I'm coding it in C++, not true C, but I speak a very C-like dialect of C++. I really only use objects, vectors and strings from the C++ side; I still use printf() and #defines and all those other things C programmers love. I think I only have one case of inheritance in the whole damn project. Someone else in this discussion called such a thing "C+"; I think I like that term. It's C, with some but not all the addons of C++.
And I, too, chose the language for fun. I could have written it faster in Java. Hell, I could have done it in Flash. But that wouldn't be as fun for me.
High-end, not really. Even the current batch of Intel integrated GPUs can handle 1080p video decompression. You can do it with a $50 bottom-of-the-line GeForce.
Gaming, though, still requires a decent GPU. $100-$150 for the low end. So hardware costs won't decrease if you just stream the game data (as opposed to streaming video).
But what *would* matter is latency. If the rendering is done IN THE CLOUD!, that means latency becomes an even bigger deal. Instead of just having to deal with controller->computer->monitor latency, you're dealing with controller->computer->SERVER->computer->monitor latency. And since computer->server latency is going to be in the realm of 20-60ms, I would venture to say that twitchy games are going to suffer *heavily*. Civilization VI or Final Fantasy XV will be fine, but Quake V or Unreal Tournament 2014? No way.
Just to pre-empt a potential argument, NO, current multiplayer games don't have that latency issue for most things. Currently, clients handle the rendering and input. They also run a shadow copy of the server to "predict" the response it will give, so it can give feedback *immediately*. The client doesn't send a constant stream of "OK, he moved the mouse over a pixel", it sends a "he just fired his weapon from position X at angle Y, who does he hit?". The server does sanity checks to prevent cheating (like going all the way across the map in one frame), and the client will periodically send "I'm at position X, angle Y", but the bulk of the time, the client is the one deciding what the player will see happening. Which can (and does) cause problems when they don't communicate right, but they've gotten good at recovering from that.
Over the past 2 years, Sony is $10 BILLION in the hole, and with the bad decisions they constantly make, I wont be suprised if they are gone in a few years.
C and C++ (I consider them essentially the same, if only because I write them essentially the same) have a few advantages:
They work. A language update doesn't break your actual programs. It may break your ability to compile them, but you still have a working binary compiled with the old version, which gives you time to make the code work with the new version. You never have to run around like a chicken with it's head cut off because some automatic Java or Python or PHP or __LANGUAGE__ update broke __BIG_CRITICAL_APP__.
The tools work. You have IDEs that actually work. You have debuggers that actually debug. You've got static analysis tools that actually analyze (I've seen some PHP "static analyzers" that actually just make sure you use a particular code style!). If you want, you can grab the intermediate assembly files and debug *those*.
The coders work. Sure, C[++] has some really awful language features, but the programmers know about them, know how to use them properly (which, often times, is "never"). It's a language known by any decent programmer. Maybe not used, or liked, but pretty much everyone can read C.
It does things many other languages can't. You cannot (last I checked) embed assembly snippets in any other major language. There are many libraries that only have C APIs.
It's fast. Game developers, serious ones, use C++, because even Java is still too slow. And when you have 20,000,000 vertices you need to render every 16ms, speed *matters*. That's why web servers are written in C. That's why operating systems are written in C. That's why other programming languages are written in C. Because sometimes, processor time actually *is* more expensive than programmer time.
I *like* C. That game I program in my free time? It's C++, but it acts like "C with objects and strings". Sure, I could have done it "faster" in another language, but I know C and like C, for all the reasons enumerated above.
Yes, because that 0.0001% could grow into 10%. That means it drives the 40% vendors to innovate (or at least, to copy *their* innovative ideas).
Or because that 0.0001% could have needs that just are not met by another OS. There's probably some people who would like a smartphone with a full set of IPA characters on a hardware keyboard, or a smartphone with 5.1 TOSLINK audio outputs, or maybe one that runs on an Itanium processor. Would I (or any reasonable person, really) want those? No. But someone probably does (yes, even the Itanic phone).
While it sounds like this would work decently well in cities, it probably won't have nearly as many signals to work with in less populated areas, and it would be practically useless out in, say, the middle of the Pacific. So at best, it's a complement to GPS, not a replacement.
Second, how is it going to match up different sources with physical locations? I assume they'll just have a massive database of "this wifi router is located at 31.41592N 27.18281W, this AM transmitter is at....", but that brings up even more problems. Who will maintain that database - the big regulated transmitters can probably be figured out easily, but WiFi routers? How much space will that DB take up - could make it prohibitive on some devices?
