I just want to kind of chime in and agree. I do take public transportation into and out of the city near where I live, but when I do, it's because parking would be ridiculous and I hate driving in the city. But even then, I frequently end up driving anyway, and it's because getting from where I live to just about anywhere is generally timed in hours when taking public transportation and minutes when driving. A trip that might take 20 minutes by car can easily take two hours by public transportation.
It helps that the public transportation schedules here are complete jokes. That 10:30 bus might arrive at 10:35. Or 10:40. Or maybe 10:45. Or possibly 10:28. But the one time you can guarantee it won't be arriving is 10:30.
All this adds up to it generally being easier (but almost never cheaper) to just drive and say "screw it" to public transportation. Even if you end up paying more in parking and gas than you would have in bus/subway fare, it's generally worth it for avoiding the hassle and saving at least a couple of hours in time.
But that's the thing - the game in question uses a custom in-house graphics engine written to support the PC, PS3, and PS4. They're already maintaining three separate rendering back-ends, including one that's intended to target a console that's nearly a decade old.
I find it really, really hard to believe that they can't get a game that's designed to be playable on the PS3 to run on modern Mac hardware.
No, he meant Metal when he said "and the replacement of OpenGL with a new graphics API in Appleâ(TM)s next OS." When he refers to "DirectX11 for Mac" the best guess would be he's talking about Transgaming Cider supporting DirectX 11, but that's not what he said, so who knows how that sentence is supposed to be parsed. (Plus, Cider already supports DirectX 11.)
It doesn't help that it's presumably been translated from Japanese.
If that's not management rotten to the core, what is ?
Final Fantasy XIV is kind of the poster child for bad management at Square Enix, to the point where they actually fired the original management team. This new fiasco is from the team hired to replace the original team.
Any company relying on Microsoft technology to achieve cross-platform deserves a spectacular failure anyway.
Which makes no sense, because they've already ported the graphics engine twice! The game also supports the PS3 and the PS4. If they can deal with three different graphics engines, you'd think adding a fourth would be no big deal.
Seriously, no joke. The Win10 version of games are horribly resource hungry for fuck knows what reason.
They are in Windows 8.1 as well. I tried playing Microsoft Sudoku on my Surface Pro 3, but - no joke - it forced the fan on and reduced the battery life to the point where I just gave up playing it.
I'm not sure how Microsoft fucked up their Metro - er, "universal" - versions of their games, but they did.
What the summary doesn't mention is that "large repository of open source software" is a Maven repository. Maven allows you to specify dependencies for your Java project.
The problem is that you have to specify a specific version of whatever you use. So let's say you use OpenFoo 1.1 and that at the time you write your code, the latest version of OpenFoo is 1.1.3.
Now assume a horrible vulnerability is discovered in OpenFoo 1.1.3, so they release OpenFoo 1.1.4 to fix it. Well, your Maven POM says you require OpenFoo 1.1.3, so until you go in and manually change that, you will only ever use 1.1.3. There is - by design - no way to say "I want the latest 1.1 version." You can only describe a single, specific version.
So it's no surprise that Sonatype will see a ton of old Maven projects continuing to download outdated Maven artifacts. There's no way to say "I want the latest version of a specific branch" you can only specify a single version. Which means that a project that hasn't changed in years will still pull in the old versions of the libraries, even if it would work with the later versions.
Define "mod-friendly." My guess is "not very" but there's this:
The most interesting wrinkle? âoeDoom Snapmap,â an in-game level editor designed, says Bethesda, to let any player craft complex maps or fiddle with the game rules on the fly. When youâ(TM)re ready, you just push a button to play, or share your creation with anyone in the world.
The reason I say "not very" is that presumably that's intended to satisfy modders due to an otherwise complete lack of modability.
Of course, that may be designed to bring something like mods to consoles in a way that Microsoft and Sony will allow, so who knows.
Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
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· Score: 1
Then that's new since they originally moved it to the App Store, because I remember having to enter a credit card number to be allowed to download the "free" download. I don't remember whether or not the Apple Account I created was for that or not (pretty sure I needed it earlier solely to get access to Apple's Developer Program through my employer), but I do remember being forced to enter a credit card number despite Xcode being free.
