How frustrating is sample code that doesn't work? It distracts from the learning process, it frustrates beginners and it devalues the book. Sure, it might teach some debugging skills but in the context of trying to learning or a reference, bugs have no place.
Bruce Eckel discusses unit testing the examples in his books in a chapter of Thinking In Patterns. He says it improved the quality of the code in his book. Why can't book authors and publishers do the same, require a full set of tests for the source code? Even if it verifies that the code compiles without warnings and errors it would contribute greatly to the publication's quality.
"It's definitely an accident from Morpheus' side, probably a worm. This is very dangerous."
A worm???
Like Code Red? Or NIMDA?
This sounds like some crack addled reporters posing as computer hackers.
Scenario 1: There is a hole and it will be confirmed through trustworthy channels. It is a buffer overflow or http path traversal problem. The reporters or editors got confused when the brainiacs described it to them and attempted to describe it in terms everyone understands, hence a coding mistake from FastTrak or Morpheus being described as a 'worm'.
Scenario 2: There is a worm exploiting Morpheus. Fat chance the first we hear of this is from BBC.
Scenario 3: They discovered that Morpheus uses http over port 1214 as a transport layer and were amazed to find out that some people have shared their entire hard drive. Wanna find everyone that has their entire hard drive shared? Just search for some windows component that shouldn't be shared. Try it, you'll be amazed. Others have covered this in greater detail, including variations that make even more sense.
Scenario 4: Conspiracy. Also more details in other posts.
Who developed this nifty system but dropped the ball at grouping commonly used letters together? Imagine being able to crank out most words without moving that wheel more than a couple detents left or right.
Whats the average age of the people on BNet? How much hacking has BNet attracted? How much of that would change if people were paying $$$/mo for the privilege of playing?
Now I'm sure that EQ and others attract their share of hacks and lamerz that act well below their age. But the $10/mo probably goes a long ways toward keeping that number down.
Stories vary but from what I've heard, a few months back someone figured out how to 'Dupe' items in Diablo2. These were undetectable dupes, for all intents and purposes real items in the game. Supposedly they quietly did this for a while, selling the goods on eBay and then finally sent instructions for the hack to Blizzard so it could be fixed.
Somehow the hack leaked and over the past weekend, many players were duping stuff, in effect, printing money for themselves. Enough did it that the economy of Diablo2 is completely changed. Blizzard has corrected the bug that allowed duping but the economy has permanently changed, unless Blizzard does something drastic like a player reset or figures out how to eliminate the duped items.
I remember this one, a chilling tale of a misguided audit doing severe damage to a corporation. It is an AC post, and requests for clues went unanswered (understandable where lawsuits are involved) but it rings true. Anyone have the wherewithal to track this down and verify?
dang, they snuck this in starting in 0.8 and completing the code in 0.9.x milestones. And I didn't notice. At least it wasn't in there when I first was looking around...
I noticed the gopher update in sid a few days back. In a fit of nostalgia months earlier I put the gopher daemon on my linux box and set about learning how to 'create gopher sites'. Surely it couldn't be as easy as dropping some files in some directories:)
Its really amazing how quickly gopher dried up as http took off. The gopher clients for windows are all written for Windows 3.1 or NT 3.1 and the major browser vendors seemed to have left the code in a state of neglect.
I was also amazed to find CGI like scripts for handling gopher+ (or something like that, my memory is hazy and in true/. fashion I'm too lazy to recheck facts) forms. If everyone wasn't so busy re-inventing the wheel gopher might have made a good base for all the low bandwidth wireless devices running around today instead of WAP. A few modifications and it might have worked. Problem is, 'gopher' just isn't as sexy on the resume as all those modern TLA's...
The editor has improved but is still not a full blown 3D modeling package. The engine and editor both have been tweaked to easily allow the import of complex models from 3D packages such as 3ds max, maya and others without a performance hit ingame. From what I've seen and heard, this is the preferred workflow, much more work done in those kinds of packages and only the final bits assembled in the editor. Don't know about getting stuff back out of it, although with that workflow you wouldn't really need to.
10 hours a night. She can wake up early but then a day or two later she crashes on the couch hours before we normally go to sleep.
I seem to be optimum at 8 hours a night, once I work off the sleep debt I'll even wake up without the alarm (otherwise I sleep through it).
From this and from reading this thread, it just seems that different people need different amounts of sleep and they have different schedules for going to sleep and waking up.
Morpheus is a windows app that works on the FastTrak network(same as Kazaa), claims not to install spyware and still works after I did the ad-aware thing. It pops up ads in IE every once in a while if you leave it running but other than that it gives you access to all the ill-gotten gain out there.
What happens when a patent is invalidated by prior art? Can the parties who demonstrated prior art file a patent? Or does the fact that they didn't file a patent invalidate any claim they have on the invention.
Blizzard has a history of making games that don't need the latest in processor / vid card to run.
