You're right. The one thing I struggle to fault MS on is their development toolset. Up to a couple of years ago, I was programming in asm, c/c++ and java. Today, you'll find it hard to make me give up C# and my Visual Studio IDE.
Maybe the market shares are shifting, but I'm getting so many queries about Mac and Linux versions of software, that I just can't stick with just Windows anymore. I haven't explored Mono much yet, but I need something that's cross-platform and if C#/.NET/Visual Studio isn't giving me that, then I need to drop it and move to something that does. Maybe MS is waking up to this and the idea that people using their products to create apps for non-Windows platforms isn't all that bad. I hope so.
It's happening in the UK, too. I just heard last week about a guy I used to work with, whose home was raided due to his mod chip activities. When I worked with him, he earned his beer money by installing mod chips in playstations for about £20-30 a time. I'm guessing he continued the service with the newer consoles.
Maybe that's the distinction here. Muck around with the innards of your own console, no big deal. Start a cottage industry charging people to enable bypassing of the copy protection/arbitrary manufacturer limitations, then they'll sit up and take notice.
Don't overestimate how long it takes to compose and send a text message, especially in the hands of a pro, i.e., a teenage girl.
Waiting to get off a plane yesterday, I noticed the girl in the row in front flip open her razr phone, flash past a couple of menus, enter "LOL I know", and hit send within about 4 seconds. One text message every 3.7 minutes for 14 hours seems relatively pedestrian.
Alas, I don't have a ninja thumb, and composing a text message takes me an age. Something to do with hunting through sub-menus for the apostrophe in "you're", rather than sticking with "ur", I imagine.
Peer-reviewed journals can also be wrong. This was an important lesson I learned at university. Helps you really think about what you're reading, rather than just accepting everything as the gospel truth. Maybe - just maybe - the reason why your work isn't showing the same results as a paper you're referring to in your research is because the paper contains a mistake.
Managed to get an online order in with Circuit City when they had stock at the beginning of last month. I got the bundled games and controller, but the Wii went awol during transit. Somewhere, there's a USPS working having a great time with my console. Meanwhile, I'm back on the damned waiting list.
24 may be the minimum number of fps to perceive smooth animation, if the device (flip book, movie projector, etc) is showing just those 24 frames within that second.
The problem when it comes to tv, is that it'll show you 50 (or 60 for NTSC) frames per second.
Say, for example, your demo has text scrolling at 25 fps on a PAL tv. If the tv only showed 25 fps, you'd see a nice smooth scrolling.
tv frame 0: text at position x tv frame 1: text at position x-1 tv frame 2: text at position x-2 tv frame 3: text at position x-3
However, the tv is showing double that number of frames, and every other frame, the text doesn't move:
tv frame 0: text at position x tv frame 1: text at position x - stationary tv frame 2: text at position x-1 - moved! tv frame 3: text at position x-1 - stationary tv frame 4: text at position x-2 - moved! tv frame 5: text at position x-2 - stationary
It's the stop-move-stop-move inconsistency that you're noticing.
I know a guy who worked on a game that had both Windows and Mac versions. When they added up how much it cost to develop the Mac version, compared to Mac version sales, in hindsight, it would have been cheaper for them to give all the Mac users a free PC instead.
Wish it wasn't like that, but apparently it was. Not to say all games will perform like that. YMMV, as they say.
I was working on cell phone games, and some of the older J2ME titles had their image data - several PNG files - concatenated into a single data block, to be unpacked later using index information in a different file.
One day, the publisher calls in a panic, because their AV scan keeps reporting our games as being infected with a virus. We tried assuring them otherwise; we'd had trouble fitting the games in the limited download package, so we'd certainly know if there was something we didn't want or need in there. Regardless, they wanted it fixed.
Turns out the scan was searching the jar file, finding the image data file, recognizing the PNG header of the first image in the file, then freaking out because the entire file size didn't match the calculation from the first PNG header. Apparently, there was some kind of exploit using incorrect header information in PNGs, and the AV software was detecting the size discrepancy and flagging it as suspect.