Odd, that's what the Comcast rep told me that last time I looked into getting faster Internet. Are you telling me that Comcast lied directly to me? Because as far as I can tell through their website, it's true, the only way I can get the faster tier is to upgrade to "Triple Play," it's just not offered any other way. And in order to use "Triple Play" you have to use their Xfinity box. I specifically asked if I could keep my cable modem and they flat-out told me "no."
That's all I can get without doing the "Triple Play" bullshit where I'd have to get TV and home phone service too, as well as install their own router and in-home wifi Xfinity thing.
So, yes, it's effectively all they'd offer me. Getting a faster speed would require me to rent a cable modem from them despite the fact I already own a DOCSIS 3 capable modem and have a working wifi router.
No, of course I can't watch it, I don't own an 8K TV or let alone a 4K TV.
But what I'm more curious is: can I even stream it? Because I'm stuck with Comcast, so I'm limited to something like 20Mbps download speed. ("Something like" because that's the maximum, not the guaranteed, which is 0Mbps. Yay monopolies!) 4K video on YouTube apparently requires more than that!
So forget watching it, I can't even stream it in real time.
And I live in an area where there "is" competition. I could also get the same 20Mbps speed from RCN, plus Verizon offers FiOS in the area! But not to me, despite it literally running down the street I live on.
Firefox is multithreaded. Apparently it's using 86 threads right now as I type this.
I haven't a clue what those threads are doing since nearly everything clearly takes place in the UI thread given the number of times the browser freezes to deal with JavaScript, but - it's got a whole lot of threads for some reason.
This sounds like a feature nobody actually gives a damn about.
This sounds like a feature almost no one can even use.
I'm curious how many Slashdot readers even have a VR headset. I sure don't nor do I have any interest in getting one. It's one of those things I might be interested in "some day" but at present, I've done an Oculus Rift demo before. It was neat but it didn't make me think "I need to get this!"
This seems like a feature that not only does no one want, that nearly no one can even use.
Maybe hold off on the VR support until there's an install base? Or anyone actually wants such a thing?
Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
These days I'm pretty sure it's just "download it from the App Store" - to the point where I'm not sure you even can download it any other way.
But that does mean you need to a valid Apple Account and it also means you need a valid credit card. It was fun convincing someone to let me "use" a corporate credit card to download a free copy of Xcode.
Re:Does El Capitan Fix Major Problems?
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
And OS X isn't the worst for that. Windows 8.1 has this lovely thing where if you drag a file over the directory tree in Explorer, it will spin up every single goddamned disc and network drive and freeze the drag operation until it's done.
Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
That's almost a requirement for iOS development (although you can install home-written software on your own stuff, I think),
Nope! You need to pay them to do that, and there's a limit to how many devices your organization can install apps to. I'm not sure what the limit is for the base plan since I only have ever used the Apple developer program through my employer. But there's a whole process to get a device "provisioned" to be able to run apps you're developing and there's a limit based on your plan with Apple.
Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Wait, you guys (Apple developers) have to pay *licenses* to Apple to write programs and apps on their platforms?
No, of course not, Xcode is a free download and you can write programs and apps for any iDevice for free. (Ignoring the cost of the Mac you need to buy in the first place, of course.)
You just can't let other people use them without forking over $100/year. (At all for iOS or without making users disable scary security dialogs for OS X.)
My best guess is that they really wanted to include a "massively multiplayer" game in some fashion and what better representative of MMOs is there than WoW?
But I agree, they would have been far better served just leaving MMOs out entirely than including WoW in the first iteration. WoW probably deserves to be in a "gaming hall of fame" - eventually.
There's a huge catalog of games and genres that are just flat-out more deserving of recognition than MMOs in general and WoW in particular. WoW can wait.
Microsoft hasn't made a JVM in - well, over a decade, at this point.
Java applets are "safe" because they're sandboxed. By default a Java application can do anything a native application can, and just blindly running a native application in the browser is clearly a horrible, horrible idea.