As far as I can tell, all current operating systems handled it fine. It's applications that have problems, mainly server-type apps that actually use the clock for important things.
Linux being heavily affected is just a side-effect of most servers running Linux (although apparently some older versions don't handle leap seconds so cleanly - maybe that has something to do with it?).
I was in it - it was not a particularly bad storm. Heavy winds, lots of cloud-to-cloud lightning, but very little rain or cloud-to-ground lightning. I lost power repeatedly, but it was always back up within seconds. And I'm located way out in a rural area, where the power supply is much more vulnerable (every time a major hurricane hits, I'm usually without power for about a week - bad enough that I bought a small generator).
According to TFA, they were only without power for half an hour, and that the ongoing problems were related to recovery, not actual power-lossage. So their problems are more "bad disaster planning" than "bad disaster".
Still, you'd think a major data center would have the usual UPS and generator setup most major data centers have - half an hour without power is something they should have been able to handle. Or at least have enough UPS capacity to cleanly shut down all the machines or migrate the virtual instances to a different datacenter.
The *sites* are the ones that should be held to the same standards as brick-and-mortar stores. Having the ISP enforce those rules would be like putting regulations on roads that prevent minors from visiting those brick-and-mortar stores.
And guess what? The porn sites *already* follow laws designed to keep minors out. Granted, they usually follow US laws instead of UK laws, simply because of statistics (the US has more porn sites per capita than ANY other country, and a rather large population to boot). But they're effectively the same.
Hard drives eventually fail as well. The problem is that current flash memory tends to fail an order of magnitude faster than disks (that's just a rough figure, depends heavily on the specifics of the particular technology being used).
But this is purely a reliability issue with relatively new technology. They're still figuring out all the oddities, and also (I believe) making a slight trade-off between reliability and storage density.
Eventually, the failure rates will decrease to the point that flash memory has comparable reliability to spinning disks. Possibly even better.
My *guess* (haven't watched video yet, making some big assumptions right here) is that it meant the Latin alphabet, aka the one we're using right now, and which is used by most West European languages including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and the all-important Latin.
With the premise that only music that can be performed in concert halls AND bring in enough concertgoers is deserving of being made.
Seems correct. You can get people to go to a concert for anything - look at all the dubstep musicians who show up, press a few buttons on a computer, and bam. Music.
If you can't get people to come to your concert, the only reason is because nobody likes your music.
And what about movies?
Movies seem to be doing fine, despite all of Hollywood's claims to the contrary. It helps that they already make most of their money from concert-like theatrical experiences you cannot recreate at home. Also known as movie theaters. Home VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray sales have never been the primary moneymaker for movies.
In short, you can pirate Michael Bay presents: Guns and Tits ]I[, but you can't pirate watching MBpGaT3 on a massive 60' screen with subwoofers that need a DoD export license.
Any problems the movie industry is having are a) minor, and b) self-inflicted. Stop giving movies *that* much of a budget, start greenlighting some more original movies and fewer sequels, and knock off the stupid practices like staggered releases, and they'll be fine.
Artists deserve to be paid. They are not being paid under the current system, and they would arguably make *more* under a "copyright doesn't exist, pirate whatever you want" system.
Why?
Artists do *not* get paid properly for recordings. Seriously. Your album can go multi-platinum, and you still will see *maybe* a few cents on each album. Often less - Hollywood accounting means that you'll quite often see *nothing*. At that point, it doesn't matter whether people pay for your albums or not - all you can make money from is licensing (if you managed to retain the rights to your own music), and concerts. And your "publisher" *will* take a cut from both.
So let's suppose, for a minute, that we get rid of all that. Piracy is completely legalized for personal use - you only need to pay for it if you're using it in a movie or broadcasting it on the radio or something.
That turns your recordings into advertisements for your concerts. Which means you *want* them spread as far as they can - you *want* people to pirate your music, because that means more people are likely to shell out $$ for tickets, and t-shirts, and other merchandise.
And how do I know this would work? Because artists are rooting for it.
Not all of them, no, but there are more than I can list, who *already* say "pirate my music, come to my concerts".
How many other industries are there where the producers actually *encourage* their customers to break the law? That alone should be enough of a sign that the law, and the system, are *broken*.
And what do we do with broken systems? We throw them out, destroy them, and build a new one.
Every web designer should spend a week using the Internet blindfolded, using only JAWS.