We got around the problem by adding a dummy byte at the start of the file, enough to make it think it wasn't a single PNG image. Simple fix, but it still took a fair chunk of time to restore project backups, make the change, test it, repackage it and submit.
But the law requires that H1-Bs be paid the same as their native peers. Add on the legal and possible relocation costs, I don't see how hiring H1-Bs cuts costs, other than reaping the rewards of hiring the best and the brightest from overseas.
Yeah, an H1-B application includes a Labor Condition Application (LCA), part of which specifies that the salary that will be paid is at least the mean salary for one year of experience for the specific occupation and geographic location, at time of application. I didn't see any explanation of when or where these figures were from.
But then over the years, McD's introduces new meals and refines older meals. It starts to taste rather good and it's not all that bad for you. You're still wondering about the guys outside the doors handing out leaflets advocating their open food stalls; food that apparently taste wonderful and make you live forever. You try them out but find the food comes in those annoying plastic wrappers that have the "handy" tabs to open them that tear off before you actually manage to break the seal, forcing you to tear them open with your teeth. When you do finally get the packet open, you find the food isn't compatible with your fork and you end up trying to eat your peas off your knife. And they don't do McRibs.
So I gather it's an open source effort to build an alternative SecondLife client. Being a client, it receives definitions and textures of objects in order to render them on screen. It was a small step to take those definitions and use them to create exact copies of objects in the game. The only difference is the copies then belong to the copier, and can have their mod/copy/transfer permissions set to whatever they like. Quite possibly a useful development/test tool. Trouble is, someone else downloaded the tool from their public SVN repository and is using it to make unauthorized copies of in-game objects.
Does that sound about right?
If so, that's a tricky one. I'm not sure how you could avoid this issue. OSS makes it easier to exploit, but even with closed source software, you can only slow someone down so much with layers of encryption, obfuscation and so on. Ultimately, the client has to be able to decode and display the content, and therefore can be copied.
I'm thinking the only course of action they can take is to identify the copies and taking action against the copiers. I was wondering if they could deduce this from some kind of log describing the object's creation. For example, if A and B are complex but identical objects (or at least identical within a tolerance), A was created before B, and B was created in a fraction of the time that A was, would that indicate that B was cloned from A? If A's creator reported seeing B's creator with the object, would this be sufficient proof that a copybot was used, in order to clobber B with the ban stick?
Cancelled my AT&T land line a few months back - without any problems, I'm glad to say.
Regardless, their online billing stuff happily continues sending "Your bill for $0.00 is ready - log in to view" emails each month until you log in and uncheck the email option.
I mean, seriously, would it have been that hard to put an "if (balance > 0)", or "if (account == active)" test before sending?
I just replaced the battery in my Acer laptop. The old one seemed to stop holding any charge at all, or just not charging. I know the charging capacity diminishes as the battery ages, but mine went from holding about an hour's-worth of power to nothing in a very short space of time. It's difficult to say exactly when it failed because during that time I almost exclusively used the laptop while on AC power, but I would have expected a more gradual decline.
The battery was a few years old, and maybe it was just its time to go. Still, reading these articles about battery recalls makes me wonder. I don't recall any mention of Sony on the battery, though.
Yep, it's been a couple of years since I lived in the UK, but it sounds like it hasn't improved a huge amount.
I used to live out in the sticks. Well out of range of DSL, but there was much rejoicing when NTL finally gave us 512K cable connections. Then I moved to Cheltenham, in the shadow of GCHQ - which I imagine to be one of the most connected places in the UK - and could I get DSL there? Could I bugger. It was a good day if the dial-up connection managed more than 40k.
They love to advertise their top speeds, but somewhere in the small print it'll say "only if you can physically spit on the exchange from your bedroom window".
I received a couple of infected messages through a Yahoo groups subscription, which comes to my gmail account. The javascript was displayed as plain text, and I could see it was issuing requests to the Yahoo webmail system to extract user IDs and contacts. As far as I could tell, if you're not reading the email from within Yahoo's webmail reader, the script is not going to achieve anything.
