In theory, sure. In practice, this never happens; jamming GPS is possible but very obvious, and anybody on the receiving end can tell they're being intentionally jammed and if they're smart will be able to figure out where it's coming from.
And I'm not aware of anybody ever successfully spoofing GPS in a real-world application, because it's incredibly hard to do. You would have to create an entire constellation of fake satellites targeting a specific receiver and gradually fool it into thinking your fake constellation is "real" so that it would acknowledge them instead of a real one -- and even after that's successful, you still have to do all the math to transmit signals that the target receiver will process in such a way that they can generate a valid fix in the location you desire.
Nobody uses GPS for anything requiring accuracy simply because it's inaccurate, but there are plenty of life-critical applications that don't require so much accuracy that use it all the time.
If you need a performant, statically typed language, there are better alternatives.
Sometimes you want a performant, statically typed language that also has a massive number of robust, mature open source libraries available for it. In general, if you want to do something that some other person conceivably may have wanted to do at some point in time, there's a Java library for it that has hundreds of users. Developing a load-balanced application server that uses websockets, communicates with a high-performance database, and uses PKI authentication? Heck, there's probably a maven stereotype that will take care of 95% of the boilerplate code for you. Not to mention the tools that are available -- there are few IDEs or profilers for any language that are as powerful as IntelliJ IDEA and JProfiler, for example.
Plus, learning something new is hard. Learning a new language can be tough enough, but it's far worse if you're switching frameworks on top of that. It doesn't matter if an alternative is better if Java is good enough and it's what you know.
Claws Mail is pretty nice. It's still regularly maintained and very fast.
I use Thunderbird because I like using its Lightning extension to access CalDav calendars, and Claws doesn't have anything like that (or very good calendaring support in general), but I'd probably use Claws if e-mail was the only thing I cared about.
Exactly. The "PC Master Race" seems to forget that piracy has really killed games on PC, at least the AAA titles. Indies are huge on PC (as they are on mobile), so that's all left.
Sorry, what did you say? I can't hear you over the sound of The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Just Cause 3, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3... (some of which got console ports, but none of which were developed before the PC version)
Otherwise why else would developers subject themselves to content approvals and all sorts of other things when they can release on PC for free.
Because: 1) Releasing on PC isn't free if you're distributing through a major platform like Steam or GOG, which you'd be a fool not to do. 2) The cost of content approvals and other such things is more than worth the amount of money the console ports will bring in.
You're not wrong about developers doing multi-platform releases to make as much money as they can, but in the end piracy hasn't made a dent in PC games. Steam's DRM is effective enough that it stops casual pirates; the only people who pirate PC games are those who were never going to buy them in the first place. Then you've also got publishers are GOG, who are completely DRM-free, and somehow they still seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
Think about how vision actually works; photons emitted from a light source bounce off of an object and enter your eye. Your eye detects the photons, and your brain constructs an image of them based on their wavelength and direction of arrival.
You can't see a black hole because its gravitational field is strong enough that even light can't escape. Since no photons are bouncing off, there's literally no way that your eye can perceive it.
On the down side, the only time methods will actually check privileges is when they suspect the calling method has too many privileges, in which case it will be completely ignored.
You are a bit confused about #notyourshield. If you review the GamerGate IRC logs, you can see that it was created by GamerGate and popularised through sock puppet accounts, using profile photos stolen from social media. The goal was to confuse people and make them think that there was a grass roots movement, and to smear opponents of GamerGate.
Have you actually seen these IRC logs? If so, where can the rest of us see them? Is there any way to verify their authenticity? I've seen this claim before, but never any evidence for it -- at this point it seems like anti-GG people just keep repeating it because they heard other anti-GG people say it... which describes a lot of the anti-GG rhetoric.
It only turned into gamergate because someone's jilted posted a bunch of lies and it exploded when all those basement dwellers felt offended that a woman should dump a guy that seemed so thoughtful and well spoken in his drunken rant.
