What? Surely you are kidding? The AI in Black and White is interesting because it is far better than most computer game AI. But there's nothing revolutionary about it in the field of AI in general. They are using well-established algorithms that have been known about for years or decades.
I'm not cutting down Black and White. I love that game, at least partly because of the AI. But let us not kid ourselves. Gaming is not in the least leading the way in the field of artificial intelligence.
The whole point, though, was that software did not have to be changed. If we are going to require a great quantity of software to be modified, we may as well move to IP6.
I, of course, agree that games should allow you to enter a domain name instead of an IP address. I also think games should allow you to configure which ports it uses.
I read the description. I pointed out some problems I saw. If you think these aren't problems, please follow up and explain what I missed.
I repeat that I do not think this guy's solution is universal as it relies on using domain names while many programs do not allow their use. In addition, it seems to offer no compelling reason to switch over simply forwarding arbitrary ports past the NAT firewall.
Client A (not behind a NAT) wants to communicate with server B (behind a NAT). Client A only allows the input of an IP address.
Now, what IP address do we use? We cannot use server B's IP address, nor can we uniquely identify any of the servers behind the NAT because we can only use an IP address.
This is hardly a new approach. As noted in the Slashdot writeup, this is basically similar to virtual hosts that Apache supports. Furthermore, there is a significant problem with this solution.
This works fine for software that uses domain names to communicate. An http request, for example, resolves a domain name and includes that domain name in the request header. That is why virtual domains can work so well under Apache. However, there are other protocols, often somewhat non-standard, that do not use a domain name at any point. These protocols will continue not working under this scheme.
Consider, for example, many multiplayer games. You connect to another person's IP address. You do not use a name. If that person is behind a NAT firewall, I do not see how this proposed solution will help at all.
Besides, for all but huge internal networks protected by NAT, how is this any better than forwarding ports? For example, when you hit port 8080 on the firewall, it is forwarded to port 80 on apache1. When you hit 8081, it is forwarded to apache2, port 80. And so on. Any modern firewall allows this fairly easily and lets you hide a whole series of servers behind a NAT firewall.
The downside, of course, is that the protocol of choice must be able to connect on arbitrary ports. No problem with http but probably you cannot set up your multiplayer game to do this. On the other hand, you do not need to install any new software assuming your firewall is half decent.
I agree. I have had nothing but problems with Network Solutions. Currently, they are EIGHT MONTHS behind changing some of my settings after I requested it (and mailed back the form). In that time, I have actually moved house and so I no longer care about the pending change. The place where I work has had similar problems, resulting in more than two weeks of lost email.
Really, you would be hard pressed to find a worse place to register a domain name. I have had good luck with register.com, though they are quite pricey. But honestly, stay away from Network Solutions.
True enough, Baldur's Gate 2 certainly uses DirectX for things other than graphics. But again, does the consumer care? What difference does it make to a consumer whether his character moves because DirectX is tracking the mouse or X-Windows is tracking the mouse? How does the average consumer know that the networking code uses DirectX instead of some other network library?
The average consumer doesn't. Provided the game still works, provided the graphics still look as nice and the sound still sounds as nice.
Claiming that the market has chosen DirectX is silly. Certainly it is true that DirectX has won the hearts of (most) developers, I'll grant that. And for what it is worth, that is a far more important battle.
Does the market want Linux games? Perhaps, but more probably not. Do I want Linux games? Yes, and I am willing to pay for them. I will even choose them over Windows versions of the games if they are both released close to the same time.
The market has chosen DirectX? Surely you are kidding. It is certainly true that most game developers have chosen DirectX but the consumers do not care. The majority of consumers could not tell you the difference between DirectX and OpenGL. Most video cards have good OpenGL support. Did anyone complain that Baldur's Gate 2 was written to OpenGL instead of DirectX? No. Near as I can tell, nobody cared.
Does Linux need DirectX support? No, clearly not. It may help matters (and certainly would for gaming) but come on.
I plan on ordering Alpha Centauri. I already own the Windows version and I enjoy it so much that I'd like a version for my regular operating system.
I do not play that many games. Most of them are Windows only (e.g. Black and White) and so when something I really enjoy is available in Linux, it is worth it to me to purchase.
Besides, I seem to be reinstalling my Microsoft operating systems once every 4 - 8 weeks while my Linux install is completely stable.
For what it is worth, if a game came out for both Windows and Linux at the same time and played pretty much the same, I'd rather buy the Linux version than the Windows version.
I, of course, do not claim to represent even a significant minority. But hey, I represent me (most of the time).
