There are two open-source projects I've been thinking about forking. ntop is a very useful program, but they've chosen to cripple their Windows binaries and provide uncrippled Windows binaries for $$$. Visual Boy Advance is a GBA emulator - the author has publicly stated he has no plans to add link cable support, partially because it would make it look designed for piracy.
I've thought about forking ntop into ntopwin - it would be identical to ntop in every way, but easily compilable under Windows, and with uncrippled binaries provided.
I've thought about forking VBA to add link cable support.
In both cases I'd still give credit to the original authors. And I'd merge their new code versions in whenever they're released . . . mine would just be better, because it would do everything theirs does, plus some.
I don't imagine either one would be too happy. I'd probably end up in the middle of a holy war. But, in the end, that's what "open source" means - "free for anyone to use, even if you don't approve of the use, as long as they're working within the terms of the license." It's funny how few people really seem to believe that - the closed-source world isn't alone in having that deep-seated belief that all their legal documents carry an implicit "unless we don't want you to" clause.
I'll probably never do it - I was really going to fork ntop, but then my workplace got an Ethernet switch, which nicely eradicated any use I would have had for it. And VBA would take a lot of work, and I have projects of my own to work on. Still, I can only wonder what would happen.
The line between the "open" and "closed" worlds is, in a lot of ways, far thinner than people think.
Windows actually had this for a while - DirectDraw5 or so recommended that you lock the Win16 mutex when locking the back buffer so you could return it as quickly as possible.
They don't have it anymore. It provided, at most, maybe about 0.1% CPU boost, and if anything went wrong during that time *boom* the entire system melted down. I imagine, yes, they could have fixed that, but it would have been buggy code.
Are you seriously telling me that your Linux box runs at a load factor of more than 0.01 when it's not actually doing anything?
That's not true. They did it through backwards compatibility. DOS was king, so they made extra-extra sure that you could still run all your old DOS games and software. Eventually, people started realizing that everyone playing DOS games was, in fact, playing them under Windows, and so they started releasing software directly for Windows.
I'm writing a GBA game right now in my spare time. So far, I've got about 4000 lines of code in the game itself and 7000 in tools (and I'm about to go throw another 3000 or so in tools.) I've spent several days on all of this, and spent about six hours stealing sprites from other games and making other placeholder art. Yes, placeholder art - I needed something to test my code with.
I imagine, by the time this is done, I'll have spent several times as long working on levels as I have making code, and I imagine my artist (if I ever get one:P) will have spent just as long on art, if not longer.
And this is just a GBA game! I was involved in making Champions of Norrath. The company included:
Five programmers One (overworked) level designer Seven artists
And more than once, I ended up implementing stuff we didn't really need because the stuff we did need was waiting on the artists.
Art uses a TON of resources. Programmers, while still absolutely critical to a good game, just don't need as much time anymore.
Whoa, hold on. I hear this a lot, and you're partially right, there are guys who don't respect girls. No argument here. I bet this has been going on pretty much since we were consciously aware of the difference, and I doubt it's going to change soon:P
*But*. There are guys who *do* respect girls - and there are also guys who consider girls "just another person that happens to have different anatomy." And you don't hear from us because we don't feel any need to broadcast it. I mean, would you honestly prefer getting bombarded by people saying "Hi, I'm going to talk to you the exact same way, I promise"?
I know plenty of people who have no trouble dealing with both genders online. I personally don't even know which gender the people are (a few weeks ago we realized that every single "female" player in our FFXI linkshell was actually male, while a few "male" players were actually female. So it goes.) But if we don't broadcast the fact that we don't care, nobody even notices!
So please, tell me what I'm supposed to be doing here. If I talk down to girls, I'm evil. If I explicitly say "hi, you're a girl, and I don't mind that" I'm evil. If I don't mention anything, I'm still evil-by-association. How exactly am I supposed to get on your good side?
On a project I did a year ago, we had a few simple rules.
You don't have to justify logging anything in particular. However, any default logging must go to the console (GUI program, so this didn't disturb usability). Plus, we were running on a platform with really glacial console output.
