim: I see comp2 is taking his time choosing between two different but equally scoring outcomes. I wonder if the random number generator used is pseudo or quasi-random?
Living in South Africa, which is a race obsessed nation, I hear this types of arguments a lot. So, I will naively assume you are not a troll but just a misguided individual.
Yes, it is true that Africans score lower on general IQ tests, and that Ashkenazi Jews, Indians and Chinese people score generally higher. (I will make the dangerous assumption here that IQ is in fact some effective, neutral measurement of intelligence, which it is not).
However, before we start taking out the "genetically superior" card, we must take a scientific look. There are multiple reasons why the IQ results may be skewed this way:
1) Genetics (wired into your DNA)
2) Environmental (education, culture, traditions, availability of proper nutrition)
Now, in order to test which one of the above has the biggest effect, you need to setup an experiment where you remove the environmental effects.
Scientists have done this by studying the IQ levels of people of different races in similar cultural settings. For example, they compared the IQ of African children of American soldiers serving overseas like Germany (who goes to the same schools as their white American counterparts, and live in the same cultural environment). Scientist also studied the IQ results of African children living in middle class societies in America and elsewhere.
The result? Children of African ancestry have the same IQ as children of European ancestry when you eliminate environmental factors. So, the difference in IQ is not genetic.
I think its important to note that Nicholas does not say that Financial Maths is hocus pocus - he says that the way banks put all their faith in them puts them at risk. He has an excellent analogy about a pilot flying a plane with instruments that are 99% correct - he reckons, this pilot must also look out of the window every once in a while and not fly blindly by his instruments.
I work at a bank, and there is certainly no talk about dropping or revising the use of financial maths. In fact, the result of this crises will probably be more strict controls over the maths used by traders, which will probably make a "quant" even more valuable as a tradesman.
I seriously doubt this is the last we'll hear of Jack Thompson
Jack Thompson's antics has already discredited him as a lawyer (at least where it matters). This news is not important to the gaming industry in any significant manner.
The fundamental question of whether video gaming will be regulated by the right is not a matter of Jack Thompson, but in how the US constitution is upheld by the powers that be.
Ironically, Norway is a large exporter of oil (about 20% of GDP is oil/gas export). So while this token programme should be applauded, perhaps they could look at reducing how they help choking the rest of the world too?
The absolute accuracy of the test is not that important - what is important is the accurancy vs. the ratio of the population that will go for the test that can reasonably be expected to test truely positive. If a pregnancy test is 97.4% accurate, and 50% of women who think they are pregnant is in actual fact pregnant, then the chance of a false positive is much much lower than in your HIV test case. So yes, in that case the pregnancy test is very useful.
99% accurate means 1% false positives. In countries with low HIV infection rates like most of the first world, that 1% basically makes the test pretty useless. In Africa, where HIV rates are closer to 10% of the general population, this type of test actually has value.
I love it when religious people likens disregard for their religion with racism. Racism is the act of discriminating against a person's race, something over which he had no choice and for which there exists no scientific evidence that he is different from you in any way beyond the colour of his skin. Religion is a personal choice, so it says something about your individual person. Hence, stereotyping on that basis is quite fair.
I am not a geneticist, but if I recall correctly according to Dawkins' Selfish Gene theory a gene is defined as a replicating entity that have selection pressure acting upon it. He specifically excluded it to mean a specific part in the DNA sequence - a single gene can be encoded with many different proteins all over the DNA sequence, as long as it replicates as a unit.