That's not quite what actually happened or why GamerGate became a thing. After a man went public about the emotional abuse and infidelity he had dealt with from his ex-girlfriend, it turned out that one of the men she had cheated with was a writer for Kotaku and had given her favorable coverage without disclosing their relationship. GamerGate happened because, instead of admitting the mistake, Kotaku released an article claiming they had investigated and decided nothing improper was going on, despite photographic evidence otherwise. Personally, I find it very confusing that anti-GG keeps insisting that the entire incident was lies from a jilted ex despite the provided evidence and Quinn later admitting to it.
Many gamers were upset about the coverup, and it might have died down on its own, except several gaming news sites then seemingly independently produced a series of "gamers are dead" articles, which attacked and criticized gamers as a whole and accused gamers of widespread, systemic misogyny because they dared to be upset about a reporting scandal that involved a woman who cheated on her boyfriend. Making things even worse, it was discovered soon after that the series of articles was coordinated through a private mailing list used by all of those publications, where they colluded to decide what should be published.
A lot of people were very upset about this, and what's when GamerGate really took off. Since then, the involved sites have continued to hammer down on their accusations, and a large number of third-wave feminists have joined in after hearing calls of misogyny, trying to claim that strong criticism is the same as harassment, even though men like Jason Schreier, Nathan Grayson, and Jonathan McIntosh have been just as harshly criticized as any women involved. Meanwhile, the examples that anti-GG tries to point to as harassment and threats regularly turn out to be either unassociated with GG or complete fabrications. I keep trying to find somebody who has actually committed physical violence in the name of GG, and I still haven't found any. Women Action Media even did a study and released a report indicating that only a tiny percentage of GamerGate-related activity was involved in harassment at all. If you're going to judge the group based on the actions of a few outliers, then you can condemn pretty much any group.
And it might make you feel better to tell yourself "10 people still believe that gamergate is still about ethics", but KotakuInAction is up to well over 53k subscribers now and is still working hard at exposing corruption, censorship, and collusion. Calling them misogynists just makes them even more determined.
There are plenty of liberals who don't try to prohibit speech they don't like, and plenty of conservatives who do. Free speech isn't a partisan issue, although the people who are anti-free speech like it when you pretend that it is, because it only serves to divide you.
Because making the androids "smart enough" to replace a human is insanely hard and nobody thinks we'll have that by the 2030s, and repeatedly bringing samples up into orbit will be more expensive than just putting a lab (and people) on the surface.
Currently, having a human do collection and analysis directly is orders of magnitude faster and more effective than a remotely-controlled robot, and there's no reason to think that will change by then.
I can't speak for the original poster, but as for myself, I think that conceptually exceptions are great, but the C++ implementation of them is full of holes and prone to abuse. As much as the Slashdot base loves to hate Java, I think Java got exceptions right.
Notable differences: 1) There's a distinction between checked (compile-time) and unchecked (runtime) exceptions. All C++ exceptions are unchecked. 2) A method that can throw checked exceptions must declare every checked exception it can throw, and a method that calls another method that can throw checked exceptions must explicitly catch or re-throw them. These can be verified at compile time. 3) Every object that can be thrown/caught must implement the Throwable interface, so it has a predictable interface and can be properly manipulated in an object-oriented manner. 4) try/catch blocks also have a "finally" clause that is guaranteed to be run after the try/catch blocks complete, regardless of whether either one of them runs to completion or throws an exception out of the method. This is crucial for safely cleaning up filesystem/network resources -- the C++ alternative is only allocating objects on the stack and implementing destructors that clean up their resources, but then you have the restriction of not being able to allocate on the heap, and it may not also be obvious from looking at the try/catch block what the destructors are doing or in what order they'll be called in...
I go back and forth between C++ and Java development a lot, and every time I go back to C++, I'm immediately reminded why C++ developers are so averse to using exceptions for error handling.
The solution to this is really simple: build a gaming PC that has nothing but windows and your games on it. Have a second PC running Linux that you use for everything else.
There are very few sites that will publish content out of the goodness of their hearts.... But if online advertising can't unltimately make money somehow we're gonna have a very different web on our hands.
Ahh, that sounds so nice.
