This happens sometimes when I screw up doing pointer arithmetics or when I do not check array bounds.
To cure this, I started designing a system were I will abstract pointers with my own custom library. It will also automatically free the memory from unused objects. I will call it "memory recollection".
I am also designing my own custom third party library to automatically check array bounds;-))
I used to play a board game similar to Risk, that had tokens, little standing cards, the value of which were only visible to me. So you have an army and the opponent has an army, you see various soldiers, but you don't know what they are. Some tokens are soldiers, some are mines, there is one that is the flag. The idea is to capture the flag by 'attacking' it. When one player attacks the other, he challenges the opponent's token soldier with his own. Now the soldiers are compared, if one has a higher rank, he wins, the opponent's token is removed. If both are the same rank, both are removed.
Finding where a program crashed is way easier than finding a logic error, and those can occur in any language. Actually, debugging crashes can lead to discovery of certain kinds of logic and/or runtime errors that would be difficult to find if your runtime environment is protecting you from ever seeing a crash (heaven forbid).
Except when your non-protected runtime doesn't crash and instead overwrites the stack, corrupts the malloc arena or writes to a dangling pointer causing corruption in a completely unrelated part of the program. Hours and hours of fun!
One of the most important thing that managed programming languages brought is the fact that other parts of the program can't corrupt the system enough to make things undebuggable and that an error in a module is self-contained enough that it can't trample other parts of the program due to a memory error.
I do agree though that C and other unmanaged languages should still be taught.
it saddens me when i see people who not only fail to see farther than their own noses (the hardware they personally deal in), but also forget to look back in history (the hardware we used, grew out of, and abandoned in favor of something better - our own progress).
by your arguments, we would never have arrived to where we were 10 years ago with Fast Ethernet, VGA, serial and parallel connectors, USB1.0, parallel ATA etc., and we wouldn't be where we are today, with DisplayPort, DVI, serial ATA, optical/gigabit Ethernet and 802.11 wireless, USB2/3 etc. - all of the latter being technologies that i'm certain you enjoy thoroughly, in loving favor of the alternatives you had 10 years ago.
and i'm sure even you can figure out that if we stick with your rationale, we won't arrive at tomorrow's technology either.
I didn't argue against new standards, as much as you seem to want to put words in my mouth, but rather at you saying that because we use some older standards because we need things to work instead of using the new whizbang technology we're just a "crowd of conservative oddballs and anal retentives, barking like old dogs refusing to learn how to sit, for keeping old standards, trying to justify it by reasons of pointless, smelly compatibility that is long past its expiry date."
There are other things than just the consumer market and some of us have specialized equipment for which older interfaces are needed because replacing the equipment for no reason other than "it uses the new connector/interface" is simply ridiculous.
Agree fully. I still drop my jaw everytime I see a laptop from the past 3-4 years still sporting a friggin' VGA connector, or even worse, from some "PC" manufacturers, a parallel port.
Sadly, there will always be that crowd of conservative oddballs and anal retentives, barking like old dogs refusing to learn how to sit, for keeping old standards, trying to justify it by reasons of pointless, smelly compatibility that is long past its expiry date.....and everyone knows they are the ones who contribute to nothing but stagnation, not the ones who help driving the world forward.
Yeah, just like people using serial ports to program Cisco gear or people in EE using serial ports to program microcontrollers by plugging the RX and TX pins directly to a serial port. And what about those people presenting their research at conferences around the world wanting to use a display connector that's supported on every single projector around the world in all convention centres instead of carrying a suitcase of adapters. We all know those aren't the people who help drive the world forwards, right?
What is the difference between this and creating an ad-hoc network and enabling internet connection sharing for the physical port in Vista (and XP, and OS X, and Linux)?
It's an actual access point, not an ad hoc network. My Android Dev Phone 1(which does not support connecting to ad hoc networks) can connect to it.
They somehow managed to hand-count ~40M votes in a couple hours. It doesn't take a brain surgeon (or a statistician, in this case) to realize there's something fishy going on.
How so? I believe the way it works in Canada is that ballots are counted at each polling station and parties are free to have a representative oversee the election process. This ensures that we have an unofficial count a couple of hours after the polling stations close. (See The Electoral System of Canada, on page 34 of the PDF)
The official count comes, by law, up to seven days later, but it usually doesn't differ from the unofficial count.
