IMHO even games from a few years ago are looking quite good. One game I'm particularly looking forward to is X:Rebirth, and it will use "only" DirectX 9. Which is almost 10 years old according to Wikipedia. Doesn't matter. The (announced) improvements in gameplay over previous games in the X series are more important.
If your new code does what the old code did when both are fed the same input, you're good to go. Exactly how you go about setting up these tests can be a nightmare worse than dealing with the original spaghetti code, but at least that is the idea.
The sphagetti-ness of the old code often means you don't have clearly defined units and no easily understood intermediate results. So the answer is simple:
You are limited to system-level tests. That is, you feed the old code input at the user interface and look at the end result. Of course, that does not help much to understand the original spaghetti code. Your system tests merely tell you if you have sucessfully duplicated the behavior of the old system. They won't give you many clues about how to get there:-(
Even if you install it as a different user, you would need to log out of your main account every time (or, I suppose, run a secondary X server) as the rights required to display to your X server pretty much give full access to your account.
Interesting point. Leaving aside the X server issue (which I'm not an expert on), some comfortable way of running software in a less privileged sub-account would be useful sometimes. Such as "may access only its own subdirectory under $HOME". That would already stop the software from rifling though your email and such.
It has influenced my buying too. Not necessarily as a complete boycott, but I will definitely pay less for a game that requires online authentication for each start. I call it a pre-emptive compensation for the risk that it might become unusable some day.
How much of a discount I insist on depends on the track record of the publisher.
-Valve has been pretty reliable so far, even my old HalfLife 1 still works. So Valve gets away with "only" a 50% discount, compared to the same game without DRM.
-For Companies like EA, whom I consider less trustworthy, it is more like 80%.
-Distributing root kits is a complete no-no. After that I won't even look at your Free2Play games anymore. Sony (and now Ubisoft), I'm looking at you.
On top of that, there is the fact that I still have a bunch of pretty good games without DRM lying around that I haven't played through. That makes getting the latest games even more optional.
Not if our government keeps bending over when the other EU states scream for bailout money. A few more years of that, and Germany will be as bankrupt as Greece. That will be the end of German economic domination in the EU.
A disgruntled German who really dislikes his government's policy of trying to keep the Euro intact at all costs:-(
Getting a bit off topic, but I'll bite: Games publishers are increasingly using DirectX10 and DirectX11 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support). In case of Battlefield 3, DX10 is even a minimum requirement. Based on other articles and forums (not only on/.) I have the impression that the influence of the current console generation on graphics features is waning, because they can no longer keep up with current gaming PCs.
Of course, this might change with the next console generation. Which will probably support DirectX 11.1 (at least the new XBOX will do it). Then we can have the same discussion again over DirectX13;-)
A slight correction: What you need is not unlimited resources, but an economy with extremely high work productivity. High enough that the efforts of a few hobbyists are enough to sustain everyone's life. And yes, this is utopian for most fields.
There is one exception where it would work today: Standard software like operating systems, office suites and so on. Develop once, let everyone download a copy;-)
Sometimes, IKEA is weak in ways that are not obvious unless you have some experience with tinkering.
When I bought a (rather simple) desk two years ago, I've looked at IKEA too. They had a rather cheap one made of 25mm (1'') particle board with plastic "varnish" and metal table legs. Sounds not so bad, the desk at work is similar and you know you can climb on it?
Now look at the way those table legs are attached. There is a small metal disk at the top of each leg, with holes for five small chipboard screws that go into the board. So you have considerable lever action when someone pushes the thing sideways, and screws in chipboard come loose a lot easier than in wood. Too much wiggling and the thing will eventually collapse.
I ended up buying a model from a supplier of office equipment. Three times as expensive but worth it.
In theory, that is also possible in Germany, but the fees are hefty.
Here you might be better of suing them for the outstanding paycheck, even if you have to pay your own lawyer (in the first instance, there is no recovering of lawyer's fees from the loser).
Nope, that is entirely a ploy by Microsoft to mov people off WinXP. There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.
One might also wonder what the need for hardware acceleration that cannot be satisfied with DX9 is there in an office suite;-) Based on that alone, I think the suspicions about Microsoft trying to pry users off XP are justified.
I'm working for a company that still requires at least XP SP2 compatibility in new applications, because they have systems with XP SP2 in the field. Since those are medical devices, upgrading them to SP3 would require a re-validation and management prefers to avoid that. Sometimes, even requests for Windows 2000 compatibility come up because some customer still use ancient models with Win2000...
