What part of "sitting unwanted in freezers" and "killing whales" is part of your moronic idea of popluation study? Oh! The Bald Eagle is Endangered.... Guess What's For Dinner! Get bent you idiot.
I just use Git. You know, that DECENTRALIZED source control thing.... yeah, might want to think about using it in a decentralized way, since, well, you know? That's what it is? I mean, unless you mean that all of the systems you're writing code with are collectively less reliable. Seems like PEBKAC to me. Hell, you can comment out one line in a.git config file to enable a post-update hook, and you're pretty much done setting up an "in-house source code repository".
Put it this way: If any one part of your DISTRIBUTED source control goes down for a few hours, and that's a big deal.... Then you're a fucking idiot.
Say what you will about reddit, they're just another community information outlet. This post explains what's going on pretty well, and gives insight as to why the issue won't easily be resolved.
See, it's not all idiots. There users have the capability classify and sort and let good discussions and explanations bubble up, without the daft as rocks editorial approval required (like here), but you have to know where to look.
Every society that can be destroyed by social media should be.
B-but? Isn't that all of them? Moderation is key.... I would revise the statement in the light I think you meant it: Any power hierarchy that can be destroyed by factual information should be.
Centralization of something that is otherwise as free-wheeling and independence minded as Open Source Software, just seems contradictory.
Yep. I never understood Giant Websites. We give the world a distributed information network with fault tolerance and a self healing structure designed to withstand entire cities disappearing (censorship, nuclear war, etc), and what do folks do? Centralize the shit out of everything. Data Silos?! CLIENT SEVER architecture?! That was the whole point. There IS NO CLIENT on the web. EVERYONE is supposed to be a server. It's a shame that greed has firmly entrenched the essentially prototype protocol IPv4 (which was never meant to be used for this long, hence the 32bit IP addr...) and reinforced the divide between content providers and consumers via NAT.
This is why we can't have nice things. Long Live The Internet, but Fuck the Web.
I'm jealous. My 2nd-hand model doesn't work well. It's less like a noble police box and more like a trashy Bill's and Ted's phone booth. Nav-circuits are broke so it only takes me to places the TARDIS has already been -- Doors won't open till the other TARDIS is gone. Great for watching re-runs though. I call it the RE-TARDIS.
We'll have +100 exaFLOP systems in five years, 100 times the performance
Exaflops?! And those suckers are electrical? Great Scott! We'll need a Nuclear Reaction to produce the 1.21 Jiggawahts of electricity required to power such things!
"Hobby Gaming" -- I understand the desire to make the distinction between video games and games that are not video games, but "Hobby Gaming" sounds like a futures market for hedging bets against folks with hobbies... Gaming their Hobbies.
I've always considered them all to just be games. I mean, I frequently paper mock-up the video games to see if they'll be fun and work out some logic kinks before creating an actual digital prototype. Many turn based strategy games start their lives resembling "Hobby Gaming", even in a playable state before being implemented in cardstock & pewter, or digitally with a video game engine. When I was a kid I would dream up new enemies and levels for Mario and tape together dozens of sheets of graph paper on my wall... I would take a paper cutout and "play" the levels -- "You put the string on where his feet are, then you can only jump as high as the string is long" Some of these paper levels had "teleporters" (go to page 4 [13,42] ), or rules that listed you couldn't go backwards... That was when PC game making was somewhat of a black art. Learning the the voodoo coding rituals without any instruction was hard (before the Internet), and I guess I didn't learn about how other folks came up with "game designs" so I used a paper based rapid prototyping system (and still do). In a FPS, each room can be "rendered" as a top-down 3rd person game on paper, and a string used to determine a "line of sight", or a grenade throw distance. You can get a good handle on approximately how the movement will flow through the level in about 5 minutes rather than spending hours in a 3D modeling suite... Need to reconfigure part of the map? Scissors and tape are faster than redrawing the lines.