Only if you are an idiot. The first rule of client-server programming is don't trust the client. Don't give the client any more data than it needs, validate all messages from the client. Things like wall hacks only work because the server is providing the client with too much information. Speed hacks only work because the server is allowing the client to move more than the correct amount (i.e. not validating the input). As for tripling the size of on-screen enemies and aimbots; if your game depends so much on your ability to click accurately on small things to be fun, the odds are that it isn't.
No, wallhacks work because it is very expensive to perform thorough visibility checks on every single frame of the game(See Potentially visible set on Wikipedia). The idea is that a precalculated set of areas have information as to which other areas are potentially visible from that particular area. This means that an area spanning a corridor would have visibility into adjacent corridors, and thus, you could 'see' around corners with translucent walls.
Pushing more information towards the client is an optimization, in the same way that database denormalization is. In an ideal world, you wouldn't need either of those, but we're still bound by performance constraints.
So closed source games are free of said hacks? No? Well, I be damned!
There's this thing - the "server". It can do things like "hack prevention" and "sanity checks". Who's to say that the only contribution to open source would be client-side hacks and not server-side anti-hack improvements?
I'm not argueing for open source games, but saying there will be hacks because of open source is just as dumb as saying an open source encryption tool is less secure than closed source security-by-obscurity implementation.
There are limits to what server-side checking can do. When your MMO starts getting overrun by people with autoclickers, bots and other annoyances that can be done client-side, no amount of server-side checking can help you.
I mean World of Warcraft, has absolutely no CD protection, hell you can just copy the entire folder to a new PC and start to play, you don't even need installation. Yet they earn millions every day.
Why would they put copy protection on the game anyway, they make most of their money selling subscriptions, not retail boxes. Besides, even if someone copies the game and subscribes to WoW, they probably make more profit on one month of subscription fees than whatever trickles through the retail chain back to Blizzard.
The exclusion of pornographic content was a new, intentional policy.
Actually, it's been there for quite a while. I've been told by an Amazon employee a couple years ago that they do have it, it just doesn't appear in their catalog nor in recommendations. However, if you are to search for specific titles or names, you'll find what you are looking for, or so I've been told.
Indeed, it's a pretty dubious statistic. Anyway, what kind of business desperately needs to update in the first months of an OS release(excluding software development/testing)?
Besides, if your business relies on having some mission-critical piece of software that your vendor still hasn't managed to make work on Vista by now, you should seriously consider kicking that vendor to the curb for being incompetent twits and migrating away from them.
You're doing something seriously wrong if you're doing mocap for a month.
Also, there already is a 3D model market, see TurboSquid for example. However, you're assuming that a game is only a patchwork of random disparate elements. It's not. It would pretty much break the fourth wall if you started to notice that you saw that particular soldier in another game, so you'd need people to retouch the models and assets anyway. Besides, you probably want all the models to have the same visual style, so it's probably less effort to just create the models from scratch instead of having to tweak something you bought.
Also, you failed to see that asset production is pretty much a pipelined process: a modeler makes a model, which is then sent to a texturer and an animator to complete. Also, a lot of the costs related to assets are mostly related to client demands. If someone at Disney or Warner doesn't like the look of character X from their license, well, you have to rework it, then send it for their approval again, hear them whine again, etc. Having asset libraries in that case doesn't help.
I don't doubt that this could work fine in the casual market, but I don't see how this could be cost-effective for the latest games, and I don't see how they would be able to convince the hardcore gamers to switch.
I doubt they're targeting the hardcore gamers. It would be a pretty suicidal move, since they're the ones likely to say that the service sucks because they don't get every single pixel in their game without compression and hog the service for hours on end.
If you use Outlook and Exchange, there is a message recall feature. Of course, for those who don't, we just get an annoying two line email saying "Foo would like to recall message blah". Even funnier is that in French, the word they use for recall can mean either of recall or highlight/remind.
It took me a while to understand why some senders always wanted to remind me of some silly email.
You know, I'm starting to take issue with comments that protest the use of the M$, Micro$oft etc. memes. I know how something can get on your tits - articles that identify companies by their stock symbols is a particular irritant of mine.
