Although belated, I should point out that (1) I was only giving examples and (2) even when aborting is the only option, it's far preferable to buffer overflows or other holes. Think of how the WTC towers collapsed downwards rather than toppling sideways and taking out whole blocks; it's possible to be robust even in failure.
As a (very low-level) Go player, everything I've seen, and been told by higher-level players, says that it's all about pattern recognition. By playing games upon games upon games, you apparently learn to recognize certain combinations of stones and the optimal sequences of moves from them. All the high-level players are very good at this sort of reading ahead, and it's how good you are at reading ahead that primarily determines your skill at such levels.
In fact, it would probably benefit technology and discovery more at this point to avoid standards between nations. Darwin's theories will go to work on a much grander (albeit unintended by Darwin) scale, weeding out the inferior designs and ideas, whether by minor failure or full-out destruction.
Very good point. As the developer of a fairly widely used program, I rely on just this principle to pick up ideas for new versions; there have been over a dozen derivatives of my program, and I keep watch on them and take the best ideas back for my own version. (And if I were Microsoft, I'd have/.ers screaming bloody murder at me for it, but that's another story.)
Quite possible--know your audience, and all that. I should mention that I picked this particular example only partly because it's Microsoft, and partly because it's just so dumb, even if it was fixed later (and from the source, it looks like somebody just goofed up when adding multithreading support).
Maybe one of these days I'll put some procmail source in my sig instead.
A2000 with WB2.0, and no, I was booting off HDD. Like I said, it's been too many years, but I know the BIOS startup sequence alone took at least 3-4 seconds. (Which I'd still take any day over the crazy things they install on modern PCs, but...)
Three guesses as to what the first computer I owned was, and the first two don't count. Yes, the Amiga was ultra ahead of its time, but it couldn't boot in two seconds no matter what you did to it. It's been too many years, but I'm pretty sure the best boot time I got out of it was about 10 seconds, and that without Workbench (I was very much a CLI fan even then).
While I'm in full agreement that today's programs are much fatter than those of 10 or 20 years ago, and I'll bravely resist the temptation to point fingers at Microsoft, I should point out that larger, slower programs are not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, you could get a prompt in a couple of seconds on an Apple II, Atari 400 (my personal favorite), or whatnot, but you couldn't run multiple programs at once, do filesystem operations with a mouse, etc. It takes more resources to accomplish more things, and technology hasn't necessarily been keeping up with that curve. (Though granted, there is far too much gratuitous bloat around--a minimal Linux system I keep on hand can boot in 2 seconds on a machine that takes 40 seconds to get through the BIOS startup...)
The other thing that should be done with the current level of technology, and regrettably rarely is done, is adding robustness. Array bounds checking, input sanity checking, the works. Except in very specialized cases, we have more than enough CPU power around to actually check all these things and still get done what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time (as in, less than the user will notice). Instead of assuming that a function's inputs will be within range, check that they are in range, and take some sort of error action if not, rather than blowing away random areas of memory or the like. I get frustrated every time I see people saying "extra checks are inefficient and a waste of resources" (though admittedly I was of the same mind until recently). What else are you going to do with all those spare cycles? Twiddle your thumbs?
Back in 1993, my expectations for 2003 were basically that computers would be able to do the same things faster, have more storage space, and I guess that we'd have graphical Internet browsing. And, well, computers have gotten faster (disregarding Microsoft bloat), storage has gotten bigger, and we do have graphical browsers, so hey, good enough for me.
Of course, my point of view may be tainted by having been around in 1983 as well and seeing how computers actually did advance in 10 years (answer: they got faster, bigger, and more graphical).
The GCC issue on the other hand is one party, who has not been harmed in any way, pummeling the users of a maligned company instead of the company itself. This is foolish as it creates enemies from friends.
But at the same time, it informs those users of a problem they may not have been aware of. Not the nicest way, I'll agree, but in reality that's about the only thing that will make many people sit up and look around. And at the same time, I suspect that the FSF isn't interested in keeping as friends people who would complain about the removal of SCO support, and that's 100% their decision. After all, you can't please everyone anyway.
