The UK Government Gateway used to issue keys to every individual user. You can use the GG to do everything from file tax forms to start a business. I've never had to do anything as secure and never been as worried about someone finding out those login details on any other website, including my own personal bank account. It was an absolute pain in the arse. 50% of their phone calls were for lost / reissued keys. It didn't stop automated tools scraping keys from compromised computers and causing all sorts of pain (even with separate password required). Issuing them took forever. And in the end you had to prove who you were to get one which was inevitably less secure than the key itself, prove who you were to get one revoked/reissued, prove who you were to do anything with them. Especially around the tax filing time, they were so busy re-issuing keys to people who'd lost them and just wanted to file their return before they got charged, you couldn't get through on the phone lines.
They scrapped it after only two years, I believe, and replaced it with a password system like the banks - two unique items of information posted to you in separate envelopes and requiring both to login. Although there's still a crush around filing time, it's not anywhere near the shambles of before. And to be honest, it wasn't the government fault. People are just inept at holding items secretly, especially when they are downloaded from a secure website that they have to authenticate against in some way anyway, and when the reissue process has to be secure anyway. It could work, if you could make everyone get used to saving such things in a good place but they are no better or worse - the gains in security are lost in practicality almost immediately. Even *generating* that amount of keys must take months.
Run them in Windows 95 mode as the documentation suggests? I've not had a problem getting them to run at all on XP. If in doubt, download the free ISO's of Red Alert from http://www.commandandconquer.com/classic/ and follow their instructions (you might have to patch with a file that's on the ISO, I can't remember).
Any military that just "relies" on the fact that what the company sends you is actually the device you bought, rather then the one you designed, shouldn't be procuring ANYTHING from ANYONE. If you're buying stuff that was made in some foreign country, and it's for a military application, you should damn well be inspecting it before using it anyway. You should damn well be inspecting it no matter where it came from - even an ally.
And there are a million and one of these "bugs coming from Chinese-manufactured devices" stories and not one shred of evidence that it's ever happened. Hell, the tiniest change to a mass-produced board can have hundreds of subtle knock-on effects in timing, RF interference, capacitance, etc. of the circuit and would most probably break it without some seriously skilled understanding of every tolerance on the circuit - something barely the designers can claim to have. Of course it's *possible*, but it's incredibly, incredibly unlikely and if such militaries were that worried about it, they would, should, can and will make their *own* devices - because it would be no more difficult for a skilled engineer working in a US semiconductor company to affect a circuit than it would be in a foreign semiconductor company.
And incorporating such changes into a foreign military (or even large scale civil) design could actually be perceived as an act of war. The US, EU etc. are NOT at war with anyone at the moment - people need to get this into their thick heads. Starting a war because you want to listen to a couple of phone calls is not a sensible way to act when one side has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, or the world's largest airforce, or navy, or spy satellite system.
Please stop the "foreigners are bad" crap. That's what started the last "war" the US had.
Yeah, even the Aliens were averse to a bit of flamethrower no matter how huge / soggy / armour-plated they were.
Hollywood tells us that there's not much that survives a double-barrelled shotgun, either. You just have to remember to shoot them AGAIN when they look dead because it's almost certain that you missed or hit only a minor organ and they'll get back up and attack you again if you don't.
Silence of the Lambs: "Shoot him in the leg".
If everyone done this, Hollywood movies would be MUCH shorter. That can only be a good thing.
You could run Linux on it. Then QEMU/WINE combo on that. Then Crysis on that. It'd still probably only get you back to the 2.5-ish-GHz of your average desktop, though.
Strange. That's not what a lot of physicists are saying: "The photon is currently believed to be strictly massless" (citing Wiki, but I'm no expert - it does say it in about 20 different ways, though).
Come back when you've absorbed that and understand that. Applying your Newtonian Physics class, that basically doesn't go past the 1800's, to modern quantum physics, string theory, brane-theory, etc. is like saying that you understand how to design and fly a 747 because you once made a paper plane.
"Of course, when the universe is several nanoseconds old, we're past talking about "creation", aren't we? By several nanoseconds, at least."
Assuming a single-universe, in only the four human-visible dimensions, that came from "nothing" rather than, say, a constantly expanding and contracting universe, or one created via intra-dimensional interactions that are invisible to us in "our" universe, or... etc.etc.etc. Simply saying "this universe looks to be several billion years old" does not negate the possibility that a) we're wrong, b) only *this* universe is that old, or c) that what we think of as time isn't quite that simple. Time and space are pretty much the same thing to a theoretical physicist, remember. Until you can get your head round that, interpreting simplified statements isn't going to get you anywhere.
"Ultimately, the other side of the singularity that is the Big Bang is unknowable. We can speculation all we like, and pretty much all the speculations are equally valid - they're all a pile of crap...."
Unknowable is a big word to a physicist. They can just about accept that you can't "know" certain things at certain times (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, for example), but they formalise that "enforced ignorance" as much as possible. Mathematicians, like myself, respect that. If you know something is impossible, work out how, why, and what the limits of that impossibility are. Otherwise, you might as well not even bother to learn physics at all past your first six months of lessons in that subject. Or mathematics. Or computing (The Halting Problem, for instance).
Saying that they're all a pile of crap is over-simplifying things. The point is, they are all logically consistent up to a point. That may be due to human error, it may be due to the fact that they are all linked by something we haven't yet found. But they ARE still logically inconsistent and until we find any mistakes or connections, they aren't "crap". Maybe unusable. Maybe unverifiable. Maybe impractical. But they are no worse than any other hypothesis at all.
"Note that Hawking was, most likely, talking about the galaxies, suns, planets, etc. when he said that God wasn't needed to make it happen. In that, he's correct, in that once the Big Bang happens, gravity pretty much requires the formation of planets, stars, galaxies, etc."
I doubt he was. Hawking generally doesn't simplify down that far and if he did, he'd probably be immensely pissed that someone was taking his high-end work and using such a simplified version of a conclusion from it. He's talking intra-dimensional gravitational interactions, most probably. Which leads into things like understanding how a dimension can exist outside our universe and inside it, and how an extra-dimensional interaction can kick-start something from nothing. Gravitons are believed to travel between dimensions that we can only describe mathematically (up to 11 of them). They are the only things we have theorised that are able to do so - electromagnetism, mass, etc. can't. Thus I think what he's saying is that if we sort out M-Theory (which is the formalisation of many string theories that are all "crap" for various values of "crap", until we get a single, logically consistent theory that explains all the shortcomings and "crap"), we'll discover that gravitons can pass through other dimensions and yet still affect our own, and thus a "Big Bang" is more an externally-triggered event that creates a universe from which it's hard to see outside, even mathematically, and guess what else is outside it.
But, hey, that's just from me reading up on M-theory since the article was published. It took me about 10 minutes and the only classes I ever came close to failing were Physics ones. Strange how a little research can provide so many possible alternative "non-crap" answers so quickly.
My own way of thinking about this is that the universe is a bubble. We can't see outside it, we can't poke the borders, we can only guess. Saying that the b
I'm no physicist (far from it) but the reason you have trouble is that you're still thinking in 1800's physics lessons.
Gravity probably has a lot less to do with mass than you might think. Gravity is basically a "curvature" in space-time - a dent in a rubber sheet for an everyday analogy. It can be caused by the presence of mass, and it can affect mass because it makes the "shortest path" to something shorter (imagine denting a rubber sheet with two marbles close to each other - one will "roll down" the other's "gravity" slope).
Gravitational lensing is the most prominent evidence for this - we can actually see things that are hiding behind huge space objects (e.g. galaxies, stars close to us, etc.) because the huge object "bends" space around it, so the light gets distorted like it's been through a curved lense - to the light the travel was perfectly straight, but the space it was in "curved" as it went past the massive object. Thus, we are sometimes able to see parts of space that would technically be impossible to see otherwise - we are literally looking "around and behind" large galaxies / stars.
Then go back several billion years to a time when the universe was nanoseconds old, and its entire mass and energy (and, confusing as it is, space) was crushed into something smaller than the head of a pin. The laws of physics get really "weird" to our eyes at that point and lots of strange stuff happens. The single best source of information for us to explain what happens at that point is probably Prof. Hawking, a modern-day Einstein in this exact field. Given that there are probably a million and one errors in even my simple explanation, and he has a good reputation, I'd say he probably thinks he's correct and there are very, very few people in the world who can actually argue by having a complete understanding of the same facts but a different opinion.
It's sad that Wiki thinks it makes any difference to tell people the plot but it's not really that big a deal. In a month's time everyone will have forgotten anyway, and it only really affects you if you've been DYING to see that particular play.
I love The Mousetrap. I try to take all my friends to it at least once. It's in the tiniest little theatre, hidden among dozens of huge monstrosities. The first time I tried to get there on my own, I spent an hour walking around asking in shops where the place was, despite having been there before - I eventually found out it was OPPOSITE the shop where I'd asked a store-owner and he'd said he'd never heard of it and didn't know where the theatre was. Considering it's the only play in that theatre, and the only theatre it's been in for the last few decades, and it does several showings every day, that was pretty impressive. It's very "old-fashioned" because it is the world's longest running play, mostly in that same theatre for the majority of that time: St. Martin's Theatre. It's a simple, fun thing to watch. It's a good, old-fashioned play. Not a spectacular, not a circus, not some pantomime or musical made famous because some actor from TV is in it, just a good, old-fashioned play in a theatre.
The play actually includes a part at the end where the actors come together on stage, and ask you to "keep the secret of The Mousetrap in your hearts" now that you know it. In all the time I've spoken to people about it, nobody has ever told me the ending even when they knew I'd seen it myself.