But seriously, there was a time, somewhere around two decades ago, when web pages were not covered in advertisements. If a web page had a banner ad, it was because it was part of a circle of related pages who all agreed to display each others' banners; they weren't earning money, they were just sharing places of interest.
Believe it or not, many web sites were published out of the goodness of peoples' hearts -- many of them just wanted to share information or connect with other like-minded people. That kind of thing doesn't really happen any more, though, now that social media has provided people with a way of easily connecting with others and sharing information without needing to write your own web page or host a server... and Facebook will gladly provide you with that service, funded by their corporate overlords.
If online advertising fails to make money and we have to go back to the good old days, then bring it on, I say. If your business model depends on annoying people, you deserve to go out of business.
For what it's worth, typing "man mdadm" or "man lvm" in a console should provide you with the documentation for those tools, as it will with most command-line utilities. Consider GParted or system-config-lvm if you need pretty GUIs, both of which have help built into them. "man upstart" works as well, although if you want something with pretty formatting and extensive examples, searching Google for "upstart manual" results in this as the first hit: Upstart Intro, Cookbook, and Best Practises
I don't think there really is a "wrong virtual terminal". Use whatever you like. xterm is pretty bare-bones; konsole also works and is more powerful, among others.
Out of curiosity, what distribution are you using? It sounds like you're trying to do some pretty complex system administrative tasks, and, well, I don't think it's unreasonable that those would be difficult to do for somebody who is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn't know where the documentation is.
I will say that generally, modern distributions with a focus on usability make it simple to configure multiple displays... but trying to get a single desktop working across multiple video cards (especially ones that use different drivers!) is either very difficult or impossible. You're better off using a single video card that has multiple outputs.
So... first, an IDE is not a compiler. If you can't compile your program cleanly with no IDE at all, you've set it up wrong, and no IDE is going to fix your problems.
I've done a fair amount of GUI development on both Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, and in general Qt Creator is great, even for non-Qt projects; I'd be curious how it "got pissy" with you, if you had a project that compiled cleanly from the command line. Lately I've also been liking CLion a lot, which is very powerful, although it's also pretty new and has a few rough edges. (boost accumulators give it a heart attack)
Given how widely various distros differ, it's impossible to have a single build that targets everything, but you can certainly write a CMake build file that will work in most scenarios and fail cleanly if dependencies are missing (and it's not like any other platform is better at dealing with missing dependencies). You don't need to write a program that will run on all of the "countless distros" out there, just the specific one you're targeting, and Ubuntu (and other Debian variants) are generally stable targets.
I've been using Linux for decades. I think its modern GUIs have shaped up quite nicely (in particular, I'm a fan of Cinnamon) and offer a good level of polish with regards to configuring almost everything that an average user would need to touch.
Pretty much everybody nowadays has a fancy multi-function mouse, right? Sure, your desktop computer come with a cheap optical mouse that just has two buttons and scroll wheel, but the first thing you do is shove that in a bag somewhere and plug in a nice wireless laser mouse, and it probably also has three or four extra function buttons and maybe a tilt wheel.
And then, you run into the exact same problem in every Linux distribution: there is no way to configure what all of your mouse buttons actually do. Every couple of years I look around to see if anybody's made a decent GUI yet, and nope, there's still none. I know it's possible -- I've written more than my fair share of.xbindkeysrc files. No "normal" user is going to do that, though. Why isn't there a GUI that gives me a list of mouse buttons and lets me pick a key or event to associate with them?
There isn't really a common Windows app for this, because every mouse manufacturer provides their own; since the Logitech one supports all the Logitech mice, the Microsoft one supports all of the Microsoft mice, and so on, there's not really a need for a unified one since you won't be switching mice very often. But surely it's not that hard to just write a generic one?
Which only works if you're on a system that has reliable internet access and your user is capable of setting up some sort of account credentials and is willing to go through that process any time they're playing a game on a different system. Remember who the target audience is here (young chlidren).
It's plenty of space, roomy in fact, for quite a lot of useful data structures.