What some call "Hobby Games" or "Video Games" are all just "Games" to me. Here's a GDC video about the action platformer Shadow Complex, Skip to 10:40 to see how the first "build" of the game was basically just made with digital graph paper, and just like a table top game they manually had to move the pieces to play it in that state... and it was fun! (so they say; I can only vouch for the end results, which are pretty fun). Computers can just move the pieces for you and keep track of more rules than a non-digital game can typically afford. That's the way I see it, anyway.
I think Table Top series should win. It's great to see what some of the various games are, and how they're played before picking them for game night. It's gotten some of my digital only gamer friends to broaden their horizons a bit too.
I don't buy games because they might be worth more someday; I buy games to play, to have a good time, and even to appreciate them as a kind of art. I buy games that matter to me.
I do this too. It's also why I don't buy games with DRM. In the past I only bought games with DRM I could crack. Now I'm not so sure future emulators will work with the cracks -- Some of my old games require NO-CD cracks that don't work in my emulator... I alternate between games in my backlog and games I really liked to play in my library. Recently played the old X-Com again, good thing I still have the manual for the codes it requires, it's getting old and faded though, but there are digitized versions... I would hate not to be able to share a game with my kids that I loved and remember and talk about with them... "Sounds cool pops! Can we play it?" No. DRM killed it. Better not to get attached to games that have death sentences installed at the factory.
GP is trying to say that only sports cars are popular, because they're fastest. No one will ever value a VW Bug because it's not fastest. Buses and Vans won't stay popular if your friends only want to ride in faster better vans. Newer faster cars will mean all the old hot-rods will be considered SHIT. Which is bullshit. It's like saying the Mona Lisa is crap because Digital Art has more bits per pixel. Some folks like classic cars. Some folks love classic games. The tech level of the hardware the game runs on is the artistic medium -- Watercolors are still valuable even though oil on canvas reproduces more vibrant color; Not all cars are great or worth anything to a collector, but the interesting ones are. Same with games.
An MMO dies because the server dies, not always because of lack of players. City of Heroes was making money, but that it was still successful while new games flopped caused embarrassment to the studio, so they killed it. If you collect a car but leave out the transmission and part of the engine, then it's not worth hardly anything. The client is not the whole game, it needs a server to be called the whole game, and thus be collectible. For this reason I don't play online games that don't have a private server community. Leasing a car is not the same as owning it.
Sorry, I got a bit of paint on that car analogy...
I wonder why folks think they can use sand and plaster molds to make things out of metal? Everyone knows sandcastles don't stand up to wear and tear, and plaster is very brittle. It's just not going to last very long in use.
However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.
I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.
I do not agree with you. I think Oracle should win this. It's going to get far worse before it gets better. I'd much rather sooner than later. For instance: If there were ice everywhere and I were an Eskimo, would you try to sell me the ice? No? Then why do folks think it's OK to sell me, a PC owner, infinitely reproducible bits? It's because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of information and work. A mechanic is not granted a limited (70 year beyond their death) monopoly over the work they perform. They have an infinite monopoly to leverage before you do your work, after the work is done and paid for, then you have no monopoly. You don't get to charge each time I start up the car. You shouldn't get to charge for each copy of the bits, you can only do so because laws that support the economically untenable practice of Artificial Scarcity. The work has already been done. You want more money, do more work. Make an estimate / proposal, agree on a price, do the work. Do not seek rent for those who use the work afterwards, get assurance your work will be paid for up front... Like every other labor industry already does. Then you can put an end piracy, by abolishing patent and copyright laws.
Make no mistake. This will happen. It is starting to happen that those who "Publish" content are not necessary. We can all pay the workers directly now. Publishers add no value to the work. They will become publicists / advertizers / marketers of your ability to do work, instead of resellers of artificially scarce bits. This is the first Internet Generation generation -- growing up with fully connected in the Age of Information. The business models will have to adjust. You speak of the end of the software industry as you know it. Indeed. The way it works now is down right retarding, and ridiculously out of touch with reality. Oracle should win because it will point out how stupid Copyright and Patents actually are.
Further: No Scientist can condone the practice of operating under unproven hypotheses. There is no proof that Copyright, or "the software industry as we know it" is actually benefical for society as a whole. No one did any test. They all assumed it was so because the English had a patent and copyright law, so do we. That's bad science, and if you are a scientist, yes even a computer scientist, then you should feel it in the pit of your stomach: That dread that you are running your life and the entire economy of the world based on an unproven, untested, untenable hypothesis.
