It's not a Java problem though, it's a problem that affects the wider software development industry, I don't think really any major database framework for any platform or any language does a good job of database security right now unfortunately.
The way I see it, it is a Java problem as well as a problem with most other languages out there and the very reason why the industry struggles to solve it, is because of that, as you can't solve a language problem with yet another library. Would the SQL queries be properly integrated into the language and syntax checked, instead of just being some unchecked string manipulation that only gets checked after the string is already complete you wouldn't have a problem with SQL injection. Its a classic case of mixing code and data.
Not sure how good C# Language Integrated Queries are in practice, but making the query code part of your other code instead of data certainly seem to be the right direction.
Buffer overflows are caused by lazy and stupid programmers...
And also by lazy and stupid language designers it seems, just look at gets(). The problem with C is that you can only avoid buffer overflows in theory, in practice on the other side basically all C applications have suffered from it and only after years and years of fixing security leaks the number of errors goes down. Having a standard library that is full of functions that make it trivial to introduce buffer overflows of course doesn't help either.
It's because programmers love their dangerous and primitive dinosaur language (least common denominator).
I think the real issue is simply that C (aside from Ada and C++) is basically the only language that lets you do low level stuff. If you use Python, Java or whatever you are too far away from the metal to do the interesting stuff. Also lots and lots of libraries are in C, you can use them from another language, but then you are stuck with wrapper code of varying quality. C is the language that doesn't need wrappers and stuff to work, it "just works". Which of course might not be much of a good argument to continue to use C, as you could use different languages for different parts of your application, but I still find it quite annoying that none of the "advanced" languages has bothered to allow the user to do what C can do.
in the middle of combat operations in a highly active and volatile war zone.
Two minutes after the van got shot (unedited version) you see a women and a child walk right past it. If this was a hot zone, somebody seems to have forgot to tell that to the civilians that live there.
Second, it may be a machine gun, perhaps a PKM, based on how the bearer is carrying it and how he leans up against it.
It could be a lot of things. The point is that you don't just shoot people because you suspect they might have a weapon, you better make sure that they do have the weapon, especially when you are flying around out of weapon range with a nice camera and good zoom on your helicopter.
Also lets not forget that while the video shows things that might be misidentified as weapon, it also shows a lot of unarmed civilians and people trying to rescue the wounded. The last two things are pretty damn clear from the video, the weapons and the thread they pose on the other side is not clear at all.
In the full version of the video you can also see them shooting Hellfires in a house while civilians are passing by, not exactly the best way to avoid collateral damage.
Thats a tripod, it is much to thin for an RPG and never identified by the Apache crew as RPG. Also they request permission to engage before they misidentify the camera as RPG at 4:07.
They responded to a preceived threat of a rocket propelled grenade launcher. A real threat to a gunship.
An RPG has a range of ~1000 meter before it self detonates, an AK-47 has a range of 400 meter, the Apache was flying at a distance of around 1600 meter (~2 sec delay between shooting and projectiles hitting the ground multiplied by ~800 meter projectile velocity). Even if the RPG would have been real, they where never in real danger. And thats ignoring the van incident, nothing there ever looked like a weapon.
Photographer vs man with RPG, when the the back half of the image is covered and you only see the silhouette, as in the video, then they look pretty much the same. However it is clear that its a camera, RPGs are twice as long, you never ever see the "RPG" in full and you never see the "RPG" from any other angle.
The thing I don't understand is why they request permission to engage before they see the RPG, is it enough to kill people to see them walking around with an AK in a non threating pose? Also is it ok to shoot everybody that is near to an insurgent? They don't seem to make any effort to shoot the RPG guy, they just shoot everybody in sight, even the ones that come much later to the scene and never ever have anything on them that could be confused for a weapon.
And how many ways can you design a game controller?
When it comes to the pure shape: lots of ways. In terms of actual controls and button placement you are of course, as changing it to much would be the controller non-functioning. Anyway, while the controller does look similar to the original, thats nothing unusual really, third party controllers have always looked kind of like the original.
Thats a tripod and never identified by anybody as RPG. The only thing identified as RPG in the video is the camera, which can be mistaken for an RPG as the view is blocked by the wall at 4:08.
The page is still available, but they now have added this little text to the top:
On PS3 system models sold earlier than the CECH-2000 series models, the Open Platform feature will not be available if the system software is updated to version 3.21 or later.
I wonder how you would react if the House of Commons were to say that the e-mails are undeniable proof that global warming is a scam.