The end effect was that any annoyingly large amount of logging would bog down the program so much that we'd figure out whose logging it was and go kill them. It worked quite well:) I ended up with maybe a hundred lines of logging per invocation, at most, with another few hundred at most in an algorithm area that was entirely mine (meaning that nobody else needed to decipher it.)
Right now, my car has an electrical problem that I haven't tracked down yet. The battery doesn't hold a charge when connected to the car - it manages 24 hours pretty easily, but a weekend will kill it and I need to get a jumpstart from someone.
There's an easy solution (at least until I fix the real problem) - when I think I won't be using it for a few days, I disconnect the battery.
Dear god yes. I flew Delta once - never again. ATL was *atrocious*. I've never seen an airport that large with that lousy of a food selection, and they wanted us to pay money for food inflight. And it was, like, $2 cheaper. Totally wasn't worth it.
I remembered that Jet Blue's JFK terminal had open wifi in the terminal. That's why I chose Jet Blue to come to NYC a few weeks ago. (Although the fact that they were $20 cheaper didn't hurt either.)
I'll have to remember US Airways. If their prices are competitive, they probably have my business from now on, assuming I'm going someplace that Jet Blue doesn't support.
Oh, come on. Once it's going through a known good computer, it's easy to deal with assuming the sysadmins are competent.
(1) It's known where it's coming from, since our competent outgoing mail server has authentication turned on and won't accept emails with invalid "from" addresses. (2) It's easy to see that suddenly Aunt Bertha, who averages 5 emails per day, is sending 50,000 per second. And easy to block - this can be *automated*, too. If someone sends ten substantially identical emails in the space of five seconds, put a hold on the account and flag it for review. If they stop, send the emails and remove the flag after five minutes. If, on the other hand, they keep sending thousands of emails, it's pretty clear they've been exploited.
I've always been amused by scripts like that. I have an almost irresistable urge to jump out of the lines of their script and force them to think. Few things are funnier than watching someone struggle to make reality fit the template they have for "how reality should be".
"Student X, what is it about Student Y with which you have an issue?" "My issue is that Student Y is a spineless lackey of the teachers, and actually believes that pre-rehearsed scripts are a good idea. What do you think? Do you think this rote rehearsal is helping?" "Student Y, what is it about Student X with which you have an issue?" "Well, uh, I used to think you were capable of thinking for yourselves despite the script, but you've just proven me wrong. So I guess we don't have an issue anymore."
Assuming the server is secure, the game shouldn't be hackable, whether it's Diablo II or Counterstrike.
Obviously if the server is compromised, that all goes out the window. However, a default installation of a server by someone who isn't trying to cheat shouldn't be cheatable on. In CS, it was.
That's true - you do need to send the data a bit before the player could actually see them. Still, the screenshots I've seen of hacks have been pretty clear evidence that the game is sending information *long* before it was necessary. Maybe it's been improved since, though, since I was only really curious about that quite a few years ago;)
Yes, Half-Life did have cheats like that, and I don't think it was a modified server. I went out with a girl whose brother was a cheater - there were wallhacks, and flying hacks, and some pretty bizarre things that didn't seem like they should even be remotely possible.
Plus some bugs.
Meanwhile, Diablo II was booting players who failed an equipment consistency check due to a game bug . . . not *everyone* implicitly trusts the client, at least:P
What I keep wondering is, why don't they, say, *make it not quite as hackable*?
It's not like we don't know how to do it. You don't send the client information that they don't need (say, the position of players that they can't see), and you check to make sure the returned data is sane (for example, the player is traveling on foot more slowly than 200mph, the player isn't walking through solid obstacles, etc.)
Obviously it's not nearly as possible to get rid of things like bots - we're pretty much stuck with those - but we should at least be able to constrain it to bots that play by the rules. Why *was* Half-Life so cheatprone?
Yeah, if you want to do.Net development, you're locked into Windows. No argument.
On the other hand, if you want to do Cocoa development, you're locked into Apple.