But being annoying to a given reader does not cause a comment to lose all credibility. I mean, you can judge a comment by any criteria you choose, even moderate that way if you like. But you and I can't have a conversation either, if at any time you might write off everything I've said because I violated some arbitrary boundary you have. It's like people who dismiss an otherwise intelligent comment because it was posted AC. Again, it's their prerogative, but it makes it hard for the rest of us to talk to them.
And I am not suggesting the comment you replied to was "otherwise intelligent." The comment you replied to was obviously a troll, and should be dismissed for that reason. I would agree that a user who says something like "Winblows" isn't making any kind of lucid point with that act, but he may just be really frustrated for a good reason. Let him vent - he "paid" for that right - then see if he has an actual point.
In defense of the use of M$ etc, I see it as sort of a short hand, like Garry Trudeau would do with politicians. A feather for Dan Qualye, a bomb for Newt Gingrich... To a passionate free software advocate, M$ is a concise, efficient and - IMO - accurate moniker.
In two characters, the anonymous poster - who is probably Twitter - told us all we need to know about his opinion of Microsoft. I don't think an anti-Microsoft - or anti-Google/Linux/Apple bias for that matter - invalidates anyone's opinion. If it does, good grief we're all doomed.
BTW, I agree with you about the suicide remark.
I beg to differ. If you're so puerile to have the need to use "M$ Winbloze" or "open sores software" in a rational discussion, it seems as if you're trying to sidestep the issue with colorful language. Call things by their name and focus on arguments rather than taking trite potshots.
As for identifying corporations by their stock ticker symbols, it allows to easily differentiate between corporations who would have otherwise similar names(for example, an article talking about the Royal Bank could refer to both RY and RBS) and to look them up quickly and unambiguously.
How about filenames other than peculiar serial numbers like dsc-12345.jpg? How about an option to use the timestamp as a filename? How about a datestamp and serial number?
the #1 feature needed in DSLR cameras. LET ME CHOOSE THOSE first 3 LETTERS!!!!
when I have a shooting team covering an event I would LOVE to have each camera they use set to their initials for the filename. Or set the event ID, etc....
Honestly the firmware in all cameras, just sucks. they really could add features that pro photographers would kill for and others would find incredibly useful.
The reason why files in cameras are in the DCIM\DSC?????.JPG format is documented in JEITA standards JEIDA-49-1998 and JEIDA-49-2-1998, but it essentially allows creating a camera-agnostic system that can read images from cameras. (fun fact:DSC stands for Digital Still Camera)
As for labeling the pictures with a shooting team, can't they each use their own media or change the sequence number used to mark the pictures as their own?
It's not just bands now, either. Modern film scores use a click track. Some of my friends play film scores as freelancers (they are professional, classically trained musicians) - and they've all reported having to use a click track.
The "conductor" is mostly used to notify them which section to play... as most of the music doesn't merit actual rehearsal time. The conductor does get to watch the film during the session, however.
It's pure torture for the musicians... to make it worse, the "conductors" will sometimes say, "Wow! I wish you guys could have seen that scene!"
Is the usage of the click track torture or the lack of rehearsal time? And how is it torture? (Not trolling, just curious since I'm not a musician)
The question being... how could you use a monopoly on advertising to keep other advertising companies from effectively advertising?
If you have a monopoly on advertising, it means that you control a majority of where ads are displayed. Since some kinds of advertising are dependent on impression volume, if Google controls a majority of "eyeballs" for your particular market, you can't avoid using their service unless you want to have a much lower impression volume.
This kind of imbalance isn't as pronounced in other medias. If you want to reach 20-25 year old single males, you could put your ads on Fox, ESPN or some other channel and it wouldn't matter too much if one doesn't want to carry your ad or charges too much, since there's some competition between all the players. On the other hand, if most national TV stations were controlled by a single player with regards to advertising, then that might prove problematic. Sure, you could advertise on local community stations, but would you get an ad campaign that's as effective?
Slashdot Mirror
This happens sometimes when I screw up doing pointer arithmetics or when I do not check array bounds.
