It actually is very possible. I recall recently AMD had to place a block on FurMark in their drivers because it was stressing their video cards too much - causing them to fail. AMD had designed their power circuitry and cooling designs around "typical" use cases and not around the theoretical maximums - meaning you could overload the power circuitry or burn out your graphics card with just software.
It was never stipulated that there's anything fundamentally insecure about WebGL. The problem is that exposing hardware acceleration to untrusted code significantly increases your attack surface. With WebGL, suddenly graphics drivers and hardware acceleration subsystems must also be made secure because they're running untrusted code from the web.
Graphics drivers aren't even close to being secure enough to allow untrusted code - I remember seeing a case a couple of months ago where a game developer had accidentally read from a NULL texture in OpenGL and instead of a blank texture he had somehow managed to get an image of his webbrowser window wrapped around his model in-game. The graphics driver hadn't bothered to flag a NULL texture as an error and had just allowed the application to read from random places in video memory - in this case he just happened to grab an area of video memory that the OS window manager was using to store the his webbrowser's window.
Silverlight does support shaders - Reach profile just means that you're limited to Shader Model 2. SM2 is sort of like a baseline requirement these days for a lot of things including Windows Aero. On the desktop it's supported by the old-school ATI Radeon 9 series or higher or Nvidia Geforce FX or higher. On the mobile, GPUs that support OpenGL ES 2.0 are generally SM2-compliant.
Ironically, Microsoft is already fighting the current patent system. They're one of the biggest supporters of patent reform becuase in the end, Microsoft loses way more money defending against patent trolls than it gains from licensing deals.
It's "script manipulation" in the same sense that writing Python would be "script manipulation". TouchStudio contains a turing-complete scripting language that's tailored to working with/on a touchscreen phone.
Windows is compiled using MSVC, which is the Visual C++ compiler. Their actual build process would definitely be more complicated than hitting F5 in VS.
Mono for Linux and OSX, MonoTouch for iOS, and MonoDroid for Android. XNA is a library that deals mostly with graphics and input and the like; it doesn't actually have anything to do with your actual game logic (eg. physics and AI). XNA isn't available on platforms like iOS or Android, but that should be okay because you'll be ripping out the graphicsa nd input stuff anyway. Although you'll have to rewrite your graphics and input for each platform, it's possible to have a single C# codebase that runs on all major platforms.
It's "less-bad" than Apple. Microsoft unambiguously documents, exactly, everything that's required to pass certification. If your app fails marketplace certification, they point you to the section in the certification requirements document that your app violates. You can also ask for technical exceptions to the certification requirements for your app, but they're evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
It's not "easy", but it's much easier than other platforms. Porting between, say, Xbox 360 and iPhone is pretty difficult if only because the programming languages are completely different. Indie Games on Xbox 360 and WP7 both use C# and XNA, and if you have an Xbox 360 project it's literally just a couple of clicks and it compiles and runs natively on WP7.
Your game won't be *usable*, of course, since your game will be designed for a controller and not a touch screen. But it'll work.
1) HTTPS gets turned off for a few hours in most of Northern Africa and the Middle East, and a few pacific islands 2) Several countries in the Middle East are experiencing unrest, therefore 3) IT MUST BE INTENTIONAL!!11
Well, duh. That's the whole point of a business: to make money.
I suppose you think that without corporations we'd live in a fantasy land with unicorns and fairies where hundreds of people and millions of dollars can appear out of nowhere to start making quality video games.
Get back to us when Microsoft actually rely on.Net and related technologies for their own flagship products like Office
They're already doing so. Expression Studio is fairly large, pretty popular, and is written in.NET. Visual Studio 2010, one of Microsoft's flagship products, has the IDE frontend written in.NET. Other things like Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 are.NET based. Microsoft's been slowly transitioning everything to.NET for a while now.