This *will* ruin things for some people - they'll go on Wiki to look up the play before they go to see it and, bam, the whole plot of the play is ruined. For them. It's inevitable that such people will want to spoil it for others but you can't avoid that. More fool them.
And, although I always thought that the "murderer" was obvious from the outset, apparently that's not a majority view. I now use the play as a sort of test. I take friends to it, let them get to the interval and ask them if they know "whodunnit". Nobody that I've taken has yet managed to do that correctly - including scientists, a barrister, and research students. As far as I can tell, from all the friends I know that have seen the play, I'm the only one to have worked it out before the interval - and I didn't just guess.
The Mousetrap is great. Cheap, basic, entertainment if you're ever in London. Just be sure to ask for directions, don't be looking for HUGE signposts showing the way, and don't expect some modern special-effects extravaganza.
Or you could, I don't know, tax fuel, like every European country does. The more fuel you use, the more it costs you. The further you drive, the more it costs you. The more inefficient your car, the more it costs you. And you can tax at source and thereby stop virtually all "tampering" with the system where people claim to use less than they do, or modify their cars, etc. And you can use the gained tax to do lots of environmental-saving, road-maintenance and other good acts.
US fuel prices are locked low because the US are scared of charging their citizens more for it. They fear some sort of revolt, I assume. European fuel costs are mostly tax for many reasons, one of which is that it's the easiest, simplest, per-usage, pro-efficiency tax that you can put on petroleum use of every consumer.
Similarly, if electric cars take off and are similarly inefficient - tax battery technologies and/or electricity itself (second is probably a lot easier).
If a badly-written program can circumvent ASLR and DEP for itself, then aren't DEP and ASLR a bit useless? The point of them is to prevent data execution, and to randomise the address space. How does a badly-written, ancient program "bypass" such measures? I can understand such measures not being applied (e.g. because ASLR or DEP on really-old code would break it because it was written with certain assumptions) but what that then assumes is that some administrator or Microsoft programmer has chosen at some point to disable DEP and ASLR for those old programs (if they have DEP and ASLR enabled at all). And if the code wasn't compiled without some DEP/ASLR magic enabled, then is this really surprising? What's to stop any other program similarly avoiding DEP/ASLR, or anyone exploiting such programs?
How is this a "Quicktime problem" when the code being attacked is years old, and yet the OS still lets it break basic security? Surely the problem is not the program, but the things that let it execute. Hell, I have used old Windows programs that refuse to work with DEP enabled because they make certain assumptions and I realised that because the DEP handler would prevent them working in XP - they were NOT compiled at a time when any knowledge of DEP or ASLR on Windows was around. That's the whole point of DEP, isn't it? To stop programs executing code they shouldn't? I had to force an override for them network-wide but that was my choice, and no I did not specifically enable DEP myself, the Windows XP install decided to do that for me.
Is this version of QuickTime whitelisted? Are DEP and ASLR really that worthless that "old programs" compiled before they came along are allowed to do anything? Isn't this the fault of an administrator running an outdated program rather than anything to do with DEP, ASLR, Quicktime or anything else? What's Quicktime doing differently to every other old, insecure program out there that makes it more of a risk?
Seems like a complete red herring to me. Don't run old software. Don't run insecure software. Don't run programs that you haven't authorised yourself. And, apparently, don't rely on DEP or ASLR to actually DO anything.
I claim your school failed because you didn't read the bit that said that they marked them, including their working, as correct because they were able to read them - it was just "messy", not "illegible". And you don't have the excuse of my handwriting to blame.
My further point was also that writing increasingly ISN'T used for communication as much as personal aide-mémoire. When I fill in forms from the bank, they are all pre-printed with my details. Increasingly, I do nothing more on such forms than tick a box and sign it. Handwriting as a communications medium has always been second-rate. Books are not hand-written. Fonts on my computer do not appear hand-written. Standard form letters are not hand-written. And, like I said, the last time I actually HAD to write something was on an insurance claim form and that was only because they sent me a pre-printed form that I had to fill out in my own words - printing on the damn thing would have been more hassle than just handwriting it.
Handwriting is now starting to be like Latin lessons and parchment-writing - yes, there's a point to having the skill/knowledge, and those that have it may have an advantage, but it's increasingly becoming irrelevant and there are a million better things to be teaching our kids in their place.
I hereby demand $0.01 for every time you use your hammer to hit a nail. Does that seem stupid? What if I invented the hammer? What if I patented the hammer design? What if I took a standard hammer, changed the detail of the shaft a tiny bit, and then you bought MY hammer instead of the other, similar ones? They might be free, but I still want my $0.01 because you're using MY hammer. It's a pitiful amount, and you're using my tool, so why don't you pay for it?
Software patents, and most specifically, licensing of software patents are an abomination. If you build a substantial new invention, yes, you should be able to patent it for the purposes of stopping competitors building something identical after they've seen it for a few years in order to allow you to profit from your idea.
With software, most of those ideas are completely virtual. They usually are no more than a single mathematical manipulation. Rarely are they new and insightful, and most of them don't correspond to an invention so much as a process. That is, according to most sensible countries, not enough to be patentable. It doesn't result in a "device", it's still just an idea - if you want to patent a device that digitises video - marvellous, no problem at all. Or a new type of cable to connect it (DVI/HDMI/USB3 hardware patents - fine, nobody is moaning about that). If you want to patent the idea of a particular way of digitising the video, you're on more dubious ground unless it's truly revolutionary and isn't just something that exists by manipulating bits in a slightly different fashion.
The patent system was designed so that inventors had time to get their ideas off the ground into a working device without having to worry about copycats stealing the idea and getting to a working product first by using greater resources. They exist *because* physical devices and engineering take time. However, software patents allow you to literally patent any absurd, abstract, mathematical idea. I hereby patent the concept of a complex number, or a graph, or a quadratic equation, or dividing two numbers by calculating their reciprocal and multiplying them, or a method for solving the Towers of Hanoi, or the method of solving the Rubik's Cube. That's just how absurd they are, if not in theory then in practice.
Asking *USERS* of a piece of software, and even people who've never heard of or seen that software in their life, to pay for every single use of that software is a bit stupid. Every time I encode a bit of music, you expect me to pay the inventor of WAV, PCM, IFF, etc. a few dollars? That's just as stupid as MP3 licensing. And if a lot of people listen to that file, you expect me to pay on higher scales? I will pay you for the software to do the encode or decode, yes, probably, no problem at all. Once. I don't have to pay a royalty to Adobe every time I save a file in Photoshop format. I may have to pay them to find out the exact details of the format, but that's it, and that's optional - if I decide to reverse-engineer it (as is my right in lots of countries), I can then reimplement it - so long as I don't breach *COPYRIGHT*, there's no problem there.
Video-licensing is absurd. Every single owner of a DVD player or laptop in the world has paid the MPEG LA money. They don't even realise it. And, technically, a lot of "home video creation" packages, camcorder software, etc. aren't licensed to do what people are doing with them. If I was part of MPEG LA, OF COURSE I would want everyone in the world to pay every time they look at a video, encode it, transcode it. Doesn't mean it's a sensible, rational or reasonable thing to do though.
And the vast majority of video-related patents are nothing more than an algorithm. You cannot patent, or copyright, an algorithm. You have NEVER been able to in the majority of the world. It's like me charging you because you just used my method of long-division, or you worked out how to stack boxes using an thought process that I submitted to the patent office before y
My mother stormed into my school about 23 or so years ago and gave them a right rollicking. They were marking me down for bad handwriting, but I always got top-marks for the right answers. Her reasoning was thus: it wasn't a handwriting test, the work wasn't for display, the writing was legible enough for them to tell I had the right answer and the right working-out (they had marked it correct, after all) and I was one of the best students in the class academically. Did it REALLY matter what my handwriting looked like? She was hardly going to claim that the school had failed in my education just because my handwriting was a bit messy.
They never bothered me again until secondary school where we had exactly the same thing happen all over again.
To write neatly TAKES TOO LONG - for me and a lot of other people. My brain is already on the next question by the time I'm halfway through writing out the answer. Seriously - I never used more than half of the time available in an exam from primary school to university, and at least 50% of the time I *did* use was due to using a damn pen rather than a keyboard. Handwriting was always slowing me down and making me lose my concentration and place. My writing, technically, was perfect - grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. were all present but the handwriting was a little messy and scrunched because I was trying desperately to NO..T..... WRI.... TE.... AT... A... SNA....IL'... S.... PAC...E and then lose what I actually wanted to say by the end of the sentence.
How many *authors* who want to knock out a 500-page novel still use pen and paper for even the first drafts? Very few, and they don't do that because they use the classic typewriter or a computer which takes away the tedious business of transcribing their thoughts and lets them get on with the thoughts themselves. It's handy to scrawl some notes with a pen on a computer printout, it's handy to write tiny memos with them, but anything longer than a few sentences and you're better off doing it on a keyboard. I can't even *remember* the last time I had to write something down - possibly an insurance claim form some months back.
We have a viable, widely-available, cheap, more efficient, more accurate and faster method of transcription now - I work in schools and even in the poorest UK primary schools it's mandated to have one computer per three children, or thereabouts. Every topic must have some IT work in it, too. No wonder the kid's handwriting is deteriorating - damn right, as well. But these kids can touch-type before they move into secondary school. Handwriting's only advantage is that it needs no additional hardware past the most basic and crude (a stick of some kind that makes a mark), and kids can *still* do that if necessary - writing things on the back of your hand will never go out of fashion. It just won't be neat, but in those cases the ONLY people to ever read the message will be themselves, so neatest doesn't matter.