As a UKian, I would like to play devils advocate: if it stops one single delusional nutter from murdering upwards of 200 people in one easy stroke because the voices in their head told them to, and the only thing between that latent human homicidal psychosis and my safety is a porno machine, what do I care how many 3d pictures of my cock I have to give up?
It would be great if financial companies were required to make a publicly accessible testing site, in order to qualify for benefits from government, like insurance. The testing site would be a mock-up of the current system. Just copy the code over keep a separate database, it wouldn't have to be large because it won't do the same volume and we don't all need unique accounts. I mean, there is testing and production systems already, right? So, after pushing to production you also push to public testing. This way, I can hack your systems all day and night, and not worry about going to jail for trying out the exploits I think exist -- Some are even just changing URL parameters...
The government insures the banks, but the banks aren't setting up a system where it's easy for folks to test and report vulnerabilities. It should be a no-brainer. You want car insurance? You have to drive safely and get your car inspected, also anyone can report your bad driving or smoking engine via your mandatorily exposed license plate number... Since everyone can't just visibly inspect the live version of the online systems without falling afoul of the law, then we need a mock-up.
I mean, they let me inspect the vault where my safe deposit box is... I don't get to swing a hammer, but at least I can see if the door is made of steel, and the guard is armed and paying attention. We should be able to knock on the digital vault door to ensure it's not wafer thin. I don't trust the bank to put items in my safe deposit box for me, I do that myself. Just because I put my money in the bank, doesn't mean I trust their security practices completely. I don't think we should be trying to hack the live systems because it could cause disruption, but in the current system if we notice a damn exploit we can't even report it. It would be like noticing the guards are just distracted teens with cell phones instead of guns or batons, and that there's a huge hole in the side of the vault with muddy footsteps leading in and out through it, but you'll get thrown in jail if you say anything about it at all!
Back when this online banking thing started I accidentally changed the URL parameters while logged into one of my banks' online portals. I was trying to copy paste the URL field, but ended up changing the digits in my user ID. Suddenly, my account balance was drained!? I brought up a few more account pages and my savings account wasn't just drained, it was GONE!! Wait, no, the name in small print under the company logo wasn't mine! Another users account had been pulled up. Whew.... Oh Shit! I just accessed another users account AND rummaged around looking at all the funds! I immediately logged out. I did not report anything to anyone. I was afraid that accidentally discovering a vulnerability could land me in jail if I reported it, even if I never intended to "hack" anything. It was still accessing an account without permission, a violation of the US's computer fraud and abuse act -- Similar to using a browser that someone is still logged into, you see their "private" social media stuff because they're not logged out; The bar for triggering the CFAA violation is ridiculously low. Since the bank had crappy security, and incompetent web developers I closed my account the next day. When asked why I was leaving their service, I said in the sternest voice I could conjure, "There is a large theoretical hole in the side of your bank's vault, apparently no one can see it but me, and I can't even legally show you where it is." The look on the clerks face was priceless. These banks shouldn't qualify for government benefits, IMO. I mean, security audit? No, that's obviously not working, or you wouldn't have been able to drain any account by changing a number in the URL bar... The public would do a better job for less.
I would have loved to be able to log into a mock-up site. Perform the "exploit", show them what's happening, and give them all the info they need to fix the problem. In TFA, it would be
It is a bit like allowing a giant sink to empty through thousands of tiny drains and looking for any evidence of swirling water.
It's a bit like dusting for fingerprints on a cosmic scale.
It's a bit like tossing handfuls of candy in a class room, then listening for quarreling and munching noises to detect school children.
It's a bit like rolling around in the grass then waiting for stings to discover fire ant mounds.
It's a bit like casting a net made out of fish and counting the holes to detect sharks.
It's a bit like shouting, "You're all fat and ugly" into the woman's bathroom then counting the "Screw You Jerk"s to see if you should wait to clean it.
It's a bit like making a bunch of posts on Slashdot to detect folks with mod points.