If you want, you can do Java and Perl programming on your Apple. Surprise surprise, you can do those on Windows also, and they won't magically stop working when you change platforms (at least, no more so than any other semi-cross-platform applications would be expected to.)
I don't get the problem here. Most open-source apps have Windows ports. Now if you wanted to say "the very few open-source apps that I use don't have Windows ports", then okay, that's something - but saying that writing code in Windows instantly locks you into Windows seems pretty ludicrous. The same languages still exist, and you can still write the same code.
Betcha they gave out open invitations to everyone working at Google and all their friends. The second thing I did on Orkut (after explore the site a bit) was search for a cool girl I met while I was there, and yep, I found her.
90 friends.
I think she got in pretty much on the ground floor.:P
Keep in mind that he's said *he* doesn't use turnitin.com - his *teachers* do. If his teachers sign a contract saying that anything they submit can be used, and then submit something they have no right to give up rights to, then the law is pretty firmly on the student's side.
It's definitely possible. Real-life example: I compete in an online programming competition. About a month ago, I solved a medium problem - about 20 lines of code. When they opened the problems for inspection, I discovered my code was *identical* to my closest rival's - algorithm, tab spacing, even down to the variable names (all one-character names along the lines of "i" and "j".) The only difference - mine was written in C++, and his was written in Java. (The only change this made in the code was the framework around the work function, and that I used.size() while he used.length.)
So yeah, it's absolutely possible to generate identical code, even on projects that aren't quite trivial. I've done it.
You're right - we can't win, so we'd better not try.
Oooh, oooh, the RIAA is coming! Everyone hide, there's no way to fight them! They are gods on this earth, and we are lower than the lowest worms.
Please. Of *course* we won't win if we don't try. I don't know exactly how we'll go about doing that, but if you want the freedom to continue running arbitrary code on your own computer, we're going to have to try.
"Um, did you know there's someone following you around hitting you on the head with a shovel?"
"Yeah, of course I know. I don't mind. I mean, yeah, it hurts, but did you know there's somebody walking around hitting people on their heads with pickaxes? Ha ha, this guy's practically on my side! Why would I complain about him?"
Eh? So you're saying it's impossible to make a profit off anything, because as soon as you do, the price drops to exactly the minimum it takes for you to bring it there?
If I pay $1 for a certain amount of iron, and Company X can bring it from space for $0.50, they're going to charge $0.90 or so and turn a hefty profit. It's not until we have *multiple* companies in space that profit starts getting tricky, and even then, it'll still be profitable since everyone's trying to make a profit.
First I plugged it in, but it didn't work. So I played with it for a while and it still didn't work. I left it alone for a while, and then it started magically working!
Then I went on to the next part. Again, I couldn't get it working. So I did some random stuff to it and it still didn't work. Then I left it alone and it started magically working too!
Our employer uses some proprietary software that has a Mac port. Unfortunately, the Mac port isn't perfect. But this won't be permanent, because my company is upgrading to a new version of the proprietary software, and I have faith that Apple will release an update to their package at the exact right moment to make it continue working.
. . . This really isn't making me want to rush out and buy a Mac, you know? I mean, the next part is pretty impressive - dongles working *through a virtual operating system layer* is mighty cool. But the first few paragraphs just make me wonder what I'd do if it *didn't* magically start working, or if the gnomes at Apple didn't release a new patch just in time for my own personal use.
If he said "it didn't work, and so I checked the extensive documentation, browsed the detailed error logs, and figured out exactly what was wrong", yeah, that'd be great. But if he's saying "it just started working eventually", that doesn't fill me with confidence.
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason few people take fanfics seriously - because most of them suck. Yes, there are exceptions, but they're rare.
On the other hand, Desert Combat is technically a mod, and people seem to respect that one quite a bit.
I just googled for his name, and found out that apparently he's - get this - suing Google because he doesn't like what a Google search brings up!
If that isn't an insult to his intelligence, I don't know what is.