The majority of Java vulnerabilities are new and clever ways to escape the sandbox, thereby gaining the ability to do anything the user could do.
Of course there have been other neat vulnerabilities like CVE-2014-6601 where apparently Java's JIT can be tricked into just running native code and this can be exploited remotely. I'm unclear on the exact details of that one.
First thing a new installation of Skype does is download every single message you've received for the past several months, I think.
I haven't tried deleting a history file (they're actually SQLite databases) but I think the same thing happens in that case: Skype sees that it isn't up to date on messages and redownloads them.
Half the point behind the Nvidia Shield devices is the ability to stream games from your Nvidia GPU-powered PC. So you're not limited to Android games, at least in theory.
Of course, based on the Steam version of game streaming, this isn't a thing you're ever going to be doing in reality, but at least that's the theory. (I mean, it works, almost, but you're still adding a whole bunch of lag.)
Hell, I've run into Java code that only runs on 32-bit versions of Java.
I'm not sure how they did that, but it absolutely requires you to have 32-bit Java 6 prior to a certain patch level.
Thankfully the part of IT demanding we run that software eventually caved to the part of IT demanding that the software running on every computer was, y'know, not full of security holes.
Why not? I mean, they're just getting into the "HD re-release" market that seems to be all the rage these days.
I mean, if Square Enix can resell a nearly 15 year old Final Fantasy "HD remake" for about half the price of a new game, why not full price for a two year old game?
Define "fast." This is apparently not about download speed but about latency. The idea is apparently to keep the majority of traffic that doesn't care about latency on fiber and move only that which does to a microwave network. (How do you do that? They didn't say.)
I'm not sure why they think latency is a big issue. Latency simply isn't a concern for the vast majority of Internet applications. They admit as much in the article and claim the majority of traffic would remain on fiber links.
So what's left that requires extremely low latency, lower than what we already have? They didn't say, other than mentioning that high frequency traders already use microwave links to reduce latency.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to kind of chime in and agree. I do take public transportation into and out of the city near where I live, but when I do, it's because parking would be ridiculous and I hate driving in the city. But even then, I frequently end up driving anyway, and it's because getting from where I live to just about anywhere is generally timed in hours when taking public transportation and minutes when driving. A trip that might take 20 minutes by car can easily take two hours by public transportation.
It helps that the public transportation schedules here are complete jokes. That 10:30 bus might arrive at 10:35. Or 10:40. Or maybe 10:45. Or possibly 10:28. But the one time you can guarantee it won't be arriving is 10:30.
All this adds up to it generally being easier (but almost never cheaper) to just drive and say "screw it" to public transportation. Even if you end up paying more in parking and gas than you would have in bus/subway fare, it's generally worth it for avoiding the hassle and saving at least a couple of hours in time.
But that's the thing - the game in question uses a custom in-house graphics engine written to support the PC, PS3, and PS4. They're already maintaining three separate rendering back-ends, including one that's intended to target a console that's nearly a decade old.
I find it really, really hard to believe that they can't get a game that's designed to be playable on the PS3 to run on modern Mac hardware.
No, he meant Metal when he said "and the replacement of OpenGL with a new graphics API in Appleâ(TM)s next OS." When he refers to "DirectX11 for Mac" the best guess would be he's talking about Transgaming Cider supporting DirectX 11, but that's not what he said, so who knows how that sentence is supposed to be parsed. (Plus, Cider already supports DirectX 11.)
It doesn't help that it's presumably been translated from Japanese.
If that's not management rotten to the core, what is ?
Final Fantasy XIV is kind of the poster child for bad management at Square Enix, to the point where they actually fired the original management team. This new fiasco is from the team hired to replace the original team.
Any company relying on Microsoft technology to achieve cross-platform deserves a spectacular failure anyway.
Which makes no sense, because they've already ported the graphics engine twice! The game also supports the PS3 and the PS4. If they can deal with three different graphics engines, you'd think adding a fourth would be no big deal.
Seriously, no joke. The Win10 version of games are horribly resource hungry for fuck knows what reason.
