It's good to see Namco are managing to continue to do so well, as they are one of the few truly innovative games companies out there. For example, they created an extremely exciting rivalry-based game called "Pinpoint Shot" which got virtually no exposure in the mainstream games press, but is available in a number of arcades if you search for it.
One of the things that was innovative in the game was known as a "focus-point" where the game could use sophisticated AI to tell if a player was off-form, and stop them. This pause was used to give the player who was below the chance to fully concentrste on the target, resulting in an altogether fairer game.
It's a shame the game was mostly ignored, as its innovations could have benefitted many arcade games.
Tell you what: normally I'd bet you 10, but clearly that doesn't work on the Internet. But I'll bet my credibility (which is all we have online) that it turns out to be an unpatched vulnerability.
Also, I don't deny that it could be social engineering. But read the thread to get the nuances.
"The server was hacked. Was it running NT?"
"No, Linux. It was probably $ANYTHING_EXCEPT_SOFTWARE_ERROR"
And that sort of comment deserves all the invective I can muster.
On the A31 near where I used to live there is a stretch that is done in a noticeably darker (and smoother) tarmac. I think it was done specifically for noise reduction, and when driving over it you can really tell - it's a tremendous difference. Like you know if you're in a room with a washing machine and it finishes, and suddenly you're aware of how quiet everything is? Same sort of effect.
Now I'm not saying it's the same stuff, but is it really a new finding that it is the tire/road contact that's noisy when this was done at least 6 years ago?
Or maybe, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, Linux isn't some sort of magical bug free OS where every buffer is checked, every race condition averted, and every service that runs on it is guaranteed bug free.
Good God. The fact you can post that comment...no. You're just too much of an unthinking hero-worshipping idiot for me to finish. Yes, it was an inside job or a weak password. Anything except a vulnerability. Yes.
That some guys projected Space Invaders onto a building as part of an advertising stunt? Well let me tell you something.
As part of an advertising stunt a few years ago, FHM (UK) projected a picture of Gail Porter, naked, onto the side of the Houses of Parliament. Now that's much more of a story.
A YRO article that has nothing to do with your rights online. Actually, this comment is -1 redundant, as clearly there never has/will be a YRO article that does what it says on the tin.
These files and anything else on this site are here for private purposes only and SHOULD NOT BE DOWNLOADED OR VIEWED WHATSOEVER!
Why the fuck do people bother with that crap? Do they really think that they have cunningly found a legal loophole that every lawyer in the world has missed? Do they not realise that if they trotted out that defence in any court in the world the judge would just laugh at them?
Y'know, it could've been, like, mind controlling wheelchairs, and that'd totally freaky, 'cause I'd be all like "They're controlling my thoughts! Aieee!".
Whoa. That's like mobility Daleks or shit like that.
Yeah, I played with that one too - pretty impressive rasterizer to reduce the number of DHTML primitives to a minimum.
I don't know exactly what your app does, but I guess that from what I assume a graphing interface would do, a <1 second delay is perfectly acceptable. It's a little slow for what I am working on, as it needs to be near-as-damnit realtime (think lines tracking mouse drags), but I'll certainly bear it in mind for any future projects that don't need to be quite as fast.
The API is nice and simple too, so I guess it'd be relatively simple to write an abstraction layer for the functions - just include the VML or DHTML libraries depending on a server-side browser sniff. Let me know how it all works out - I'm kinda interested in this one.
I think you missed the point of me bringing up the sobig worm. What I was trying to get across is that if all things were equal (Windows and Linux had equal shares of the desktop, and they both had the same demographics of users) then you would see a huge increase in the number of "security breaches". The reason I used sobig in particular is that you can claim Linux has all the security in the world, but it can't help with someone who will take an unexpected attachment, process it, then run it.
It doesn't have to be a hack to be a security problem, and I was giving one undeniable (surely nobody would be stubborn enough to deny it?) example of where the only reason Linux is not affected is because it is not as widely used.
What he means, and has quite a valid (if unpopular) point with is that because of Windows' huge dominance, the majority of all hack attempts, and the vast majority of all viruses are directed at Windows. Because people consider Linux to be too obscure to be worth spending their time attacking, it rarely succumbs to such attacks.
And before you start yammering about Many eyes/shallow bugs or whatever, I shall use my new favorite example: the sobig worm. In order to get infected with this, a user must receive an email, save the attachment, unzip it, then execute the file contained within.
Yeah, someone else already pointed out that flash was bundled. As you may have guessed, the overriding reason was that we have no Flash experience (Also a PHP coder whose environment is a text editor).
As for W3C ratification, I think you're being optimistic. Yes, it's nice to future proof things. However, SVG has been around for a couple of years, and is still not natively supported by IE. VML, however, is, and has been for some time. Even if (when) IE starts supporting SVG, there will be a significant time before VML is deprecated, then finally dropped. When that finally happens, the chances are the software will have undergone far more serious changes than switching the client side vector language.