A similar, but easier, test:
Use Lynx. Preferably in a full-screen 80x25 terminal, not a little xterm or whatever.
No Flash. No HTML5 video or audio. No Java. No Javascript. No CSS. No images. No colors, on some versions.
I think every web designer should include Lynx in their end-stage browser compatibility tests (when they test in old versions of IE), because it's a fairly good approximation of using a screen reader, but far less expensive.
No, $2.9*10^10 for an entire national industry, per annum, seems a reasonable number. That's less than 0.1% of the entire national GDP.
Now, if MAFIAA lawyers were coming up with these numbers, it would be roughly $130 septillion ($1.3*10^26), including everything from companies that *would* have made actual products with their patents but found it more profitable to troll, to all the patent-invalidation appeal lawyers that lost business because no patents seem to ever get invalidated.
It's interesting when you think about it. The media producers are pushing for the so-called pirates to be punished by removing their ability to pirate or assist others in doing so by uploading.
If they were truly motivated purely by profit, wouldn't they be pushing instead for massive civil penalties, or perhaps some sort of tax?
Banning pirates from the internet does little to increase profits even IF you follow MAFIAA logic that every single pirated file equates to one "stolen" sale, because where are people most likely to buy music? Online.
This leads to several possible conclusions (ranked in order of probability (by my analysis), descending): 1) The entire music/film industry is basically panicking and is unable to think straight due to the massive upheavals caused by the Internet, and they're lashing out like a scared animal. 2) They actually do not care about pure profits, but are instead concerned primarily with maintaining control of distribution, making this as much an attack on iTunes as The Pirate Bay. 3) They are fully aware of how ineffective this will be at curbing piracy, and plan to use this as a stepping-stone to something bigger and worse ("Look, even with the Three Strikes law, we're still making only billions of dollars per minute, we need a law that taxes people by the megabyte to use the Internet because they might use it for PIRACY!"). 4) They're just a pawn in someone else's Evil Master Plan.
Slashdot Mirror
I too am working on a game for fun.
I'm coding it in C++, not true C, but I speak a very C-like dialect of C++. I really only use objects, vectors and strings from the C++ side; I still use printf() and #defines and all those other things C programmers love. I think I only have one case of inheritance in the whole damn project. Someone else in this discussion called such a thing "C+"; I think I like that term. It's C, with some but not all the addons of C++.
And I, too, chose the language for fun. I could have written it faster in Java. Hell, I could have done it in Flash. But that wouldn't be as fun for me.
High-end, not really. Even the current batch of Intel integrated GPUs can handle 1080p video decompression. You can do it with a $50 bottom-of-the-line GeForce.
Gaming, though, still requires a decent GPU. $100-$150 for the low end. So hardware costs won't decrease if you just stream the game data (as opposed to streaming video).
But what *would* matter is latency. If the rendering is done IN THE CLOUD!, that means latency becomes an even bigger deal. Instead of just having to deal with controller->computer->monitor latency, you're dealing with controller->computer->SERVER->computer->monitor latency. And since computer->server latency is going to be in the realm of 20-60ms, I would venture to say that twitchy games are going to suffer *heavily*. Civilization VI or Final Fantasy XV will be fine, but Quake V or Unreal Tournament 2014? No way.
Just to pre-empt a potential argument, NO, current multiplayer games don't have that latency issue for most things. Currently, clients handle the rendering and input. They also run a shadow copy of the server to "predict" the response it will give, so it can give feedback *immediately*. The client doesn't send a constant stream of "OK, he moved the mouse over a pixel", it sends a "he just fired his weapon from position X at angle Y, who does he hit?". The server does sanity checks to prevent cheating (like going all the way across the map in one frame), and the client will periodically send "I'm at position X, angle Y", but the bulk of the time, the client is the one deciding what the player will see happening. Which can (and does) cause problems when they don't communicate right, but they've gotten good at recovering from that.
Over the past 2 years, Sony is $10 BILLION in the hole, and with the bad decisions they constantly make, I wont be suprised if they are gone in a few years.
And there will be much rejoicing.
C and C++ (I consider them essentially the same, if only because I write them essentially the same) have a few advantages:
They work. A language update doesn't break your actual programs. It may break your ability to compile them, but you still have a working binary compiled with the old version, which gives you time to make the code work with the new version. You never have to run around like a chicken with it's head cut off because some automatic Java or Python or PHP or __LANGUAGE__ update broke __BIG_CRITICAL_APP__.