Well, as a manager, that's his job - to maximise the wealth of the company shareholders. If Java isn't making money (directly or indirectly), then he needs to institute change so that it *does* make money one way or another. Otherwise he wouldn't be doing his job (and then he'd be fired and replaced by the board of directors).
Maybe tiering the JVM is the best way to maximise shareholder wealth, maybe it isn't. Either way, it should be obvious that any corporate manager would see "valuable" in a purely monetary sense. Even if Oracle decided to keep the JVM completely free, it'd be because they believe that keeping it free would make them more money than charging for it (maybe they think it'd drive sales of their other products or something like that, who knows). Everything a company does, even if it seems altruistic, is somehow contributing to the company's bottom line.
It only seems nice until you realise that William J Lashua's family specifically asked that random strangers do NOT show up. It was an event reserved for family and friends, and the internets basically gatecrashed what was supposed to be an old man's birthday party.
I've read through those pages, and the overarching conclusion seems to be that it's a threadpool that's easier to use. I don't doubt the veracity of that claim, because the WinAPI is pretty horrible to work with in general.
But in terms of the actual underlying technology, it seems relatively standard aside from the fact that GCD can intelligently handle dependencies between tasks. For example, the threadpool library on Windows is a system-level library, and the OS determines how many kernel threads to create, based on hardware resources and system load. You schedule tasks, and Windows will queue the task and run it some time in the future once a thread becomes free.
Like I said, this sort of thing has been around for a long time - a system-level threadpool library has been available on Windows since Windows 2000... but we haven't exactly seen a mulitcore renaissance on Windows over the past few years. And from what I've seen, there isn't much to suggest that GCD will do any different.
I'm not sure I get it - GCD just looks like a threadpool library. Windows has had a built-in threadpool API that's been available since Windows 2000, and it seems to do pretty much the same thing as GCD.
Most of Mono (which is C# and the CLR implementation) is not vulnerable to Microsoft.
The C# language specification and Common Language Infrastructure are EMCA standards and are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise. Since Mono is a clean-room implementation of.NET and C# (both EMCA standards), they do not infringe on any of Microsoft's copyrights. And the Community Promise means that Microsoft guarantees that it won't use any of its patents against third-party implementations of.NET and C# like Mono.
Viruses use security holes to get onto PCs in the first place - once the virus is running on the PC, it's got free reign. There can be absolutely no security vulnerabilities on a system and the virus usually still do what it wants if it's preloaded onto the system.
You don't need administrative privileges to do many things that viruses want to do (eg. send mail, monitor keypresses). They ran the test by loading the virus onto the machine, then letting it execute. That doesn't demonstrate that the system is full of holes - it demonstrates that the system is very good at backwards compatibility!
It makes sense that Microsoft would take this stance. They've already invested a lot of time an money on the Xbox 360 hardware. It took them this long to get the hardware right - I'm sure we all remember the RROD and related issues that plagued the early Xbox 360's.
Those are now sunk costs. It makes little sense to throw that investment away and create a new console with the latest and greatest hardware. Heck, the PS3's hardware may or may not be superior to the Xbox 360's, but the marketplace has proven that it's the software as the deciding factor, not the hardware. Despite the astounding number of hardware issues with the Xbox 360, it remains the most popular HD console this generation. Microsoft is a software company, and they want to keep doing what they do best: making software.
I'm a developer who has had a game published on Xbox Live Community Games.
Although this isn't so much of a problem for XBLA, I think it is completely true that there are far too many low-quality titles flooding Xbox Live Community Games. The modicum of good games are being swamped by a flood of ill-designed, terribly-executed, low-quality games (and in many cases, "games"). The review process for publishing Xbox Live Community Games is designed to weed out technical issues; it's actually forbidden for a reviewer to reject a game submission because "he didn't like it". The reason for this is because the review process is done by fellow developers, and allowing subjective judgements in the review process introduces a conflict of interest.