It's a bit like observing the expected effect black holes cause in various conditions to further confirm their existence.
At that point it doesn't matter how crappy your code is, all it is is isolated to a single portion of a layer with inputs and outputs and relatively modularized as a result in regards to similar models.
You're assuming that people actually put in that separation all the time. Just because you are using an MVC framework doesn't mean things are separated like they should be. Just like declaring something with "class" doesn't automatically make it (good) OO.
Furthermore, not everything can be separated into those classifications. Take your average "Web2.0" website for example: The components of the MVC are spread out across HTML CSS JS and back end code. Sometimes it makes sense to put some controls in the view. Blind adherence to paradigms as a core business strategy can lead to unsynergistic blue-sky thinking that leaves the best and brightest ideas out of the loop. The best game plan is to go the extra mile to make sure that movers and shakers can interface with your knowledge economy -- That's the fast track to empowering partnerships that stretch the envelope and benefit the bottom line results.
P.S. You're welcome. Consider it payment in kind for helping me win design pattern bingo.
I can't imagine anything joining the world together in unity to create a real space defense (and get us out there and off this rock) than a few million people getting killed at once.
You missed the memo. It was in the We The Geeks NASA G+ hangout today. Some folks actually care about the issue enough to put their money and time where their mouth is and thus are actually doing what you propose.
Game Engine development has nothing to do with Mathematics.
I'm just going to call you out on this complete and utter bullshit statement. Tell me, how do you best classify assets that exist in three intersecting sets: stored on disk, loaded in memory, and available for rendering (in the GPU)? Keep in mind we would like to minimize cache misses. Even a moderately heavy statistics / logistics calculation in the asset manager is beneficial if it reduces the occurrence of expensive cache misses slightly. Furthermore you pigeon hole ENGINE DEVELOPMENT by saying its not about all those other things that it actually is about. For instance, I wrote my own PKI encryption library so that modders can sign their game mods and I can sign our game updates, and everyone can use decentralized distribution while players can trust the source. That doesn't come bundled in a box with a bow, neither does tweaking the sound or image / video compression algorithms to be less generalized and more targeted to the content you're delivering. FFT's and frequency domains aren't rocket science. Physics IS Mathematics, allowed error bars and instability propagation limiting, the whole damn thing, it all benefits from some higher mathematics -- It's not "just programming". Parallelism is CORE to engine design. Where to draw the lines and segment the engine matters A LOT, and you can use mathematics to inform the decision instead of just wasting time guessing and checking, like a blind person in an orgy.
"No, Advanced Mathematics is not required," bullshit. First off: Define "Advanced". Secondly, CS is not just Programming. Third, learning a bit of higher math is really useful and actually not hard to grasp, especially if you have a game engine to work with -- The most advanced graphing calculator in the world: You can make visual graphs that plot equations and react to the inputs real time. That really helped me teach myself this stuff. Want to combat power creep or balance your enemy / weapon strengths? Ensure your platformer difficulty follows pacing well? Guess what? Break out the statistics, buddy. Even that high level "game designing" -- most removed from the engine development -- benefits from mathematics. Getting past the disconnect between the cryptic symbolics of mathematics and being able to convert them into the more verbose and simple source code is a skill worth an infinite amount its weight in gold. If you can't do that, then hit the books. Once you can do that, then the scales will fall from your eyes and the gameworld will truly become your playground.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple doesn't set the prices, how can they fix the prices?
Furthermore, for the sake of argument: What if Apple Loses? They'll be ordered to ... what? Fix the prices?
What part of "sitting unwanted in freezers" and "killing whales" is part of your moronic idea of popluation study? Oh! The Bald Eagle is Endangered.... Guess What's For Dinner! Get bent you idiot.
I just use Git. You know, that DECENTRALIZED source control thing.... yeah, might want to think about using it in a decentralized way, since, well, you know? That's what it is? I mean, unless you mean that all of the systems you're writing code with are collectively less reliable. Seems like PEBKAC to me. Hell, you can comment out one line in a .git config file to enable a post-update hook, and you're pretty much done setting up an "in-house source code repository".