To cure this, I started designing a system were I will abstract pointers with my own custom library. It will also automatically free the memory from unused objects. I will call it "memory recollection".
I am also designing my own custom third party library to automatically check array bounds ;-))
You mean like boost::shared_ptr and std::vector::at() ?
I used to play a board game similar to Risk, that had tokens, little standing cards, the value of which were only visible to me. So you have an army and the opponent has an army, you see various soldiers, but you don't know what they are. Some tokens are soldiers, some are mines, there is one that is the flag. The idea is to capture the flag by 'attacking' it. When one player attacks the other, he challenges the opponent's token soldier with his own. Now the soldiers are compared, if one has a higher rank, he wins, the opponent's token is removed. If both are the same rank, both are removed.
Are you talking about Stratego?
Finding where a program crashed is way easier than finding a logic error, and those can occur in any language. Actually, debugging crashes can lead to discovery of certain kinds of logic and/or runtime errors that would be difficult to find if your runtime environment is protecting you from ever seeing a crash (heaven forbid).
Except when your non-protected runtime doesn't crash and instead overwrites the stack, corrupts the malloc arena or writes to a dangling pointer causing corruption in a completely unrelated part of the program. Hours and hours of fun!
One of the most important thing that managed programming languages brought is the fact that other parts of the program can't corrupt the system enough to make things undebuggable and that an error in a module is self-contained enough that it can't trample other parts of the program due to a memory error.
I do agree though that C and other unmanaged languages should still be taught.
it saddens me when i see people who not only fail to see farther than their own noses (the hardware they personally deal in), but also forget to look back in history (the hardware we used, grew out of, and abandoned in favor of something better - our own progress).
by your arguments, we would never have arrived to where we were 10 years ago with Fast Ethernet, VGA, serial and parallel connectors, USB1.0, parallel ATA etc., and we wouldn't be where we are today, with DisplayPort, DVI, serial ATA, optical/gigabit Ethernet and 802.11 wireless, USB2/3 etc. - all of the latter being technologies that i'm certain you enjoy thoroughly, in loving favor of the alternatives you had 10 years ago.
and i'm sure even you can figure out that if we stick with your rationale, we won't arrive at tomorrow's technology either.
I didn't argue against new standards, as much as you seem to want to put words in my mouth, but rather at you saying that because we use some older standards because we need things to work instead of using the new whizbang technology we're just a "crowd of conservative oddballs and anal retentives, barking like old dogs refusing to learn how to sit, for keeping old standards, trying to justify it by reasons of pointless, smelly compatibility that is long past its expiry date."
There are other things than just the consumer market and some of us have specialized equipment for which older interfaces are needed because replacing the equipment for no reason other than "it uses the new connector/interface" is simply ridiculous.
Agree fully. I still drop my jaw everytime I see a laptop from the past 3-4 years still sporting a friggin' VGA connector, or even worse, from some "PC" manufacturers, a parallel port.
Sadly, there will always be that crowd of conservative oddballs and anal retentives, barking like old dogs refusing to learn how to sit, for keeping old standards, trying to justify it by reasons of pointless, smelly compatibility that is long past its expiry date.....and everyone knows they are the ones who contribute to nothing but stagnation, not the ones who help driving the world forward.
Yeah, just like people using serial ports to program Cisco gear or people in EE using serial ports to program microcontrollers by plugging the RX and TX pins directly to a serial port. And what about those people presenting their research at conferences around the world wanting to use a display connector that's supported on every single projector around the world in all convention centres instead of carrying a suitcase of adapters. We all know those aren't the people who help drive the world forwards, right?
-40 Fahrenheit and -40 Celsius are the same.
What is the difference between this and creating an ad-hoc network and enabling internet connection sharing for the physical port in Vista (and XP, and OS X, and Linux)?
It's an actual access point, not an ad hoc network. My Android Dev Phone 1(which does not support connecting to ad hoc networks) can connect to it.
don't you mean tinfoil umbrellas?
Like this one?
They somehow managed to hand-count ~40M votes in a couple hours. It doesn't take a brain surgeon (or a statistician, in this case) to realize there's something fishy going on.