As developers, we've time and time again asked Microsoft to introduce a user rating system, where the users of the service (and ultimately, our customers) will be able to give games ratings and allow for user recommendations. This should give power back to the users to weed out the bad games and allow the real gems of the service to shine.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft decided to actually listen to us. About a month and a half ago they announced that user ratings are coming to Xbox Live. From what I've heard, these features should be arriving in the coming months - so maybe once that happens things will get a little better.
It wasn't a government demand, but Microsoft voluntarily banned these search terms in order to comply with local laws in various countries.
An article on Ars Technica found that 20% of regions had sexual content blocked.
The article states, "Microsoft says it determined this list of regions by looking at their local laws. The company is not taking action in response to specific government demands or regulations; it is simply playing it safe."
I suspect that the user upgraded to Win7 beta from XP - because ever since Vista there has been no "Local Settings" folder. In Vista, the old "Local Settings" folder which existed in XP was relocated to AppData\Local.
In the location of the old Local Settings folder is an NTFS junction, which merely redirects to the new AppData\Local location. Windows Explorer doesn't handle these junctions correctly and instead of redirecting you, will erroneously give you an "Access Denied" message.
Also, programs have always been able to insert themselves as exceptions into the Windows Firewall. Many applications which require internet access and which are blocked by the firewall will ask you if they can create a firewall exception for themselves. So programs have always been allowed to insert exceptions into the firewall - it's not a requirement that the program has to ask you first.
If a program is already running on your computer then it means the firewall is no longer responsible for stopping that application in any way - the firewall only protects against outside threats.
It's also far more likely that your modifications to the DLL broke something, which would explain why CS4 no longer worked. Why jump to the inane conclusion that Microsoft/Adobe are plotting against us all in some wild conspiracy?
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It actually is very possible. I recall recently AMD had to place a block on FurMark in their drivers because it was stressing their video cards too much - causing them to fail. AMD had designed their power circuitry and cooling designs around "typical" use cases and not around the theoretical maximums - meaning you could overload the power circuitry or burn out your graphics card with just software.
It was never stipulated that there's anything fundamentally insecure about WebGL. The problem is that exposing hardware acceleration to untrusted code significantly increases your attack surface. With WebGL, suddenly graphics drivers and hardware acceleration subsystems must also be made secure because they're running untrusted code from the web.
Graphics drivers aren't even close to being secure enough to allow untrusted code - I remember seeing a case a couple of months ago where a game developer had accidentally read from a NULL texture in OpenGL and instead of a blank texture he had somehow managed to get an image of his webbrowser window wrapped around his model in-game. The graphics driver hadn't bothered to flag a NULL texture as an error and had just allowed the application to read from random places in video memory - in this case he just happened to grab an area of video memory that the OS window manager was using to store the his webbrowser's window.
Silverlight does support shaders - Reach profile just means that you're limited to Shader Model 2. SM2 is sort of like a baseline requirement these days for a lot of things including Windows Aero. On the desktop it's supported by the old-school ATI Radeon 9 series or higher or Nvidia Geforce FX or higher. On the mobile, GPUs that support OpenGL ES 2.0 are generally SM2-compliant.
Ironically, Microsoft is already fighting the current patent system. They're one of the biggest supporters of patent reform becuase in the end, Microsoft loses way more money defending against patent trolls than it gains from licensing deals.
It's "script manipulation" in the same sense that writing Python would be "script manipulation". TouchStudio contains a turing-complete scripting language that's tailored to working with/on a touchscreen phone.
eg. A screenshot I found on Microsoft Research.
I said "compile", not "build". :P
Windows is compiled using MSVC, which is the Visual C++ compiler. Their actual build process would definitely be more complicated than hitting F5 in VS.
Microsoft is fairly big even in webservers. IIS serves 20% of the web which, while a minority, is still a significant marketshare.
Uh, using a GUI doesn't preclude you from editing text. Windows is developed and compiled in Visual Studio, which is a GUI-based IDE.