Put it this way: If any one part of your DISTRIBUTED source control goes down for a few hours, and that's a big deal.... Then you're a fucking idiot.
Sadly, I fear '127.0.0.1 slashdot' is to blame. Live by the hosts file, die by the hosts file... He slashdotted himself.
Say what you will about reddit, they're just another community information outlet. This post explains what's going on pretty well, and gives insight as to why the issue won't easily be resolved.
See, it's not all idiots. There users have the capability classify and sort and let good discussions and explanations bubble up, without the daft as rocks editorial approval required (like here), but you have to know where to look.
Every society that can be destroyed by social media should be.
B-but? Isn't that all of them? Moderation is key.... I would revise the statement in the light I think you meant it:
Any power hierarchy that can be destroyed by factual information should be.
Folks in this thread seem to be dichotomous over whether the cameras cause the police to be a bit more cautious or the folks around the police to be more aware. Personally, I don't trust humans. They're illogical, irrational, reactionary, hormone and adrenaline fueled beasts. Anything that reduces violence in general, for whatever reason is good. I welcome the cameras. Even if they can be "disabled", I don't think police or people are uniformly corrupt. Their decisions can be swayed by circumstance and An increase in objective observations where laws are being enforced (sometimes by force) is good for both subjects. No need for a false dichotomy. The cameras can make everyone involved behave better. A little bit better behavior on both parts can lead to a disproportionate decrease in tensions due to the nature of escalation of force and perceived threat.
That would be an argument for some type of visible symbol or warning that is prominently displayed with the wearable video system.
I propose a giant bacon stripped uniform. Everyone loves bacon.
Centralization of something that is otherwise as free-wheeling and independence minded as Open Source Software, just seems contradictory.
Yep. I never understood Giant Websites. We give the world a distributed information network with fault tolerance and a self healing structure designed to withstand entire cities disappearing (censorship, nuclear war, etc), and what do folks do? Centralize the shit out of everything. Data Silos?! CLIENT SEVER architecture?! That was the whole point. There IS NO CLIENT on the web. EVERYONE is supposed to be a server. It's a shame that greed has firmly entrenched the essentially prototype protocol IPv4 (which was never meant to be used for this long, hence the 32bit IP addr...) and reinforced the divide between content providers and consumers via NAT.
This is why we can't have nice things. Long Live The Internet, but Fuck the Web.
I'm jealous. My 2nd-hand model doesn't work well. It's less like a noble police box and more like a trashy Bill's and Ted's phone booth. Nav-circuits are broke so it only takes me to places the TARDIS has already been -- Doors won't open till the other TARDIS is gone. Great for watching re-runs though. I call it the RE-TARDIS.
We'll have +100 exaFLOP systems in five years, 100 times the performance
Exaflops?! And those suckers are electrical? Great Scott! We'll need a Nuclear Reaction to produce the 1.21 Jiggawahts of electricity required to power such things!
"Hobby Gaming" -- I understand the desire to make the distinction between video games and games that are not video games, but "Hobby Gaming" sounds like a futures market for hedging bets against folks with hobbies... Gaming their Hobbies.
I've always considered them all to just be games. I mean, I frequently paper mock-up the video games to see if they'll be fun and work out some logic kinks before creating an actual digital prototype. Many turn based strategy games start their lives resembling "Hobby Gaming", even in a playable state before being implemented in cardstock & pewter, or digitally with a video game engine. When I was a kid I would dream up new enemies and levels for Mario and tape together dozens of sheets of graph paper on my wall... I would take a paper cutout and "play" the levels -- "You put the string on where his feet are, then you can only jump as high as the string is long" Some of these paper levels had "teleporters" (go to page 4 [13,42] ), or rules that listed you couldn't go backwards... That was when PC game making was somewhat of a black art. Learning the the voodoo coding rituals without any instruction was hard (before the Internet), and I guess I didn't learn about how other folks came up with "game designs" so I used a paper based rapid prototyping system (and still do). In a FPS, each room can be "rendered" as a top-down 3rd person game on paper, and a string used to determine a "line of sight", or a grenade throw distance. You can get a good handle on approximately how the movement will flow through the level in about 5 minutes rather than spending hours in a 3D modeling suite... Need to reconfigure part of the map? Scissors and tape are faster than redrawing the lines.