Handwriting is not a necessary skill any more. Hasn't been for at least 23 years, probably a lot more. It's *nice* to be able to do, sure. Convenient at times, but it's basically an artform. How many people today can write with a proper quill? Not many. Why? Because it's an outdated technology that has enormous downsides with the only real upside being the simplicity of the equipment and the artistry of the finished product. In 50 years time, handwriting will be "quaint" and you'll only use it for love-letters or artworks.
Assume the GPS weighs a kilo (shit, that's a heavy GPS). Assume your car weighs 1000 kilos (conservative estimate of a small European car). That's one-thousandth of its weight. They might possibly be required to compensate you for one-thousandth of your petrol (gasoline) - approximately 6p for 60 litres bought at £1 per litre, probably a LOT less over in the US. Say you get £10 off them (approximately 167 full tanks - or 83,000 miles in a decent car), after administrative costs, days off work etc. are weighed up - they got to violate quite a lot of your property, personal information and human rights for £10.
More importantly, if I attach a device to a car, I can be liable for criminal damage - that's what illegal clampers, key-scratchers, people who "move" a car without permission (e.g. to get it off their driveway when its been dumped), etc. are charged with over here, even if the car isn't "damaged", just immobilised or moved without permission by their actions. I think it would be infinitely more interesting and profitable to take them to court for the method of tracking, for installing the device, for doing so without permission, for "illegal search without a warrant" when they retrieve the information from that device, etc. than you'd ever get from fuel-cost recompense.
To be honest, if I ever suspected my car of having such a device that wasn't my own (I put GPS trackers on my own cars - they don't record any location information at all, they just allow me to dial-in and find the location when I want to know it, e.g. the car has been stolen), it would be destroyed quite quickly. If it couldn't be destroyed, it would suddenly have a LOT of trouble getting a signal. If it did get a signal, it would amazingly find that the signal it was getting was way inaccurate due to the introduction of several artificial signals that basically make it think it's driving around the bottom of the ocean rather than my actual location. The day that I can't buy a GPS that is independent of law-enforcement is the day I stop using GPS (or, more likely, the day I build my own).
And if I ever appear before a court based on the evidence of an unwarranted GPS device, whether I committed the actual crime they accuse me of or not, there would be legal hell - it would not be difficult to find a lawyer or a law to support several reasons to overturn any decision like that. If the police are *really* that stupid, not only would it jeopardise their use of the device, it would jeopardise EVERY case they brought where such tracking was even suspected of being used - at best it would be a mistrial because of the evidence given by those devices not being admissible. At worst, it would mean that the entire case was thrown out, even if the GPS had put me at the murder scene, because it might mean the case was impossible to try again fairly if it had been publicised.
Don't criticise your courts when your legal costs double and convicted felons are freed because of mistrials and retrials due to use of this law, even historically, blame the police who were silly enough to think they needed to use it and thought it was worth the risk to get a tiny, otherwise-obtainable piece of evidence.
But then, I live in a country that doesn't have a declaration of independence, a bill of rights, or a guarantee of freedom of speech, etc. I only live in a country that actually allows itself to be kept in check by its citizens and other countries and lets people, on the whole, live their lives.
Mine is a small, cheap, portable TomTom that has no "aerial" to speak of (it's all internal). It was the cheapest thing I could buy. It works inside the car, wedged between the seats in a drinks holder, under a metal roof with electrically-heated windscreens inside a major city no problem at all. I only ever lose signal going through a tunnel (to be expected) and it gets taken out of the car and then reinserted every trip every day for, say, the last year or two - that's about 50,000 miles. It's been through France, Germany, Poland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands and even on a cross-channel ferry on the trip to those places from the UK and never suffered more than a very intermittent loss of signal. It went through the Black Forest, through three-inches of snow on the roof of the vehicle, through the various tunnels under Bruges/Brussels (loss of signal, of course, but only for a second or so and not for the first / last 200m of each tunnel), through London's skyscrapers, through hills, valleys, and the Alps.
Also, I built my own "GPS tracker" using a Mini-ITX board, a cheap Bluetooth GPS dongle that I bought from eBay for £10 (with SirfStar III chipset) and a 3G dongle. That gets a GPS signal from inside a Mini-ITX case, in the boot (trunk) of my car - it even gets a GSM and sometimes a 3G signal for the "dial-in" functionality should the car ever be stolen.
Either the GPS signal is shit in the half of the world that you live in, or your GPS is severely crap. A tiny little black-box GPS with "wifi-router"-style antenna can reliably pick up GPS from underneath a lorry (truck) no problem at all. That's why they sell £100 devices to do just that.
Of course I'm exaggerating the team situation to an extreme, but it has a truth to it. Programming is an inherently single-person process - team programming methodologies basically boil down to "you do this bit, I'll do that bit, we'll meet in the middle to these specs". It's usually design-by-committee, implement-by-parts, with individual inspirations made public. Yes, there's feedback and direction and lots of other interactions but in-between, the programmers are basically walking to their own personal computer, thinking to themselves, working on their own in their own heads and then sharing with others later.
And CS students, even the social ones, have to be taught how to work effectively as a team because, like mathematics, it's such a single-person process that collaboration is all about getting everyone on the same page by their own methods. Programming in teams does not scale linearly (far from it), does not scale at all in some cases, and isn't portable between humans. Even setting a code-style can be an administrative nightmare - many programmers have breakaway systems where they do the actual grunt work in their own way and then have some sort of conversion back and forth to the team methodology (whether that be source-control methods, coding style, etc.). Sometimes getting programmers to agree on a common development environment can be tricky, even (but fortunately that usually HELPS the code quality rather than hinder it).
If you leave 100 people in a room and tell them that they have to move a 50-ton rock to the other side, they will work naturally together as a team (on average, at least - one will sulk and do nothing because they weren't listened to, another will take exception with the unelected "leader", another will be actively working against the majority with their "more efficient" method, one will be complaining because they're doing all the grunt-work while the others are discussing the problem etc.). Leave 100 programming students in a room and tell them to achieve a similarly difficult intellectual objective using their coding skills and you will have absolute chaos on your hands. And, more than likely, one guy out of the 100 will figure out a super-efficient method at the start, work on their own and then just apply their code to get the job done before anyone can even think about analysing the problem team-wide.
It's a generalisation, but I've seen no end of CS students who would actually do a million times better job if you removed the team around them and asked them to do it themselves on their own. And even if you cherry-pick the most active, most integral and most amenable members and group them together on their own, they aren't any better than the best individual. The *quantity* of work achieved increases, of course, but the quality and the rate of achievement doesn't.
- APB cost over $100m in investment capital. That's a warning sign right there. - APB has been in development for five years. No-one I know had heard of it until it popped up on Steam pre-orders. - APB gets bad reviews on user sites. - APB *didn't* get bad reviews in magazines, etc. because of a review embargo (until a week AFTER release) that stopped people publishing reviews - this arguably killed the game's publicity. - APB changed over 5 years from being originally planned for the XBox and ending up being announced as a PC-only title. - The APB studios seemingly have not-much-else in the pipeline at all. APB was their sole "saviour" really, and $100m of risk is a hell of a situation to start from with an MMO that basically relies on lots of people playing it a lot and liking it for a long time. - APB is quite expensive compared to other MMO's, probably to compensate for the HUGE deficit and to keep lots of servers running 24/7. - APB is very different in terms of genre, content, etc. to other MMO's. - APB's parent company went into administration SIX WEEKS after release - they must have known that it needed to bring in millions within the first few weeks or the company would die like it did - they must have known that WAY BEFORE release, probably before the beta even started. They must also have known that it was a bit shit, given that they'd been running beta's for nearly a year.
Basically, 200 people lost their jobs because someone spent too much on something so enormously risky that they were betting on paying back millions of dollars in a matter of weeks on an untested concept on something that had been in development for five years, beta for a year and still couldn't get good reviews (or even ANY official reviews from professional sources), had been delayed and delayed, had priced itself too high, etc.etc.etc.
It was a classic bad investment, with bad management. Some games programmers operate like this in perpetuity - form company, make popular game, get investment, spend it all, declare company bankrupt, sack everyone, move over to a new company and hire the now-out-of-work "good" staff again (probably on worse contracts), rinse and repeat.
APB and Realtime Worlds have *nothing* to do with the games industry being weak, with games budgets getting too high or anything else. It was just stupidity.
Programmers are funny animals. Some of them work best in complete isolation. One person can pull off things that entire teams never dreamed of. A kid in their back bedroom, and a rainy summer, can generate a game quicker by any design-by-committee. Programmers don't naturally work in teams, they have to be taught - every serious CS course has a team-building component to it.
Lots of big names started off as tiny indies... Codemasters is the most famous example, most probably, and Valve has bought up indie teams before now. It's not surprising at all, the only surprise is that indie went "out of fashion" with some people for a decade or so.
The skill of programming a game is not about knowing Knuth off by heart, or finding mathematical shortcuts using integer arithmetic, it's about actually having a little vision and wanting to see it move around and make funny sounds. Once you know what you want to do, the rest is just slog-work to get it to work how you imagined. Large teams do sometimes miss the fact that, underneath everything else, there should be a game. Most of the "classic" games of the early 80's were written by teenagers in back bedrooms. Magazine cover tapes were full of indie material. Even large collect-a-weekly-parts programming magazines were written by what we would legally class as children (I know, I've spoken to someone on here that wrote a huge game for INPUT by Marshall Cavendish when they were a kid).
