Yet another company with a fat monolithic, app store that wants to sit on my PC and devices. Steam/Valve, Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, GOG, Blizzard etc.
I know this is a wild and crazy concept, but how about building a federated system where people are free to buy their games from multiple sources without being trapped in a vertical slice? Games for Windows was more or less that concept, but it seems to have been forgotten about and really it needs to be revisited.
I looked at the prices and *laughed*. $20 for calls and another $10 for 1GB of data up to 6GB after which it becomes "unlimited". So I could be looking at a monthly bill of up to $80. Plus all the bullshit taxes and fees on top.
I can get unlimited calls and 15GB data for €15 prepaid in Ireland. No contract, no other charges. Roaming & data works in other EU countries too. What the hell is up with the United States when it comes to fucked up expensive mobile service?
The car kills a mother and child because signal was lost or because of latency issues. Or any other fatal or embarrassing fuck up that is a completely predictable outcome from this. Good luck with the fallout from that.
That may be true, but it's kind of a niche. I'd point out that Rust is encroaching there too. C and C++ are not dead by any stretch but they are certainly becoming marginalized in a lot of problem domains.
Use a card or some other token with NFC in it. If you move jobs or if technology advances you'll feel a lot less stupid than you will a useless chip permanently implanted in your skin.
Vastly more likely is that fewer and fewer C++ projects are starting because its lunch is being eaten by other languages. If speed / memory are not critical then a higher level language (e.g. Java, Python, Go etc.) is more appropriate. And if speed / memory is critical then a language like Rust has a distinct advantage in a number of regards.
I write C and C++ everyday but if I were contemplating writing something new and without some incredibly good reason I would be hard pressed to convince myself to use either.
C++17 onwards and the impl doesn't own the string so you get a view onto garbage if the string disappears from underneath. One thing I really like about Rust is that good ideas like slices were baked into the language & runtime and enforced by lifetime rules rather than optional, heavily caveated afterthoughts.
I think in general Rust code will compile and execute with equivalent speed to C++. However Rust can produce vastly more efficient code when it is manipulating strings because it is all slice based. In C++ if I make a substring, I allocate a new piece of memory to copy the substring into whereas Rust can return a slice to the existing string.
The main area for improvement is that Rust is a lot safer for multithreaded use, so it encourages the developer to think of ways to make their code more concurrent and that in turn can lead to better hardware utilisation and better performance. A simple example of that would be a command tool like ripgrep which absolutely slaughters grep and most other tools for recursive search operations because it runs in parallel over directories.
Well quite. I've written code in C and C++ for decades and I still write stupid bugs from time to time that the compiler could have caught but didn't. I sometimes write code where I could have const'd something, or might be doing something potentially unsafe (depending on what the caller does), or a raft of other little errors which might be fine in isolation but could compound to be a problem.
That's why the likes of Rust are such a boon. The language design and the compiler stop potential bugs from even becoming code. You write code and if it compiles then you know you don't have any data races, no pointer / ownership issues, double frees, null pointer exceptions, memory management leaks. It also kicks your ass if the code isn't thread safe. It also panics at runtime if you run off the end off a buffer or do some other dumb stuff. And the runtime is more expansive than C/C++ and RAII in nature. All that and it still compiles to performant code.
While Rust won't stop application level bugs, it eliminates a whole raft of issues inflicted by C and C++ through the design of their language. If I were starting any system level project from scratch these days I would default consider writing it in Rust first and only if that wasn't viable would I think of using C++ or C.
The self publishing business model is to extract cash upfront from the author because they sure as hell won't make up for it in volume sales later. Yes there might be the odd professor, or guy selling some low volume quality book in amongst them, the exceptions that prove the rule, but it's background noise to their main audience - vanity publishers. This is reflected by simply perusing a site like lulu where 99% of it is garbage.
