They're naming the process after the original concept that demonstrates it's not an an original or novel concept and they still got the fucking patent approved? What does it take to get a patent request rejected these days?
You're still talking about sending an http request per guess. If there is no parallelisation then that's waiting at least 100ms there and back per guess, if you got an optimistic 10 guesses per second, you're still looking at around a year to crack a moderately secure password. You should not be giving your data to anyone that can't detect that and most physical media encryption should have enough built in delay to prevent more than a few guesses per second to prevent timely brute force attacks.
EA is a publisher, not a developer. As a publisher they don't give two shits about how long lived a player base is or the health of their developers. They don't care about big the modding community is for their games they don't care about making third party tools to allow the community around a game to extend it and make it better. In fact, what they want is for you to pay 60 bucks, consume the game's content and in two weeks be ready to buy another one of their titles because they want the fastest ROI possible to funnel that money into a another developer and churn out another half finished piece of crap.
Not only do they not care about the popularity of a single title in a franchise or the value they are giving players in terms of replayability and quantity and quality of content, they don't care about the developers. The usual deal is EA buys up a popular developer who just released a great title that was very popular and profitable. Then they push them to release a sequel as quickly as possible. When the game is released, initial sales are high, then as people realize who awful the game is, sales drop off, excitement for the next title drops off and the developer collapses as their recent portfolio is terrible and all their goodwill is depleted. EA then buys up a new developer, rinse and repeat.
When you buy EA games, you make gaming a little bit worse. Support independent developers not tied to a publisher
Coding standards are important. What you're describing is much more code formatting, most decent IDE's can accept coding templates that will allow the auto format feature to conform to your company's formatting standards. When I think coding standards I think, defensively checking for null values, not chaining method calls, always using braces with if statements for java users and keeping code complexity as low as possible while meeting the requirements. The goals of coding standards are to keep code human readable and avoid common pitfalls of bad coding habits. Besides, you should take pride in your written code and make it as presentable as possible.
I do not support the notion that physical medium for an intellectual property is valid as a resellable product. It worked when it was difficult to produce such mediums, but such challenges have all but disappeared. I refuse to buy a piece of IP as a physical medium, have it treated like a license to use, and then be forced to rebuy if it is damaged.
Take Redbox for example. It is insane that we have vending machines selling pieces of plastic and aluminium that we are valuing so much that people are stealing them. Imagine if you had to retake your driving test if your license was lost or destroyed or reapply for citizenship if you lost your green card. I will not be shafted by the use of a physical medium as a license agreement.
The law has to do with export control. The purpose of it is to enforce trade sanctions, embargoes and to prevent commodities that may have a dual military use(tons of electronic devices fall into this category for one reason or another and the iPhone probably does too.). Violating export law is a big deal, penalties can be up to a $500,000 or 10 years in prison. If you're working in the Apple Store at the mall you probably don't want to risk those penalties by selling to someone you have a reasonable suspicion is going to try to export those phones.
Congrats you're an edge case! Most people recognize that your code should be written to meet the requirements of the system and yeah, if you're writing code that needs to loop over a million tuples of structured data then writing logic from scratch to deal with the error handling cleanly and efficiently is a good idea. If the error is with complex data such as "the file uploaded was not a recognized image format" then you're not really going to find a much less expensive way, both in developer time and computational time than catching the exception from the method that was used to parse the file expected to be an image. While people like you working in such problem domains are greatly appreciated, yours is not the only space.
This. It's not difficult to write good defensive programs that check for nulls before performing operations and can fairly consistently never raise an exception. However, most programs need to handle inputs from other applications that the program cannot guarantee are valid, a lot of complex inputs cannot be verified by simply null checks. Additionally any developer who writes code that touches the internet(i.e. most of us) have to cope with unreliable services, deployment engineers, or worse the lack thereof setting up applications with incorrect configurations, bad inputs and network failures.
What a try catch block should really be used for, is a conscious decision point to identify where a valid program might meet an error conditions and deal with the implications of that error. Maybe the error is not finding crucial initialization parameters and all you can do is log an error, set a pretty error message for the user and kill the program. Maybe you can flush the current parameters and try again with some defaults. Maybe you can still run but with impaired functionality. Maybe you are a secondary function and it's ok if you fail but you need to let the user know.