There are two open-source projects I've been thinking about forking. ntop is a very useful program, but they've chosen to cripple their Windows binaries and provide uncrippled Windows binaries for $$$. Visual Boy Advance is a GBA emulator - the author has publicly stated he has no plans to add link cable support, partially because it would make it look designed for piracy.
I've thought about forking ntop into ntopwin - it would be identical to ntop in every way, but easily compilable under Windows, and with uncrippled binaries provided.
I've thought about forking VBA to add link cable support.
In both cases I'd still give credit to the original authors. And I'd merge their new code versions in whenever they're released . . . mine would just be better, because it would do everything theirs does, plus some.
I don't imagine either one would be too happy. I'd probably end up in the middle of a holy war. But, in the end, that's what "open source" means - "free for anyone to use, even if you don't approve of the use, as long as they're working within the terms of the license." It's funny how few people really seem to believe that - the closed-source world isn't alone in having that deep-seated belief that all their legal documents carry an implicit "unless we don't want you to" clause.
I'll probably never do it - I was really going to fork ntop, but then my workplace got an Ethernet switch, which nicely eradicated any use I would have had for it. And VBA would take a lot of work, and I have projects of my own to work on. Still, I can only wonder what would happen.
The line between the "open" and "closed" worlds is, in a lot of ways, far thinner than people think.
I got mine from an open-source kit ;) Search for devkitadv - there's quite a large amateur GBA development scene out there.
Windows actually had this for a while - DirectDraw5 or so recommended that you lock the Win16 mutex when locking the back buffer so you could return it as quickly as possible.
:P
They don't have it anymore. It provided, at most, maybe about 0.1% CPU boost, and if anything went wrong during that time *boom* the entire system melted down. I imagine, yes, they could have fixed that, but it would have been buggy code.
Are you seriously telling me that your Linux box runs at a load factor of more than 0.01 when it's not actually doing anything?
20:24:40 up 5 days, 8:58, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
I don't see the point of increasing complexity, or moving things into kernelspace, just for an extra 0% performance.
That's not true. They did it through backwards compatibility. DOS was king, so they made extra-extra sure that you could still run all your old DOS games and software. Eventually, people started realizing that everyone playing DOS games was, in fact, playing them under Windows, and so they started releasing software directly for Windows.
I'm writing a GBA game right now in my spare time. So far, I've got about 4000 lines of code in the game itself and 7000 in tools (and I'm about to go throw another 3000 or so in tools.) I've spent several days on all of this, and spent about six hours stealing sprites from other games and making other placeholder art. Yes, placeholder art - I needed something to test my code with.
:P) will have spent just as long on art, if not longer.
I imagine, by the time this is done, I'll have spent several times as long working on levels as I have making code, and I imagine my artist (if I ever get one
And this is just a GBA game! I was involved in making Champions of Norrath. The company included:
Five programmers
One (overworked) level designer
Seven artists
And more than once, I ended up implementing stuff we didn't really need because the stuff we did need was waiting on the artists.
Art uses a TON of resources. Programmers, while still absolutely critical to a good game, just don't need as much time anymore.
Whoa, hold on. I hear this a lot, and you're partially right, there are guys who don't respect girls. No argument here. I bet this has been going on pretty much since we were consciously aware of the difference, and I doubt it's going to change soon :P
*But*. There are guys who *do* respect girls - and there are also guys who consider girls "just another person that happens to have different anatomy." And you don't hear from us because we don't feel any need to broadcast it. I mean, would you honestly prefer getting bombarded by people saying "Hi, I'm going to talk to you the exact same way, I promise"?
I know plenty of people who have no trouble dealing with both genders online. I personally don't even know which gender the people are (a few weeks ago we realized that every single "female" player in our FFXI linkshell was actually male, while a few "male" players were actually female. So it goes.) But if we don't broadcast the fact that we don't care, nobody even notices!
So please, tell me what I'm supposed to be doing here. If I talk down to girls, I'm evil. If I explicitly say "hi, you're a girl, and I don't mind that" I'm evil. If I don't mention anything, I'm still evil-by-association. How exactly am I supposed to get on your good side?