Last time I checked, the studies show that the average salary for a person with an MSc (in Computing Science) is worth about $10 000 a year more than a person with only a BSc (in Computing Science), all other things being equal. A PhD adds virtually nothing to the average starting salary, however.
My best advice to you is this. Only go for a PhD if you feel you can make a meaningful contribution to the field. Do not expect more money or more opportunities. Sure, you could perhaps find better opportunities with a PhD but the odds aren't for it. Instead, you'd be better off making money with an MSc and building up your experience that way.
The under-18 thing is from back in the BBS days (could be earlier, I suppose). You are not permitted to allow under-18s on to a computer network that allows profanity. You have two options... eliminate the profanity or do not allow under-18s on. Of course, the Internet is rife with profanity.:)
Of course, most ISP's require an adult to sign up for access and then turn a blind eye to the fact that their kids also use it.
In Canada, it is officially illegal for under-18's to access the Internet. Furthermore, it is officially illegal to route any network traffic originating in Canada and destined for a location also in Canada, through any foreign country including the U.S.
Of course, neither of these rules are ever enforced to the best of my knowledge.
Apart from that, Canada has reasonable Internet access. Broadband is available in virtually all cities at a rate of $40 a month or less (Canadian, so about $26 U.S.). Often the service is lousy but no more so than in the U.S. In universities here, basically everyone has to have Internet access (perhaps through computer labs on campus), even for psych and philosophy and other such courses.
Outside of universities and colleges, though, probably only a little over fifty percent of people use the Internet regularly.
The problem, from the perspective of open-source advocates, is that Microsoft is not placed at a significant disadvantage by locking you in. We have seen several examples in the past of Microsoft suddenly realising that they need to play nicer with open standards and it has never been hard for them to do so. In fact, when they do, end users are given the option of the 'tried and tested' proprietary Microsoft solution (say, Wins) or the standard solution which they also implement.
I must admit, I do not see Microsoft will ever successfully lock us down completely. They will certainly continue to try, of course, but companies tend to be too invested in other solutions (say, Oracle databases, DNS, etc.) to go Microsoft-only.
Of course, the company I work for is a Microsoft-only shop. But we never had Oracle databases or any other similar thing.
Virtually nobody is going to upgrade from a 1.2 Ghz to a 1.33 Ghz machine. And sure, most people would choose to go for a 1.2 Ghz chip if they were buying new right now. But that isn't the point.
Nobody would buy a 733 Mhz chip when they wouldn't notice the difference over a 700 Mhz chip. Yet the 733 Mhz chips have sold very well. Because people don't just compare it against the 700 Mhz chips.
Everyone has their own sweet spot for CPUs. Some people might want the extra tiny bit of performance a 1.33 Ghz chip provides over a 1.2. Others will be quite happy at 900 Mhz with a 100 Mhz FSB.
Given that you aren't likely to stay very long (say, 18 months), make sure you aren't signing away your right to work for another company. Don't laugh, a few companies will say you can't work for any other IT company for TWO YEARS. More reasonable is that you cannot work for a competing company for three months, but in that case you want to make sure you understand exactly who qualifies as a 'competing company'.
You also want a company that will offer you some training. And who will not claim to own all that training once you leave.
I presume you are working out outside clients. If that is the case, you should probably be creating design documents and defining acceptance criteria in there.
Acceptance criteria should include delivery date, important functionality, stability, etc.
So use this as your metric. Determine some weighting for each of these criteria and then get the customer and the manager to rate performance at the end.
Did they deliver early? In that case, they get over 100% for coding speed. Is the application running at an acceptable speed (but not particularly fast)? Then they get all the points for code speed. Does it have significant bugs (but was still accepted by the client)? If so, they lose points here.
After all, if you are pleasing your customers (and your managers), can you really ask anything more from your coders?
In addition, it provides feedback for where the coder is having problems and how they can improve.
We've seen Microsoft do this before. COM works on other platforms. ActiveX works on other platforms. Heck, Microsoft for a while was pushing ActiveX as an open-standard for all platforms for client-side web stuff.
The truth of the matter is that ActiveX web components on non-Windows machines was even less used than ActiveX web components in Windows operating systems.
While.Net has more hope (it is generally compiled to a virtual machine rather than to the i86 platform, etc. etc.), we should certainly not read this announcement as Microsoft committing to allow developers to run.Net programs they have developed on Windows boxes or Linux boxes interchangably.
You are kidding, right? It is trivially easy to associate web bugs with your email address at the very least. Of course, it requires that your email client supports HTML, but most do these days.
While I fundamentally agree with you, it is never worth overclocking mission-critical (i.e. work) systems, you should realise that overclocking is not really a natural category.