But crowdfunding is similar to self publish they have a very low quality threshold. If your campaign looks superficially kosher they'll list it. Why? Because they rake 5% of the funds raised and most likely get kickbacks from their payment processors (who take another 3%) too. It's in their interests to allow as many campaigns to list as possible, regardless of them being economically viable, or outright scams or not. Campaigns just have to have the trappings of viability / not-scam and that's enough for them.
I don't believe either that they serve a purpose that wasn't served by other forms of funding in the past - self funding, bank loans, investors. A good product, even one available in low volumes is either economically viable or it isn't. If it's viable, it will find funding. If it isn't and it ends up on crowdfunding then it throws into question its viability and the motivations / acumen of the people raising funds for it.
I'm not sure how the comment comes to that conclusion. The rational decision for a company as large and as influential as Facebook is to ensure all their executives, especially the ones who travel or work in other jurisdictions are using secure devices that a resilient to hacking / trojans or other forms of espionage. Not just by state actors, but potentially their rivals in Google or Apple who... make the most popular phone platforms. Really their execs should be running handsets stripped of all Google / Apple software, or at least designed in a way to silo / protect any information they might get on their phones from other processes.
The bottomless hole that is human stupidity is doing a great deal of harm to these sites. It doesn't matter what dumb, useless or ultimately bullshit idea somebody has, there will always be idiots ready to back it. And not just back it for a % of the profits, no, they back it for a pathetic discount off the final product (assuming there is one) or some other meaningless gesture.
And Indigogo and other crowdfund sites don't care. They get to skim the money flowing in and the money flowing out regardless of that happening.
People with an ounce of sense in their heads would just wait for a tangible product to actually exist.
Now they can have billions of tax dollars siphoned off as economic incentives and tax breaks to Amazon. At some point it will dawn on them that the economic benefits are nowhere to be seen, their politics have been corrupted beyond all recognition, and the poverty gap is wider than ever. After they've been bled dry Amazon will decide it wants to build its headquarters somewhere else and the cycle will repeat.
Well certainly some form of carrot and stick stores - use chip & pin / contactless payment and get a meaningful reduction in transaction fees, don't use and get whacked with higher fees and be on the hook for fraud.
The point of chip and pin is that the cards details don't go through merchants system at all. Instead the card is authenticated / authorized through a secure device that talks directly to the payment service. All the merchant gets is a token of the transaction. Of course if the merchant stupidly allows cards to be swiped instead then they're just as vulnerable to skimming / hacking / database theft as non chip and pin devices.
I've never heard of Ironchat but from the sounds of it, it was cryptographic snakeoil. If cops / intelligence services were listening in realtime that would suggest that it wasn't securing messages from man in the middle / spoof attacks or the manner that keys were exchanged was insecure.
There are lots of scenarios where point A to point B is perfectly fine. Many metro lines work exactly that way, going back and forth between two terminals with stops along the way. So to many shuttle / airport express type services. I expect that A to B would be fine too for other kinds transportation, between warehouse / distribution depots, parking lots & themeparks and so on.
And besides, tunnels are entirely capable of branching and splitting you know. I could see a computer controlled network routing shuttles through an interconnecting series of tunnels that run in paralle, join and diverge, load balancing the traffic to maximize throughout. Who knows what it would end up like eventually but it has to start somewhere.
Who says they didn't patch the game? Even if they did it doesn't make up for lost earnings or economic harm that the company may believe itself to have suffered.
GTA V is a cash cow for Take Two. It is obviously in their interests to come down hard on people selling tools that deprive the company of revenue either directly or indirectly by griefing / cheating other players. It's too bad for the perps if they live in a country where they can be pursued through the courts.
Proprietary charge formats suck. At best it means carrying around expensive adapters. At worst it means being locked into a particular charging network because of the inconvenience of using another.
Europe recognized this issue and has adopted type 2 CCS as the standard. Legislation means that soon all public chargers in Europe will soon be required to support CCS type 2 as the baseline and offer charge on a non-discretionary, impartial basis through common payment forms. i.e. you can plug your EV into a charger and pay by credit card.