Mono for Linux and OSX, MonoTouch for iOS, and MonoDroid for Android. XNA is a library that deals mostly with graphics and input and the like; it doesn't actually have anything to do with your actual game logic (eg. physics and AI). XNA isn't available on platforms like iOS or Android, but that should be okay because you'll be ripping out the graphicsa nd input stuff anyway. Although you'll have to rewrite your graphics and input for each platform, it's possible to have a single C# codebase that runs on all major platforms.
It's "less-bad" than Apple. Microsoft unambiguously documents, exactly, everything that's required to pass certification. If your app fails marketplace certification, they point you to the section in the certification requirements document that your app violates. You can also ask for technical exceptions to the certification requirements for your app, but they're evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
It's not "easy", but it's much easier than other platforms. Porting between, say, Xbox 360 and iPhone is pretty difficult if only because the programming languages are completely different. Indie Games on Xbox 360 and WP7 both use C# and XNA, and if you have an Xbox 360 project it's literally just a couple of clicks and it compiles and runs natively on WP7.
Your game won't be *usable*, of course, since your game will be designed for a controller and not a touch screen. But it'll work.
1) HTTPS gets turned off for a few hours in most of Northern Africa and the Middle East, and a few pacific islands
2) Several countries in the Middle East are experiencing unrest, therefore
3) IT MUST BE INTENTIONAL!!11
Which doesn't jive with the fact that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google. Bing anonymizes IP logs after 6 months. Google after 9 months.
I believe the reason IPs are logged at all is because of a legal requirement - but I don't know exactly what that requirement is.
Well, duh. That's the whole point of a business: to make money.
I suppose you think that without corporations we'd live in a fantasy land with unicorns and fairies where hundreds of people and millions of dollars can appear out of nowhere to start making quality video games.
Get back to us when Microsoft actually rely on .Net and related technologies for their own flagship products like Office
They're already doing so. Expression Studio is fairly large, pretty popular, and is written in .NET. Visual Studio 2010, one of Microsoft's flagship products, has the IDE frontend written in .NET. Other things like Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 are .NET based. Microsoft's been slowly transitioning everything to .NET for a while now.
Well, as a manager, that's his job - to maximise the wealth of the company shareholders. If Java isn't making money (directly or indirectly), then he needs to institute change so that it *does* make money one way or another. Otherwise he wouldn't be doing his job (and then he'd be fired and replaced by the board of directors).
Maybe tiering the JVM is the best way to maximise shareholder wealth, maybe it isn't. Either way, it should be obvious that any corporate manager would see "valuable" in a purely monetary sense. Even if Oracle decided to keep the JVM completely free, it'd be because they believe that keeping it free would make them more money than charging for it (maybe they think it'd drive sales of their other products or something like that, who knows). Everything a company does, even if it seems altruistic, is somehow contributing to the company's bottom line.
It only seems nice until you realise that William J Lashua's family specifically asked that random strangers do NOT show up. It was an event reserved for family and friends, and the internets basically gatecrashed what was supposed to be an old man's birthday party.
I've read through those pages, and the overarching conclusion seems to be that it's a threadpool that's easier to use. I don't doubt the veracity of that claim, because the WinAPI is pretty horrible to work with in general.
But in terms of the actual underlying technology, it seems relatively standard aside from the fact that GCD can intelligently handle dependencies between tasks. For example, the threadpool library on Windows is a system-level library, and the OS determines how many kernel threads to create, based on hardware resources and system load. You schedule tasks, and Windows will queue the task and run it some time in the future once a thread becomes free.
Like I said, this sort of thing has been around for a long time - a system-level threadpool library has been available on Windows since Windows 2000... but we haven't exactly seen a mulitcore renaissance on Windows over the past few years. And from what I've seen, there isn't much to suggest that GCD will do any different.
I'm not sure I get it - GCD just looks like a threadpool library. Windows has had a built-in threadpool API that's been available since Windows 2000, and it seems to do pretty much the same thing as GCD.