The tools work. You have IDEs that actually work. You have debuggers that actually debug. You've got static analysis tools that actually analyze (I've seen some PHP "static analyzers" that actually just make sure you use a particular code style!). If you want, you can grab the intermediate assembly files and debug *those*.
The coders work. Sure, C[++] has some really awful language features, but the programmers know about them, know how to use them properly (which, often times, is "never"). It's a language known by any decent programmer. Maybe not used, or liked, but pretty much everyone can read C.
It does things many other languages can't. You cannot (last I checked) embed assembly snippets in any other major language. There are many libraries that only have C APIs.
It's fast. Game developers, serious ones, use C++, because even Java is still too slow. And when you have 20,000,000 vertices you need to render every 16ms, speed *matters*. That's why web servers are written in C. That's why operating systems are written in C. That's why other programming languages are written in C. Because sometimes, processor time actually *is* more expensive than programmer time.
I *like* C. That game I program in my free time? It's C++, but it acts like "C with objects and strings". Sure, I could have done it "faster" in another language, but I know C and like C, for all the reasons enumerated above.
Yes, because that 0.0001% could grow into 10%. That means it drives the 40% vendors to innovate (or at least, to copy *their* innovative ideas).
Or because that 0.0001% could have needs that just are not met by another OS. There's probably some people who would like a smartphone with a full set of IPA characters on a hardware keyboard, or a smartphone with 5.1 TOSLINK audio outputs, or maybe one that runs on an Itanium processor. Would I (or any reasonable person, really) want those? No. But someone probably does (yes, even the Itanic phone).
SlashBuzzwords
Stop giving them ideas!
You forgot to include nuclear fusion.
So what happens if you try to use it with no internet connection?
While it sounds like this would work decently well in cities, it probably won't have nearly as many signals to work with in less populated areas, and it would be practically useless out in, say, the middle of the Pacific. So at best, it's a complement to GPS, not a replacement.
Second, how is it going to match up different sources with physical locations? I assume they'll just have a massive database of "this wifi router is located at 31.41592N 27.18281W, this AM transmitter is at....", but that brings up even more problems. Who will maintain that database - the big regulated transmitters can probably be figured out easily, but WiFi routers? How much space will that DB take up - could make it prohibitive on some devices?
As far as I can tell, all current operating systems handled it fine. It's applications that have problems, mainly server-type apps that actually use the clock for important things.
Linux being heavily affected is just a side-effect of most servers running Linux (although apparently some older versions don't handle leap seconds so cleanly - maybe that has something to do with it?).
I was in it - it was not a particularly bad storm. Heavy winds, lots of cloud-to-cloud lightning, but very little rain or cloud-to-ground lightning. I lost power repeatedly, but it was always back up within seconds. And I'm located way out in a rural area, where the power supply is much more vulnerable (every time a major hurricane hits, I'm usually without power for about a week - bad enough that I bought a small generator).
According to TFA, they were only without power for half an hour, and that the ongoing problems were related to recovery, not actual power-lossage. So their problems are more "bad disaster planning" than "bad disaster".
Still, you'd think a major data center would have the usual UPS and generator setup most major data centers have - half an hour without power is something they should have been able to handle. Or at least have enough UPS capacity to cleanly shut down all the machines or migrate the virtual instances to a different datacenter.
Is there something inherently wrong with the US?
Yes.
The *sites* are the ones that should be held to the same standards as brick-and-mortar stores. Having the ISP enforce those rules would be like putting regulations on roads that prevent minors from visiting those brick-and-mortar stores.
And guess what? The porn sites *already* follow laws designed to keep minors out. Granted, they usually follow US laws instead of UK laws, simply because of statistics (the US has more porn sites per capita than ANY other country, and a rather large population to boot). But they're effectively the same.
Wishful thinking?
That's a software workaround to a hardware problem. I'm talking about SSDs actually lasting as long as a hard drive under the same usage.
Hard drives eventually fail as well. The problem is that current flash memory tends to fail an order of magnitude faster than disks (that's just a rough figure, depends heavily on the specifics of the particular technology being used).
But this is purely a reliability issue with relatively new technology. They're still figuring out all the oddities, and also (I believe) making a slight trade-off between reliability and storage density.
Eventually, the failure rates will decrease to the point that flash memory has comparable reliability to spinning disks. Possibly even better.
My *guess* (haven't watched video yet, making some big assumptions right here) is that it meant the Latin alphabet, aka the one we're using right now, and which is used by most West European languages including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and the all-important Latin.
With the premise that only music that can be performed in concert halls AND bring in enough concertgoers is deserving of being made.