Indie development was around at the start of the Internet - almost the whole shareware scene was indie. It kinda lost sight of itself when huge powerful consoles became mainstream, moving into the "homebrew" and various other sidelines which, because of their dubious legal status, were never as popular in mass-media. Now indie has found its roots again. A teenager can knock up a game in a week and be selling it by the thousands from Steam, or direct from their own website. They don't have to worry about system architectures or OS or having enough processor power. They can be pretty sure that it can be ported to myriad systems and not have to worry about development kits for consoles.
I also think that indie and retro are often closely linked, because of this connection with old-time indie development. Retro remakes are popular, retro gaming magazines are everywhere - I was in London Stansted last week and there were FIVE different retro gaming magazines on the shelf - I couldn't believe it! People are happy to just play silly games that are no more complex than some Spectrum games of old - Facebook jollies, or five-minute play-throughs or even Flash/Java demos on the author's website (Altitude is very cool!). People are carrying devices that can run small games with ease and even buy them immediately and securely from their phones.
In fact, I've started programming on a game that I've been wanting to do for years because of all the indie development I see. I see how simple or retro games are coming back into fashion and it makes me want to code. Chances are that my code will never leave my PC but it's immense fun to be doing for myself - it's replaced quite a lot of other hobbies just lately - and very heart-warming to see my little sprites bop around the screen. Even my girlfriend likes the fact that there is a little game that she can modify and influence and has often said she wants to sit there and make dozens of sprites for it. She often asks what I've got "your little people" to do today. The beauty is that if other people think the finished article is good enough then setting up a store, Paypal link or even Steam distribution takes no time at all. And because I programmed it for the fun of it, it's ALL profit - I would have programmed if a time-traveller told me that I'd never, ever sell a single copy.
If you're working in the industry, and the scare-stories are anywhere near true, I'm not surprised that people are leaving their megalithic corporations that are trying to source funding for $60m games and instead want to see if they ca
Since the advent of games-for-show instead of games-for-fun, I have certain rules for buying games. These will probably explain why huge development budgets are a waste of money and why indie games are increasingly occupying more of my hard drive. It'll also explain specifically why APB died a death, because it was one of the games I looked at in the last few months.
1) No subscription. If I buy a game, I buy it. I don't rent games - never have, never will. I may borrow them from friends. I may have to (at some point) pay in installments to "own" the game, but when I do that's more a financial arrangement than an ongoing subscription. I've never played WoW, or any other MMO, because of this.
2) Demo. I do not play a game that I don't know *exactly* how it plays. I do not pre-order games, either. Some FPS's are vomit-inducing to me because of the motion (for some reason, Duke Nukem 3D was like that, but almost no other game). Some games *don't* let me change the controls to something I can actually get on with, or that works comfortably on my laptop. Some games do not play well despite looking nice (I *cannot* get on with DogFighter because the control system is just so horrendously out-of-tune with how I want the aircraft to move - thus the game is unplayable to me). If you don't offer me a demo, the only other options open to me are: playing a friend's version, playing a pirate version, or not buying the game until it's incredibly cheap and therefore worth the risk.
3) Value. I don't pay for any game that I won't get value back for. Asking £50 for a game is ludicrous unless I get hundreds of hours out of it. They are £6.99 games on my hard drive that have hundreds of hours of gameplay from me - you have to compete with that. For some reason, this seems to operate on a bell-curve... very cheap games are usually shit value, very expensive games are usually shit value, with the peak being at about £10 or so. If your game is too expensive, I *will* wait until it's cheaper - I don't mind playing games that are several years old so long as they work. If it never gets cheaper, it never gets bought.
4) System requirements. If I need a PC greater than the one I have, I won't look at the game. I don't buy PC's to fit the games, I buy games to fit my PC. There is no excuse any more for slow-running games on modern dual-core processors with Gb's of RAM available to them. Dogfighter CRAWLED on my PC and to get it to run smoothly required me to put it into 800x600 with no texture detail - it looked like a version of F29 Retaliator from my DOS days, without the fun, and with broken textures everywhere - and still my PC struggled (in fact, I loaded up F29 Retaliator in DOSBox soon after and had much more enjoyment out of it). If Tom Clancy's HAWX can work fine on my PC without me changing any options, Dogfighter should as well. If you require Windows Vista or 7, that's me done too. There's no reason for that. If you require a particular Service Pack, I will be suspicious and want to play the demo to be sure that you're just fibbing - most games run fine on SP2 even if they demand SP3 for example. If you require gobs of disk space, that's probably the biggest killer because my hard drive space and bandwidth is my most precious commodity.
5) DRM. If I can't play my friend's copy on my computer to see how it runs on my machine, that breaks Rule Number 2 above. If I can't play a legit version or demo on another PC, then I won't pirate it - I just won't buy it. However, if I do decide your game is good enough to make it onto my machine, a good way to kill Rule Number 3 is to reduce its value by making it a hassle to install / uninstall, making it require Internet access even just for "activation", making it unremoveable, limiting my installs artificially, making it impossible to backup to media, etc. Pirate versions and cracks will solve this for games I do buy but if I have to do that, you have a serious customer service problem. It's like me buying a car a
That labourer had to get to your project somehow. They had to transport necessary tools that you probably don't have but they would need to use to build your project. They would have to represent some hours of effort that *wouldn't* need to be done if you weren't building your project. They also represent the environmental savings which arise due to the use of mass produced tools, supplies and equipment and local skill rather than some expert who lives on the other side of the country.
I don't think it's perfect but it's as damn close as you can ever get from something measurable. And a "green" house is not a green house if the maintenance people have to constantly come back and check the damn thing every week, or it takes huge, specialised tools to install the thing which, in the end, probably have more environmental impact that the thing you're installing. That's fine for a generic tool, say a spanner, because it's mass produced and therefore *probably* better, but not if that tool is *only* ever used for, say, calibrating a photovoltaic setup.
You map a network drive on your LAN, you execute a program on it that requires a DLL. That DLL can't be found unless Windows looks on the remote drive too, and chances are that if a program is bundled with a DLL, that DLL is actually a better match for the program than anything lurking in the Windows folder or other paths. So there is a use-case here - I'm pretty sure there's at least one school system I've worked on that would just break in a second if you couldn't load DLL's from a remote network location, and for not much reason ("The installation files are all there, I can see them, they are in the read-only mapped public drive we've always used for software distribution, etc." - and at least one school administration package I know runs from a shared Windows drive on the server thus requiring zero installation on the client)
I agree that the things being blown out of all proportion - if someone can place a file on your drive in any way, shape or form, it's game over anyway, Windows File Protection or not. More importantly, why the HELL haven't we fixed this DLL mess yet to only load DLL's from the application folder and then let people hard-link to a shared copy if they really want to share libraries between applications?
The only thing that ever matters in these kinds of projects, the only thing WORTH measuring, is how long until it starts to pay for itself. Not the electrical system, or the "money saved" on your normal use, but the time until you're actually in profit on the venture as a whole.
It's a crass and crude measure but the money invested into getting something like photovoltaics, underfloor heating, etc. is directly related to the difficulty of manipulating the raw materials, the cost of extraction, the rarity, the difficulty of transporting them, installing them, the environmental impact they have (via taxes, subsidies, etc.). Marble floors, stone walls, etc. have wonderful properties but require you to move tons of stone cross-country (and even across continents). Photovoltaics contain some rare minerals, require lots of energy to manipulate, produce, dispose of and maintain, etc.
If we're talking houses then if you can't have the systems pay themselves off in less than 25 years, you're wasting your time. In 25 years, you could have bought and paid for any house you could afford, that would almost certainly sell for more than you bought it once your mortgage term is up (and thus provide overall profit even with your monthly mortgage expenditure), even despite interest accrued, ongoing maintenance and everything else - the house would "pay for itself" and any environmental damage that you incurred that wasn't directly related to its construction (i.e. I assume you bought a house that already existed, not have one constructed especially). Also, you could live in it and not have to worry about maintaining a roof garden unless you wanted to, or finding specialist contractors when your one-off heating/cooling system goes wrong.
If your super-duper green house, or your super-duper energy production system, doesn't start turning an *overall* profit in less than 25 years, you're wasting your time and actually COSTING more energy than you're saving - in planning, analysis, trips to the city to find an engineer / consultant / whatever, maintenance, replacement, time-wasting, application-lodging, construction etc.etc.etc. Although theoretically perfect solar systems can turn profits in certain parts of the world relatively quickly, this isn't true of a VAST proportion of other things that are necessary. The energy used to BUILD a new house? Hell, that's not small - and if you paid for that and then hope to get that money back by later selling the house, or on savings on unnecessary utilities, all you've done is sold your green credentials for cash on the first step anyway.
In the end, the places and people that are the greenest are NOT those putting HVAC systems in their houses at all, or even understand how a photovoltaic works. It's the people living in countries where the problems of heating, cooling, water supply, etc. were solved MILLENNIA ago and they still retain elements of that culture. Most of them are farmers. Most of them live in white-covered buildings constructed from local stone. Most of them have shutters on their windows. Most of them have land on which they can grow their own food and not have to transport food in little metal tins from foreign countries to survive. Most of them have simple solutions like wells, wood-burning stoves, their own animals and crops, houses constructed in such a way that the roof-patio is about 40 degrees C hotter than the wine cellar for most of the year. Most of them live in houses that have almost literally been maintenance-free for the last 2-3 hundred years and are likely to last at least that again.