For an embedded programmer, sure. Most of the people making console games nowadays have no experience programming for a system that doesn't effectively have as much storage space as they could want. Out in the non-embedded world, I've got preference files for text editors that are larger than 4k. I've seen save game files that are dozens of megabytes.
The hardware in the Amiibo have 4 kB of writeable space, which is almost inconceivably tiny nowadays. You could fit enough data in there for a couple of games if you're using minimal, tightly-packed C structures, but nobody does that any more when every game console has enough space that you can use dozens or even hundred of kB for storing saved games.
To be fair, I really don't know why they couldn't have just put a whole MB of storage space on the chip and then allocated something like 4 kB per game. Sometimes Nintendo makes baffling hardware decisions.
Please find a business model that does not involve annoying and exploiting the people who consume your media.
Now, it's not my job to tell you what your business model should be. Sell merchandise, provide paid services, ask for donations, or whatever else you can think of.
But if the basis of your business model is providing content for free to me while accepting money from people who solely want to annoy me or buy information about me, then I'm not going to allow that and you deserve to go out of business.
Shockingly, it turns out that a metaphor intended to describe what "heat death" means in layman's terms was not 100% scientifically accurate. The responsible parties have been sacked.
"Heat," in an atomic sense, is basically a measurement of how constrained molecules are within a structure and how rapidly they're bouncing around. "Cold" molecules are those that arelocked into a rigid structure and don't move around much. "Hot" molecules are ones that move about freely, without constraint. In that sense, the "heat death" of the universe will be when there is no more solid matter in the universe, and all of its atoms are distributed evenly, bouncing around freely.
What kind of bubble have you lived in that with a Slashdot id that low you still put any faith in this crap?
As Kidpro pointed out, you're making an incorrect assumption. I don't think smartphone credit card readers are secure. I think that all of the other types of card readers are insecure, too. There have been many cases of them being compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
wow linus seems like a dick
he could have gotten his point across without being such a rude dick
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who just won't get the point if you try to be polite to them about it.
And if protecting your feelings is more important than kernel stability, you're not cut out to be a kernel developer.
signals can be jammed/spoofed
In theory, sure. In practice, this never happens; jamming GPS is possible but very obvious, and anybody on the receiving end can tell they're being intentionally jammed and if they're smart will be able to figure out where it's coming from.
And I'm not aware of anybody ever successfully spoofing GPS in a real-world application, because it's incredibly hard to do. You would have to create an entire constellation of fake satellites targeting a specific receiver and gradually fool it into thinking your fake constellation is "real" so that it would acknowledge them instead of a real one -- and even after that's successful, you still have to do all the math to transmit signals that the target receiver will process in such a way that they can generate a valid fix in the location you desire.
Nobody uses GPS for anything requiring accuracy simply because it's inaccurate, but there are plenty of life-critical applications that don't require so much accuracy that use it all the time.
If you need a performant, statically typed language, there are better alternatives.
Sometimes you want a performant, statically typed language that also has a massive number of robust, mature open source libraries available for it. In general, if you want to do something that some other person conceivably may have wanted to do at some point in time, there's a Java library for it that has hundreds of users. Developing a load-balanced application server that uses websockets, communicates with a high-performance database, and uses PKI authentication? Heck, there's probably a maven stereotype that will take care of 95% of the boilerplate code for you. Not to mention the tools that are available -- there are few IDEs or profilers for any language that are as powerful as IntelliJ IDEA and JProfiler, for example.
Plus, learning something new is hard. Learning a new language can be tough enough, but it's far worse if you're switching frameworks on top of that. It doesn't matter if an alternative is better if Java is good enough and it's what you know.
Claws Mail is pretty nice. It's still regularly maintained and very fast.
I use Thunderbird because I like using its Lightning extension to access CalDav calendars, and Claws doesn't have anything like that (or very good calendaring support in general), but I'd probably use Claws if e-mail was the only thing I cared about.
Exactly. The "PC Master Race" seems to forget that piracy has really killed games on PC, at least the AAA titles. Indies are huge on PC (as they are on mobile), so that's all left.