I ran the beta and release of Diablo II (spring / summer 2000) on my P200 / 64MB / Voodoo2 card. That was below minimum requirements. DII did have some compatibility problems that left people with much faster computers with bad framerates and other problems, but that isn't exactly a performance problem.
IIRC Starcraft asked for a 75 MHz or 90 MHz Pentium in late spring of '97. That was about the same time the Pentium II was coming on the market. And indeed, Starcraft played well on the P90 we had at work.
Didn't play the original Diablo when it came out (early '96?), I think that required a Pentium. That may have pushed the requirements a bit.
Warcraft II? Don't remember the requirements, probably any 486 would do well with it. It did get choppy if you had all 8 players maxed out to the population limit and only 8MB of memory but that was pretty rare, smaller games performed just fine.
Warcraft I? Again, probably a decent 386 would handle it OK. That was a while ago...
I think Blizzard has done a great job of releasing games that perform decently on 2 year old hardware. While a PII 400 is huge compared to its predecessor, it isn't much compared to a new 'budget' computer today.
Opera 5 static weighs in under 3MB (tgz). Dynamicly linked build is under 2MB (tgz). A little heftier than you're after but you get the bonus of good HTML 4 support and decent stylesheet support. Closed source though.
Netscape 3 weighs in at 3MB compressed. Netscape 2 weighs in at 2 MB compressed. Given those choices I'd favor Opera.
But there does seem to be a gap between the 'modern' brosers and the very simple.
<disclaimer>I know little about 'big iron'</disclaimer>
But isn't the point of these kind of projects to derive more computing power in a generic form, something useful to many situations?
Sure, my Athlon isn't too slow at the piddly little hobbyist 3d rendering stuff I play with, but what if I suddenly get grandiose dreams of 3D worlds, wouldn't it be nice if I could divert the down payment for a house and move myself a year or two farther along Moore's timeline?
I can think of some small business applications where a nice quick video compression would be nice, especially if the hardware and software were all generic enough to buy off the shelf without a serious outlay of cash. Granted, there are very nice and very fast hardware codecs but then what if that same small business wanted to render some 3D along with that video stream? Or I'm working for them and get permission to render my VR opus overnight?
What about applications that could be enabled by cheap and standardized GFLOPs? If you can't think of any you're not thinking hard enough.
Ha, I just read Forever Peace!
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 2
I've read a bit of SciFi but don't remember the author (Haldeman). I came across Forever Peace at the local library and read it.
Forever Peace was a good read, light but engrossing, with ideas good enough to challenge me even if I disagreed with some of them (or disagreed with the 'light' treatment they recieved).
Odd that this shows up on/. - I'm gonna have to hunt down the book and read it now.
Slashdot Mirror
had the same problem with a brand new CD. It installed fine off my slow speed CD burner, although it took a very long time.
Is the confusion because they both abbreviate their online services b.net?
Bruce Eckel discusses unit testing the examples in his books in a chapter of Thinking In Patterns. He says it improved the quality of the code in his book. Why can't book authors and publishers do the same, require a full set of tests for the source code? Even if it verifies that the code compiles without warnings and errors it would contribute greatly to the publication's quality.
Hmm, notice that the mention of the worm has since been removed from the article?
A worm???
Like Code Red? Or NIMDA?
This sounds like some crack addled reporters posing as computer hackers.
Scenario 1: There is a hole and it will be confirmed through trustworthy channels. It is a buffer overflow or http path traversal problem. The reporters or editors got confused when the brainiacs described it to them and attempted to describe it in terms everyone understands, hence a coding mistake from FastTrak or Morpheus being described as a 'worm'.
Scenario 2: There is a worm exploiting Morpheus. Fat chance the first we hear of this is from BBC.
Scenario 3: They discovered that Morpheus uses http over port 1214 as a transport layer and were amazed to find out that some people have shared their entire hard drive. Wanna find everyone that has their entire hard drive shared? Just search for some windows component that shouldn't be shared. Try it, you'll be amazed. Others have covered this in greater detail, including variations that make even more sense.
Scenario 4: Conspiracy. Also more details in other posts.
So we can have a Beowulf cluster along with our space elevator? Thats pretty cool!
But don't you think it is a little odd that this mess starts with AOL not a week after Trillian gets top pick in a CNET review of IM clients?
A quick scan seemed to indicate that Sun's HotSpot, IBM's JVM and GCJ all do very well.
Or is that patented too?
Now I'm sure that EQ and others attract their share of hacks and lamerz that act well below their age. But the $10/mo probably goes a long ways toward keeping that number down.
Stories vary but from what I've heard, a few months back someone figured out how to 'Dupe' items in Diablo2. These were undetectable dupes, for all intents and purposes real items in the game. Supposedly they quietly did this for a while, selling the goods on eBay and then finally sent instructions for the hack to Blizzard so it could be fixed. Somehow the hack leaked and over the past weekend, many players were duping stuff, in effect, printing money for themselves. Enough did it that the economy of Diablo2 is completely changed. Blizzard has corrected the bug that allowed duping but the economy has permanently changed, unless Blizzard does something drastic like a player reset or figures out how to eliminate the duped items.