Most new EVs are using type 2 CCS. Tesla and Nissan Leaf will eventually have to adopt CCS type 2 in Europe at least. The Euro launch of the model 3 would be a good time for Tesla to start (existing Teslas have a type 2 charge with proprietary DC fast charge). The Leaf also has a type 2 for AC charging but a CHAdeMO for DC charging - so they should just drop the CHAdeMO and/or add the CCS DC pins.
Palm, the company that made the Palm Pilot is long dead. This is some random company that bought the rights to the Palm brand off of HP slapping it on some random android handset. Whatever spirit or ethos the name Palm may have originally represented is long gone.
My second but last printer was an Epson - I made sure I could get 3rd party cartridges before I bought it and yet it would frequently brick cartridges - literally it would run them for a bit and then outright refuse to recognise them. I cannot accept that this was not intentional.
After that experience I always use chipless cartridges and I will never buy Epson under any circumstances. The reality is that printers do not need to put microchips on a cart for any technical reason - an optical sensor is far more reliable. It's simply an anti-consumer, anti-competitive move. I'm kind of surprised the EU doesn't force this issue, possibly even forcing printers to adopt some standard cartridge sizes while they're at it to stop this BS.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked GOG didn't have a federated platform of services.
I know this is a wild and crazy concept, but how about building a federated system where people are free to buy their games from multiple sources without being trapped in a vertical slice? Games for Windows was more or less that concept, but it seems to have been forgotten about and really it needs to be revisited.
I can get unlimited calls and 15GB data for €15 prepaid in Ireland. No contract, no other charges. Roaming & data works in other EU countries too. What the hell is up with the United States when it comes to fucked up expensive mobile service?
The car kills a mother and child because signal was lost or because of latency issues. Or any other fatal or embarrassing fuck up that is a completely predictable outcome from this. Good luck with the fallout from that.
That may be true, but it's kind of a niche. I'd point out that Rust is encroaching there too. C and C++ are not dead by any stretch but they are certainly becoming marginalized in a lot of problem domains.
Use a card or some other token with NFC in it. If you move jobs or if technology advances you'll feel a lot less stupid than you will a useless chip permanently implanted in your skin.
I write C and C++ everyday but if I were contemplating writing something new and without some incredibly good reason I would be hard pressed to convince myself to use either.
C++17 onwards and the impl doesn't own the string so you get a view onto garbage if the string disappears from underneath. One thing I really like about Rust is that good ideas like slices were baked into the language & runtime and enforced by lifetime rules rather than optional, heavily caveated afterthoughts.
The main area for improvement is that Rust is a lot safer for multithreaded use, so it encourages the developer to think of ways to make their code more concurrent and that in turn can lead to better hardware utilisation and better performance. A simple example of that would be a command tool like ripgrep which absolutely slaughters grep and most other tools for recursive search operations because it runs in parallel over directories.
That's why the likes of Rust are such a boon. The language design and the compiler stop potential bugs from even becoming code. You write code and if it compiles then you know you don't have any data races, no pointer / ownership issues, double frees, null pointer exceptions, memory management leaks. It also kicks your ass if the code isn't thread safe. It also panics at runtime if you run off the end off a buffer or do some other dumb stuff. And the runtime is more expansive than C/C++ and RAII in nature. All that and it still compiles to performant code.
While Rust won't stop application level bugs, it eliminates a whole raft of issues inflicted by C and C++ through the design of their language. If I were starting any system level project from scratch these days I would default consider writing it in Rust first and only if that wasn't viable would I think of using C++ or C.
But crowdfunding is similar to self publish they have a very low quality threshold. If your campaign looks superficially kosher they'll list it. Why? Because they rake 5% of the funds raised and most likely get kickbacks from their payment processors (who take another 3%) too. It's in their interests to allow as many campaigns to list as possible, regardless of them being economically viable, or outright scams or not. Campaigns just have to have the trappings of viability / not-scam and that's enough for them.