In fact, we should really celebrate life. It's great: Superb resolution, realistic sound effects plus some exotic touch-effects!
Damn, where do you get the touch effects? I must need an upgrade...;-)
Overall, though, I agree with what you're saying, and (to be at least vaguely on topic) I think that the number of people who play online games demonstrates at least to an extent that there are plenty of people not satisfied with the world the way it is--and I think that's why players complain so much when things go wrong in online games; they want the game world to be "better" than the real one in some aspect or another. I'm just not optimistic that we (the general we) can make much improvement in the real world. Maybe I've just spent too long in the bundle of insanity that is the IT industry. <shrug>
I only skimmed the middle of your post before replying, so I didn't notice that you also make the comparison to real life. My point was that the hermit life (that's probably a bad way to put it, but nothing else comes to mind at the moment) isn't for all of us; whether good or bad, those of us who do invest time or money in material things, services, whatever, get upset if that investment is put to waste (again, not the best choice of words). That may not be ideal, yes, but it's the way people are, and it would do you well to recognize that even if you don't agree with it.
You could say exactly the same thing about the real world, you know. Get your car stolen? That's real loss. Hard drive goes up in smoke (this happened to me two days ago)? That's real loss. In the End, no, nothing matters, but until then--which is subjectively quite a long time!--being pissed is, IMNSHO, a perfectly normal and reasonable reaction.
Somebody with bad intentions hacks into the server and destroys your virtual items. Later, the hack is revealed. The sysadmin either goes to the backup or resets a few counters. Virtual items are returned to you.
I suspect that's the crux of the problem--whether or not the sysadmin would actually return the items/counters or just say "tough luck". As an off-and-on FFXI player, I've had to deal with Square taking the latter position (albeit on bugs rather than cracks) far too often. If it took you X number of days to acquire an item or the like, and through no fault of your own that item suddenly disappeared, then yes, the real time you spent acquiring that item is a real loss.
David Boies is not stupid. The GPL is a copyright agreement. Why would you think it's valid if the work in question is a derivative of someone else's work, as SCO claims?
That's a pretty big "if" (though granted Boies is being paid to think like a SCOian). If SCO's copyright claims are ruled invalid, then SCO is (or will be) violating the GPL and in for even more trouble than they were before.
It is interesting though that they're going outside the legal system in collecting damages, i.e. licensing fees.
My IANAL guess is that SCO knows full well that they're going to get blasted in court, and is trying to scrape as much money off people as they can before they get smashed into little bits of corporate kibble.
I don't know the details of this particular case, but once you have access to the save data it's easy to tweak things that look like they could cause problems. (Put yourself in the developers' shoes, and ask yourself "if I was rushed to get this out the door, where would I be likely to cut corners?") Text strings are obvious things to play with; some games compress their saved data, so you could create a bogus compressed file that expanded to some huge number of bytes and see if it crashes the game; et cetera. The "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote probably applies to finding the overflow just as much as writing the actual exploit.
I'll freely admit that I know next to nothing about.NET, so I may be drawing the wrong impression here, but reading posts here from people who (claim to) have worked in.NET give me the impression that it's designed primarily, if not solely, for ASP and similar Web-based programming, which frankly doesn't interest me much (I look on the current ASP/JSP/Flash/what-have-you rage as a passing thing; networked programs will eventually come out of the mix, but not on the browser, or at least not on the browser as we know it). Is.NET useful for anything else--server/daemon programming, game programming, or the like?
Slashdot Mirror
Came with Visual Studio 6.0. Screenshot here.
Although belated, I should point out that (1) I was only giving examples and (2) even when aborting is the only option, it's far preferable to buffer overflows or other holes. Think of how the WTC towers collapsed downwards rather than toppling sideways and taking out whole blocks; it's possible to be robust even in failure.
As a (very low-level) Go player, everything I've seen, and been told by higher-level players, says that it's all about pattern recognition. By playing games upon games upon games, you apparently learn to recognize certain combinations of stones and the optimal sequences of moves from them. All the high-level players are very good at this sort of reading ahead, and it's how good you are at reading ahead that primarily determines your skill at such levels.