You don't honestly think that all of the climate change theories is based on a few hundred emails, do you? There is quite a bit more climate research floating around in peer reviewed journals and unless somebody debunks that and proposes an alternative theory there is no good reason do believe that the science is faulty, even when one group of scientists might have been fraudulent.
Both sides of this debate stopped caring about the facts a long time ago.
Its not about debating, its about science and data. And when all that points into the direction of climate change, there might be some truth behind it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it?
The story goes something like this: Back in the good old days happy little trees got bigger rings when it was warm and smaller rings when it was cold, so tree ring data correlated quite nicely with temperatures and provided data for several hundreds of years. But then came men with its industrialization and polluted the air. Trees in turn didn't like the pollution and got sick, but a sick tree makes smaller rings and thus smaller rings no longer correlate with temperature data, thus making the tree ring data useless for temperature measurements. But scientists aren't stupid and actually figured that out and thus where able to clean up the wrong data and replacing it with good data.
I don't know if I could handle genuine AI in video games.
That wouldn't be a problem in reality, as a game that has realistic AI would be designed and balanced around having realistic AI.
The reason why you encoder dozens and dozens of enemies today is simply because enemies are dead stupid, so they have to make up what they lack in AI by just higher numbers of enemies.
And if all game design fails with a hyper intelligent AI enemy you could still switch around and simply make the clever AI your teammate, while the enemies are some kind of stupid zombie. So I wouldn't really worry about to much AI, especially not in times where AI still has trouble with pathfinding its way around a box. We are still far away from good AI in games.
Realism is difficult - I appreciate this. Designing a world to give players maximum freedom is much more complex than the very tightly-controlled worlds we're currently being offered,
To a certain degree its actually much easier to do a game with lots of freedom, as you simply do not have to care about each and every detail in the game world. You don't have to script and motion capture an enemy falling down the stairs when physics engine can do those situations automatically for you. You however of course give up tight control over the story. If you give the player maximum freedom you can't stop him from not doing what you have planed without falling back to invisible falls and other hacks, so its best to just not plan much, instead give the player a goal that he has to accomplish, but let him rather free hand in how exactly to accomplish that goal.
GTA4: Liberty City is insanely big, open world, no invisible borders,...
Not quite, GTA4 lacks persistence. Vehicles might disappear when you look into the other direction and missions are completly inaccessible unless triggered by a cutscene. Its kind of a bummer when you shall kill some thugs, but you can't shot them from a distance, as they are not even there unless you get close enough and the script triggers inserts them into the gaming world. The GTA-kind of open world games are really just simple linear games that share the same huge level for each mission, but between missions everything is basically reset to zero. Also the ending of GTA4 sucked a lot and the lack of choice in the outcome was annoying, but thats another story.
With Mass Effect I kind of agree, those games are amazing, but more because of the good story then RPG or choice. In Mass Effect 1 people got annoyed by the Mako driving and the inventory, in Mass Effect 2 then, instead of improving the issues, they ripped them out completly. You can't even upgrade the armor of your team mates anymore. Thus reducing the rather open RPG game world of ME1 to a rather small set of linear levels, you still can take the levels in different orders, but the levels themselves are very linear and flat in ME2. Choice in Mass Effect is also an illusion, you have basically the choice between playing a nice guy or an asshole, but you can really chose to actually do anything that will impact the story.
In the end it really comes down to expectations, when one has played the likes of Elite, XCom, Syndicate or EF2000 well over a decade ago, I just expect more from my games in 2010. And as much as I love Mass Effect, its basically just Wing Commander with space marines instead of fighter pilots, thats not a bad thing, but neither something that goes beyond games of the past. In terms of graphics and physics games have improved a lot, but in terms of what your character is allowed to do in the game world very little has changed in a long while.
Exactly. The thing to realize is that almost no game these days tries to emulate reality, instead they all emulate what one could call movie-reality or hyper-reality or whatever, i.e. that kind of reality where cars explode when you shot a few bullets and interesting things only happen when the game designer tells them to.
Games that actually try to emulate real reality, i.e. simulations, basically just get better for it, as a large part of emulating reality is the removal of artificial restrictions. Take flightsims for example or Operation Flashpoint/ARMA, those games don't have invisible walls, you can literally go into any direction for an hour and not see an end. What makes those games great is that all the interesting stuff that happens, happens due to the game mechanics, not duo to fake scripting events.