The author's arguments boil down to "try catch blocks make my code look ugly." There is no valid solution to error handling that doesn't involve developers proactively identifying and addressing unreliable operations. Any valid solution that isn't current exception handling is going to look a lot like it because error handling is not some boilerplate task that you can wave a magic wand at and make disappear.
Good luck finding any Java or C libraries that handle network traffic that won't occasionally throw an exception from an inherently unreliable service.
For a lot of people who are serious gamers and actually computer literate, Windows is very grudgingly tolerated simply because it is the platform with the most titles. It has zero other redeeming features. It's less stable, poorer memory management and the core OS been demonstrated time and again to be about 25% more bloated than the Linux kernel. There are a lot of people who live and work in Linux and do not want to have to split their time between two OSes to have a non shitty work environment at home and be able to game as well. People also want the developers to have powerful tools. Directx is a bloated piece of proprietary shit that developers cannot look through to debug their code, most of it is guess work and trial and error to figure out what the most optimal means of doing something with it is. Opensource graphics libraries and opensource graphics drivers will make better faster games. Less black boxes means better understanding means better code means better code.
Because if you're not running low end gear like some user tend to have a hard on for it's actually nice to have a pretty interface. If you're only wasting memory and cycles on it when your machine is at rest and it's a pitiful amount of resources for the system you're on then there's no harm in it. Why does every single XFCE user need to come into every Unity and Plasma article and and squeal with indignation like there's a catastrophic world wide memory shortage. If you're running XFCE, LXDE or any DE designed for low end hardware you're probably not playing games.
There is a major difference between upgrading from windows 7 to 8 ass there was from xp to vista or xp to windows 7. XP came about before things like wireless G was ubiquitous. It didn't handle a lot of web frameworks very well and it was frequently populated with applications that look far shinier than it did. Combine that with the large time gap between OSes, most people were running XP on laptops with external pci wireless cards or no wireless at all and they were seeing friends, family, and coworkers with sleeker, faster, easier to use laptops that just worked with any wireless network they were in range of and actually like similar in quality aesthetically with all of the applications people were running on it.
Nobody has a problem with their current version of windows 7 where they're thinking "If only I had a new windows 8 laptop this would be so much faster/easier/less frustrating etc". In fact, the processing power required to complete most tasks your average lay windows user does has pretty much stagnated over the past five years. Screen resolutions are virtually unchanged for most; Web browsing, email and productivity apps are pretty much at a stand still processing wise. The biggest changes in leaps and bounds have been internet bandwidth and the ability for network cards to process internet bandwidth has never been a bottleneck. This is why tablets are starting to takeover for lay computer users, because the stagnation in processor requirements have allowed smaller form factor hardware to catch up.
All in all, for most user upgrading doesn't mean a shiny new toy, it means work learning a new interface. Combine that with cost and the fact that it offers no solutions to problems or limitations they are currently having with windows 7 means nobody really wants it.
What we might see then is a kind of hybridization of PC and console hardware, which I'm sure PC developers would love, soon everyone will want to be distributing hardware that is compatible with the "steambox specification" and developers will have to optimize their games for a lot less hardware.
You know they don't necessarily have to release the console themselves. They could easily make it an open platform and let Asus, Samsung, and other PC vendors make their own consoles based on it. Given that Valves hardware department can be counted on one hand, this is likely what's going to happen. You just need to be able to optimize against commonly used hardware, optimize the opensource graphics drivers and design specifications and maybe even produce a few controllers and peripherals. They would basically just be creating the console to enable their distribution system to expand into a new market. To that end, having someone else make the hardware instead of making it yourself at cost or even a loss is a much better scenario.
Steam likely reduces the rate of piracy among PC gamers because it actually offers some really good benefits over piracy and buying in store. When you buy through steam you can always redownload the game, scratched your black ops 2 dvd? Fuck you buy another one. Your rig's harddisk failed? Redownload the game free of charge as many times as you like; I know that any game I buy on steam I will have until the service dies at which point the game will likely be freeware anyway. It offers a lot of stability as well. If I pirate a game on pc then I would have top find a new crack for the executable every time I wanted to play on the latest patch. Steam will automatically update my games for me and I have a reasonable that everything will work if I meet the hardware specs for the game and it was developed in the last 5 years.