They are in Windows 8.1 as well. I tried playing Microsoft Sudoku on my Surface Pro 3, but - no joke - it forced the fan on and reduced the battery life to the point where I just gave up playing it.
I'm not sure how Microsoft fucked up their Metro - er, "universal" - versions of their games, but they did.
This is a problem that Maven has created, mostly.
What the summary doesn't mention is that "large repository of open source software" is a Maven repository. Maven allows you to specify dependencies for your Java project.
The problem is that you have to specify a specific version of whatever you use. So let's say you use OpenFoo 1.1 and that at the time you write your code, the latest version of OpenFoo is 1.1.3.
Now assume a horrible vulnerability is discovered in OpenFoo 1.1.3, so they release OpenFoo 1.1.4 to fix it. Well, your Maven POM says you require OpenFoo 1.1.3, so until you go in and manually change that, you will only ever use 1.1.3. There is - by design - no way to say "I want the latest 1.1 version." You can only describe a single, specific version.
So it's no surprise that Sonatype will see a ton of old Maven projects continuing to download outdated Maven artifacts. There's no way to say "I want the latest version of a specific branch" you can only specify a single version. Which means that a project that hasn't changed in years will still pull in the old versions of the libraries, even if it would work with the later versions.
Define "mod-friendly." My guess is "not very" but there's this:
The most interesting wrinkle? âoeDoom Snapmap,â an in-game level editor designed, says Bethesda, to let any player craft complex maps or fiddle with the game rules on the fly. When youâ(TM)re ready, you just push a button to play, or share your creation with anyone in the world.
The reason I say "not very" is that presumably that's intended to satisfy modders due to an otherwise complete lack of modability.
Of course, that may be designed to bring something like mods to consoles in a way that Microsoft and Sony will allow, so who knows.
Then that's new since they originally moved it to the App Store, because I remember having to enter a credit card number to be allowed to download the "free" download. I don't remember whether or not the Apple Account I created was for that or not (pretty sure I needed it earlier solely to get access to Apple's Developer Program through my employer), but I do remember being forced to enter a credit card number despite Xcode being free.
Odd, that's what the Comcast rep told me that last time I looked into getting faster Internet. Are you telling me that Comcast lied directly to me? Because as far as I can tell through their website, it's true, the only way I can get the faster tier is to upgrade to "Triple Play," it's just not offered any other way. And in order to use "Triple Play" you have to use their Xfinity box. I specifically asked if I could keep my cable modem and they flat-out told me "no."
That's all I can get without doing the "Triple Play" bullshit where I'd have to get TV and home phone service too, as well as install their own router and in-home wifi Xfinity thing.
So, yes, it's effectively all they'd offer me. Getting a faster speed would require me to rent a cable modem from them despite the fact I already own a DOCSIS 3 capable modem and have a working wifi router.
No, of course I can't watch it, I don't own an 8K TV or let alone a 4K TV.
But what I'm more curious is: can I even stream it? Because I'm stuck with Comcast, so I'm limited to something like 20Mbps download speed. ("Something like" because that's the maximum, not the guaranteed, which is 0Mbps. Yay monopolies!) 4K video on YouTube apparently requires more than that!
So forget watching it, I can't even stream it in real time.
And I live in an area where there "is" competition. I could also get the same 20Mbps speed from RCN, plus Verizon offers FiOS in the area! But not to me, despite it literally running down the street I live on.
Unless you have NoScript installed, then it does literally nothing.
Half the point to the original Phoenix browser was to allow shit like Reader Mode and Pocket to be offered as optional addons.
Firefox seems to have entirely forgotten this.
Firefox is multithreaded. Apparently it's using 86 threads right now as I type this.
I haven't a clue what those threads are doing since nearly everything clearly takes place in the UI thread given the number of times the browser freezes to deal with JavaScript, but - it's got a whole lot of threads for some reason.
This sounds like a feature nobody actually gives a damn about.
This sounds like a feature almost no one can even use.