They have electricity and televisions and, yes, they probably could generate their own but they know it's unlikely to produce any return on their investment unless they get it absolutely, perfectly correct and even then that it's "cheating" and not really being green. Hell, some of them might even have water mills on a local water source and still the investment in copper cabling, electronic safety systems, generators and electric lighting/h
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The UK Government Gateway used to issue keys to every individual user. You can use the GG to do everything from file tax forms to start a business. I've never had to do anything as secure and never been as worried about someone finding out those login details on any other website, including my own personal bank account. It was an absolute pain in the arse. 50% of their phone calls were for lost / reissued keys. It didn't stop automated tools scraping keys from compromised computers and causing all sorts of pain (even with separate password required). Issuing them took forever. And in the end you had to prove who you were to get one which was inevitably less secure than the key itself, prove who you were to get one revoked/reissued, prove who you were to do anything with them. Especially around the tax filing time, they were so busy re-issuing keys to people who'd lost them and just wanted to file their return before they got charged, you couldn't get through on the phone lines.
They scrapped it after only two years, I believe, and replaced it with a password system like the banks - two unique items of information posted to you in separate envelopes and requiring both to login. Although there's still a crush around filing time, it's not anywhere near the shambles of before. And to be honest, it wasn't the government fault. People are just inept at holding items secretly, especially when they are downloaded from a secure website that they have to authenticate against in some way anyway, and when the reissue process has to be secure anyway. It could work, if you could make everyone get used to saving such things in a good place but they are no better or worse - the gains in security are lost in practicality almost immediately. Even *generating* that amount of keys must take months.
In the UK, we already have that - have had it for years in fact. Nobody uses it except the odd eBayer.
http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/olpui
Basically, you pay, print, post.
Run them in Windows 95 mode as the documentation suggests? I've not had a problem getting them to run at all on XP. If in doubt, download the free ISO's of Red Alert from http://www.commandandconquer.com/classic/ and follow their instructions (you might have to patch with a file that's on the ISO, I can't remember).
Any military that just "relies" on the fact that what the company sends you is actually the device you bought, rather then the one you designed, shouldn't be procuring ANYTHING from ANYONE. If you're buying stuff that was made in some foreign country, and it's for a military application, you should damn well be inspecting it before using it anyway. You should damn well be inspecting it no matter where it came from - even an ally.
And there are a million and one of these "bugs coming from Chinese-manufactured devices" stories and not one shred of evidence that it's ever happened. Hell, the tiniest change to a mass-produced board can have hundreds of subtle knock-on effects in timing, RF interference, capacitance, etc. of the circuit and would most probably break it without some seriously skilled understanding of every tolerance on the circuit - something barely the designers can claim to have. Of course it's *possible*, but it's incredibly, incredibly unlikely and if such militaries were that worried about it, they would, should, can and will make their *own* devices - because it would be no more difficult for a skilled engineer working in a US semiconductor company to affect a circuit than it would be in a foreign semiconductor company.
And incorporating such changes into a foreign military (or even large scale civil) design could actually be perceived as an act of war. The US, EU etc. are NOT at war with anyone at the moment - people need to get this into their thick heads. Starting a war because you want to listen to a couple of phone calls is not a sensible way to act when one side has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, or the world's largest airforce, or navy, or spy satellite system.
Please stop the "foreigners are bad" crap. That's what started the last "war" the US had.
Yeah, even the Aliens were averse to a bit of flamethrower no matter how huge / soggy / armour-plated they were.
Hollywood tells us that there's not much that survives a double-barrelled shotgun, either. You just have to remember to shoot them AGAIN when they look dead because it's almost certain that you missed or hit only a minor organ and they'll get back up and attack you again if you don't.
Silence of the Lambs: "Shoot him in the leg".
If everyone done this, Hollywood movies would be MUCH shorter. That can only be a good thing.
You could run Linux on it. Then QEMU/WINE combo on that. Then Crysis on that. It'd still probably only get you back to the 2.5-ish-GHz of your average desktop, though.
Strange. That's not what a lot of physicists are saying: "The photon is currently believed to be strictly massless" (citing Wiki, but I'm no expert - it does say it in about 20 different ways, though).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton
Come back when you've absorbed that and understand that. Applying your Newtonian Physics class, that basically doesn't go past the 1800's, to modern quantum physics, string theory, brane-theory, etc. is like saying that you understand how to design and fly a 747 because you once made a paper plane.
"Of course, when the universe is several nanoseconds old, we're past talking about "creation", aren't we? By several nanoseconds, at least."
Assuming a single-universe, in only the four human-visible dimensions, that came from "nothing" rather than, say, a constantly expanding and contracting universe, or one created via intra-dimensional interactions that are invisible to us in "our" universe, or... etc.etc.etc. Simply saying "this universe looks to be several billion years old" does not negate the possibility that a) we're wrong, b) only *this* universe is that old, or c) that what we think of as time isn't quite that simple. Time and space are pretty much the same thing to a theoretical physicist, remember. Until you can get your head round that, interpreting simplified statements isn't going to get you anywhere.
"Ultimately, the other side of the singularity that is the Big Bang is unknowable. We can speculation all we like, and pretty much all the speculations are equally valid - they're all a pile of crap...."
Unknowable is a big word to a physicist. They can just about accept that you can't "know" certain things at certain times (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, for example), but they formalise that "enforced ignorance" as much as possible. Mathematicians, like myself, respect that. If you know something is impossible, work out how, why, and what the limits of that impossibility are. Otherwise, you might as well not even bother to learn physics at all past your first six months of lessons in that subject. Or mathematics. Or computing (The Halting Problem, for instance).
Saying that they're all a pile of crap is over-simplifying things. The point is, they are all logically consistent up to a point. That may be due to human error, it may be due to the fact that they are all linked by something we haven't yet found. But they ARE still logically inconsistent and until we find any mistakes or connections, they aren't "crap". Maybe unusable. Maybe unverifiable. Maybe impractical. But they are no worse than any other hypothesis at all.
"Note that Hawking was, most likely, talking about the galaxies, suns, planets, etc. when he said that God wasn't needed to make it happen. In that, he's correct, in that once the Big Bang happens, gravity pretty much requires the formation of planets, stars, galaxies, etc."
I doubt he was. Hawking generally doesn't simplify down that far and if he did, he'd probably be immensely pissed that someone was taking his high-end work and using such a simplified version of a conclusion from it. He's talking intra-dimensional gravitational interactions, most probably. Which leads into things like understanding how a dimension can exist outside our universe and inside it, and how an extra-dimensional interaction can kick-start something from nothing. Gravitons are believed to travel between dimensions that we can only describe mathematically (up to 11 of them). They are the only things we have theorised that are able to do so - electromagnetism, mass, etc. can't. Thus I think what he's saying is that if we sort out M-Theory (which is the formalisation of many string theories that are all "crap" for various values of "crap", until we get a single, logically consistent theory that explains all the shortcomings and "crap"), we'll discover that gravitons can pass through other dimensions and yet still affect our own, and thus a "Big Bang" is more an externally-triggered event that creates a universe from which it's hard to see outside, even mathematically, and guess what else is outside it.
But, hey, that's just from me reading up on M-theory since the article was published. It took me about 10 minutes and the only classes I ever came close to failing were Physics ones. Strange how a little research can provide so many possible alternative "non-crap" answers so quickly.
My own way of thinking about this is that the universe is a bubble. We can't see outside it, we can't poke the borders, we can only guess. Saying that the b
I'm no physicist (far from it) but the reason you have trouble is that you're still thinking in 1800's physics lessons.
Gravity probably has a lot less to do with mass than you might think. Gravity is basically a "curvature" in space-time - a dent in a rubber sheet for an everyday analogy. It can be caused by the presence of mass, and it can affect mass because it makes the "shortest path" to something shorter (imagine denting a rubber sheet with two marbles close to each other - one will "roll down" the other's "gravity" slope).
Gravitational lensing is the most prominent evidence for this - we can actually see things that are hiding behind huge space objects (e.g. galaxies, stars close to us, etc.) because the huge object "bends" space around it, so the light gets distorted like it's been through a curved lense - to the light the travel was perfectly straight, but the space it was in "curved" as it went past the massive object. Thus, we are sometimes able to see parts of space that would technically be impossible to see otherwise - we are literally looking "around and behind" large galaxies / stars.
Then go back several billion years to a time when the universe was nanoseconds old, and its entire mass and energy (and, confusing as it is, space) was crushed into something smaller than the head of a pin. The laws of physics get really "weird" to our eyes at that point and lots of strange stuff happens. The single best source of information for us to explain what happens at that point is probably Prof. Hawking, a modern-day Einstein in this exact field. Given that there are probably a million and one errors in even my simple explanation, and he has a good reputation, I'd say he probably thinks he's correct and there are very, very few people in the world who can actually argue by having a complete understanding of the same facts but a different opinion.
It's sad that Wiki thinks it makes any difference to tell people the plot but it's not really that big a deal. In a month's time everyone will have forgotten anyway, and it only really affects you if you've been DYING to see that particular play.
I love The Mousetrap. I try to take all my friends to it at least once. It's in the tiniest little theatre, hidden among dozens of huge monstrosities. The first time I tried to get there on my own, I spent an hour walking around asking in shops where the place was, despite having been there before - I eventually found out it was OPPOSITE the shop where I'd asked a store-owner and he'd said he'd never heard of it and didn't know where the theatre was. Considering it's the only play in that theatre, and the only theatre it's been in for the last few decades, and it does several showings every day, that was pretty impressive. It's very "old-fashioned" because it is the world's longest running play, mostly in that same theatre for the majority of that time: St. Martin's Theatre. It's a simple, fun thing to watch. It's a good, old-fashioned play. Not a spectacular, not a circus, not some pantomime or musical made famous because some actor from TV is in it, just a good, old-fashioned play in a theatre.
The play actually includes a part at the end where the actors come together on stage, and ask you to "keep the secret of The Mousetrap in your hearts" now that you know it. In all the time I've spoken to people about it, nobody has ever told me the ending even when they knew I'd seen it myself.