Combine the low prices, convenience features, and permanence that physical media doesn't offer, a lot of people prefer to buy games through steam rather than pirate; At least anyone with a reasonable amount of disposable income.
No we would just be using something else. Very rarely are someone or something's inventions non obvious that wouldn't soon be developed by someone else in a slightly different form.
Agreed. In order for a developer to royally screw a project up, there has to be systemic failures in process. It means he didn't have a second pair of eyes reviewing his code and it means there was no QC resource. Combined those two are indicative of gross negligence on management's part and they got what was coming to them. If someone bluffs their way through a technical and an HR interview and lands a job, initial training and a good development process should have the guy back out the door in the span of a week or two.
You're an idiot. Bush ran against two very uninspiring candidates, the first one arguably having his base split by the green party candidate and could have won. During the second election the full consequences of relaxed regulations on wall street, the mounting debt from 2 wars and the well hidden but inevitable housing market crash had not come to fruition yet. By the time the 2008 election had come around all of them had been realized. There is no fucking way Bush could have ever won a third term if such a thing existed.
I think in rare cases it can help, but it largely impairs your ability to code. A small amount of substance use can slightly impair the brain and allow you to be less rigid in your thinking and get past a block by considering valid ideas you would immediately dismiss otherwise. It's the same way a small amount of alcohol in your blood will impair motor function a small amount to act as a muscle relaxant which can help smooth out your motion and make you more precise at certain tasks, like a game of darts or pool, but it very quickly becomes a serious impairment.
These are basically crude solutions to the fact that our brains are prone to overfitting our patterns for how to come to a solutions. Yes it can help, but 9/10 it is probably more harmful and there certainly isn't some hidden potential that is unlocked by regular substance use and there are certainly means of getting past code blocks or coming up with more elegant solutions that don't require it. If you came up with a great idea while using, there are was probably a safer way to get the creative juices lowing without it.
Slashdot Mirror
They're naming the process after the original concept that demonstrates it's not an an original or novel concept and they still got the fucking patent approved? What does it take to get a patent request rejected these days?
You're still talking about sending an http request per guess. If there is no parallelisation then that's waiting at least 100ms there and back per guess, if you got an optimistic 10 guesses per second, you're still looking at around a year to crack a moderately secure password. You should not be giving your data to anyone that can't detect that and most physical media encryption should have enough built in delay to prevent more than a few guesses per second to prevent timely brute force attacks.
EA is a publisher, not a developer. As a publisher they don't give two shits about how long lived a player base is or the health of their developers. They don't care about big the modding community is for their games they don't care about making third party tools to allow the community around a game to extend it and make it better. In fact, what they want is for you to pay 60 bucks, consume the game's content and in two weeks be ready to buy another one of their titles because they want the fastest ROI possible to funnel that money into a another developer and churn out another half finished piece of crap. Not only do they not care about the popularity of a single title in a franchise or the value they are giving players in terms of replayability and quantity and quality of content, they don't care about the developers. The usual deal is EA buys up a popular developer who just released a great title that was very popular and profitable. Then they push them to release a sequel as quickly as possible. When the game is released, initial sales are high, then as people realize who awful the game is, sales drop off, excitement for the next title drops off and the developer collapses as their recent portfolio is terrible and all their goodwill is depleted. EA then buys up a new developer, rinse and repeat. When you buy EA games, you make gaming a little bit worse. Support independent developers not tied to a publisher
Coding standards are important. What you're describing is much more code formatting, most decent IDE's can accept coding templates that will allow the auto format feature to conform to your company's formatting standards. When I think coding standards I think, defensively checking for null values, not chaining method calls, always using braces with if statements for java users and keeping code complexity as low as possible while meeting the requirements. The goals of coding standards are to keep code human readable and avoid common pitfalls of bad coding habits. Besides, you should take pride in your written code and make it as presentable as possible.
I do not support the notion that physical medium for an intellectual property is valid as a resellable product. It worked when it was difficult to produce such mediums, but such challenges have all but disappeared. I refuse to buy a piece of IP as a physical medium, have it treated like a license to use, and then be forced to rebuy if it is damaged.