I don't think so. There is too much of a market for "classic" PCs on the server side. Worst case:
Typical consumer PC hardware will disappear and we'll have to stuff server processors and mainboards into our cases, at a higher price. I'm assuming that cases will still be available, those can be made by relatively small companies and I'm sure someone will cater to the PC enthusiast market.
On the software side, I guess it is possible that the big vendors focus more on consoles, smartphones and whatever the industry likes. But I think there are enough open source alternatives to make it feasible for most end users to go open source only. You might have to make do without Battlefield VI, though;-)
So there are a couple of problems with what you said. First, there's no data to perfectly prove a relationship between downloads and selling losses because we can't test this in a vacuum, with two perfectly equally desirably products where one can be pirated and the other can't. So you're always basing stuff on estimates, which means any argument will eventually boil down to you saying "you can't prove that was a lost sale" and the other guy saying "the effect is statistically significant, we're just sure exactly how much, but that makes a bad sound bite so I simplified it"
To some extent this has been tested with e-books. Baen Books (http://www.baen.com/) has introduced the Free Library a few years ago, where they made some of their older titles available as legal downloads, even without DRM. So there was suddenly a perfect opportunity to get some books for free, which were previously only available on paper and for $.
The result was that sales of the paper versions went up, not down. Obviously the marketing effect exceeded the loss from people who chose to download and not to pay for the e-books.
Now it is possible that this went at the expense of other authors, because the people who bought stuff from Free Library authors found their reading needs satisfied and bought less elsewhere. But that would be difficult to prove.
In the end, we still have only a gut feeling that piracy hurts business, but where actual effects can be measured, the effects of piracy seem to be small or even negative..
Maybe the vinyl as such. But another limiting factor is the pre-amplifier stage for the signal from the magnetic cardridge. Back in the 1990s, MM cardridges with cheap pre-amplifiers used to have a S/N ratio of around 50 dB. I remember how turning up the volume without actually playing a record produced sigificant noise in the speakers.
Some expensive equipment offered a few db more of dynamic range due to less noisy pre-amps, but I cannot remember a review of an amplifier that provided a S/N ratio of 60 or better. Maybe there has been some progress in low-noise amplifiers since the 90s, but to be honest I have not followed recent developments...
I don't mind compression features on the playback side, if it helps to cope with a bad environment. Or maybe to cope with a transmission channel of limited quality (FM broadcasting has a somewhat limited dynamic range and may profit from moderate compression). But applying it in the studio sucks, because then everyone has their playback quality reduced even in good listening environments.
Not really the fault of the medium. It is much easier to avoid hitting the limits by accident on the CD. If you leave, say, 20 dB of headroom for really loud peaks, you still have a signal to noise ratio better than 70 dB. That is more than the entire dynamic range for vinyl.
The problem is (again) with the loudness wars. If you don't leave headroom, but master a CDs as loud as possible, you get indeed more nasty clipping than with analog equipment. Producers and sound engineers abusing the CD give it a bad name
Depends a lot on the implementation though. Your description sounds like you have a pretty well designed system, but there is a lot of stuff around that seems designed for Joe "Turn it up to 11" Sixpack. My brother, for instance, has an old stereo amp lying around where loudness merely seems to boost the bass.
"Big label" often translates to "mainstream pop music", because that's where the most money is. IMHO mainstream pop music is also the most produced-to-death kind of music, so GP has a point there. If you happen to like other kinds of music where not so much money is involved, there is a much better chance to find something unspoiled by the industry. Of course, the low budgets also tend to limit the recordings in other ways - you may sometimes run across something that sounds like a garage recording;-)
You got a point there - for a given thing you want to cut. In the case of little Max, he might just find something tougher that he can attack with all of his strength...
I have a six year old nephew, and his parents allow him to use a fork and a knife at the table. Which seems safe enough as it is a normal table knife, read not very sharp. But considering how he attacks his food with more enthusiasm than skill, I'd have some reservations about giving him a really sharp knife;-)
6. Use correct names for software systems, like not "Android Ice Scream Sandwich" but "Android 4.0" as that way people know better what it is about, so leave code names to ignorance nerds and wannabe teens.
Depends on how much of a hash the marketing makes of the names. With Android 4.0 you have picked an example where the official name is actually meaningful. So far, so good.