Reminds me of an idle Tuesday afternoon (UK time) back in September 2001, when yet another refresh of the/. homepage brought up a curious story about a plane in the side of a building. First thoughts were "some kind of silly advertising stunt with a giant inflatable?", but the unbelievable summary suggested otherwise. Slashdot was taking forever to load the story, so I tried BBC news... and then Sky news, then CNN, and several other news sites, finding that they were all extremely slow. Finally, we tracked down a tv set in the office and learned the full extent of the events occurring in NY. That's as close to a meltdown as I've seen, although that's probably more those particular news sites being swamped, rather than the entire net grinding to a halt.
As popular as football is, I doubt that you'll get that many people all hammering the internet simultaneously to create a full meltdown.
I once worked on a PS2 game with a team of people all expecting the end product to end up on a DVD. Late on, the publisher decided that because they could save a ton of money by using CDs instead of DVDs, and we had to squeeze it all down to a single CD.
I've no idea how much it will cost to produce Blu-ray discs over DVD, but I imagine it's a substantial amount with it being a higher capacity AND a brand new format. I wouldn't be surprised if most publishers were reigning back their developers to DVD sized games for most titles, at least for a couple of years.
Unless, of course, Sony mandates that all games need to use Blu-ray. This would encourage developers to take advantage of the extra space, which should make the games look better, which in turn will make the PS3 look better. Hmm.
And to be completely fair, he shouldn't complain if the Linden contender happens to nobble some of the net packets to increase damage inflicted by 1000% during the fight.
I've never heard of computer use leading to retinal detachment before. I've had a quick search and can't find anything to support this. Does anyone have any links providing more information about this?
I read that extreme short-sightedness increases the risk of retinal detachment, but otherwise trauma seems to be the main cause. Maybe it's due to the banging of heads against walls and/or monitor when the dreaded "This application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down..." pops up seconds before you save.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. The one thing I struggle to fault MS on is their development toolset. Up to a couple of years ago, I was programming in asm, c/c++ and java. Today, you'll find it hard to make me give up C# and my Visual Studio IDE.
Maybe the market shares are shifting, but I'm getting so many queries about Mac and Linux versions of software, that I just can't stick with just Windows anymore. I haven't explored Mono much yet, but I need something that's cross-platform and if C#/.NET/Visual Studio isn't giving me that, then I need to drop it and move to something that does. Maybe MS is waking up to this and the idea that people using their products to create apps for non-Windows platforms isn't all that bad. I hope so.
It's happening in the UK, too. I just heard last week about a guy I used to work with, whose home was raided due to his mod chip activities. When I worked with him, he earned his beer money by installing mod chips in playstations for about £20-30 a time. I'm guessing he continued the service with the newer consoles.
Maybe that's the distinction here. Muck around with the innards of your own console, no big deal. Start a cottage industry charging people to enable bypassing of the copy protection/arbitrary manufacturer limitations, then they'll sit up and take notice.
Haven't you seen Speed? There are ways around that, especially when there's a bucket full of free ipods at stake.
Don't overestimate how long it takes to compose and send a text message, especially in the hands of a pro, i.e., a teenage girl.
Waiting to get off a plane yesterday, I noticed the girl in the row in front flip open her razr phone, flash past a couple of menus, enter "LOL I know", and hit send within about 4 seconds. One text message every 3.7 minutes for 14 hours seems relatively pedestrian.
Alas, I don't have a ninja thumb, and composing a text message takes me an age. Something to do with hunting through sub-menus for the apostrophe in "you're", rather than sticking with "ur", I imagine.
Peer-reviewed journals can also be wrong. This was an important lesson I learned at university. Helps you really think about what you're reading, rather than just accepting everything as the gospel truth. Maybe - just maybe - the reason why your work isn't showing the same results as a paper you're referring to in your research is because the paper contains a mistake.
I have the controller but no Wii!
Managed to get an online order in with Circuit City when they had stock at the beginning of last month. I got the bundled games and controller, but the Wii went awol during transit. Somewhere, there's a USPS working having a great time with my console. Meanwhile, I'm back on the damned waiting list.
24 may be the minimum number of fps to perceive smooth animation, if the device (flip book, movie projector, etc) is showing just those 24 frames within that second.
The problem when it comes to tv, is that it'll show you 50 (or 60 for NTSC) frames per second.