I don't believe either that they serve a purpose that wasn't served by other forms of funding in the past - self funding, bank loans, investors. A good product, even one available in low volumes is either economically viable or it isn't. If it's viable, it will find funding. If it isn't and it ends up on crowdfunding then it throws into question its viability and the motivations / acumen of the people raising funds for it.
I'm not sure how the comment comes to that conclusion. The rational decision for a company as large and as influential as Facebook is to ensure all their executives, especially the ones who travel or work in other jurisdictions are using secure devices that a resilient to hacking / trojans or other forms of espionage. Not just by state actors, but potentially their rivals in Google or Apple who... make the most popular phone platforms. Really their execs should be running handsets stripped of all Google / Apple software, or at least designed in a way to silo / protect any information they might get on their phones from other processes.
And Indigogo and other crowdfund sites don't care. They get to skim the money flowing in and the money flowing out regardless of that happening.
People with an ounce of sense in their heads would just wait for a tangible product to actually exist.
Now they can have billions of tax dollars siphoned off as economic incentives and tax breaks to Amazon. At some point it will dawn on them that the economic benefits are nowhere to be seen, their politics have been corrupted beyond all recognition, and the poverty gap is wider than ever. After they've been bled dry Amazon will decide it wants to build its headquarters somewhere else and the cycle will repeat.
Well certainly some form of carrot and stick stores - use chip & pin / contactless payment and get a meaningful reduction in transaction fees, don't use and get whacked with higher fees and be on the hook for fraud.
The point of chip and pin is that the cards details don't go through merchants system at all. Instead the card is authenticated / authorized through a secure device that talks directly to the payment service. All the merchant gets is a token of the transaction. Of course if the merchant stupidly allows cards to be swiped instead then they're just as vulnerable to skimming / hacking / database theft as non chip and pin devices.
I've never heard of Ironchat but from the sounds of it, it was cryptographic snakeoil. If cops / intelligence services were listening in realtime that would suggest that it wasn't securing messages from man in the middle / spoof attacks or the manner that keys were exchanged was insecure.
And besides, tunnels are entirely capable of branching and splitting you know. I could see a computer controlled network routing shuttles through an interconnecting series of tunnels that run in paralle, join and diverge, load balancing the traffic to maximize throughout. Who knows what it would end up like eventually but it has to start somewhere.
Sucked into the alternate reality of IBM - software and processes everyone hates, petty bureaucracy, and layoffs.
It looked like a nice phone. It was far too expensive though.
Who says they didn't patch the game? Even if they did it doesn't make up for lost earnings or economic harm that the company may believe itself to have suffered.
GTA V is a cash cow for Take Two. It is obviously in their interests to come down hard on people selling tools that deprive the company of revenue either directly or indirectly by griefing / cheating other players. It's too bad for the perps if they live in a country where they can be pursued through the courts.
Europe recognized this issue and has adopted type 2 CCS as the standard. Legislation means that soon all public chargers in Europe will soon be required to support CCS type 2 as the baseline and offer charge on a non-discretionary, impartial basis through common payment forms. i.e. you can plug your EV into a charger and pay by credit card.
Most new EVs are using type 2 CCS. Tesla and Nissan Leaf will eventually have to adopt CCS type 2 in Europe at least. The Euro launch of the model 3 would be a good time for Tesla to start (existing Teslas have a type 2 charge with proprietary DC fast charge). The Leaf also has a type 2 for AC charging but a CHAdeMO for DC charging - so they should just drop the CHAdeMO and/or add the CCS DC pins.
Palm, the company that made the Palm Pilot is long dead. This is some random company that bought the rights to the Palm brand off of HP slapping it on some random android handset. Whatever spirit or ethos the name Palm may have originally represented is long gone.
After that experience I always use chipless cartridges and I will never buy Epson under any circumstances. The reality is that printers do not need to put microchips on a cart for any technical reason - an optical sensor is far more reliable. It's simply an anti-consumer, anti-competitive move. I'm kind of surprised the EU doesn't force this issue, possibly even forcing printers to adopt some standard cartridge sizes while they're at it to stop this BS.