But on the hardware side, the codenames are often more useful to identify the product generation of a certain model. As a particular bad example, consider Nvidia's GT 640: three different models under the same name. Two new ones in 28 nm and one obsolete one in 40 nm manufacturing. With codenames (in this case "Kepler" versus "Fermi"), you can at least tell which is the obsolete one;-)
The US haven't made any comment on it one way or another; they're about as discrete as it gets.
From the NY times article: American intelligence agencies, in an unusually blunt public criticism of China and Russia, reported to Congress... That amounts to a public announcement. By a government agency. It is pretty much a given that such reports find their way into the press.
The problem for the US is that they just can't win no matter what they do. It's a lose-lose-lose-n*lose situation.
They could win in the reputation department if they would not use the same methods as their opponents. Of course, that would amount to a disadvantage in getting things done. But by using tools like Stuxnet and Flame on other countries, the US put themselves on the same level as China (for instance) in terms of international relations.
At this points, only apologists like you expect the world to see them in a more favorable light than China.
Obviously we are talking about different aspects of "illegal". Your point was that no US law was broken. That might even be correct (although I don't trust any intelligence agency in that regard, including those of my own country, Germany).
My point was that the US tend to be rather cavalier about ignoring the laws of other countries, and often act like this is their god-given right. While most other contries try at least to be discreet about it.
This tends to come across as arrogant, and sometimes as hypocritical when other countries mess with their computers and the US government complains about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/world/us-report-accuses-china-and-russia-of-internet-spying.html This news is also an example of other countries trying to be discreet about it: The Chinese obviously don't want to be publicly connected to a systematic hacking campaign. Their denials may not be very credible, but they still make the effort...
You have a point about things not being black and white.
But from those who advocate partial solutions, I expect that they define clearly what they consider "bad things". And that there are checks against abuse of the system, such as the web site of the political opposition "accidentally" being blocked.
I guess GP meant "illegal according to the laws of the countries where Stuxnet and Flame were used". This may or may not be correct (who on/. knows the details of Iranian laws about computer sabotage?).
But your answer illustrates one of the reasons why the US are not very popular in the rest of the world: The attitude of "only our laws count, fuck the rest of the world".
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO even games from a few years ago are looking quite good.
One game I'm particularly looking forward to is X:Rebirth, and it will use "only" DirectX 9. Which is almost 10 years old according to Wikipedia. Doesn't matter. The (announced) improvements in gameplay over previous games in the X series are more important.
If your new code does what the old code did when both are fed the same input, you're good to go. Exactly how you go about setting up these tests can be a nightmare worse than dealing with the original spaghetti code, but at least that is the idea.
The sphagetti-ness of the old code often means you don't have clearly defined units and no easily understood intermediate results. So the answer is simple: :-(
You are limited to system-level tests. That is, you feed the old code input at the user interface and look at the end result. Of course, that does not help much to understand the original spaghetti code. Your system tests merely tell you if you have sucessfully duplicated the behavior of the old system. They won't give you many clues about how to get there
Even if you install it as a different user, you would need to log out of your main account every time (or, I suppose, run a secondary X server) as the rights required to display to your X server pretty much give full access to your account.
Interesting point. Leaving aside the X server issue (which I'm not an expert on), some comfortable way of running software in a less privileged sub-account would be useful sometimes. Such as "may access only its own subdirectory under $HOME". That would already stop the software from rifling though your email and such.
It has influenced my buying too. Not necessarily as a complete boycott, but I will definitely pay less for a game that requires online authentication for each start. I call it a pre-emptive compensation for the risk that it might become unusable some day.
How much of a discount I insist on depends on the track record of the publisher.
-Valve has been pretty reliable so far, even my old HalfLife 1 still works. So Valve gets away with "only" a 50% discount, compared to the same game without DRM.
-For Companies like EA, whom I consider less trustworthy, it is more like 80%.
-Distributing root kits is a complete no-no. After that I won't even look at your Free2Play games anymore. Sony (and now Ubisoft), I'm looking at you.
On top of that, there is the fact that I still have a bunch of pretty good games without DRM lying around that I haven't played through. That makes getting the latest games even more optional.
Not if our government keeps bending over when the other EU states scream for bailout money. A few more years of that, and Germany will be as bankrupt as Greece. That will be the end of German economic domination in the EU.
A disgruntled German who really dislikes his government's policy of trying to keep the Euro intact at all costs :-(
Getting a bit off topic, but I'll bite: /.) I have the impression that the influence of the current console generation on graphics features is waning, because they can no longer keep up with current gaming PCs.