On a project I did a year ago, we had a few simple rules.
:) I ended up with maybe a hundred lines of logging per invocation, at most, with another few hundred at most in an algorithm area that was entirely mine (meaning that nobody else needed to decipher it.)
You don't have to justify logging anything in particular. However, any default logging must go to the console (GUI program, so this didn't disturb usability). Plus, we were running on a platform with really glacial console output.
The end effect was that any annoyingly large amount of logging would bog down the program so much that we'd figure out whose logging it was and go kill them. It worked quite well
Right now, my car has an electrical problem that I haven't tracked down yet. The battery doesn't hold a charge when connected to the car - it manages 24 hours pretty easily, but a weekend will kill it and I need to get a jumpstart from someone.
There's an easy solution (at least until I fix the real problem) - when I think I won't be using it for a few days, I disconnect the battery.
This would mean I wouldn't be able to do that.
Ick.
Dear god yes. I flew Delta once - never again. ATL was *atrocious*. I've never seen an airport that large with that lousy of a food selection, and they wanted us to pay money for food inflight. And it was, like, $2 cheaper. Totally wasn't worth it.
I remembered that Jet Blue's JFK terminal had open wifi in the terminal. That's why I chose Jet Blue to come to NYC a few weeks ago. (Although the fact that they were $20 cheaper didn't hurt either.)
I'll have to remember US Airways. If their prices are competitive, they probably have my business from now on, assuming I'm going someplace that Jet Blue doesn't support.
Oh, come on. Once it's going through a known good computer, it's easy to deal with assuming the sysadmins are competent.
(1) It's known where it's coming from, since our competent outgoing mail server has authentication turned on and won't accept emails with invalid "from" addresses.
(2) It's easy to see that suddenly Aunt Bertha, who averages 5 emails per day, is sending 50,000 per second. And easy to block - this can be *automated*, too. If someone sends ten substantially identical emails in the space of five seconds, put a hold on the account and flag it for review. If they stop, send the emails and remove the flag after five minutes. If, on the other hand, they keep sending thousands of emails, it's pretty clear they've been exploited.
I've always been amused by scripts like that. I have an almost irresistable urge to jump out of the lines of their script and force them to think. Few things are funnier than watching someone struggle to make reality fit the template they have for "how reality should be".
"Student X, what is it about Student Y with which you have an issue?"
"My issue is that Student Y is a spineless lackey of the teachers, and actually believes that pre-rehearsed scripts are a good idea. What do you think? Do you think this rote rehearsal is helping?"
"Student Y, what is it about Student X with which you have an issue?"
"Well, uh, I used to think you were capable of thinking for yourselves despite the script, but you've just proven me wrong. So I guess we don't have an issue anymore."
Assuming the server is secure, the game shouldn't be hackable, whether it's Diablo II or Counterstrike.
Obviously if the server is compromised, that all goes out the window. However, a default installation of a server by someone who isn't trying to cheat shouldn't be cheatable on. In CS, it was.
That's true - you do need to send the data a bit before the player could actually see them. Still, the screenshots I've seen of hacks have been pretty clear evidence that the game is sending information *long* before it was necessary. Maybe it's been improved since, though, since I was only really curious about that quite a few years ago ;)
:P
Yes, Half-Life did have cheats like that, and I don't think it was a modified server. I went out with a girl whose brother was a cheater - there were wallhacks, and flying hacks, and some pretty bizarre things that didn't seem like they should even be remotely possible.
Plus some bugs.
Meanwhile, Diablo II was booting players who failed an equipment consistency check due to a game bug . . . not *everyone* implicitly trusts the client, at least
What I keep wondering is, why don't they, say, *make it not quite as hackable*?
It's not like we don't know how to do it. You don't send the client information that they don't need (say, the position of players that they can't see), and you check to make sure the returned data is sane (for example, the player is traveling on foot more slowly than 200mph, the player isn't walking through solid obstacles, etc.)