Seems correct. You can get people to go to a concert for anything - look at all the dubstep musicians who show up, press a few buttons on a computer, and bam. Music.
If you can't get people to come to your concert, the only reason is because nobody likes your music.
And what about movies?
Movies seem to be doing fine, despite all of Hollywood's claims to the contrary. It helps that they already make most of their money from concert-like theatrical experiences you cannot recreate at home. Also known as movie theaters. Home VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray sales have never been the primary moneymaker for movies.
In short, you can pirate Michael Bay presents: Guns and Tits ]I[, but you can't pirate watching MBpGaT3 on a massive 60' screen with subwoofers that need a DoD export license.
Any problems the movie industry is having are a) minor, and b) self-inflicted. Stop giving movies *that* much of a budget, start greenlighting some more original movies and fewer sequels, and knock off the stupid practices like staggered releases, and they'll be fine.
No. You're putting words in his mouth.
Artists deserve to be paid. They are not being paid under the current system, and they would arguably make *more* under a "copyright doesn't exist, pirate whatever you want" system.
Why?
Artists do *not* get paid properly for recordings. Seriously. Your album can go multi-platinum, and you still will see *maybe* a few cents on each album. Often less - Hollywood accounting means that you'll quite often see *nothing*. At that point, it doesn't matter whether people pay for your albums or not - all you can make money from is licensing (if you managed to retain the rights to your own music), and concerts. And your "publisher" *will* take a cut from both.
So let's suppose, for a minute, that we get rid of all that. Piracy is completely legalized for personal use - you only need to pay for it if you're using it in a movie or broadcasting it on the radio or something.
That turns your recordings into advertisements for your concerts. Which means you *want* them spread as far as they can - you *want* people to pirate your music, because that means more people are likely to shell out $$ for tickets, and t-shirts, and other merchandise.
And how do I know this would work? Because artists are rooting for it.
Not all of them, no, but there are more than I can list, who *already* say "pirate my music, come to my concerts".
How many other industries are there where the producers actually *encourage* their customers to break the law? That alone should be enough of a sign that the law, and the system, are *broken*.
And what do we do with broken systems? We throw them out, destroy them, and build a new one.
Yes, I think he is. Are you implying that they are not?
Every web designer should spend a week using the Internet blindfolded, using only JAWS.
A similar, but easier, test:
Use Lynx. Preferably in a full-screen 80x25 terminal, not a little xterm or whatever.
No Flash. No HTML5 video or audio. No Java. No Javascript. No CSS. No images. No colors, on some versions.
I think every web designer should include Lynx in their end-stage browser compatibility tests (when they test in old versions of IE), because it's a fairly good approximation of using a screen reader, but far less expensive.
No, $2.9*10^10 for an entire national industry, per annum, seems a reasonable number. That's less than 0.1% of the entire national GDP.
Now, if MAFIAA lawyers were coming up with these numbers, it would be roughly $130 septillion ($1.3*10^26), including everything from companies that *would* have made actual products with their patents but found it more profitable to troll, to all the patent-invalidation appeal lawyers that lost business because no patents seem to ever get invalidated.
If all it does is bounce between "ur a fag" and "i fuked ur mom", how can you tell if it's been offended?
Now now, no need to panic. We simply need to augment our cat forces, perhaps arm them with some sort of "laser" device...
It's interesting when you think about it. The media producers are pushing for the so-called pirates to be punished by removing their ability to pirate or assist others in doing so by uploading.
If they were truly motivated purely by profit, wouldn't they be pushing instead for massive civil penalties, or perhaps some sort of tax?
Banning pirates from the internet does little to increase profits even IF you follow MAFIAA logic that every single pirated file equates to one "stolen" sale, because where are people most likely to buy music? Online.
This leads to several possible conclusions (ranked in order of probability (by my analysis), descending):
1) The entire music/film industry is basically panicking and is unable to think straight due to the massive upheavals caused by the Internet, and they're lashing out like a scared animal.
2) They actually do not care about pure profits, but are instead concerned primarily with maintaining control of distribution, making this as much an attack on iTunes as The Pirate Bay.
3) They are fully aware of how ineffective this will be at curbing piracy, and plan to use this as a stepping-stone to something bigger and worse ("Look, even with the Three Strikes law, we're still making only billions of dollars per minute, we need a law that taxes people by the megabyte to use the Internet because they might use it for PIRACY!").
4) They're just a pawn in someone else's Evil Master Plan.