This *will* ruin things for some people - they'll go on Wiki to look up the play before they go to see it and, bam, the whole plot of the play is ruined. For them. It's inevitable that such people will want to spoil it for others but you can't avoid that. More fool them.
And, although I always thought that the "murderer" was obvious from the outset, apparently that's not a majority view. I now use the play as a sort of test. I take friends to it, let them get to the interval and ask them if they know "whodunnit". Nobody that I've taken has yet managed to do that correctly - including scientists, a barrister, and research students. As far as I can tell, from all the friends I know that have seen the play, I'm the only one to have worked it out before the interval - and I didn't just guess.
The Mousetrap is great. Cheap, basic, entertainment if you're ever in London. Just be sure to ask for directions, don't be looking for HUGE signposts showing the way, and don't expect some modern special-effects extravaganza.
Or you could, I don't know, tax fuel, like every European country does. The more fuel you use, the more it costs you. The further you drive, the more it costs you. The more inefficient your car, the more it costs you. And you can tax at source and thereby stop virtually all "tampering" with the system where people claim to use less than they do, or modify their cars, etc. And you can use the gained tax to do lots of environmental-saving, road-maintenance and other good acts.
US fuel prices are locked low because the US are scared of charging their citizens more for it. They fear some sort of revolt, I assume. European fuel costs are mostly tax for many reasons, one of which is that it's the easiest, simplest, per-usage, pro-efficiency tax that you can put on petroleum use of every consumer.
Similarly, if electric cars take off and are similarly inefficient - tax battery technologies and/or electricity itself (second is probably a lot easier).
If a badly-written program can circumvent ASLR and DEP for itself, then aren't DEP and ASLR a bit useless? The point of them is to prevent data execution, and to randomise the address space. How does a badly-written, ancient program "bypass" such measures? I can understand such measures not being applied (e.g. because ASLR or DEP on really-old code would break it because it was written with certain assumptions) but what that then assumes is that some administrator or Microsoft programmer has chosen at some point to disable DEP and ASLR for those old programs (if they have DEP and ASLR enabled at all). And if the code wasn't compiled without some DEP/ASLR magic enabled, then is this really surprising? What's to stop any other program similarly avoiding DEP/ASLR, or anyone exploiting such programs?
How is this a "Quicktime problem" when the code being attacked is years old, and yet the OS still lets it break basic security? Surely the problem is not the program, but the things that let it execute. Hell, I have used old Windows programs that refuse to work with DEP enabled because they make certain assumptions and I realised that because the DEP handler would prevent them working in XP - they were NOT compiled at a time when any knowledge of DEP or ASLR on Windows was around. That's the whole point of DEP, isn't it? To stop programs executing code they shouldn't? I had to force an override for them network-wide but that was my choice, and no I did not specifically enable DEP myself, the Windows XP install decided to do that for me.
Is this version of QuickTime whitelisted? Are DEP and ASLR really that worthless that "old programs" compiled before they came along are allowed to do anything? Isn't this the fault of an administrator running an outdated program rather than anything to do with DEP, ASLR, Quicktime or anything else? What's Quicktime doing differently to every other old, insecure program out there that makes it more of a risk?
Seems like a complete red herring to me. Don't run old software. Don't run insecure software. Don't run programs that you haven't authorised yourself. And, apparently, don't rely on DEP or ASLR to actually DO anything.
I claim your school failed because you didn't read the bit that said that they marked them, including their working, as correct because they were able to read them - it was just "messy", not "illegible". And you don't have the excuse of my handwriting to blame.
My further point was also that writing increasingly ISN'T used for communication as much as personal aide-mémoire. When I fill in forms from the bank, they are all pre-printed with my details. Increasingly, I do nothing more on such forms than tick a box and sign it. Handwriting as a communications medium has always been second-rate. Books are not hand-written. Fonts on my computer do not appear hand-written. Standard form letters are not hand-written. And, like I said, the last time I actually HAD to write something was on an insurance claim form and that was only because they sent me a pre-printed form that I had to fill out in my own words - printing on the damn thing would have been more hassle than just handwriting it.
Handwriting is now starting to be like Latin lessons and parchment-writing - yes, there's a point to having the skill/knowledge, and those that have it may have an advantage, but it's increasingly becoming irrelevant and there are a million better things to be teaching our kids in their place.
I hereby demand $0.01 for every time you use your hammer to hit a nail. Does that seem stupid? What if I invented the hammer? What if I patented the hammer design? What if I took a standard hammer, changed the detail of the shaft a tiny bit, and then you bought MY hammer instead of the other, similar ones? They might be free, but I still want my $0.01 because you're using MY hammer. It's a pitiful amount, and you're using my tool, so why don't you pay for it?
Software patents, and most specifically, licensing of software patents are an abomination. If you build a substantial new invention, yes, you should be able to patent it for the purposes of stopping competitors building something identical after they've seen it for a few years in order to allow you to profit from your idea.
With software, most of those ideas are completely virtual. They usually are no more than a single mathematical manipulation. Rarely are they new and insightful, and most of them don't correspond to an invention so much as a process. That is, according to most sensible countries, not enough to be patentable. It doesn't result in a "device", it's still just an idea - if you want to patent a device that digitises video - marvellous, no problem at all. Or a new type of cable to connect it (DVI/HDMI/USB3 hardware patents - fine, nobody is moaning about that). If you want to patent the idea of a particular way of digitising the video, you're on more dubious ground unless it's truly revolutionary and isn't just something that exists by manipulating bits in a slightly different fashion.
The patent system was designed so that inventors had time to get their ideas off the ground into a working device without having to worry about copycats stealing the idea and getting to a working product first by using greater resources. They exist *because* physical devices and engineering take time. However, software patents allow you to literally patent any absurd, abstract, mathematical idea. I hereby patent the concept of a complex number, or a graph, or a quadratic equation, or dividing two numbers by calculating their reciprocal and multiplying them, or a method for solving the Towers of Hanoi, or the method of solving the Rubik's Cube. That's just how absurd they are, if not in theory then in practice.
Asking *USERS* of a piece of software, and even people who've never heard of or seen that software in their life, to pay for every single use of that software is a bit stupid. Every time I encode a bit of music, you expect me to pay the inventor of WAV, PCM, IFF, etc. a few dollars? That's just as stupid as MP3 licensing. And if a lot of people listen to that file, you expect me to pay on higher scales? I will pay you for the software to do the encode or decode, yes, probably, no problem at all. Once. I don't have to pay a royalty to Adobe every time I save a file in Photoshop format. I may have to pay them to find out the exact details of the format, but that's it, and that's optional - if I decide to reverse-engineer it (as is my right in lots of countries), I can then reimplement it - so long as I don't breach *COPYRIGHT*, there's no problem there.
Video-licensing is absurd. Every single owner of a DVD player or laptop in the world has paid the MPEG LA money. They don't even realise it. And, technically, a lot of "home video creation" packages, camcorder software, etc. aren't licensed to do what people are doing with them. If I was part of MPEG LA, OF COURSE I would want everyone in the world to pay every time they look at a video, encode it, transcode it. Doesn't mean it's a sensible, rational or reasonable thing to do though.
And the vast majority of video-related patents are nothing more than an algorithm. You cannot patent, or copyright, an algorithm. You have NEVER been able to in the majority of the world. It's like me charging you because you just used my method of long-division, or you worked out how to stack boxes using an thought process that I submitted to the patent office before y
My mother stormed into my school about 23 or so years ago and gave them a right rollicking. They were marking me down for bad handwriting, but I always got top-marks for the right answers. Her reasoning was thus: it wasn't a handwriting test, the work wasn't for display, the writing was legible enough for them to tell I had the right answer and the right working-out (they had marked it correct, after all) and I was one of the best students in the class academically. Did it REALLY matter what my handwriting looked like? She was hardly going to claim that the school had failed in my education just because my handwriting was a bit messy.
They never bothered me again until secondary school where we had exactly the same thing happen all over again.
To write neatly TAKES TOO LONG - for me and a lot of other people. My brain is already on the next question by the time I'm halfway through writing out the answer. Seriously - I never used more than half of the time available in an exam from primary school to university, and at least 50% of the time I *did* use was due to using a damn pen rather than a keyboard. Handwriting was always slowing me down and making me lose my concentration and place. My writing, technically, was perfect - grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. were all present but the handwriting was a little messy and scrunched because I was trying desperately to NO..T..... WRI.... TE.... AT... A... SNA....IL'... S.... PAC...E and then lose what I actually wanted to say by the end of the sentence.
How many *authors* who want to knock out a 500-page novel still use pen and paper for even the first drafts? Very few, and they don't do that because they use the classic typewriter or a computer which takes away the tedious business of transcribing their thoughts and lets them get on with the thoughts themselves. It's handy to scrawl some notes with a pen on a computer printout, it's handy to write tiny memos with them, but anything longer than a few sentences and you're better off doing it on a keyboard. I can't even *remember* the last time I had to write something down - possibly an insurance claim form some months back.
We have a viable, widely-available, cheap, more efficient, more accurate and faster method of transcription now - I work in schools and even in the poorest UK primary schools it's mandated to have one computer per three children, or thereabouts. Every topic must have some IT work in it, too. No wonder the kid's handwriting is deteriorating - damn right, as well. But these kids can touch-type before they move into secondary school. Handwriting's only advantage is that it needs no additional hardware past the most basic and crude (a stick of some kind that makes a mark), and kids can *still* do that if necessary - writing things on the back of your hand will never go out of fashion. It just won't be neat, but in those cases the ONLY people to ever read the message will be themselves, so neatest doesn't matter.