How so? I believe the way it works in Canada is that ballots are counted at each polling station and parties are free to have a representative oversee the election process. This ensures that we have an unofficial count a couple of hours after the polling stations close. (See The Electoral System of Canada, on page 34 of the PDF)
The official count comes, by law, up to seven days later, but it usually doesn't differ from the unofficial count.
Only if you are an idiot. The first rule of client-server programming is don't trust the client. Don't give the client any more data than it needs, validate all messages from the client. Things like wall hacks only work because the server is providing the client with too much information. Speed hacks only work because the server is allowing the client to move more than the correct amount (i.e. not validating the input). As for tripling the size of on-screen enemies and aimbots; if your game depends so much on your ability to click accurately on small things to be fun, the odds are that it isn't.
No, wallhacks work because it is very expensive to perform thorough visibility checks on every single frame of the game(See Potentially visible set on Wikipedia). The idea is that a precalculated set of areas have information as to which other areas are potentially visible from that particular area. This means that an area spanning a corridor would have visibility into adjacent corridors, and thus, you could 'see' around corners with translucent walls.
Pushing more information towards the client is an optimization, in the same way that database denormalization is. In an ideal world, you wouldn't need either of those, but we're still bound by performance constraints.
So closed source games are free of said hacks? No? Well, I be damned!
There's this thing - the "server". It can do things like "hack prevention" and "sanity checks". Who's to say that the only contribution to open source would be client-side hacks and not server-side anti-hack improvements?
I'm not argueing for open source games, but saying there will be hacks because of open source is just as dumb as saying an open source encryption tool is less secure than closed source security-by-obscurity implementation.
There are limits to what server-side checking can do. When your MMO starts getting overrun by people with autoclickers, bots and other annoyances that can be done client-side, no amount of server-side checking can help you.
I mean World of Warcraft, has absolutely no CD protection, hell you can just copy the entire folder to a new PC and start to play, you don't even need installation. Yet they earn millions every day.
Why would they put copy protection on the game anyway, they make most of their money selling subscriptions, not retail boxes. Besides, even if someone copies the game and subscribes to WoW, they probably make more profit on one month of subscription fees than whatever trickles through the retail chain back to Blizzard.
Actually, it's been there for quite a while. I've been told by an Amazon employee a couple years ago that they do have it, it just doesn't appear in their catalog nor in recommendations. However, if you are to search for specific titles or names, you'll find what you are looking for, or so I've been told.
Indeed, it's a pretty dubious statistic. Anyway, what kind of business desperately needs to update in the first months of an OS release(excluding software development/testing)?
Besides, if your business relies on having some mission-critical piece of software that your vendor still hasn't managed to make work on Vista by now, you should seriously consider kicking that vendor to the curb for being incompetent twits and migrating away from them.
They probably use CAP codes, which sometimes flashes a dot pattern during the movie.
You're doing something seriously wrong if you're doing mocap for a month.
Also, there already is a 3D model market, see TurboSquid for example. However, you're assuming that a game is only a patchwork of random disparate elements. It's not. It would pretty much break the fourth wall if you started to notice that you saw that particular soldier in another game, so you'd need people to retouch the models and assets anyway. Besides, you probably want all the models to have the same visual style, so it's probably less effort to just create the models from scratch instead of having to tweak something you bought.
Also, you failed to see that asset production is pretty much a pipelined process: a modeler makes a model, which is then sent to a texturer and an animator to complete. Also, a lot of the costs related to assets are mostly related to client demands. If someone at Disney or Warner doesn't like the look of character X from their license, well, you have to rework it, then send it for their approval again, hear them whine again, etc. Having asset libraries in that case doesn't help.
I don't doubt that this could work fine in the casual market, but I don't see how this could be cost-effective for the latest games, and I don't see how they would be able to convince the hardcore gamers to switch.
I doubt they're targeting the hardcore gamers. It would be a pretty suicidal move, since they're the ones likely to say that the service sucks because they don't get every single pixel in their game without compression and hog the service for hours on end.
If you use Outlook and Exchange, there is a message recall feature. Of course, for those who don't, we just get an annoying two line email saying "Foo would like to recall message blah". Even funnier is that in French, the word they use for recall can mean either of recall or highlight/remind.
It took me a while to understand why some senders always wanted to remind me of some silly email.