Or so I hear, anyway.
(Yes, I know the answer is that nobody actually needs these new CPUs, but you know Microsoft and Intel won't stand for that...)
In fact, it would probably benefit technology and discovery more at this point to avoid standards between nations. Darwin's theories will go to work on a much grander (albeit unintended by Darwin) scale, weeding out the inferior designs and ideas, whether by minor failure or full-out destruction.
Very good point. As the developer of a fairly widely used program, I rely on just this principle to pick up ideas for new versions; there have been over a dozen derivatives of my program, and I keep watch on them and take the best ideas back for my own version. (And if I were Microsoft, I'd have /.ers screaming bloody murder at me for it, but that's another story.)
They all bought Silicon Valley stock during the dot-com bobble, and when it burst they got suicidally depressed?
Quite possible--know your audience, and all that. I should mention that I picked this particular example only partly because it's Microsoft, and partly because it's just so dumb, even if it was fixed later (and from the source, it looks like somebody just goofed up when adding multithreading support).
Maybe one of these days I'll put some procmail source in my sig instead.
A2000 with WB2.0, and no, I was booting off HDD. Like I said, it's been too many years, but I know the BIOS startup sequence alone took at least 3-4 seconds. (Which I'd still take any day over the crazy things they install on modern PCs, but...)
Here's proof (current as of when this VC was purchased: 2001) which I keep handy for disbelievers like you.
Three guesses as to what the first computer I owned was, and the first two don't count. Yes, the Amiga was ultra ahead of its time, but it couldn't boot in two seconds no matter what you did to it. It's been too many years, but I'm pretty sure the best boot time I got out of it was about 10 seconds, and that without Workbench (I was very much a CLI fan even then).
While I'm in full agreement that today's programs are much fatter than those of 10 or 20 years ago, and I'll bravely resist the temptation to point fingers at Microsoft, I should point out that larger, slower programs are not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, you could get a prompt in a couple of seconds on an Apple II, Atari 400 (my personal favorite), or whatnot, but you couldn't run multiple programs at once, do filesystem operations with a mouse, etc. It takes more resources to accomplish more things, and technology hasn't necessarily been keeping up with that curve. (Though granted, there is far too much gratuitous bloat around--a minimal Linux system I keep on hand can boot in 2 seconds on a machine that takes 40 seconds to get through the BIOS startup...)
The other thing that should be done with the current level of technology, and regrettably rarely is done, is adding robustness. Array bounds checking, input sanity checking, the works. Except in very specialized cases, we have more than enough CPU power around to actually check all these things and still get done what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time (as in, less than the user will notice). Instead of assuming that a function's inputs will be within range, check that they are in range, and take some sort of error action if not, rather than blowing away random areas of memory or the like. I get frustrated every time I see people saying "extra checks are inefficient and a waste of resources" (though admittedly I was of the same mind until recently). What else are you going to do with all those spare cycles? Twiddle your thumbs?
Back in 1993, my expectations for 2003 were basically that computers would be able to do the same things faster, have more storage space, and I guess that we'd have graphical Internet browsing. And, well, computers have gotten faster (disregarding Microsoft bloat), storage has gotten bigger, and we do have graphical browsers, so hey, good enough for me.
Of course, my point of view may be tainted by having been around in 1983 as well and seeing how computers actually did advance in 10 years (answer: they got faster, bigger, and more graphical).
POP or IMAP though, that's just dumb. What kind of moron doesn't prefer IMAP? :-)
I don't know, for my part I run an SMTP server on my machine at home and just grab everything straight off the mail spool... (:
The GCC issue on the other hand is one party, who has not been harmed in any way, pummeling the users of a maligned company instead of the company itself. This is foolish as it creates enemies from friends.
But at the same time, it informs those users of a problem they may not have been aware of. Not the nicest way, I'll agree, but in reality that's about the only thing that will make many people sit up and look around. And at the same time, I suspect that the FSF isn't interested in keeping as friends people who would complain about the removal of SCO support, and that's 100% their decision. After all, you can't please everyone anyway.