If you buy a 1000 Mhz machine for a mission-critical system and simply cannot afford any downtime, you'll almost certainly want to use better cooling (the same cooling overclockers use) on the CPU, chipset, et al. You'll also want to underclock your system because by doing so, you'll reduce heat still further.
So you could still find overclocking techniques useful even if you do not overclock.
They'd better not be going after people outside of the U.S. In many countries such as Canada, you do not need to own a copy of the music you have an MP3 of.
Sorry, I should have rewritten that bit. What I mean is that you have cyphertext file A. You try key 1 and get file B out. Is file B random-looking? If so, it is not the 'plain-text' file you are looking for. You try key 2 and get file C out. File C is not random-looking and is rather compressible. It is therefore all but guaranteed to be the 'plain-text'.
I am assuming that the decryption attempt also uncompresses the file.
The fundamental assumption of strong encryption is that the attacker knows everything except the specific secret key. The algorithm should be secure regardless. This is true for things like one time pads, Triple-DES, etc. etc. provided the secret key is long enough.
Certainly obfuscating the decryption adds some security, but this is only security through obscurity. It adds less additional security than keeping the encryption algorithm secret. It adds far less than choosing a decent key-size. Heck, it adds less additional security than adding a single bit to the secret key, probably.
The basic problem is that you can never trust security-through-obscurity. If I am protecting trade documents, for example, I may be able to keep my secret key secret but I'm not likely to be able to protect the details of the algorithm (here I'm counting the algorithm itself and the additional obfuscation at the end) because ex-employees or partner companies or some such will necessarily need details of the algorithm.
On top of that, unless your obfuscation is truly secure, you can tell when you've decrypted most files. Most files compress. By definition, strongly-encrypted files do not. So you could see how much entropy is in your test decryption. 8 bits per byte? Then you probably haven't successfully decrypted yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not cutting down Black and White. I love that game, at least partly because of the AI. But let us not kid ourselves. Gaming is not in the least leading the way in the field of artificial intelligence.
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I, of course, agree that games should allow you to enter a domain name instead of an IP address. I also think games should allow you to configure which ports it uses.
--
I repeat that I do not think this guy's solution is universal as it relies on using domain names while many programs do not allow their use. In addition, it seems to offer no compelling reason to switch over simply forwarding arbitrary ports past the NAT firewall.
--
Client A (not behind a NAT) wants to communicate with server B (behind a NAT). Client A only allows the input of an IP address.
Now, what IP address do we use? We cannot use server B's IP address, nor can we uniquely identify any of the servers behind the NAT because we can only use an IP address.
--
This works fine for software that uses domain names to communicate. An http request, for example, resolves a domain name and includes that domain name in the request header. That is why virtual domains can work so well under Apache. However, there are other protocols, often somewhat non-standard, that do not use a domain name at any point. These protocols will continue not working under this scheme.
Consider, for example, many multiplayer games. You connect to another person's IP address. You do not use a name. If that person is behind a NAT firewall, I do not see how this proposed solution will help at all.
Besides, for all but huge internal networks protected by NAT, how is this any better than forwarding ports? For example, when you hit port 8080 on the firewall, it is forwarded to port 80 on apache1. When you hit 8081, it is forwarded to apache2, port 80. And so on. Any modern firewall allows this fairly easily and lets you hide a whole series of servers behind a NAT firewall.
The downside, of course, is that the protocol of choice must be able to connect on arbitrary ports. No problem with http but probably you cannot set up your multiplayer game to do this. On the other hand, you do not need to install any new software assuming your firewall is half decent.
--
Really, you would be hard pressed to find a worse place to register a domain name. I have had good luck with register.com, though they are quite pricey. But honestly, stay away from Network Solutions.
--
The average consumer doesn't. Provided the game still works, provided the graphics still look as nice and the sound still sounds as nice.
Claiming that the market has chosen DirectX is silly. Certainly it is true that DirectX has won the hearts of (most) developers, I'll grant that. And for what it is worth, that is a far more important battle.
--
The market has chosen DirectX? Surely you are kidding. It is certainly true that most game developers have chosen DirectX but the consumers do not care. The majority of consumers could not tell you the difference between DirectX and OpenGL. Most video cards have good OpenGL support. Did anyone complain that Baldur's Gate 2 was written to OpenGL instead of DirectX? No. Near as I can tell, nobody cared.
Does Linux need DirectX support? No, clearly not. It may help matters (and certainly would for gaming) but come on.
--
I do not play that many games. Most of them are Windows only (e.g. Black and White) and so when something I really enjoy is available in Linux, it is worth it to me to purchase.