You know, I'm starting to take issue with comments that protest the use of the M$, Micro$oft etc. memes. I know how something can get on your tits - articles that identify companies by their stock symbols is a particular irritant of mine.
But being annoying to a given reader does not cause a comment to lose all credibility. I mean, you can judge a comment by any criteria you choose, even moderate that way if you like. But you and I can't have a conversation either, if at any time you might write off everything I've said because I violated some arbitrary boundary you have. It's like people who dismiss an otherwise intelligent comment because it was posted AC. Again, it's their prerogative, but it makes it hard for the rest of us to talk to them.
And I am not suggesting the comment you replied to was "otherwise intelligent." The comment you replied to was obviously a troll, and should be dismissed for that reason. I would agree that a user who says something like "Winblows" isn't making any kind of lucid point with that act, but he may just be really frustrated for a good reason. Let him vent - he "paid" for that right - then see if he has an actual point.
In defense of the use of M$ etc, I see it as sort of a short hand, like Garry Trudeau would do with politicians. A feather for Dan Qualye, a bomb for Newt Gingrich ... To a passionate free software advocate, M$ is a concise, efficient and - IMO - accurate moniker.
In two characters, the anonymous poster - who is probably Twitter - told us all we need to know about his opinion of Microsoft. I don't think an anti-Microsoft - or anti-Google/Linux/Apple bias for that matter - invalidates anyone's opinion. If it does, good grief we're all doomed.
BTW, I agree with you about the suicide remark.
I beg to differ. If you're so puerile to have the need to use "M$ Winbloze" or "open sores software" in a rational discussion, it seems as if you're trying to sidestep the issue with colorful language. Call things by their name and focus on arguments rather than taking trite potshots.
As for identifying corporations by their stock ticker symbols, it allows to easily differentiate between corporations who would have otherwise similar names(for example, an article talking about the Royal Bank could refer to both RY and RBS) and to look them up quickly and unambiguously.
How about filenames other than peculiar serial numbers like dsc-12345.jpg? How about an option to use the timestamp as a filename? How about a datestamp and serial number?
the #1 feature needed in DSLR cameras. LET ME CHOOSE THOSE first 3 LETTERS!!!!
when I have a shooting team covering an event I would LOVE to have each camera they use set to their initials for the filename. Or set the event ID, etc....
Honestly the firmware in all cameras, just sucks. they really could add features that pro photographers would kill for and others would find incredibly useful.
The reason why files in cameras are in the DCIM\DSC?????.JPG format is documented in JEITA standards JEIDA-49-1998 and JEIDA-49-2-1998, but it essentially allows creating a camera-agnostic system that can read images from cameras. (fun fact:DSC stands for Digital Still Camera)
As for labeling the pictures with a shooting team, can't they each use their own media or change the sequence number used to mark the pictures as their own?
It's not just bands now, either. Modern film scores use a click track. Some of my friends play film scores as freelancers (they are professional, classically trained musicians) - and they've all reported having to use a click track.
The "conductor" is mostly used to notify them which section to play... as most of the music doesn't merit actual rehearsal time. The conductor does get to watch the film during the session, however.
It's pure torture for the musicians... to make it worse, the "conductors" will sometimes say, "Wow! I wish you guys could have seen that scene!"
Is the usage of the click track torture or the lack of rehearsal time? And how is it torture? (Not trolling, just curious since I'm not a musician)
They charge a fee of half the ticket fine, which they reimburse if the ticket does not get dismissed.
You could check their official website though. It's not as if Wikipedia contains everything.
http://www.microsoft.com/esp/
If you have a monopoly on advertising, it means that you control a majority of where ads are displayed. Since some kinds of advertising are dependent on impression volume, if Google controls a majority of "eyeballs" for your particular market, you can't avoid using their service unless you want to have a much lower impression volume.
This kind of imbalance isn't as pronounced in other medias. If you want to reach 20-25 year old single males, you could put your ads on Fox, ESPN or some other channel and it wouldn't matter too much if one doesn't want to carry your ad or charges too much, since there's some competition between all the players. On the other hand, if most national TV stations were controlled by a single player with regards to advertising, then that might prove problematic. Sure, you could advertise on local community stations, but would you get an ad campaign that's as effective?