Sorry, what did you say? I can't hear you over the sound of The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Just Cause 3, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3... (some of which got console ports, but none of which were developed before the PC version)
Otherwise why else would developers subject themselves to content approvals and all sorts of other things when they can release on PC for free.
Because:
1) Releasing on PC isn't free if you're distributing through a major platform like Steam or GOG, which you'd be a fool not to do.
2) The cost of content approvals and other such things is more than worth the amount of money the console ports will bring in.
You're not wrong about developers doing multi-platform releases to make as much money as they can, but in the end piracy hasn't made a dent in PC games. Steam's DRM is effective enough that it stops casual pirates; the only people who pirate PC games are those who were never going to buy them in the first place. Then you've also got publishers are GOG, who are completely DRM-free, and somehow they still seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
Think about how vision actually works; photons emitted from a light source bounce off of an object and enter your eye. Your eye detects the photons, and your brain constructs an image of them based on their wavelength and direction of arrival.
You can't see a black hole because its gravitational field is strong enough that even light can't escape. Since no photons are bouncing off, there's literally no way that your eye can perceive it.
On the down side, the only time methods will actually check privileges is when they suspect the calling method has too many privileges, in which case it will be completely ignored.
You are a bit confused about #notyourshield. If you review the GamerGate IRC logs, you can see that it was created by GamerGate and popularised through sock puppet accounts, using profile photos stolen from social media. The goal was to confuse people and make them think that there was a grass roots movement, and to smear opponents of GamerGate.
Have you actually seen these IRC logs? If so, where can the rest of us see them? Is there any way to verify their authenticity? I've seen this claim before, but never any evidence for it -- at this point it seems like anti-GG people just keep repeating it because they heard other anti-GG people say it... which describes a lot of the anti-GG rhetoric.
It only turned into gamergate because someone's jilted posted a bunch of lies and it exploded when all those basement dwellers felt offended that a woman should dump a guy that seemed so thoughtful and well spoken in his drunken rant.
That's not quite what actually happened or why GamerGate became a thing. After a man went public about the emotional abuse and infidelity he had dealt with from his ex-girlfriend, it turned out that one of the men she had cheated with was a writer for Kotaku and had given her favorable coverage without disclosing their relationship. GamerGate happened because, instead of admitting the mistake, Kotaku released an article claiming they had investigated and decided nothing improper was going on, despite photographic evidence otherwise. Personally, I find it very confusing that anti-GG keeps insisting that the entire incident was lies from a jilted ex despite the provided evidence and Quinn later admitting to it.
Many gamers were upset about the coverup, and it might have died down on its own, except several gaming news sites then seemingly independently produced a series of "gamers are dead" articles, which attacked and criticized gamers as a whole and accused gamers of widespread, systemic misogyny because they dared to be upset about a reporting scandal that involved a woman who cheated on her boyfriend. Making things even worse, it was discovered soon after that the series of articles was coordinated through a private mailing list used by all of those publications, where they colluded to decide what should be published.
A lot of people were very upset about this, and what's when GamerGate really took off. Since then, the involved sites have continued to hammer down on their accusations, and a large number of third-wave feminists have joined in after hearing calls of misogyny, trying to claim that strong criticism is the same as harassment, even though men like Jason Schreier, Nathan Grayson, and Jonathan McIntosh have been just as harshly criticized as any women involved. Meanwhile, the examples that anti-GG tries to point to as harassment and threats regularly turn out to be either unassociated with GG or complete fabrications. I keep trying to find somebody who has actually committed physical violence in the name of GG, and I still haven't found any. Women Action Media even did a study and released a report indicating that only a tiny percentage of GamerGate-related activity was involved in harassment at all. If you're going to judge the group based on the actions of a few outliers, then you can condemn pretty much any group.
And it might make you feel better to tell yourself "10 people still believe that gamergate is still about ethics", but KotakuInAction is up to well over 53k subscribers now and is still working hard at exposing corruption, censorship, and collusion. Calling them misogynists just makes them even more determined.
There are plenty of liberals who don't try to prohibit speech they don't like, and plenty of conservatives who do. Free speech isn't a partisan issue, although the people who are anti-free speech like it when you pretend that it is, because it only serves to divide you.