Take Redbox for example. It is insane that we have vending machines selling pieces of plastic and aluminium that we are valuing so much that people are stealing them. Imagine if you had to retake your driving test if your license was lost or destroyed or reapply for citizenship if you lost your green card. I will not be shafted by the use of a physical medium as a license agreement.
The law has to do with export control. The purpose of it is to enforce trade sanctions, embargoes and to prevent commodities that may have a dual military use(tons of electronic devices fall into this category for one reason or another and the iPhone probably does too.). Violating export law is a big deal, penalties can be up to a $500,000 or 10 years in prison. If you're working in the Apple Store at the mall you probably don't want to risk those penalties by selling to someone you have a reasonable suspicion is going to try to export those phones.
Congrats you're an edge case! Most people recognize that your code should be written to meet the requirements of the system and yeah, if you're writing code that needs to loop over a million tuples of structured data then writing logic from scratch to deal with the error handling cleanly and efficiently is a good idea. If the error is with complex data such as "the file uploaded was not a recognized image format" then you're not really going to find a much less expensive way, both in developer time and computational time than catching the exception from the method that was used to parse the file expected to be an image. While people like you working in such problem domains are greatly appreciated, yours is not the only space.
This. It's not difficult to write good defensive programs that check for nulls before performing operations and can fairly consistently never raise an exception. However, most programs need to handle inputs from other applications that the program cannot guarantee are valid, a lot of complex inputs cannot be verified by simply null checks. Additionally any developer who writes code that touches the internet(i.e. most of us) have to cope with unreliable services, deployment engineers, or worse the lack thereof setting up applications with incorrect configurations, bad inputs and network failures.
What a try catch block should really be used for, is a conscious decision point to identify where a valid program might meet an error conditions and deal with the implications of that error. Maybe the error is not finding crucial initialization parameters and all you can do is log an error, set a pretty error message for the user and kill the program. Maybe you can flush the current parameters and try again with some defaults. Maybe you can still run but with impaired functionality. Maybe you are a secondary function and it's ok if you fail but you need to let the user know.
The author's arguments boil down to "try catch blocks make my code look ugly." There is no valid solution to error handling that doesn't involve developers proactively identifying and addressing unreliable operations. Any valid solution that isn't current exception handling is going to look a lot like it because error handling is not some boilerplate task that you can wave a magic wand at and make disappear.
Good luck finding any Java or C libraries that handle network traffic that won't occasionally throw an exception from an inherently unreliable service.
For a lot of people who are serious gamers and actually computer literate, Windows is very grudgingly tolerated simply because it is the platform with the most titles. It has zero other redeeming features. It's less stable, poorer memory management and the core OS been demonstrated time and again to be about 25% more bloated than the Linux kernel. There are a lot of people who live and work in Linux and do not want to have to split their time between two OSes to have a non shitty work environment at home and be able to game as well. People also want the developers to have powerful tools. Directx is a bloated piece of proprietary shit that developers cannot look through to debug their code, most of it is guess work and trial and error to figure out what the most optimal means of doing something with it is. Opensource graphics libraries and opensource graphics drivers will make better faster games. Less black boxes means better understanding means better code means better code.
It also always seems to be the US and the third world where people frequently die of treatable diseases.
Because if you're not running low end gear like some user tend to have a hard on for it's actually nice to have a pretty interface. If you're only wasting memory and cycles on it when your machine is at rest and it's a pitiful amount of resources for the system you're on then there's no harm in it. Why does every single XFCE user need to come into every Unity and Plasma article and and squeal with indignation like there's a catastrophic world wide memory shortage. If you're running XFCE, LXDE or any DE designed for low end hardware you're probably not playing games.
There is a major difference between upgrading from windows 7 to 8 ass there was from xp to vista or xp to windows 7. XP came about before things like wireless G was ubiquitous. It didn't handle a lot of web frameworks very well and it was frequently populated with applications that look far shinier than it did. Combine that with the large time gap between OSes, most people were running XP on laptops with external pci wireless cards or no wireless at all and they were seeing friends, family, and coworkers with sleeker, faster, easier to use laptops that just worked with any wireless network they were in range of and actually like similar in quality aesthetically with all of the applications people were running on it.