What some call "Hobby Games" or "Video Games" are all just "Games" to me. Here's a GDC video about the action platformer Shadow Complex, Skip to 10:40 to see how the first "build" of the game was basically just made with digital graph paper, and just like a table top game they manually had to move the pieces to play it in that state... and it was fun! (so they say; I can only vouch for the end results, which are pretty fun). Computers can just move the pieces for you and keep track of more rules than a non-digital game can typically afford. That's the way I see it, anyway.
I think Table Top series should win. It's great to see what some of the various games are, and how they're played before picking them for game night. It's gotten some of my digital only gamer friends to broaden their horizons a bit too.
I don't buy games because they might be worth more someday; I buy games to play, to have a good time, and even to appreciate them as a kind of art. I buy games that matter to me.
I do this too. It's also why I don't buy games with DRM. In the past I only bought games with DRM I could crack. Now I'm not so sure future emulators will work with the cracks -- Some of my old games require NO-CD cracks that don't work in my emulator... I alternate between games in my backlog and games I really liked to play in my library. Recently played the old X-Com again, good thing I still have the manual for the codes it requires, it's getting old and faded though, but there are digitized versions... I would hate not to be able to share a game with my kids that I loved and remember and talk about with them... "Sounds cool pops! Can we play it?" No. DRM killed it. Better not to get attached to games that have death sentences installed at the factory.
Though I agree with your analogy to a point, I have one word for us to consider in its context: Vinyl
Perhaps a car analogy...
GP is trying to say that only sports cars are popular, because they're fastest. No one will ever value a VW Bug because it's not fastest. Buses and Vans won't stay popular if your friends only want to ride in faster better vans. Newer faster cars will mean all the old hot-rods will be considered SHIT. Which is bullshit. It's like saying the Mona Lisa is crap because Digital Art has more bits per pixel. Some folks like classic cars. Some folks love classic games. The tech level of the hardware the game runs on is the artistic medium -- Watercolors are still valuable even though oil on canvas reproduces more vibrant color; Not all cars are great or worth anything to a collector, but the interesting ones are. Same with games.
An MMO dies because the server dies, not always because of lack of players. City of Heroes was making money, but that it was still successful while new games flopped caused embarrassment to the studio, so they killed it. If you collect a car but leave out the transmission and part of the engine, then it's not worth hardly anything. The client is not the whole game, it needs a server to be called the whole game, and thus be collectible. For this reason I don't play online games that don't have a private server community. Leasing a car is not the same as owning it.
Sorry, I got a bit of paint on that car analogy...
I wonder why folks think they can use sand and plaster molds to make things out of metal? Everyone knows sandcastles don't stand up to wear and tear, and plaster is very brittle. It's just not going to last very long in use.
However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.
I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.
I do not agree with you. I think Oracle should win this. It's going to get far worse before it gets better. I'd much rather sooner than later. For instance: If there were ice everywhere and I were an Eskimo, would you try to sell me the ice? No? Then why do folks think it's OK to sell me, a PC owner, infinitely reproducible bits? It's because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of information and work. A mechanic is not granted a limited (70 year beyond their death) monopoly over the work they perform. They have an infinite monopoly to leverage before you do your work, after the work is done and paid for, then you have no monopoly. You don't get to charge each time I start up the car. You shouldn't get to charge for each copy of the bits, you can only do so because laws that support the economically untenable practice of Artificial Scarcity. The work has already been done. You want more money, do more work. Make an estimate / proposal, agree on a price, do the work. Do not seek rent for those who use the work afterwards, get assurance your work will be paid for up front... Like every other labor industry already does. Then you can put an end piracy, by abolishing patent and copyright laws.