Games publishers are increasingly using DirectX10 and DirectX11 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support). In case of Battlefield 3, DX10 is even a minimum requirement.
Based on other articles and forums (not only on
Of course, this might change with the next console generation. Which will probably support DirectX 11.1 (at least the new XBOX will do it). Then we can have the same discussion again over DirectX13 ;-)
A slight correction:
What you need is not unlimited resources, but an economy with extremely high work productivity. High enough that the efforts of a few hobbyists are enough to sustain everyone's life. And yes, this is utopian for most fields.
There is one exception where it would work today: ;-)
Standard software like operating systems, office suites and so on. Develop once, let everyone download a copy
Sometimes, IKEA is weak in ways that are not obvious unless you have some experience with tinkering.
When I bought a (rather simple) desk two years ago, I've looked at IKEA too. They had a rather cheap one made of 25mm (1'') particle board with plastic "varnish" and metal table legs. Sounds not so bad, the desk at work is similar and you know you can climb on it?
Now look at the way those table legs are attached. There is a small metal disk at the top of each leg, with holes for five small chipboard screws that go into the board. So you have considerable lever action when someone pushes the thing sideways, and screws in chipboard come loose a lot easier than in wood. Too much wiggling and the thing will eventually collapse.
I ended up buying a model from a supplier of office equipment. Three times as expensive but worth it.
In theory, that is also possible in Germany, but the fees are hefty.
Here you might be better of suing them for the outstanding paycheck, even if you have to pay your own lawyer (in the first instance, there is no recovering of lawyer's fees from the loser).
Nope, that is entirely a ploy by Microsoft to mov people off WinXP. There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.
One might also wonder what the need for hardware acceleration that cannot be satisfied with DX9 is there in an office suite ;-)
Based on that alone, I think the suspicions about Microsoft trying to pry users off XP are justified.
I'm working for a company that still requires at least XP SP2 compatibility in new applications, because they have systems with XP SP2 in the field. Since those are medical devices, upgrading them to SP3 would require a re-validation and management prefers to avoid that. Sometimes, even requests for Windows 2000 compatibility come up because some customer still use ancient models with Win2000...
I don't think so. There is too much of a market for "classic" PCs on the server side. Worst case:
Typical consumer PC hardware will disappear and we'll have to stuff server processors and mainboards into our cases, at a higher price. I'm assuming that cases will still be available, those can be made by relatively small companies and I'm sure someone will cater to the PC enthusiast market.
On the software side, I guess it is possible that the big vendors focus more on consoles, smartphones and whatever the industry likes. But I think there are enough open source alternatives to make it feasible for most end users to go open source only. You might have to make do without Battlefield VI, though ;-)
So there are a couple of problems with what you said. First, there's no data to perfectly prove a relationship between downloads and selling losses because we can't test this in a vacuum, with two perfectly equally desirably products where one can be pirated and the other can't. So you're always basing stuff on estimates, which means any argument will eventually boil down to you saying "you can't prove that was a lost sale" and the other guy saying "the effect is statistically significant, we're just sure exactly how much, but that makes a bad sound bite so I simplified it"
To some extent this has been tested with e-books. Baen Books (http://www.baen.com/) has introduced the Free Library a few years ago, where they made some of their older titles available as legal downloads, even without DRM. So there was suddenly a perfect opportunity to get some books for free, which were previously only available on paper and for $.
The result was that sales of the paper versions went up, not down. Obviously the marketing effect exceeded the loss from people who chose to download and not to pay for the e-books.
Now it is possible that this went at the expense of other authors, because the people who bought stuff from Free Library authors found their reading needs satisfied and bought less elsewhere. But that would be difficult to prove.
In the end, we still have only a gut feeling that piracy hurts business, but where actual effects can be measured, the effects of piracy seem to be small or even negative..
Maybe the vinyl as such. But another limiting factor is the pre-amplifier stage for the signal from the magnetic cardridge.
Back in the 1990s, MM cardridges with cheap pre-amplifiers used to have a S/N ratio of around 50 dB. I remember how turning up the volume without actually playing a record produced sigificant noise in the speakers.
Some expensive equipment offered a few db more of dynamic range due to less noisy pre-amps, but I cannot remember a review of an amplifier that provided a S/N ratio of 60 or better. Maybe there has been some progress in low-noise amplifiers since the 90s, but to be honest I have not followed recent developments...