Besides, I seem to be reinstalling my Microsoft operating systems once every 4 - 8 weeks while my Linux install is completely stable.
For what it is worth, if a game came out for both Windows and Linux at the same time and played pretty much the same, I'd rather buy the Linux version than the Windows version.
I, of course, do not claim to represent even a significant minority. But hey, I represent me (most of the time).
--
My best advice to you is this. Only go for a PhD if you feel you can make a meaningful contribution to the field. Do not expect more money or more opportunities. Sure, you could perhaps find better opportunities with a PhD but the odds aren't for it. Instead, you'd be better off making money with an MSc and building up your experience that way.
--
Of course, most ISP's require an adult to sign up for access and then turn a blind eye to the fact that their kids also use it.
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Of course, neither of these rules are ever enforced to the best of my knowledge.
Apart from that, Canada has reasonable Internet access. Broadband is available in virtually all cities at a rate of $40 a month or less (Canadian, so about $26 U.S.). Often the service is lousy but no more so than in the U.S. In universities here, basically everyone has to have Internet access (perhaps through computer labs on campus), even for psych and philosophy and other such courses.
Outside of universities and colleges, though, probably only a little over fifty percent of people use the Internet regularly.
--
I must admit, I do not see Microsoft will ever successfully lock us down completely. They will certainly continue to try, of course, but companies tend to be too invested in other solutions (say, Oracle databases, DNS, etc.) to go Microsoft-only.
Of course, the company I work for is a Microsoft-only shop. But we never had Oracle databases or any other similar thing.
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The physical act of transferring a copy includes electronic transfer.
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Nobody would buy a 733 Mhz chip when they wouldn't notice the difference over a 700 Mhz chip. Yet the 733 Mhz chips have sold very well. Because people don't just compare it against the 700 Mhz chips.
Everyone has their own sweet spot for CPUs. Some people might want the extra tiny bit of performance a 1.33 Ghz chip provides over a 1.2. Others will be quite happy at 900 Mhz with a 100 Mhz FSB.
--
You also want a company that will offer you some training. And who will not claim to own all that training once you leave.
--
Acceptance criteria should include delivery date, important functionality, stability, etc.
So use this as your metric. Determine some weighting for each of these criteria and then get the customer and the manager to rate performance at the end.
Did they deliver early? In that case, they get over 100% for coding speed. Is the application running at an acceptable speed (but not particularly fast)? Then they get all the points for code speed. Does it have significant bugs (but was still accepted by the client)? If so, they lose points here.
After all, if you are pleasing your customers (and your managers), can you really ask anything more from your coders?
In addition, it provides feedback for where the coder is having problems and how they can improve.
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I wasn't talking about using ActiveX components in the browser but rather, in web pages displayed to the user.
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The truth of the matter is that ActiveX web components on non-Windows machines was even less used than ActiveX web components in Windows operating systems.
While .Net has more hope (it is generally compiled to a virtual machine rather than to the i86 platform, etc. etc.), we should certainly not read this announcement as Microsoft committing to allow developers to run .Net programs they have developed on Windows boxes or Linux boxes interchangably.
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Last time I checked, Indrema had no intention of selling the hardware at a loss.
You do the math.
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You are kidding, right? It is trivially easy to associate web bugs with your email address at the very least. Of course, it requires that your email client supports HTML, but most do these days.
--
If you buy a 1000 Mhz machine for a mission-critical system and simply cannot afford any downtime, you'll almost certainly want to use better cooling (the same cooling overclockers use) on the CPU, chipset, et al. You'll also want to underclock your system because by doing so, you'll reduce heat still further.
So you could still find overclocking techniques useful even if you do not overclock.
--
They'd better not be going after people outside of the U.S. In many countries such as Canada, you do not need to own a copy of the music you have an MP3 of.
--
I am assuming that the decryption attempt also uncompresses the file.
--
Certainly obfuscating the decryption adds some security, but this is only security through obscurity. It adds less additional security than keeping the encryption algorithm secret. It adds far less than choosing a decent key-size. Heck, it adds less additional security than adding a single bit to the secret key, probably.
The basic problem is that you can never trust security-through-obscurity. If I am protecting trade documents, for example, I may be able to keep my secret key secret but I'm not likely to be able to protect the details of the algorithm (here I'm counting the algorithm itself and the additional obfuscation at the end) because ex-employees or partner companies or some such will necessarily need details of the algorithm.
On top of that, unless your obfuscation is truly secure, you can tell when you've decrypted most files. Most files compress. By definition, strongly-encrypted files do not. So you could see how much entropy is in your test decryption. 8 bits per byte? Then you probably haven't successfully decrypted yet.
--