Make no mistake. This will happen. It is starting to happen that those who "Publish" content are not necessary. We can all pay the workers directly now. Publishers add no value to the work. They will become publicists / advertizers / marketers of your ability to do work, instead of resellers of artificially scarce bits. This is the first Internet Generation generation -- growing up with fully connected in the Age of Information. The business models will have to adjust. You speak of the end of the software industry as you know it. Indeed. The way it works now is down right retarding, and ridiculously out of touch with reality. Oracle should win because it will point out how stupid Copyright and Patents actually are.
Further: No Scientist can condone the practice of operating under unproven hypotheses. There is no proof that Copyright, or "the software industry as we know it" is actually benefical for society as a whole. No one did any test. They all assumed it was so because the English had a patent and copyright law, so do we. That's bad science, and if you are a scientist, yes even a computer scientist, then you should feel it in the pit of your stomach: That dread that you are running your life and the entire economy of the world based on an unproven, untested, untenable hypothesis.
For Shame.
As a UKian, I would like to play devils advocate: if it stops one single delusional nutter from murdering upwards of 200 people in one easy stroke because the voices in their head told them to, and the only thing between that latent human homicidal psychosis and my safety is a porno machine, what do I care how many 3d pictures of my cock I have to give up?
Because Subways Exist.
It would be great if financial companies were required to make a publicly accessible testing site, in order to qualify for benefits from government, like insurance. The testing site would be a mock-up of the current system. Just copy the code over keep a separate database, it wouldn't have to be large because it won't do the same volume and we don't all need unique accounts. I mean, there is testing and production systems already, right? So, after pushing to production you also push to public testing. This way, I can hack your systems all day and night, and not worry about going to jail for trying out the exploits I think exist -- Some are even just changing URL parameters...
The government insures the banks, but the banks aren't setting up a system where it's easy for folks to test and report vulnerabilities. It should be a no-brainer. You want car insurance? You have to drive safely and get your car inspected, also anyone can report your bad driving or smoking engine via your mandatorily exposed license plate number... Since everyone can't just visibly inspect the live version of the online systems without falling afoul of the law, then we need a mock-up.
I mean, they let me inspect the vault where my safe deposit box is... I don't get to swing a hammer, but at least I can see if the door is made of steel, and the guard is armed and paying attention. We should be able to knock on the digital vault door to ensure it's not wafer thin. I don't trust the bank to put items in my safe deposit box for me, I do that myself. Just because I put my money in the bank, doesn't mean I trust their security practices completely. I don't think we should be trying to hack the live systems because it could cause disruption, but in the current system if we notice a damn exploit we can't even report it. It would be like noticing the guards are just distracted teens with cell phones instead of guns or batons, and that there's a huge hole in the side of the vault with muddy footsteps leading in and out through it, but you'll get thrown in jail if you say anything about it at all!
Back when this online banking thing started I accidentally changed the URL parameters while logged into one of my banks' online portals. I was trying to copy paste the URL field, but ended up changing the digits in my user ID. Suddenly, my account balance was drained!? I brought up a few more account pages and my savings account wasn't just drained, it was GONE!! Wait, no, the name in small print under the company logo wasn't mine! Another users account had been pulled up. Whew.... Oh Shit! I just accessed another users account AND rummaged around looking at all the funds! I immediately logged out. I did not report anything to anyone. I was afraid that accidentally discovering a vulnerability could land me in jail if I reported it, even if I never intended to "hack" anything. It was still accessing an account without permission, a violation of the US's computer fraud and abuse act -- Similar to using a browser that someone is still logged into, you see their "private" social media stuff because they're not logged out; The bar for triggering the CFAA violation is ridiculously low. Since the bank had crappy security, and incompetent web developers I closed my account the next day. When asked why I was leaving their service, I said in the sternest voice I could conjure, "There is a large theoretical hole in the side of your bank's vault, apparently no one can see it but me, and I can't even legally show you where it is." The look on the clerks face was priceless. These banks shouldn't qualify for government benefits, IMO. I mean, security audit? No, that's obviously not working, or you wouldn't have been able to drain any account by changing a number in the URL bar... The public would do a better job for less.
I would have loved to be able to log into a mock-up site. Perform the "exploit", show them what's happening, and give them all the info they need to fix the problem. In TFA, it would be
My doctor says it's OK to talk to myself so long as I don't say, "Hu?"
