In the long term, if gamed Data determines hidden features of an algorithm's output, that output will not be completely understood in case it needs to be analyzed.
I've seen this on several systems over the years where legacy programmers tweak the data just a bit to affect sort order, etc etc and it leads to nightmares when you try to actually understand what's really happening to try to replace it's functionality.
There's no hard rule but beware, Data has no comments, so you'll never completely understand all the actions of your algorithm.
I would say that reverse engineering a console is hardly trivial. I would wager that a huge percentage of BS/BA of CS/CE/whatever grads would barely know where to start short of reading the source code.
Granted, if you're into something, geek out! That's what being a geek is right?
Anybody relying solely on their school to get them to the next level, is missing the point. Your school can only do so much. Sure, you can be quite competent, but if you're looking to do something truly remarkable, you alone are solely responsible for really jumping ahead of the average programming feats found in a lot of day jobs.
-Get into an OSS project you're interested in -Do research, read books, join lists on specific technologies involved. Whatever you end up doing, you will no doubt end up learning arcane facts about the tech you're using. -Dig through the code try tackling a couple changes. (Sometimes it can be helpful to do a diff between different the code bases between two incremental releases to see the kinds of changes made to implement a feature or bug fix.) -Help with the testing and debugging or add a new feature for real. -Eventually get more and more involved until you're one of the main folks adding new features or planning the next big version or spin off app.
Positive matching is much easier to code, test, and eliminate maliciousness. It's finite. This is a good thing.
Negative matching is relatively infinite. Negative matching is why most spam filters can't stop spam reliably. Blacklists collapse under their own weight.
If a tv station wants ad revenue, it broadcasts in the "format" that accomodates as much of the audience as possible.
Regardless of what the W3C says, the unspoken web standard is to cater to the customer... cater to the viewer... no matter what they show up with, you find a way to make sure they can use your site with a minimum of discomfort. (Within reason of course.) I wish the browsers agreed with the standard as much as anybody. But seriously, if slashdot is happy to lose 25% of it's users/ad revenue, then so be it. That attitude does nothing but alienate people and that's counter-productive. If we want open source to ever succeed, this attitude has to change.
i'm sorry for my unpopular attitude... i'm just trying to be honest. m.
seriously people. it's not rocket science to write cross-browser compliant code.
i expect better from a champion of the open source community. (but of course, it is still in beta, so... )
m.
I'm getting the vibe that until we're living in boats, global warming will be considered a theory.
So Either:
A) Until the extinction of man, global warming will always be a theory and the cost of ice cream will continue to increase.
B) We'll be living in boats and global warming will be a fact. And since cows will have to live on boats, and grazing areas will be limited, the cost of ice cream will continue to increase.
Conclusion:
Invest in ice cream and have a nice day. There's always going to be claims of junk science because one man's junk science is another man's treatise.
The Flat Earth Society is still around for crying out loud. m.
What we need is education for parents to understand how to educate their kids. The same kind of rules apply. Don't talk to strangers might be amended perhaps, but the idea is the same. The same dangers are there. Nothing has changed. It's just the medium of interaction.
Don't give out your phone # or address. Don't give out your name. Don't meet strangers without your parents.
Of course, these things all happen at shopping malls and parks and stuff when kids flirt and hook up, but nobody is banning that, are they?
Let's lock everybody up in their own prison cell. Then our kids will truly be safe! (Well, except from our own monstrosity.)
goto similar statements BRA,BEQ,BLT,BGT,etc are standard biz. you survive. you just gotta be diligent with how you arrange your assembly and maintain a style. (and not use assembly when it's possible.)
but all my EE microprocessor type classes relied on such things... m.
Anybody with any amount of age will tell you the same. My uncle programmed Fortran in the 70s. My dad and I programmed BASIC in the 80s. My cousin programmed COBOL through both of those decades AND the 90s.
You can't sit still and expect to be marketable. Sure, your current job has you doing one thing or another, but look at ASP programmers... there's still jobs there, but to Microsoft, the platform is poof! It comes turned off by default! ASP.NET will be replaced just the same.