Handwriting is not a necessary skill any more. Hasn't been for at least 23 years, probably a lot more. It's *nice* to be able to do, sure. Convenient at times, but it's basically an artform. How many people today can write with a proper quill? Not many. Why? Because it's an outdated technology that has enormous downsides with the only real upside being the simplicity of the equipment and the artistry of the finished product. In 50 years time, handwriting will be "quaint" and you'll only use it for love-letters or artworks.
Assume the GPS weighs a kilo (shit, that's a heavy GPS). Assume your car weighs 1000 kilos (conservative estimate of a small European car). That's one-thousandth of its weight. They might possibly be required to compensate you for one-thousandth of your petrol (gasoline) - approximately 6p for 60 litres bought at £1 per litre, probably a LOT less over in the US. Say you get £10 off them (approximately 167 full tanks - or 83,000 miles in a decent car), after administrative costs, days off work etc. are weighed up - they got to violate quite a lot of your property, personal information and human rights for £10.
More importantly, if I attach a device to a car, I can be liable for criminal damage - that's what illegal clampers, key-scratchers, people who "move" a car without permission (e.g. to get it off their driveway when its been dumped), etc. are charged with over here, even if the car isn't "damaged", just immobilised or moved without permission by their actions. I think it would be infinitely more interesting and profitable to take them to court for the method of tracking, for installing the device, for doing so without permission, for "illegal search without a warrant" when they retrieve the information from that device, etc. than you'd ever get from fuel-cost recompense.
To be honest, if I ever suspected my car of having such a device that wasn't my own (I put GPS trackers on my own cars - they don't record any location information at all, they just allow me to dial-in and find the location when I want to know it, e.g. the car has been stolen), it would be destroyed quite quickly. If it couldn't be destroyed, it would suddenly have a LOT of trouble getting a signal. If it did get a signal, it would amazingly find that the signal it was getting was way inaccurate due to the introduction of several artificial signals that basically make it think it's driving around the bottom of the ocean rather than my actual location. The day that I can't buy a GPS that is independent of law-enforcement is the day I stop using GPS (or, more likely, the day I build my own).
And if I ever appear before a court based on the evidence of an unwarranted GPS device, whether I committed the actual crime they accuse me of or not, there would be legal hell - it would not be difficult to find a lawyer or a law to support several reasons to overturn any decision like that. If the police are *really* that stupid, not only would it jeopardise their use of the device, it would jeopardise EVERY case they brought where such tracking was even suspected of being used - at best it would be a mistrial because of the evidence given by those devices not being admissible. At worst, it would mean that the entire case was thrown out, even if the GPS had put me at the murder scene, because it might mean the case was impossible to try again fairly if it had been publicised.
Don't criticise your courts when your legal costs double and convicted felons are freed because of mistrials and retrials due to use of this law, even historically, blame the police who were silly enough to think they needed to use it and thought it was worth the risk to get a tiny, otherwise-obtainable piece of evidence.
But then, I live in a country that doesn't have a declaration of independence, a bill of rights, or a guarantee of freedom of speech, etc. I only live in a country that actually allows itself to be kept in check by its citizens and other countries and lets people, on the whole, live their lives.
You need a better GPS.
Mine is a small, cheap, portable TomTom that has no "aerial" to speak of (it's all internal). It was the cheapest thing I could buy. It works inside the car, wedged between the seats in a drinks holder, under a metal roof with electrically-heated windscreens inside a major city no problem at all. I only ever lose signal going through a tunnel (to be expected) and it gets taken out of the car and then reinserted every trip every day for, say, the last year or two - that's about 50,000 miles. It's been through France, Germany, Poland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands and even on a cross-channel ferry on the trip to those places from the UK and never suffered more than a very intermittent loss of signal. It went through the Black Forest, through three-inches of snow on the roof of the vehicle, through the various tunnels under Bruges/Brussels (loss of signal, of course, but only for a second or so and not for the first / last 200m of each tunnel), through London's skyscrapers, through hills, valleys, and the Alps.
Also, I built my own "GPS tracker" using a Mini-ITX board, a cheap Bluetooth GPS dongle that I bought from eBay for £10 (with SirfStar III chipset) and a 3G dongle. That gets a GPS signal from inside a Mini-ITX case, in the boot (trunk) of my car - it even gets a GSM and sometimes a 3G signal for the "dial-in" functionality should the car ever be stolen.
Either the GPS signal is shit in the half of the world that you live in, or your GPS is severely crap. A tiny little black-box GPS with "wifi-router"-style antenna can reliably pick up GPS from underneath a lorry (truck) no problem at all. That's why they sell £100 devices to do just that.
Of course I'm exaggerating the team situation to an extreme, but it has a truth to it. Programming is an inherently single-person process - team programming methodologies basically boil down to "you do this bit, I'll do that bit, we'll meet in the middle to these specs". It's usually design-by-committee, implement-by-parts, with individual inspirations made public. Yes, there's feedback and direction and lots of other interactions but in-between, the programmers are basically walking to their own personal computer, thinking to themselves, working on their own in their own heads and then sharing with others later.
And CS students, even the social ones, have to be taught how to work effectively as a team because, like mathematics, it's such a single-person process that collaboration is all about getting everyone on the same page by their own methods. Programming in teams does not scale linearly (far from it), does not scale at all in some cases, and isn't portable between humans. Even setting a code-style can be an administrative nightmare - many programmers have breakaway systems where they do the actual grunt work in their own way and then have some sort of conversion back and forth to the team methodology (whether that be source-control methods, coding style, etc.). Sometimes getting programmers to agree on a common development environment can be tricky, even (but fortunately that usually HELPS the code quality rather than hinder it).
If you leave 100 people in a room and tell them that they have to move a 50-ton rock to the other side, they will work naturally together as a team (on average, at least - one will sulk and do nothing because they weren't listened to, another will take exception with the unelected "leader", another will be actively working against the majority with their "more efficient" method, one will be complaining because they're doing all the grunt-work while the others are discussing the problem etc.). Leave 100 programming students in a room and tell them to achieve a similarly difficult intellectual objective using their coding skills and you will have absolute chaos on your hands. And, more than likely, one guy out of the 100 will figure out a super-efficient method at the start, work on their own and then just apply their code to get the job done before anyone can even think about analysing the problem team-wide.
It's a generalisation, but I've seen no end of CS students who would actually do a million times better job if you removed the team around them and asked them to do it themselves on their own. And even if you cherry-pick the most active, most integral and most amenable members and group them together on their own, they aren't any better than the best individual. The *quantity* of work achieved increases, of course, but the quality and the rate of achievement doesn't.
- APB cost over $100m in investment capital. That's a warning sign right there.
- APB has been in development for five years. No-one I know had heard of it until it popped up on Steam pre-orders.
- APB gets bad reviews on user sites.
- APB *didn't* get bad reviews in magazines, etc. because of a review embargo (until a week AFTER release) that stopped people publishing reviews - this arguably killed the game's publicity.
- APB changed over 5 years from being originally planned for the XBox and ending up being announced as a PC-only title.
- The APB studios seemingly have not-much-else in the pipeline at all. APB was their sole "saviour" really, and $100m of risk is a hell of a situation to start from with an MMO that basically relies on lots of people playing it a lot and liking it for a long time.
- APB is quite expensive compared to other MMO's, probably to compensate for the HUGE deficit and to keep lots of servers running 24/7.
- APB is very different in terms of genre, content, etc. to other MMO's.
- APB's parent company went into administration SIX WEEKS after release - they must have known that it needed to bring in millions within the first few weeks or the company would die like it did - they must have known that WAY BEFORE release, probably before the beta even started. They must also have known that it was a bit shit, given that they'd been running beta's for nearly a year.
Basically, 200 people lost their jobs because someone spent too much on something so enormously risky that they were betting on paying back millions of dollars in a matter of weeks on an untested concept on something that had been in development for five years, beta for a year and still couldn't get good reviews (or even ANY official reviews from professional sources), had been delayed and delayed, had priced itself too high, etc.etc.etc.
It was a classic bad investment, with bad management. Some games programmers operate like this in perpetuity - form company, make popular game, get investment, spend it all, declare company bankrupt, sack everyone, move over to a new company and hire the now-out-of-work "good" staff again (probably on worse contracts), rinse and repeat.
APB and Realtime Worlds have *nothing* to do with the games industry being weak, with games budgets getting too high or anything else. It was just stupidity.
Programmers are funny animals. Some of them work best in complete isolation. One person can pull off things that entire teams never dreamed of. A kid in their back bedroom, and a rainy summer, can generate a game quicker by any design-by-committee. Programmers don't naturally work in teams, they have to be taught - every serious CS course has a team-building component to it.
Lots of big names started off as tiny indies... Codemasters is the most famous example, most probably, and Valve has bought up indie teams before now. It's not surprising at all, the only surprise is that indie went "out of fashion" with some people for a decade or so.
The skill of programming a game is not about knowing Knuth off by heart, or finding mathematical shortcuts using integer arithmetic, it's about actually having a little vision and wanting to see it move around and make funny sounds. Once you know what you want to do, the rest is just slog-work to get it to work how you imagined. Large teams do sometimes miss the fact that, underneath everything else, there should be a game. Most of the "classic" games of the early 80's were written by teenagers in back bedrooms. Magazine cover tapes were full of indie material. Even large collect-a-weekly-parts programming magazines were written by what we would legally class as children (I know, I've spoken to someone on here that wrote a huge game for INPUT by Marshall Cavendish when they were a kid).