Especially considering that the Everyday Life with Monster Girls series of manga is regularly in the best sellers list?
Why will this not be doable by the 2030s?
Because making the androids "smart enough" to replace a human is insanely hard and nobody thinks we'll have that by the 2030s, and repeatedly bringing samples up into orbit will be more expensive than just putting a lab (and people) on the surface.
Currently, having a human do collection and analysis directly is orders of magnitude faster and more effective than a remotely-controlled robot, and there's no reason to think that will change by then.
I can't speak for the original poster, but as for myself, I think that conceptually exceptions are great, but the C++ implementation of them is full of holes and prone to abuse. As much as the Slashdot base loves to hate Java, I think Java got exceptions right.
Notable differences:
1) There's a distinction between checked (compile-time) and unchecked (runtime) exceptions. All C++ exceptions are unchecked.
2) A method that can throw checked exceptions must declare every checked exception it can throw, and a method that calls another method that can throw checked exceptions must explicitly catch or re-throw them. These can be verified at compile time.
3) Every object that can be thrown/caught must implement the Throwable interface, so it has a predictable interface and can be properly manipulated in an object-oriented manner.
4) try/catch blocks also have a "finally" clause that is guaranteed to be run after the try/catch blocks complete, regardless of whether either one of them runs to completion or throws an exception out of the method. This is crucial for safely cleaning up filesystem/network resources -- the C++ alternative is only allocating objects on the stack and implementing destructors that clean up their resources, but then you have the restriction of not being able to allocate on the heap, and it may not also be obvious from looking at the try/catch block what the destructors are doing or in what order they'll be called in...
I go back and forth between C++ and Java development a lot, and every time I go back to C++, I'm immediately reminded why C++ developers are so averse to using exceptions for error handling.
Can you link to some of the previous stories? I don't recall them.
The solution to this is really simple: build a gaming PC that has nothing but windows and your games on it. Have a second PC running Linux that you use for everything else.
There are very few sites that will publish content out of the goodness of their hearts. ... But if online advertising can't unltimately make money somehow we're gonna have a very different web on our hands.
Ahh, that sounds so nice.
But seriously, there was a time, somewhere around two decades ago, when web pages were not covered in advertisements. If a web page had a banner ad, it was because it was part of a circle of related pages who all agreed to display each others' banners; they weren't earning money, they were just sharing places of interest.
Believe it or not, many web sites were published out of the goodness of peoples' hearts -- many of them just wanted to share information or connect with other like-minded people. That kind of thing doesn't really happen any more, though, now that social media has provided people with a way of easily connecting with others and sharing information without needing to write your own web page or host a server... and Facebook will gladly provide you with that service, funded by their corporate overlords.
If online advertising fails to make money and we have to go back to the good old days, then bring it on, I say. If your business model depends on annoying people, you deserve to go out of business.
For what it's worth, typing "man mdadm" or "man lvm" in a console should provide you with the documentation for those tools, as it will with most command-line utilities. Consider GParted or system-config-lvm if you need pretty GUIs, both of which have help built into them. "man upstart" works as well, although if you want something with pretty formatting and extensive examples, searching Google for "upstart manual" results in this as the first hit: Upstart Intro, Cookbook, and Best Practises
I don't think there really is a "wrong virtual terminal". Use whatever you like. xterm is pretty bare-bones; konsole also works and is more powerful, among others.
Out of curiosity, what distribution are you using? It sounds like you're trying to do some pretty complex system administrative tasks, and, well, I don't think it's unreasonable that those would be difficult to do for somebody who is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn't know where the documentation is.
I will say that generally, modern distributions with a focus on usability make it simple to configure multiple displays... but trying to get a single desktop working across multiple video cards (especially ones that use different drivers!) is either very difficult or impossible. You're better off using a single video card that has multiple outputs.
So... first, an IDE is not a compiler. If you can't compile your program cleanly with no IDE at all, you've set it up wrong, and no IDE is going to fix your problems.