I'm curious how many Slashdot readers even have a VR headset. I sure don't nor do I have any interest in getting one. It's one of those things I might be interested in "some day" but at present, I've done an Oculus Rift demo before. It was neat but it didn't make me think "I need to get this!"
This seems like a feature that not only does no one want, that nearly no one can even use.
Maybe hold off on the VR support until there's an install base? Or anyone actually wants such a thing?
These days I'm pretty sure it's just "download it from the App Store" - to the point where I'm not sure you even can download it any other way.
But that does mean you need to a valid Apple Account and it also means you need a valid credit card. It was fun convincing someone to let me "use" a corporate credit card to download a free copy of Xcode.
And OS X isn't the worst for that. Windows 8.1 has this lovely thing where if you drag a file over the directory tree in Explorer, it will spin up every single goddamned disc and network drive and freeze the drag operation until it's done.
That's almost a requirement for iOS development (although you can install home-written software on your own stuff, I think),
Nope! You need to pay them to do that, and there's a limit to how many devices your organization can install apps to. I'm not sure what the limit is for the base plan since I only have ever used the Apple developer program through my employer. But there's a whole process to get a device "provisioned" to be able to run apps you're developing and there's a limit based on your plan with Apple.
Wait, you guys (Apple developers) have to pay *licenses* to Apple to write programs and apps on their platforms?
No, of course not, Xcode is a free download and you can write programs and apps for any iDevice for free. (Ignoring the cost of the Mac you need to buy in the first place, of course.)
You just can't let other people use them without forking over $100/year. (At all for iOS or without making users disable scary security dialogs for OS X.)
My best guess is that they really wanted to include a "massively multiplayer" game in some fashion and what better representative of MMOs is there than WoW?
But I agree, they would have been far better served just leaving MMOs out entirely than including WoW in the first iteration. WoW probably deserves to be in a "gaming hall of fame" - eventually.
There's a huge catalog of games and genres that are just flat-out more deserving of recognition than MMOs in general and WoW in particular. WoW can wait.
Microsoft hasn't made a JVM in - well, over a decade, at this point.
Java applets are "safe" because they're sandboxed. By default a Java application can do anything a native application can, and just blindly running a native application in the browser is clearly a horrible, horrible idea.
The majority of Java vulnerabilities are new and clever ways to escape the sandbox, thereby gaining the ability to do anything the user could do.
Of course there have been other neat vulnerabilities like CVE-2014-6601 where apparently Java's JIT can be tricked into just running native code and this can be exploited remotely. I'm unclear on the exact details of that one.
Yep.
First thing a new installation of Skype does is download every single message you've received for the past several months, I think.
I haven't tried deleting a history file (they're actually SQLite databases) but I think the same thing happens in that case: Skype sees that it isn't up to date on messages and redownloads them.
Half the point behind the Nvidia Shield devices is the ability to stream games from your Nvidia GPU-powered PC. So you're not limited to Android games, at least in theory.
Of course, based on the Steam version of game streaming, this isn't a thing you're ever going to be doing in reality, but at least that's the theory. (I mean, it works, almost, but you're still adding a whole bunch of lag.)
Hell, I've run into Java code that only runs on 32-bit versions of Java.
I'm not sure how they did that, but it absolutely requires you to have 32-bit Java 6 prior to a certain patch level.
Thankfully the part of IT demanding we run that software eventually caved to the part of IT demanding that the software running on every computer was, y'know, not full of security holes.
Why not? I mean, they're just getting into the "HD re-release" market that seems to be all the rage these days.
I mean, if Square Enix can resell a nearly 15 year old Final Fantasy "HD remake" for about half the price of a new game, why not full price for a two year old game?
Define "fast." This is apparently not about download speed but about latency. The idea is apparently to keep the majority of traffic that doesn't care about latency on fiber and move only that which does to a microwave network. (How do you do that? They didn't say.)
I'm not sure why they think latency is a big issue. Latency simply isn't a concern for the vast majority of Internet applications. They admit as much in the article and claim the majority of traffic would remain on fiber links.
So what's left that requires extremely low latency, lower than what we already have? They didn't say, other than mentioning that high frequency traders already use microwave links to reduce latency.