Same thing happened to a variety of languages in the *nix world. The college crowds come in with the en vogue languages to solve some of the same problems you've already been solving.
You have your platforms (languages, data formats, OSes, environments, etc) you do your work in, and to survive and thrive, you better have your platforms you hobby around in. (and hopefully if you follow things right, your hobby platforms translate to your next job platform.)
You have to be multi-lingual... or multi-platformed... think biodiversity.
Religion over ANY one platform can't cloud your judgement.
Being overzealoutous may give you big ups in the short term. You put all your eggs in. You could become the Guru. You could charge big bucks. You could write a book. You could speak at conferences and people might actually read your posts and care what you think. You may find yourself being bigger than it. But sooner or later, you may find yourself as dead wrong as you could possibly be. For a non-computer, non-troll example I present to you: Michael Jackson.
I guess this is why people in general can't sit still. Of course, maybe in the course of writing the last paragraph, I found myself going, "Man, it'd be nice to be a guru, and write a book, and be notable instead of just John Q. Bendable-Always-Employed-Programmer." Well and then there's being notable in your field, who care about the details, or notable to your customers, who care that you got it done awesomely regardless of their offbeat details.
So maybe there's a magical middle in there. A chewy center? m.
where's the artist? can i see they haven't bathed in a week? can i see that they forgot to eat cause they were so consumed that their answering machine is full of messages they haven't returned.
good science and engineering is filled with this same passion i think. sure, you don't have to be that to be the best and sometimes that leads to bad science, engineering, and art too... but i'd put my bet down on passion first. m.
(forgot to add this to the above. pardon the coffee stains on my post.)
especially on a machine. the randomness isn't very random and can be as tricky as the conditions of photographing a child or the inconsistency of stone or wood in sculpture... or the strangeness of paint on certain surfaces, etc., the odd splatter of a paintbrush or air nozzle, and so on.
i guess my deal with computer art and i do computer art is the effort involved. any jackass can make a pile of bricks, even a pretty pile... but a guy without arms... that's suffering... that's work... that moves.
i like the person up thread who remarked that it's not important whether it's art, is it good art... that's the question. everything can be art, but is it good? what constitutes good art? what raises the bar of achievement?
achievement can be conceptual. sometimes the achievement is the attitude. etc etc.
computer programs can definitely be art. and be good art. for me tho, the goodness only comes from the that time spent close to that metal that makes it worthy and not the toss off the week.
Make the interface so hard to use that no one can even get to anything. No command lines or script interfaces, and yet everything is tabbed funny and offset so you can't even tell what you are looking at with the GUI.
It's as good as anything, imho. The learning curve can be a pain depending on backgrounds and what technologies you are coding in. DX9 has a lot of.NET stuff that's sorta solid, yet still has a little bit of a beta quality to the API if you ask me. I got my job done and people were happy. (This is of course, as of a year and a half ago... so things like documentation have probably gotten way better.)
If you are in MFC land, DirectX isn't a bad choice. Of course, I'll always have a soft spot for OpenGL, but platform situations are often out of our control.
dude, let's say you have two kids... and each of them has two kids... and each of them has two kids and each of them has two kids...even if each generation only happens once every 100 years... that's like 2 to the 9th or 10th power... dude... and then add all the older generations... you're gonna NEED a crapload of years just so send everybody christmas presents... or just to know everybody. sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be included with Microsoft's Linux distribution! Extend and Embrace (the freely available open source code) !
License to sister company the rights to the relevant IP of your company. Move on. Pretty annoying, but cheaper than fighting Hasbro. Go wiki rpg!
In the long term, if gamed Data determines hidden features of an algorithm's output, that output will not be completely understood in case it needs to be analyzed.
I've seen this on several systems over the years where legacy programmers tweak the data just a bit to affect sort order, etc etc and it leads to nightmares when you try to actually understand what's really happening to try to replace it's functionality.
There's no hard rule but beware, Data has no comments, so you'll never completely understand all the actions of your algorithm.
Google Page Rank probably suffers from this.