I've done a fair amount of GUI development on both Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, and in general Qt Creator is great, even for non-Qt projects; I'd be curious how it "got pissy" with you, if you had a project that compiled cleanly from the command line. Lately I've also been liking CLion a lot, which is very powerful, although it's also pretty new and has a few rough edges. (boost accumulators give it a heart attack)
Given how widely various distros differ, it's impossible to have a single build that targets everything, but you can certainly write a CMake build file that will work in most scenarios and fail cleanly if dependencies are missing (and it's not like any other platform is better at dealing with missing dependencies). You don't need to write a program that will run on all of the "countless distros" out there, just the specific one you're targeting, and Ubuntu (and other Debian variants) are generally stable targets.
I've been using Linux for decades. I think its modern GUIs have shaped up quite nicely (in particular, I'm a fan of Cinnamon) and offer a good level of polish with regards to configuring almost everything that an average user would need to touch.
Pretty much everybody nowadays has a fancy multi-function mouse, right? Sure, your desktop computer come with a cheap optical mouse that just has two buttons and scroll wheel, but the first thing you do is shove that in a bag somewhere and plug in a nice wireless laser mouse, and it probably also has three or four extra function buttons and maybe a tilt wheel.
And then, you run into the exact same problem in every Linux distribution: there is no way to configure what all of your mouse buttons actually do. Every couple of years I look around to see if anybody's made a decent GUI yet, and nope, there's still none. I know it's possible -- I've written more than my fair share of .xbindkeysrc files. No "normal" user is going to do that, though. Why isn't there a GUI that gives me a list of mouse buttons and lets me pick a key or event to associate with them?
There isn't really a common Windows app for this, because every mouse manufacturer provides their own; since the Logitech one supports all the Logitech mice, the Microsoft one supports all of the Microsoft mice, and so on, there's not really a need for a unified one since you won't be switching mice very often. But surely it's not that hard to just write a generic one?
The rest you can store in the cloud
Which only works if you're on a system that has reliable internet access and your user is capable of setting up some sort of account credentials and is willing to go through that process any time they're playing a game on a different system. Remember who the target audience is here (young chlidren).
It's plenty of space, roomy in fact, for quite a lot of useful data structures.
For an embedded programmer, sure. Most of the people making console games nowadays have no experience programming for a system that doesn't effectively have as much storage space as they could want. Out in the non-embedded world, I've got preference files for text editors that are larger than 4k. I've seen save game files that are dozens of megabytes.
The hardware in the Amiibo have 4 kB of writeable space, which is almost inconceivably tiny nowadays. You could fit enough data in there for a couple of games if you're using minimal, tightly-packed C structures, but nobody does that any more when every game console has enough space that you can use dozens or even hundred of kB for storing saved games.
To be fair, I really don't know why they couldn't have just put a whole MB of storage space on the chip and then allocated something like 4 kB per game. Sometimes Nintendo makes baffling hardware decisions.
Please find a business model that does not involve annoying and exploiting the people who consume your media.
Now, it's not my job to tell you what your business model should be. Sell merchandise, provide paid services, ask for donations, or whatever else you can think of.
But if the basis of your business model is providing content for free to me while accepting money from people who solely want to annoy me or buy information about me, then I'm not going to allow that and you deserve to go out of business.
Shockingly, it turns out that a metaphor intended to describe what "heat death" means in layman's terms was not 100% scientifically accurate. The responsible parties have been sacked.
"Heat," in an atomic sense, is basically a measurement of how constrained molecules are within a structure and how rapidly they're bouncing around. "Cold" molecules are those that arelocked into a rigid structure and don't move around much. "Hot" molecules are ones that move about freely, without constraint. In that sense, the "heat death" of the universe will be when there is no more solid matter in the universe, and all of its atoms are distributed evenly, bouncing around freely.
What kind of bubble have you lived in that with a Slashdot id that low you still put any faith in this crap?
As Kidpro pointed out, you're making an incorrect assumption. I don't think smartphone credit card readers are secure. I think that all of the other types of card readers are insecure, too. There have been many cases of them being compromised.