Are those $1500 Gb cards quite a bit different from the $35 Gb cards (copper) or the $175 cards (fiber) listed on Pricewatch?
I remember this one, a chilling tale of a misguided audit doing severe damage to a corporation. It is an AC post, and requests for clues went unanswered (understandable where lawsuits are involved) but it rings true. Anyone have the wherewithal to track this down and verify?
Thanks pr0ndud!
Its really amazing how quickly gopher dried up as http took off. The gopher clients for windows are all written for Windows 3.1 or NT 3.1 and the major browser vendors seemed to have left the code in a state of neglect.
I was also amazed to find CGI like scripts for handling gopher+ (or something like that, my memory is hazy and in true /. fashion I'm too lazy to recheck facts) forms. If everyone wasn't so busy re-inventing the wheel gopher might have made a good base for all the low bandwidth wireless devices running around today instead of WAP. A few modifications and it might have worked. Problem is, 'gopher' just isn't as sexy on the resume as all those modern TLA's...
The editor has improved but is still not a full blown 3D modeling package. The engine and editor both have been tweaked to easily allow the import of complex models from 3D packages such as 3ds max, maya and others without a performance hit ingame. From what I've seen and heard, this is the preferred workflow, much more work done in those kinds of packages and only the final bits assembled in the editor. Don't know about getting stuff back out of it, although with that workflow you wouldn't really need to.
I seem to be optimum at 8 hours a night, once I work off the sleep debt I'll even wake up without the alarm (otherwise I sleep through it).
From this and from reading this thread, it just seems that different people need different amounts of sleep and they have different schedules for going to sleep and waking up.
Morpheus is a windows app that works on the FastTrak network(same as Kazaa), claims not to install spyware and still works after I did the ad-aware thing. It pops up ads in IE every once in a while if you leave it running but other than that it gives you access to all the ill-gotten gain out there.
What happens when a patent is invalidated by prior art? Can the parties who demonstrated prior art file a patent? Or does the fact that they didn't file a patent invalidate any claim they have on the invention.
I need to post some stego'd pics just so these guys can find some stuff.
Blizzard has a history of making games that don't need the latest in processor / vid card to run. I ran the beta and release of Diablo II (spring / summer 2000) on my P200 / 64MB / Voodoo2 card. That was below minimum requirements. DII did have some compatibility problems that left people with much faster computers with bad framerates and other problems, but that isn't exactly a performance problem. IIRC Starcraft asked for a 75 MHz or 90 MHz Pentium in late spring of '97. That was about the same time the Pentium II was coming on the market. And indeed, Starcraft played well on the P90 we had at work. Didn't play the original Diablo when it came out (early '96?), I think that required a Pentium. That may have pushed the requirements a bit. Warcraft II? Don't remember the requirements, probably any 486 would do well with it. It did get choppy if you had all 8 players maxed out to the population limit and only 8MB of memory but that was pretty rare, smaller games performed just fine. Warcraft I? Again, probably a decent 386 would handle it OK. That was a while ago... I think Blizzard has done a great job of releasing games that perform decently on 2 year old hardware. While a PII 400 is huge compared to its predecessor, it isn't much compared to a new 'budget' computer today.
Opera 5 static weighs in under 3MB (tgz). Dynamicly linked build is under 2MB (tgz). A little heftier than you're after but you get the bonus of good HTML 4 support and decent stylesheet support. Closed source though. Netscape 3 weighs in at 3MB compressed. Netscape 2 weighs in at 2 MB compressed. Given those choices I'd favor Opera. But there does seem to be a gap between the 'modern' brosers and the very simple.
I use emelFM. It seems pretty lightweight, offers a MC style interface and doesn't annoy me too greatly.
<disclaimer>I know little about 'big iron'</disclaimer>
But isn't the point of these kind of projects to derive more computing power in a generic form, something useful to many situations?
Sure, my Athlon isn't too slow at the piddly little hobbyist 3d rendering stuff I play with, but what if I suddenly get grandiose dreams of 3D worlds, wouldn't it be nice if I could divert the down payment for a house and move myself a year or two farther along Moore's timeline?
I can think of some small business applications where a nice quick video compression would be nice, especially if the hardware and software were all generic enough to buy off the shelf without a serious outlay of cash. Granted, there are very nice and very fast hardware codecs but then what if that same small business wanted to render some 3D along with that video stream? Or I'm working for them and get permission to render my VR opus overnight?
What about applications that could be enabled by cheap and standardized GFLOPs? If you can't think of any you're not thinking hard enough.
Forever Peace was a good read, light but engrossing, with ideas good enough to challenge me even if I disagreed with some of them (or disagreed with the 'light' treatment they recieved).
Odd that this shows up on /. - I'm gonna have to hunt down the book and read it now.