Nobody has a problem with their current version of windows 7 where they're thinking "If only I had a new windows 8 laptop this would be so much faster/easier/less frustrating etc". In fact, the processing power required to complete most tasks your average lay windows user does has pretty much stagnated over the past five years. Screen resolutions are virtually unchanged for most; Web browsing, email and productivity apps are pretty much at a stand still processing wise. The biggest changes in leaps and bounds have been internet bandwidth and the ability for network cards to process internet bandwidth has never been a bottleneck. This is why tablets are starting to takeover for lay computer users, because the stagnation in processor requirements have allowed smaller form factor hardware to catch up.
All in all, for most user upgrading doesn't mean a shiny new toy, it means work learning a new interface. Combine that with cost and the fact that it offers no solutions to problems or limitations they are currently having with windows 7 means nobody really wants it.
What we might see then is a kind of hybridization of PC and console hardware, which I'm sure PC developers would love, soon everyone will want to be distributing hardware that is compatible with the "steambox specification" and developers will have to optimize their games for a lot less hardware.
You know they don't necessarily have to release the console themselves. They could easily make it an open platform and let Asus, Samsung, and other PC vendors make their own consoles based on it. Given that Valves hardware department can be counted on one hand, this is likely what's going to happen. You just need to be able to optimize against commonly used hardware, optimize the opensource graphics drivers and design specifications and maybe even produce a few controllers and peripherals. They would basically just be creating the console to enable their distribution system to expand into a new market. To that end, having someone else make the hardware instead of making it yourself at cost or even a loss is a much better scenario.
There isn''t going to be a year of desktop linux. It's going to be decade of desktop linux.
Steam likely reduces the rate of piracy among PC gamers because it actually offers some really good benefits over piracy and buying in store. When you buy through steam you can always redownload the game, scratched your black ops 2 dvd? Fuck you buy another one. Your rig's harddisk failed? Redownload the game free of charge as many times as you like; I know that any game I buy on steam I will have until the service dies at which point the game will likely be freeware anyway. It offers a lot of stability as well. If I pirate a game on pc then I would have top find a new crack for the executable every time I wanted to play on the latest patch. Steam will automatically update my games for me and I have a reasonable that everything will work if I meet the hardware specs for the game and it was developed in the last 5 years.
Combine the low prices, convenience features, and permanence that physical media doesn't offer, a lot of people prefer to buy games through steam rather than pirate; At least anyone with a reasonable amount of disposable income.
Remember to complete your sentences when criticizing other people's grammar.
No we would just be using something else. Very rarely are someone or something's inventions non obvious that wouldn't soon be developed by someone else in a slightly different form.
Agreed. In order for a developer to royally screw a project up, there has to be systemic failures in process. It means he didn't have a second pair of eyes reviewing his code and it means there was no QC resource. Combined those two are indicative of gross negligence on management's part and they got what was coming to them. If someone bluffs their way through a technical and an HR interview and lands a job, initial training and a good development process should have the guy back out the door in the span of a week or two.
You're an idiot. Bush ran against two very uninspiring candidates, the first one arguably having his base split by the green party candidate and could have won. During the second election the full consequences of relaxed regulations on wall street, the mounting debt from 2 wars and the well hidden but inevitable housing market crash had not come to fruition yet. By the time the 2008 election had come around all of them had been realized. There is no fucking way Bush could have ever won a third term if such a thing existed.
He was way too liberal. Kept talking about helping the poor and ran on a very anti-war platform.
As opposed to the alternative? Jesus Fucking Christ, yes.
The accusation was of being "Linux Shills". Last I checked it was free.
I think in rare cases it can help, but it largely impairs your ability to code. A small amount of substance use can slightly impair the brain and allow you to be less rigid in your thinking and get past a block by considering valid ideas you would immediately dismiss otherwise. It's the same way a small amount of alcohol in your blood will impair motor function a small amount to act as a muscle relaxant which can help smooth out your motion and make you more precise at certain tasks, like a game of darts or pool, but it very quickly becomes a serious impairment.
These are basically crude solutions to the fact that our brains are prone to overfitting our patterns for how to come to a solutions. Yes it can help, but 9/10 it is probably more harmful and there certainly isn't some hidden potential that is unlocked by regular substance use and there are certainly means of getting past code blocks or coming up with more elegant solutions that don't require it. If you came up with a great idea while using, there are was probably a safer way to get the creative juices lowing without it.