Say, for example, your demo has text scrolling at 25 fps on a PAL tv. If the tv only showed 25 fps, you'd see a nice smooth scrolling.
tv frame 0: text at position x
tv frame 1: text at position x-1
tv frame 2: text at position x-2
tv frame 3: text at position x-3
However, the tv is showing double that number of frames, and every other frame, the text doesn't move:
tv frame 0: text at position x
tv frame 1: text at position x - stationary
tv frame 2: text at position x-1 - moved!
tv frame 3: text at position x-1 - stationary
tv frame 4: text at position x-2 - moved!
tv frame 5: text at position x-2 - stationary
It's the stop-move-stop-move inconsistency that you're noticing.
If you're fed up with breaking your delicate iPods, why not try adapting a flight data recorder to play MP3s?
I know a guy who worked on a game that had both Windows and Mac versions. When they added up how much it cost to develop the Mac version, compared to Mac version sales, in hindsight, it would have been cheaper for them to give all the Mac users a free PC instead.
Wish it wasn't like that, but apparently it was. Not to say all games will perform like that. YMMV, as they say.
I was working on cell phone games, and some of the older J2ME titles had their image data - several PNG files - concatenated into a single data block, to be unpacked later using index information in a different file.
One day, the publisher calls in a panic, because their AV scan keeps reporting our games as being infected with a virus. We tried assuring them otherwise; we'd had trouble fitting the games in the limited download package, so we'd certainly know if there was something we didn't want or need in there. Regardless, they wanted it fixed.
Turns out the scan was searching the jar file, finding the image data file, recognizing the PNG header of the first image in the file, then freaking out because the entire file size didn't match the calculation from the first PNG header. Apparently, there was some kind of exploit using incorrect header information in PNGs, and the AV software was detecting the size discrepancy and flagging it as suspect.
We got around the problem by adding a dummy byte at the start of the file, enough to make it think it wasn't a single PNG image. Simple fix, but it still took a fair chunk of time to restore project backups, make the change, test it, repackage it and submit.
But the law requires that H1-Bs be paid the same as their native peers. Add on the legal and possible relocation costs, I don't see how hiring H1-Bs cuts costs, other than reaping the rewards of hiring the best and the brightest from overseas.
Yeah, an H1-B application includes a Labor Condition Application (LCA), part of which specifies that the salary that will be paid is at least the mean salary for one year of experience for the specific occupation and geographic location, at time of application. I didn't see any explanation of when or where these figures were from.
/me grabs the analogy and runs for the hills...
But then over the years, McD's introduces new meals and refines older meals. It starts to taste rather good and it's not all that bad for you. You're still wondering about the guys outside the doors handing out leaflets advocating their open food stalls; food that apparently taste wonderful and make you live forever. You try them out but find the food comes in those annoying plastic wrappers that have the "handy" tabs to open them that tear off before you actually manage to break the seal, forcing you to tear them open with your teeth. When you do finally get the packet open, you find the food isn't compatible with your fork and you end up trying to eat your peas off your knife. And they don't do McRibs.
So I gather it's an open source effort to build an alternative SecondLife client. Being a client, it receives definitions and textures of objects in order to render them on screen. It was a small step to take those definitions and use them to create exact copies of objects in the game. The only difference is the copies then belong to the copier, and can have their mod/copy/transfer permissions set to whatever they like. Quite possibly a useful development/test tool. Trouble is, someone else downloaded the tool from their public SVN repository and is using it to make unauthorized copies of in-game objects.
Does that sound about right?
If so, that's a tricky one. I'm not sure how you could avoid this issue. OSS makes it easier to exploit, but even with closed source software, you can only slow someone down so much with layers of encryption, obfuscation and so on. Ultimately, the client has to be able to decode and display the content, and therefore can be copied.
I'm thinking the only course of action they can take is to identify the copies and taking action against the copiers. I was wondering if they could deduce this from some kind of log describing the object's creation. For example, if A and B are complex but identical objects (or at least identical within a tolerance), A was created before B, and B was created in a fraction of the time that A was, would that indicate that B was cloned from A? If A's creator reported seeing B's creator with the object, would this be sufficient proof that a copybot was used, in order to clobber B with the ban stick?