Most of Mono (which is C# and the CLR implementation) is not vulnerable to Microsoft.
The C# language specification and Common Language Infrastructure are EMCA standards and are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise. Since Mono is a clean-room implementation of .NET and C# (both EMCA standards), they do not infringe on any of Microsoft's copyrights. And the Community Promise means that Microsoft guarantees that it won't use any of its patents against third-party implementations of .NET and C# like Mono.
Viruses use security holes to get onto PCs in the first place - once the virus is running on the PC, it's got free reign. There can be absolutely no security vulnerabilities on a system and the virus usually still do what it wants if it's preloaded onto the system.
You don't need administrative privileges to do many things that viruses want to do (eg. send mail, monitor keypresses). They ran the test by loading the virus onto the machine, then letting it execute. That doesn't demonstrate that the system is full of holes - it demonstrates that the system is very good at backwards compatibility!
It makes sense that Microsoft would take this stance. They've already invested a lot of time an money on the Xbox 360 hardware. It took them this long to get the hardware right - I'm sure we all remember the RROD and related issues that plagued the early Xbox 360's.
Those are now sunk costs. It makes little sense to throw that investment away and create a new console with the latest and greatest hardware. Heck, the PS3's hardware may or may not be superior to the Xbox 360's, but the marketplace has proven that it's the software as the deciding factor, not the hardware. Despite the astounding number of hardware issues with the Xbox 360, it remains the most popular HD console this generation. Microsoft is a software company, and they want to keep doing what they do best: making software.
I'm a developer who has had a game published on Xbox Live Community Games.
Although this isn't so much of a problem for XBLA, I think it is completely true that there are far too many low-quality titles flooding Xbox Live Community Games. The modicum of good games are being swamped by a flood of ill-designed, terribly-executed, low-quality games (and in many cases, "games"). The review process for publishing Xbox Live Community Games is designed to weed out technical issues; it's actually forbidden for a reviewer to reject a game submission because "he didn't like it". The reason for this is because the review process is done by fellow developers, and allowing subjective judgements in the review process introduces a conflict of interest.
As developers, we've time and time again asked Microsoft to introduce a user rating system, where the users of the service (and ultimately, our customers) will be able to give games ratings and allow for user recommendations. This should give power back to the users to weed out the bad games and allow the real gems of the service to shine.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft decided to actually listen to us. About a month and a half ago they announced that user ratings are coming to Xbox Live. From what I've heard, these features should be arriving in the coming months - so maybe once that happens things will get a little better.
It wasn't a government demand, but Microsoft voluntarily banned these search terms in order to comply with local laws in various countries.
An article on Ars Technica found that 20% of regions had sexual content blocked.
The article states, "Microsoft says it determined this list of regions by looking at their local laws. The company is not taking action in response to specific government demands or regulations; it is simply playing it safe."
I suspect that the user upgraded to Win7 beta from XP - because ever since Vista there has been no "Local Settings" folder. In Vista, the old "Local Settings" folder which existed in XP was relocated to AppData\Local.
In the location of the old Local Settings folder is an NTFS junction, which merely redirects to the new AppData\Local location. Windows Explorer doesn't handle these junctions correctly and instead of redirecting you, will erroneously give you an "Access Denied" message.
Also, programs have always been able to insert themselves as exceptions into the Windows Firewall. Many applications which require internet access and which are blocked by the firewall will ask you if they can create a firewall exception for themselves. So programs have always been allowed to insert exceptions into the firewall - it's not a requirement that the program has to ask you first.
If a program is already running on your computer then it means the firewall is no longer responsible for stopping that application in any way - the firewall only protects against outside threats.
It's also far more likely that your modifications to the DLL broke something, which would explain why CS4 no longer worked. Why jump to the inane conclusion that Microsoft/Adobe are plotting against us all in some wild conspiracy?