I would say that reverse engineering a console is hardly trivial. I would wager that a huge percentage of BS/BA of CS/CE/whatever grads would barely know where to start short of reading the source code.
Granted, if you're into something, geek out! That's what being a geek is right?
Anybody relying solely on their school to get them to the next level, is missing the point. Your school can only do so much. Sure, you can be quite competent, but if you're looking to do something truly remarkable, you alone are solely responsible for really jumping ahead of the average programming feats found in a lot of day jobs.
-Get into an OSS project you're interested in
-Do research, read books, join lists on specific technologies involved. Whatever you end up doing, you will no doubt end up learning arcane facts about the tech you're using.
-Dig through the code try tackling a couple changes. (Sometimes it can be helpful to do a diff between different the code bases between two incremental releases to see the kinds of changes made to implement a feature or bug fix.)
-Help with the testing and debugging or add a new feature for real.
-Eventually get more and more involved until you're one of the main folks adding new features or planning the next big version or spin off app.
It's a growth thing. Anybody can do it.
Positive matching is much easier to code, test, and eliminate maliciousness. It's finite. This is a good thing.
Negative matching is relatively infinite. Negative matching is why most spam filters can't stop spam reliably. Blacklists collapse under their own weight.
Wow.
m.
If a tv station wants ad revenue, it broadcasts in the "format" that accomodates as much of the audience as possible.
Regardless of what the W3C says, the unspoken web standard is to cater to the customer... cater to the viewer... no matter what they show up with, you find a way to make sure they can use your site with a minimum of discomfort. (Within reason of course.) I wish the browsers agreed with the standard as much as anybody. But seriously, if slashdot is happy to lose 25% of it's users/ad revenue, then so be it. That attitude does nothing but alienate people and that's counter-productive. If we want open source to ever succeed, this attitude has to change.
i'm sorry for my unpopular attitude... i'm just trying to be honest.
m.
seriously people. it's not rocket science to write cross-browser compliant code. i expect better from a champion of the open source community. (but of course, it is still in beta, so... ) m.
I couldn't agree more.
It's really easy to write a stored proc that builds dynamic sql and calls "EXEC" or "EXECUTE" etc on that statement.
e ction.ppt#369,93,Advanced%20SQL%20Injection
This powerpoint presentation is about the best I have read:
http://www.owasp.org/images/7/74/Advanced_SQL_Inj
Remember folks, you have to do more than parameterize your queries.
m.
Certain individuals in power make too much money and have too much power from scarcity to let it go away.
m.
I'm getting the vibe that until we're living in boats, global warming will be considered a theory.
So Either:
A) Until the extinction of man, global warming will always be a theory and the cost of ice cream will continue to increase.
B) We'll be living in boats and global warming will be a fact. And since cows will have to live on boats, and grazing areas will be limited, the cost of ice cream will continue to increase.
Conclusion:
Invest in ice cream and have a nice day. There's always going to be claims of junk science because one man's junk science is another man's treatise.
The Flat Earth Society is still around for crying out loud.
m.
What we need is education for parents to understand how to educate their kids. The same kind of rules apply. Don't talk to strangers might be amended perhaps, but the idea is the same. The same dangers are there. Nothing has changed. It's just the medium of interaction.
Don't give out your phone # or address. Don't give out your name. Don't meet strangers without your parents.
Of course, these things all happen at shopping malls and parks and stuff when kids flirt and hook up, but nobody is banning that, are they?
Let's lock everybody up in their own prison cell. Then our kids will truly be safe! (Well, except from our own monstrosity.)
man, where's iGopher on this machine?
m.
Perhaps user feedback helps the pattern matching algorithm learn?
Do we know?
m.
It's been about a year now with no complaints.
m.
goto similar statements BRA,BEQ,BLT,BGT,etc are standard biz. you survive. you just gotta be diligent with how you arrange your assembly and maintain a style. (and not use assembly when it's possible.)
but all my EE microprocessor type classes relied on such things...
m.
Anybody with any amount of age will tell you the same. My uncle programmed Fortran in the 70s. My dad and I programmed BASIC in the 80s. My cousin programmed COBOL through both of those decades AND the 90s.