One other thing to remember is that even if the day comes that a switchover is needed, there is another major advantage of web applications: zero rollout in the company. Just patch the server, et voila! There is a trade-off between future proofing, cost, and present day usefulness. Now don't get me wrong, I can't wait until SVG becomes the de facto standard, as its language is so much cleaner than the oblique VML, but for the time being, I maintain that VML is a saner choice than SVG.
Shit, if you really want to be safe, write the client side scripting through an abstraction layer so that when you need to you can switch to SVG, or Microsoft UltraVec 2007 or whatever, just by updating vectorlib.js.
...and throw in a rasterizing algorithm on top of it as well and we're in for some serious fun.
Well, I'm glad you tried it out as otherwise I'd have been compelled to write the code myself. But your results do confirm my suspicions of the people who claimed that they'd done this before. I can only assume that they meant the idea had occurred to them before, but wanted to sound "cool" by claiming they'd implemented it. Whatever.
And there is sense in writing web apps for specific environments. First, if you're providing it as a service for hundreds or thousands of people, then you have the ultimate thin client - zero rollout, just a URL. Also, no need to worry about server security or reconfiguring firewalls, as everything runs on Apache and port 80. Also, as with a similar project I'm doing, if you're mostly interested in showing a load of data, then a web browser is an ideal platform to do it in; HTML talking to your choice of mod_perl, mod_php, whatever is a really, really easy way of coding an attractive, multiuser interface to data.
Thank you for so promptly signing, dating and returning the NR-7872 form, colloquially known as the "I want to prove I didn't read the article" form.
There will be a 2 day wait while your application is processed, at the end of which we shall send you a certificate which legally proves you don't have a clue what you're talking about, should anyone erroneously claim otherwise.
...as this would be comparable to running the exhaust of the car with the garage door down.
Not quite. Yes, if you displace enough Oxygen with CO2 then you can asphyxiate. However, what makes car exhausts so lethal is the carbon monoxide. CO actually has a much stronger affinity to haemoglobin than CO2, so rather than dying because there is no Oxygen, CO will actively displace Oxygen from your bloodstream, even if there is plenty present in the atmosphere.
Of course, this is not such a problem in modern cars with catalytic converters, but still.
OK, a hybrid solution may be acceptable depending on exactly what he wants (as in a visual clue, such as rubber-banding, drawn by Javascript, then the finished operation rendered by the server) but I think that it would be tricky to generalise this to all of the possible operations he may want.
For example, you are basically limited to drawing a rectangle. You could specialise this to only allowing a horizontal line, or a vertical line, but ultimately that's all you can get without running back into the very problem he's trying to solve.
OK, I'll apologise for being harsh (well, 99% of my slashdot contributions are trolls, and it's hard to flick out of character) but one of the common problems with "ask Slashdot" questions is that unless it is highly technical to start with, everyone is willing to chime in with irrelevant, dumb and downright wrong answers. And the entry bar doesn't get much lower than talking about web pages (read some of the "helpful" comments in this story about useful server-side graph utilities, for example) so I figured you'd just not thought it through.
So there we go: an official gazpology - cherish it, for it is a rare and wonderous thing indeed.
Cute idea - time to dig up the rasterizing algorithm and port it to JS. Yeah, in principle it would work (might possibly be a problem trying to persuade the browser that no, really, I honestly do want these TDs and TRs all to be on adjacent pixels.
I wonder how quickly a browser could re-flow a document that included an 800X600 cell table...My guess is "painfully", but it's almost worth writing the concept code to find out - time to write some PHP (I'm buggered if I'm going to write it by hand)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things that was innovative in the game was known as a "focus-point" where the game could use sophisticated AI to tell if a player was off-form, and stop them. This pause was used to give the player who was below the chance to fully concentrste on the target, resulting in an altogether fairer game.
It's a shame the game was mostly ignored, as its innovations could have benefitted many arcade games.
Also, I don't deny that it could be social engineering. But read the thread to get the nuances.
"The server was hacked. Was it running NT?"
"No, Linux. It was probably $ANYTHING_EXCEPT_SOFTWARE_ERROR"
And that sort of comment deserves all the invective I can muster.
Now I'm not saying it's the same stuff, but is it really a new finding that it is the tire/road contact that's noisy when this was done at least 6 years ago?
Good God. The fact you can post that comment...no. You're just too much of an unthinking hero-worshipping idiot for me to finish. Yes, it was an inside job or a weak password. Anything except a vulnerability. Yes.
So why not just say '>nul' then?
Boromir, son of Faramir
For someone who names themselves after characters in the film, you don't seem to know much about it, as you got it the wrong way round.
As part of an advertising stunt a few years ago, FHM (UK) projected a picture of Gail Porter, naked, onto the side of the Houses of Parliament. Now that's much more of a story.
Where was Slashdot then, eh?