Cancelled my AT&T land line a few months back - without any problems, I'm glad to say.
Regardless, their online billing stuff happily continues sending "Your bill for $0.00 is ready - log in to view" emails each month until you log in and uncheck the email option.
I mean, seriously, would it have been that hard to put an "if (balance > 0)", or "if (account == active)" test before sending?
I just replaced the battery in my Acer laptop. The old one seemed to stop holding any charge at all, or just not charging. I know the charging capacity diminishes as the battery ages, but mine went from holding about an hour's-worth of power to nothing in a very short space of time. It's difficult to say exactly when it failed because during that time I almost exclusively used the laptop while on AC power, but I would have expected a more gradual decline.
The battery was a few years old, and maybe it was just its time to go. Still, reading these articles about battery recalls makes me wonder. I don't recall any mention of Sony on the battery, though.
Yep, it's been a couple of years since I lived in the UK, but it sounds like it hasn't improved a huge amount.
I used to live out in the sticks. Well out of range of DSL, but there was much rejoicing when NTL finally gave us 512K cable connections. Then I moved to Cheltenham, in the shadow of GCHQ - which I imagine to be one of the most connected places in the UK - and could I get DSL there? Could I bugger. It was a good day if the dial-up connection managed more than 40k.
They love to advertise their top speeds, but somewhere in the small print it'll say "only if you can physically spit on the exchange from your bedroom window".
I received a couple of infected messages through a Yahoo groups subscription, which comes to my gmail account. The javascript was displayed as plain text, and I could see it was issuing requests to the Yahoo webmail system to extract user IDs and contacts. As far as I could tell, if you're not reading the email from within Yahoo's webmail reader, the script is not going to achieve anything.
Thanks... the trick is finding a UK proxy. Rare as hens teeth at the best of times, and slower than stopped today.
They cut off streaming 1 minute into the broadcast, citing contractual reasons. :(
The BBC streams are locked to be viewable by UK residents only.
Being sat in the office, many of us don't have access to TVs or XM radios, which is why internet streaming would be really useful.
The closest thing I found was ESPN 360, but it was locked to a select few ISPs, ffs.
Reminds me of an idle Tuesday afternoon (UK time) back in September 2001, when yet another refresh of the /. homepage brought up a curious story about a plane in the side of a building. First thoughts were "some kind of silly advertising stunt with a giant inflatable?", but the unbelievable summary suggested otherwise. Slashdot was taking forever to load the story, so I tried BBC news... and then Sky news, then CNN, and several other news sites, finding that they were all extremely slow. Finally, we tracked down a tv set in the office and learned the full extent of the events occurring in NY. That's as close to a meltdown as I've seen, although that's probably more those particular news sites being swamped, rather than the entire net grinding to a halt.
As popular as football is, I doubt that you'll get that many people all hammering the internet simultaneously to create a full meltdown.
Absolutely.
I once worked on a PS2 game with a team of people all expecting the end product to end up on a DVD. Late on, the publisher decided that because they could save a ton of money by using CDs instead of DVDs, and we had to squeeze it all down to a single CD.
I've no idea how much it will cost to produce Blu-ray discs over DVD, but I imagine it's a substantial amount with it being a higher capacity AND a brand new format. I wouldn't be surprised if most publishers were reigning back their developers to DVD sized games for most titles, at least for a couple of years.
Unless, of course, Sony mandates that all games need to use Blu-ray. This would encourage developers to take advantage of the extra space, which should make the games look better, which in turn will make the PS3 look better. Hmm.
And to be completely fair, he shouldn't complain if the Linden contender happens to nobble some of the net packets to increase damage inflicted by 1000% during the fight.
I've never heard of computer use leading to retinal detachment before. I've had a quick search and can't find anything to support this. Does anyone have any links providing more information about this?
I read that extreme short-sightedness increases the risk of retinal detachment, but otherwise trauma seems to be the main cause. Maybe it's due to the banging of heads against walls and/or monitor when the dreaded "This application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down..." pops up seconds before you save.