You can't sit still and expect to be marketable. Sure, your current job has you doing one thing or another, but look at ASP programmers... there's still jobs there, but to Microsoft, the platform is poof! It comes turned off by default! ASP.NET will be replaced just the same.
Same thing happened to a variety of languages in the *nix world. The college crowds come in with the en vogue languages to solve some of the same problems you've already been solving.
You have your platforms (languages, data formats, OSes, environments, etc) you do your work in, and to survive and thrive, you better have your platforms you hobby around in. (and hopefully if you follow things right, your hobby platforms translate to your next job platform.)
You have to be multi-lingual... or multi-platformed... think biodiversity.
Religion over ANY one platform can't cloud your judgement.
Being overzealoutous may give you big ups in the short term. You put all your eggs in. You could become the Guru. You could charge big bucks. You could write a book. You could speak at conferences and people might actually read your posts and care what you think. You may find yourself being bigger than it. But sooner or later, you may find yourself as dead wrong as you could possibly be. For a non-computer, non-troll example I present to you: Michael Jackson.
I guess this is why people in general can't sit still. Of course, maybe in the course of writing the last paragraph, I found myself going, "Man, it'd be nice to be a guru, and write a book, and be notable instead of just John Q. Bendable-Always-Employed-Programmer." Well and then there's being notable in your field, who care about the details, or notable to your customers, who care that you got it done awesomely regardless of their offbeat details.
So maybe there's a magical middle in there. A chewy center?
m.
where's the artist? can i see they haven't bathed in a week? can i see that they forgot to eat cause they were so consumed that their answering machine is full of messages they haven't returned.
good science and engineering is filled with this same passion i think. sure, you don't have to be that to be the best and sometimes that leads to bad science, engineering, and art too... but i'd put my bet down on passion first.
m.
(forgot to add this to the above. pardon the coffee stains on my post.)
especially on a machine. the randomness isn't very random and can be as tricky as the conditions of photographing a child or the inconsistency of stone or wood in sculpture... or the strangeness of paint on certain surfaces, etc., the odd splatter of a paintbrush or air nozzle, and so on.
i guess my deal with computer art and i do computer art is the effort involved. any jackass can make a pile of bricks, even a pretty pile... but a guy without arms... that's suffering... that's work... that moves.
i like the person up thread who remarked that it's not important whether it's art, is it good art... that's the question. everything can be art, but is it good? what constitutes good art? what raises the bar of achievement?
achievement can be conceptual. sometimes the achievement is the attitude. etc etc.
computer programs can definitely be art. and be good art. for me tho, the goodness only comes from the that time spent close to that metal that makes it worthy and not the toss off the week.
my 2%,
m.
It has no writeable drives, network access, or output port support and the only GUI looks suspicously like a windows 95 bsod... hmm.
m.
Make the interface so hard to use that no one can even get to anything. No command lines or script interfaces, and yet everything is tabbed funny and offset so you can't even tell what you are looking at with the GUI.
m.
It's as good as anything, imho. The learning curve can be a pain depending on backgrounds and what technologies you are coding in. DX9 has a lot of .NET stuff that's sorta solid, yet still has a little bit of a beta quality to the API if you ask me. I got my job done and people were happy. (This is of course, as of a year and a half ago... so things like documentation have probably gotten way better.)
If you are in MFC land, DirectX isn't a bad choice. Of course, I'll always have a soft spot for OpenGL, but platform situations are often out of our control.
m.
it's been in msie since 2000 or so. very handy. stable. probably a HUGE security hole like anything can be...
very good for writing dynamically browsable trees and things using selects and stuff.
i'm sorta shocked this is news and/or that there hasn't been a move to standardize this already.
m.
good god, grandkids!?!?
... or just to know everybody. sheesh.
dude, let's say you have two kids... and each of them has two kids... and each of them has two kids and each of them has two kids...even if each generation only happens once every 100 years... that's like 2 to the 9th or 10th power... dude... and then add all the older generations... you're gonna NEED a crapload of years just so send everybody christmas presents
m.