It is a bit like allowing a giant sink to empty through thousands of tiny drains and looking for any evidence of swirling water.
It's a bit like dusting for fingerprints on a cosmic scale.
It's a bit like tossing handfuls of candy in a class room, then listening for quarreling and munching noises to detect school children.
It's a bit like rolling around in the grass then waiting for stings to discover fire ant mounds.
It's a bit like casting a net made out of fish and counting the holes to detect sharks.
It's a bit like shouting, "You're all fat and ugly" into the woman's bathroom then counting the "Screw You Jerk"s to see if you should wait to clean it.
It's a bit like making a bunch of posts on Slashdot to detect folks with mod points.
It's a bit like observing the expected effect black holes cause in various conditions to further confirm their existence.
> enums and switches
> not using a function pointer.
ISHYGD care about performance.
At that point it doesn't matter how crappy your code is, all it is is isolated to a single portion of a layer with inputs and outputs and relatively modularized as a result in regards to similar models.
You're assuming that people actually put in that separation all the time. Just because you are using an MVC framework doesn't mean things are separated like they should be. Just like declaring something with "class" doesn't automatically make it (good) OO.
Furthermore, not everything can be separated into those classifications. Take your average "Web2.0" website for example: The components of the MVC are spread out across HTML CSS JS and back end code. Sometimes it makes sense to put some controls in the view. Blind adherence to paradigms as a core business strategy can lead to unsynergistic blue-sky thinking that leaves the best and brightest ideas out of the loop. The best game plan is to go the extra mile to make sure that movers and shakers can interface with your knowledge economy -- That's the fast track to empowering partnerships that stretch the envelope and benefit the bottom line results.
P.S. You're welcome. Consider it payment in kind for helping me win design pattern bingo.
I can't imagine anything joining the world together in unity to create a real space defense (and get us out there and off this rock) than a few million people getting killed at once.
You missed the memo. It was in the We The Geeks NASA G+ hangout today. Some folks actually care about the issue enough to put their money and time where their mouth is and thus are actually doing what you propose.
Game Engine development has nothing to do with Mathematics.
I'm just going to call you out on this complete and utter bullshit statement. Tell me, how do you best classify assets that exist in three intersecting sets: stored on disk, loaded in memory, and available for rendering (in the GPU)? Keep in mind we would like to minimize cache misses. Even a moderately heavy statistics / logistics calculation in the asset manager is beneficial if it reduces the occurrence of expensive cache misses slightly. Furthermore you pigeon hole ENGINE DEVELOPMENT by saying its not about all those other things that it actually is about. For instance, I wrote my own PKI encryption library so that modders can sign their game mods and I can sign our game updates, and everyone can use decentralized distribution while players can trust the source. That doesn't come bundled in a box with a bow, neither does tweaking the sound or image / video compression algorithms to be less generalized and more targeted to the content you're delivering. FFT's and frequency domains aren't rocket science. Physics IS Mathematics, allowed error bars and instability propagation limiting, the whole damn thing, it all benefits from some higher mathematics -- It's not "just programming". Parallelism is CORE to engine design. Where to draw the lines and segment the engine matters A LOT, and you can use mathematics to inform the decision instead of just wasting time guessing and checking, like a blind person in an orgy.
"No, Advanced Mathematics is not required," bullshit. First off: Define "Advanced". Secondly, CS is not just Programming. Third, learning a bit of higher math is really useful and actually not hard to grasp, especially if you have a game engine to work with -- The most advanced graphing calculator in the world: You can make visual graphs that plot equations and react to the inputs real time. That really helped me teach myself this stuff. Want to combat power creep or balance your enemy / weapon strengths? Ensure your platformer difficulty follows pacing well? Guess what? Break out the statistics, buddy. Even that high level "game designing" -- most removed from the engine development -- benefits from mathematics. Getting past the disconnect between the cryptic symbolics of mathematics and being able to convert them into the more verbose and simple source code is a skill worth an infinite amount its weight in gold. If you can't do that, then hit the books. Once you can do that, then the scales will fall from your eyes and the gameworld will truly become your playground.