A YRO article that has nothing to do with your rights online. Actually, this comment is -1 redundant, as clearly there never has/will be a YRO article that does what it says on the tin.
No more text.
When she does well do you give her a sticker?
Given it's the European Volume Cap, I'd wager that very little money indeed was spent there.
An increase of 3dB is equivalent to doubling the power output. 4dB is quite significant.
Why the fuck do people bother with that crap? Do they really think that they have cunningly found a legal loophole that every lawyer in the world has missed? Do they not realise that if they trotted out that defence in any court in the world the judge would just laugh at them?
Gah.
Whoa. That's like mobility Daleks or shit like that.
I don't know exactly what your app does, but I guess that from what I assume a graphing interface would do, a <1 second delay is perfectly acceptable. It's a little slow for what I am working on, as it needs to be near-as-damnit realtime (think lines tracking mouse drags), but I'll certainly bear it in mind for any future projects that don't need to be quite as fast.
The API is nice and simple too, so I guess it'd be relatively simple to write an abstraction layer for the functions - just include the VML or DHTML libraries depending on a server-side browser sniff. Let me know how it all works out - I'm kinda interested in this one.
It doesn't have to be a hack to be a security problem, and I was giving one undeniable (surely nobody would be stubborn enough to deny it?) example of where the only reason Linux is not affected is because it is not as widely used.
And before you start yammering about Many eyes/shallow bugs or whatever, I shall use my new favorite example: the sobig worm. In order to get infected with this, a user must receive an email, save the attachment, unzip it, then execute the file contained within.
*speechless*
As for W3C ratification, I think you're being optimistic. Yes, it's nice to future proof things. However, SVG has been around for a couple of years, and is still not natively supported by IE. VML, however, is, and has been for some time. Even if (when) IE starts supporting SVG, there will be a significant time before VML is deprecated, then finally dropped. When that finally happens, the chances are the software will have undergone far more serious changes than switching the client side vector language.
One other thing to remember is that even if the day comes that a switchover is needed, there is another major advantage of web applications: zero rollout in the company. Just patch the server, et voila! There is a trade-off between future proofing, cost, and present day usefulness. Now don't get me wrong, I can't wait until SVG becomes the de facto standard, as its language is so much cleaner than the oblique VML, but for the time being, I maintain that VML is a saner choice than SVG.
Shit, if you really want to be safe, write the client side scripting through an abstraction layer so that when you need to you can switch to SVG, or Microsoft UltraVec 2007 or whatever, just by updating vectorlib.js.
Well, I'm glad you tried it out as otherwise I'd have been compelled to write the code myself. But your results do confirm my suspicions of the people who claimed that they'd done this before. I can only assume that they meant the idea had occurred to them before, but wanted to sound "cool" by claiming they'd implemented it. Whatever.
My suggestion of VML stands.
And there is sense in writing web apps for specific environments. First, if you're providing it as a service for hundreds or thousands of people, then you have the ultimate thin client - zero rollout, just a URL. Also, no need to worry about server security or reconfiguring firewalls, as everything runs on Apache and port 80. Also, as with a similar project I'm doing, if you're mostly interested in showing a load of data, then a web browser is an ideal platform to do it in; HTML talking to your choice of mod_perl, mod_php, whatever is a really, really easy way of coding an attractive, multiuser interface to data.
The cross-platform nature is just a neat bonus.
I imagine, if you searched for "tulip's", you would get a hit for a page on the correct use of apostrophes.
There will be a 2 day wait while your application is processed, at the end of which we shall send you a certificate which legally proves you don't have a clue what you're talking about, should anyone erroneously claim otherwise.
Not quite. Yes, if you displace enough Oxygen with CO2 then you can asphyxiate. However, what makes car exhausts so lethal is the carbon monoxide. CO actually has a much stronger affinity to haemoglobin than CO2, so rather than dying because there is no Oxygen, CO will actively displace Oxygen from your bloodstream, even if there is plenty present in the atmosphere.
Of course, this is not such a problem in modern cars with catalytic converters, but still.
For example, you are basically limited to drawing a rectangle. You could specialise this to only allowing a horizontal line, or a vertical line, but ultimately that's all you can get without running back into the very problem he's trying to solve.
OK, I'll apologise for being harsh (well, 99% of my slashdot contributions are trolls, and it's hard to flick out of character) but one of the common problems with "ask Slashdot" questions is that unless it is highly technical to start with, everyone is willing to chime in with irrelevant, dumb and downright wrong answers. And the entry bar doesn't get much lower than talking about web pages (read some of the "helpful" comments in this story about useful server-side graph utilities, for example) so I figured you'd just not thought it through.
So there we go: an official gazpology - cherish it, for it is a rare and wonderous thing indeed.
I wonder how quickly a browser could re-flow a document that included an 800X600 cell table...My guess is "painfully", but it's almost worth writing the concept code to find out - time to write some PHP (I'm buggered if I'm going to write it by hand)