Indie development was around at the start of the Internet - almost the whole shareware scene was indie. It kinda lost sight of itself when huge powerful consoles became mainstream, moving into the "homebrew" and various other sidelines which, because of their dubious legal status, were never as popular in mass-media. Now indie has found its roots again. A teenager can knock up a game in a week and be selling it by the thousands from Steam, or direct from their own website. They don't have to worry about system architectures or OS or having enough processor power. They can be pretty sure that it can be ported to myriad systems and not have to worry about development kits for consoles.
I also think that indie and retro are often closely linked, because of this connection with old-time indie development. Retro remakes are popular, retro gaming magazines are everywhere - I was in London Stansted last week and there were FIVE different retro gaming magazines on the shelf - I couldn't believe it! People are happy to just play silly games that are no more complex than some Spectrum games of old - Facebook jollies, or five-minute play-throughs or even Flash/Java demos on the author's website (Altitude is very cool!). People are carrying devices that can run small games with ease and even buy them immediately and securely from their phones.
In fact, I've started programming on a game that I've been wanting to do for years because of all the indie development I see. I see how simple or retro games are coming back into fashion and it makes me want to code. Chances are that my code will never leave my PC but it's immense fun to be doing for myself - it's replaced quite a lot of other hobbies just lately - and very heart-warming to see my little sprites bop around the screen. Even my girlfriend likes the fact that there is a little game that she can modify and influence and has often said she wants to sit there and make dozens of sprites for it. She often asks what I've got "your little people" to do today. The beauty is that if other people think the finished article is good enough then setting up a store, Paypal link or even Steam distribution takes no time at all. And because I programmed it for the fun of it, it's ALL profit - I would have programmed if a time-traveller told me that I'd never, ever sell a single copy.
If you're working in the industry, and the scare-stories are anywhere near true, I'm not surprised that people are leaving their megalithic corporations that are trying to source funding for $60m games and instead want to see if they ca
Since the advent of games-for-show instead of games-for-fun, I have certain rules for buying games. These will probably explain why huge development budgets are a waste of money and why indie games are increasingly occupying more of my hard drive. It'll also explain specifically why APB died a death, because it was one of the games I looked at in the last few months.
1) No subscription. If I buy a game, I buy it. I don't rent games - never have, never will. I may borrow them from friends. I may have to (at some point) pay in installments to "own" the game, but when I do that's more a financial arrangement than an ongoing subscription. I've never played WoW, or any other MMO, because of this.
2) Demo. I do not play a game that I don't know *exactly* how it plays. I do not pre-order games, either. Some FPS's are vomit-inducing to me because of the motion (for some reason, Duke Nukem 3D was like that, but almost no other game). Some games *don't* let me change the controls to something I can actually get on with, or that works comfortably on my laptop. Some games do not play well despite looking nice (I *cannot* get on with DogFighter because the control system is just so horrendously out-of-tune with how I want the aircraft to move - thus the game is unplayable to me). If you don't offer me a demo, the only other options open to me are: playing a friend's version, playing a pirate version, or not buying the game until it's incredibly cheap and therefore worth the risk.
3) Value. I don't pay for any game that I won't get value back for. Asking £50 for a game is ludicrous unless I get hundreds of hours out of it. They are £6.99 games on my hard drive that have hundreds of hours of gameplay from me - you have to compete with that. For some reason, this seems to operate on a bell-curve... very cheap games are usually shit value, very expensive games are usually shit value, with the peak being at about £10 or so. If your game is too expensive, I *will* wait until it's cheaper - I don't mind playing games that are several years old so long as they work. If it never gets cheaper, it never gets bought.
4) System requirements. If I need a PC greater than the one I have, I won't look at the game. I don't buy PC's to fit the games, I buy games to fit my PC. There is no excuse any more for slow-running games on modern dual-core processors with Gb's of RAM available to them. Dogfighter CRAWLED on my PC and to get it to run smoothly required me to put it into 800x600 with no texture detail - it looked like a version of F29 Retaliator from my DOS days, without the fun, and with broken textures everywhere - and still my PC struggled (in fact, I loaded up F29 Retaliator in DOSBox soon after and had much more enjoyment out of it). If Tom Clancy's HAWX can work fine on my PC without me changing any options, Dogfighter should as well. If you require Windows Vista or 7, that's me done too. There's no reason for that. If you require a particular Service Pack, I will be suspicious and want to play the demo to be sure that you're just fibbing - most games run fine on SP2 even if they demand SP3 for example. If you require gobs of disk space, that's probably the biggest killer because my hard drive space and bandwidth is my most precious commodity.
5) DRM. If I can't play my friend's copy on my computer to see how it runs on my machine, that breaks Rule Number 2 above. If I can't play a legit version or demo on another PC, then I won't pirate it - I just won't buy it. However, if I do decide your game is good enough to make it onto my machine, a good way to kill Rule Number 3 is to reduce its value by making it a hassle to install / uninstall, making it require Internet access even just for "activation", making it unremoveable, limiting my installs artificially, making it impossible to backup to media, etc. Pirate versions and cracks will solve this for games I do buy but if I have to do that, you have a serious customer service problem. It's like me buying a car a
That labourer had to get to your project somehow. They had to transport necessary tools that you probably don't have but they would need to use to build your project. They would have to represent some hours of effort that *wouldn't* need to be done if you weren't building your project. They also represent the environmental savings which arise due to the use of mass produced tools, supplies and equipment and local skill rather than some expert who lives on the other side of the country.
I don't think it's perfect but it's as damn close as you can ever get from something measurable. And a "green" house is not a green house if the maintenance people have to constantly come back and check the damn thing every week, or it takes huge, specialised tools to install the thing which, in the end, probably have more environmental impact that the thing you're installing. That's fine for a generic tool, say a spanner, because it's mass produced and therefore *probably* better, but not if that tool is *only* ever used for, say, calibrating a photovoltaic setup.
You map a network drive on your LAN, you execute a program on it that requires a DLL. That DLL can't be found unless Windows looks on the remote drive too, and chances are that if a program is bundled with a DLL, that DLL is actually a better match for the program than anything lurking in the Windows folder or other paths. So there is a use-case here - I'm pretty sure there's at least one school system I've worked on that would just break in a second if you couldn't load DLL's from a remote network location, and for not much reason ("The installation files are all there, I can see them, they are in the read-only mapped public drive we've always used for software distribution, etc." - and at least one school administration package I know runs from a shared Windows drive on the server thus requiring zero installation on the client)
I agree that the things being blown out of all proportion - if someone can place a file on your drive in any way, shape or form, it's game over anyway, Windows File Protection or not. More importantly, why the HELL haven't we fixed this DLL mess yet to only load DLL's from the application folder and then let people hard-link to a shared copy if they really want to share libraries between applications?
The only thing that ever matters in these kinds of projects, the only thing WORTH measuring, is how long until it starts to pay for itself. Not the electrical system, or the "money saved" on your normal use, but the time until you're actually in profit on the venture as a whole.
It's a crass and crude measure but the money invested into getting something like photovoltaics, underfloor heating, etc. is directly related to the difficulty of manipulating the raw materials, the cost of extraction, the rarity, the difficulty of transporting them, installing them, the environmental impact they have (via taxes, subsidies, etc.). Marble floors, stone walls, etc. have wonderful properties but require you to move tons of stone cross-country (and even across continents). Photovoltaics contain some rare minerals, require lots of energy to manipulate, produce, dispose of and maintain, etc.
If we're talking houses then if you can't have the systems pay themselves off in less than 25 years, you're wasting your time. In 25 years, you could have bought and paid for any house you could afford, that would almost certainly sell for more than you bought it once your mortgage term is up (and thus provide overall profit even with your monthly mortgage expenditure), even despite interest accrued, ongoing maintenance and everything else - the house would "pay for itself" and any environmental damage that you incurred that wasn't directly related to its construction (i.e. I assume you bought a house that already existed, not have one constructed especially). Also, you could live in it and not have to worry about maintaining a roof garden unless you wanted to, or finding specialist contractors when your one-off heating/cooling system goes wrong.
If your super-duper green house, or your super-duper energy production system, doesn't start turning an *overall* profit in less than 25 years, you're wasting your time and actually COSTING more energy than you're saving - in planning, analysis, trips to the city to find an engineer / consultant / whatever, maintenance, replacement, time-wasting, application-lodging, construction etc.etc.etc. Although theoretically perfect solar systems can turn profits in certain parts of the world relatively quickly, this isn't true of a VAST proportion of other things that are necessary. The energy used to BUILD a new house? Hell, that's not small - and if you paid for that and then hope to get that money back by later selling the house, or on savings on unnecessary utilities, all you've done is sold your green credentials for cash on the first step anyway.
In the end, the places and people that are the greenest are NOT those putting HVAC systems in their houses at all, or even understand how a photovoltaic works. It's the people living in countries where the problems of heating, cooling, water supply, etc. were solved MILLENNIA ago and they still retain elements of that culture. Most of them are farmers. Most of them live in white-covered buildings constructed from local stone. Most of them have shutters on their windows. Most of them have land on which they can grow their own food and not have to transport food in little metal tins from foreign countries to survive. Most of them have simple solutions like wells, wood-burning stoves, their own animals and crops, houses constructed in such a way that the roof-patio is about 40 degrees C hotter than the wine cellar for most of the year. Most of them live in houses that have almost literally been maintenance-free for the last 2-3 hundred years and are likely to last at least that again.
They have electricity and televisions and, yes, they probably could generate their own but they know it's unlikely to produce any return on their investment unless they get it absolutely, perfectly correct and even then that it's "cheating" and not really being green. Hell, some of them might even have water mills on a local water source and still the investment in copper cabling, electronic safety systems, generators and electric lighting/h