Obviously it's not nearly as possible to get rid of things like bots - we're pretty much stuck with those - but we should at least be able to constrain it to bots that play by the rules. Why *was* Half-Life so cheatprone?
Yeah, if you want to do .Net development, you're locked into Windows. No argument.
On the other hand, if you want to do Cocoa development, you're locked into Apple.
If you want, you can do Java and Perl programming on your Apple. Surprise surprise, you can do those on Windows also, and they won't magically stop working when you change platforms (at least, no more so than any other semi-cross-platform applications would be expected to.)
I don't get the problem here. Most open-source apps have Windows ports. Now if you wanted to say "the very few open-source apps that I use don't have Windows ports", then okay, that's something - but saying that writing code in Windows instantly locks you into Windows seems pretty ludicrous. The same languages still exist, and you can still write the same code.
What's the big deal?
Betcha they gave out open invitations to everyone working at Google and all their friends. The second thing I did on Orkut (after explore the site a bit) was search for a cool girl I met while I was there, and yep, I found her.
:P
90 friends.
I think she got in pretty much on the ground floor.
Keep in mind that he's said *he* doesn't use turnitin.com - his *teachers* do. If his teachers sign a contract saying that anything they submit can be used, and then submit something they have no right to give up rights to, then the law is pretty firmly on the student's side.
It's definitely possible. Real-life example: I compete in an online programming competition. About a month ago, I solved a medium problem - about 20 lines of code. When they opened the problems for inspection, I discovered my code was *identical* to my closest rival's - algorithm, tab spacing, even down to the variable names (all one-character names along the lines of "i" and "j".) The only difference - mine was written in C++, and his was written in Java. (The only change this made in the code was the framework around the work function, and that I used .size() while he used .length.)
So yeah, it's absolutely possible to generate identical code, even on projects that aren't quite trivial. I've done it.
You're right - we can't win, so we'd better not try.
Oooh, oooh, the RIAA is coming! Everyone hide, there's no way to fight them! They are gods on this earth, and we are lower than the lowest worms.
Please. Of *course* we won't win if we don't try. I don't know exactly how we'll go about doing that, but if you want the freedom to continue running arbitrary code on your own computer, we're going to have to try.
"Um, did you know there's someone following you around hitting you on the head with a shovel?"
"Yeah, of course I know. I don't mind. I mean, yeah, it hurts, but did you know there's somebody walking around hitting people on their heads with pickaxes? Ha ha, this guy's practically on my side! Why would I complain about him?"
Eh? So you're saying it's impossible to make a profit off anything, because as soon as you do, the price drops to exactly the minimum it takes for you to bring it there?
If I pay $1 for a certain amount of iron, and Company X can bring it from space for $0.50, they're going to charge $0.90 or so and turn a hefty profit. It's not until we have *multiple* companies in space that profit starts getting tricky, and even then, it'll still be profitable since everyone's trying to make a profit.
First I plugged it in, but it didn't work. So I played with it for a while and it still didn't work. I left it alone for a while, and then it started magically working!
Then I went on to the next part. Again, I couldn't get it working. So I did some random stuff to it and it still didn't work. Then I left it alone and it started magically working too!
Our employer uses some proprietary software that has a Mac port. Unfortunately, the Mac port isn't perfect. But this won't be permanent, because my company is upgrading to a new version of the proprietary software, and I have faith that Apple will release an update to their package at the exact right moment to make it continue working.
. . . This really isn't making me want to rush out and buy a Mac, you know? I mean, the next part is pretty impressive - dongles working *through a virtual operating system layer* is mighty cool. But the first few paragraphs just make me wonder what I'd do if it *didn't* magically start working, or if the gnomes at Apple didn't release a new patch just in time for my own personal use.
If he said "it didn't work, and so I checked the extensive documentation, browsed the detailed error logs, and figured out exactly what was wrong", yeah, that'd be great. But if he's saying "it just started working eventually", that doesn't fill me with confidence.
I can see it now.
."
"The car crash wasn't my fault! The cellphone I was talking on exploded!"
"You were talking on a cellphone while driving?"
"Errr . .