In fact, we should really celebrate life. It's great: Superb resolution, realistic sound effects plus some exotic touch-effects!
Damn, where do you get the touch effects? I must need an upgrade... ;-)
Overall, though, I agree with what you're saying, and (to be at least vaguely on topic) I think that the number of people who play online games demonstrates at least to an extent that there are plenty of people not satisfied with the world the way it is--and I think that's why players complain so much when things go wrong in online games; they want the game world to be "better" than the real one in some aspect or another. I'm just not optimistic that we (the general we) can make much improvement in the real world. Maybe I've just spent too long in the bundle of insanity that is the IT industry. <shrug>
I only skimmed the middle of your post before replying, so I didn't notice that you also make the comparison to real life. My point was that the hermit life (that's probably a bad way to put it, but nothing else comes to mind at the moment) isn't for all of us; whether good or bad, those of us who do invest time or money in material things, services, whatever, get upset if that investment is put to waste (again, not the best choice of words). That may not be ideal, yes, but it's the way people are, and it would do you well to recognize that even if you don't agree with it.
You could say exactly the same thing about the real world, you know. Get your car stolen? That's real loss. Hard drive goes up in smoke (this happened to me two days ago)? That's real loss. In the End, no, nothing matters, but until then--which is subjectively quite a long time!--being pissed is, IMNSHO, a perfectly normal and reasonable reaction.
Get a grip - its only a f**king game!
So is everything else. To each their own enjoyment.
I could make a snide remark about people who spend real money for the privilege of pretending to have sex, but I'll pass.
Somebody with bad intentions hacks into the server and destroys your virtual items. Later, the hack is revealed. The sysadmin either goes to the backup or resets a few counters. Virtual items are returned to you.
I suspect that's the crux of the problem--whether or not the sysadmin would actually return the items/counters or just say "tough luck". As an off-and-on FFXI player, I've had to deal with Square taking the latter position (albeit on bugs rather than cracks) far too often. If it took you X number of days to acquire an item or the like, and through no fault of your own that item suddenly disappeared, then yes, the real time you spent acquiring that item is a real loss.
David Boies is not stupid. The GPL is a copyright agreement. Why would you think it's valid if the work in question is a derivative of someone else's work, as SCO claims?
That's a pretty big "if" (though granted Boies is being paid to think like a SCOian). If SCO's copyright claims are ruled invalid, then SCO is (or will be) violating the GPL and in for even more trouble than they were before.
It is interesting though that they're going outside the legal system in collecting damages, i.e. licensing fees.
My IANAL guess is that SCO knows full well that they're going to get blasted in court, and is trying to scrape as much money off people as they can before they get smashed into little bits of corporate kibble.
There's something wrong with you if most of your freshman year of college is spent looking up copyright statistics.
I don't know, my freshman year (and in fact sophomore, junior, and senior years) were spent running a Web provider...
... I'm not being much help, am I?
try arguing that to someone who "LIVES" in one of these non-tangible worlds.
Well, in that case, eBay can always "SEND" some of their level-999 minions over and "KILL" the player, thereby rendering the problem "MOOT".
I don't know the details of this particular case, but once you have access to the save data it's easy to tweak things that look like they could cause problems. (Put yourself in the developers' shoes, and ask yourself "if I was rushed to get this out the door, where would I be likely to cut corners?") Text strings are obvious things to play with; some games compress their saved data, so you could create a bogus compressed file that expanded to some huge number of bytes and see if it crashes the game; et cetera. The "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote probably applies to finding the overflow just as much as writing the actual exploit.
I'll freely admit that I know next to nothing about .NET, so I may be drawing the wrong impression here, but reading posts here from people who (claim to) have worked in .NET give me the impression that it's designed primarily, if not solely, for ASP and similar Web-based programming, which frankly doesn't interest me much (I look on the current ASP/JSP/Flash/what-have-you rage as a passing thing; networked programs will eventually come out of the mix, but not on the browser, or at least not on the browser as we know it). Is .NET useful for anything else--server/daemon programming, game programming, or the like?