I don't mind compression features on the playback side, if it helps to cope with a bad environment. Or maybe to cope with a transmission channel of limited quality (FM broadcasting has a somewhat limited dynamic range and may profit from moderate compression).
But applying it in the studio sucks, because then everyone has their playback quality reduced even in good listening environments.
Not really the fault of the medium. It is much easier to avoid hitting the limits by accident on the CD.
If you leave, say, 20 dB of headroom for really loud peaks, you still have a signal to noise ratio better than 70 dB. That is more than the entire dynamic range for vinyl.
The problem is (again) with the loudness wars. If you don't leave headroom, but master a CDs as loud as possible, you get indeed more nasty clipping than with analog equipment. Producers and sound engineers abusing the CD give it a bad name
Depends a lot on the implementation though. Your description sounds like you have a pretty well designed system, but there is a lot of stuff around that seems designed for Joe "Turn it up to 11" Sixpack.
My brother, for instance, has an old stereo amp lying around where loudness merely seems to boost the bass.
"Big label" often translates to "mainstream pop music", because that's where the most money is. IMHO mainstream pop music is also the most produced-to-death kind of music, so GP has a point there. ;-)
If you happen to like other kinds of music where not so much money is involved, there is a much better chance to find something unspoiled by the industry. Of course, the low budgets also tend to limit the recordings in other ways - you may sometimes run across something that sounds like a garage recording
You got a point there - for a given thing you want to cut. In the case of little Max, he might just find something tougher that he can attack with all of his strength...
I have a six year old nephew, and his parents allow him to use a fork and a knife at the table. Which seems safe enough as it is a normal table knife, read not very sharp. But considering how he attacks his food with more enthusiasm than skill, I'd have some reservations about giving him a really sharp knife ;-)
6. Use correct names for software systems, like not "Android Ice Scream Sandwich" but "Android 4.0" as that way people know better what it is about, so leave code names to ignorance nerds and wannabe teens.
Depends on how much of a hash the marketing makes of the names. With Android 4.0 you have picked an example where the official name is actually meaningful. So far, so good.
But on the hardware side, the codenames are often more useful to identify the product generation of a certain model. As a particular bad example, consider Nvidia's GT 640: three different models under the same name. Two new ones in 28 nm and one obsolete one in 40 nm manufacturing. ;-)
With codenames (in this case "Kepler" versus "Fermi"), you can at least tell which is the obsolete one
The US haven't made any comment on it one way or another; they're about as discrete as it gets.
From the NY times article:
American intelligence agencies, in an unusually blunt public criticism of China and Russia, reported to Congress...
That amounts to a public announcement. By a government agency. It is pretty much a given that such reports find their way into the press.
The problem for the US is that they just can't win no matter what they do. It's a lose-lose-lose-n*lose situation.
They could win in the reputation department if they would not use the same methods as their opponents. Of course, that would amount to a disadvantage in getting things done. But by using tools like Stuxnet and Flame on other countries, the US put themselves on the same level as China (for instance) in terms of international relations.
At this points, only apologists like you expect the world to see them in a more favorable light than China.
Obviously we are talking about different aspects of "illegal". Your point was that no US law was broken. That might even be correct (although I don't trust any intelligence agency in that regard, including those of my own country, Germany).
My point was that the US tend to be rather cavalier about ignoring the laws of other countries, and often act like this is their god-given right. While most other contries try at least to be discreet about it.
This tends to come across as arrogant, and sometimes as hypocritical when other countries mess with their computers and the US government complains about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/world/us-report-accuses-china-and-russia-of-internet-spying.html
This news is also an example of other countries trying to be discreet about it:
The Chinese obviously don't want to be publicly connected to a systematic hacking campaign. Their denials may not be very credible, but they still make the effort...
You have a point about things not being black and white.
But from those who advocate partial solutions, I expect that they define clearly what they consider "bad things". And that there are checks against abuse of the system, such as the web site of the political opposition "accidentally" being blocked.
In the past, some secret filter list have been leaked and it was promptly discovered that they did not restrict themselves to "extreme cases".
Here is an example from 2009: http://mattcbr.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/australia-internet-filter-list-leaked/
I guess GP meant "illegal according to the laws of the countries where Stuxnet and Flame were used". This may or may not be correct (who on /. knows the details of Iranian laws about computer sabotage?).
But your answer illustrates one of the reasons why the US are not very popular in the rest of the world:
The attitude of "only our laws count, fuck the rest of the world".