That said, I don't mind the Mario64 or Katamari style game, quite the opposite, but the thing that makes those games so great isn't just that its a colorful comic world, but also that they, just like a hard core sim, lack the artificial scripting madness that has invested so many of todays games, instead the games provide you with some core gameplay mechanics and everything that follows is basically a result of those. Its the player that plays those games and not the game designer that is playing the player.
The point here is that they will extinguish OtherOS support in old consoles, consoles that they sold containing that feature. Nobody is getting up in arms about PS3-slim being sold without OtherOS, but when they deliberately cripple their hardware with a firmware upgrade thats kind of a big deal.
First off, how could PC exclusives have "almost died out" when they have entire *genres* for them?
When all you have left is RTS and MMORPG you have a problem. Just look at FPS, once dominated by PC, now its a console-first, PC-later kind of genre. RTS are slowly getting there to, see Command&Conquer and a bunch of other EA RTS. CRPG, same thing, Fable, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, DeusEx2, Bioshock, etc. are also already console-first, PC-later. DA:O is the rare exception, most developers don't even bother to develop that kind of game any more. Also see flightsims, yeah, its still kind of a PC exclusive genre, but its also a dead genre, the flux of new good games in the genre stopped a long time ago.
And secondly, my definition of "hardcore gamer" is and always has been those who play games obsessively, and as far as I can see neither the Starcraft nor the Counter-Strike community has been affected much by console gaming.
Playing the same game for 10 years is not what I call hardcore, I prefer to call those crazy people;) Anyway, thats kind of the friggin point, if you hang on to some decade old games for so long, that is a clear indication of a lack of other good games on the market and not a sign for how great the PC gaming market is.
and for "colorful fun" games there's quite obviously PopCap so... yeah, I don't think you got many things right in your post, sorry.
I meant the Nintendo style of colorful fun, PopCap is doing more the Solitar2.0 style of game and even they have started doing console ports.
As I see it, the PC gaming marked is basically Valve and Blizzard, most other developers already went to the consoles.
Wrong, Sony is forcing you all the time to upgrade the firmware. Using new games might require a firmware upgrade, using the shop requires firmware upgrade, using Home requires firmware upgrade, using DRMed videos requires firmware upgrade and so on. Of course you can say "no" to the upgrade, but then you have basically a brick, as you can't do anything that requires a firmware upgrade.
Sony gives you basically the "choice" to play games or run Linux, to bad that what I bought from them was a machine that could play games *and* run Linux. Stuff like this really should result in a lawsuit, as you shouldn't be allowed to remove features that the costumer payed for.
Where have all the smart people gone from Slashdot? It seems to be full of clueless kneejerk reaction retards now...
Something that ideally lets you put in a seed and that is your first connection and then web-of-trust from there!
A WoT sounds nice in theory, but has it ever worked out in practice? The problem is that you need lots of friends to make it work, but hardly anybody has enough friends for that, even less so trusted ones that also use the same software. And when you then fall back to friends you found on the Internet you are opening yourself up to untrusted people.
Have you actually played the demo? I have and from what I have seen it looked pretty good, maybe not AAA potential, but as a indie game it was pretty impressive and certainly more interesting then most third party crap that makes it to Nintendo consoles these days. Its hard to judge how the full game would turn out from a short demo, but heck, even if it doesn't turn out so great, make it a download or something like that. Microsoft has its Xbox Live Community Games for stuff like that, Nintendo sadly doesn't have anything similar.
Slashdot Mirror
And how do you explain shooting up the van?
It's not a Java problem though, it's a problem that affects the wider software development industry, I don't think really any major database framework for any platform or any language does a good job of database security right now unfortunately.
The way I see it, it is a Java problem as well as a problem with most other languages out there and the very reason why the industry struggles to solve it, is because of that, as you can't solve a language problem with yet another library. Would the SQL queries be properly integrated into the language and syntax checked, instead of just being some unchecked string manipulation that only gets checked after the string is already complete you wouldn't have a problem with SQL injection. Its a classic case of mixing code and data.
Not sure how good C# Language Integrated Queries are in practice, but making the query code part of your other code instead of data certainly seem to be the right direction.
That's only a problem when you use time() as you seed, you should simply use /dev/random instead.
Buffer overflows are caused by lazy and stupid programmers...
And also by lazy and stupid language designers it seems, just look at gets(). The problem with C is that you can only avoid buffer overflows in theory, in practice on the other side basically all C applications have suffered from it and only after years and years of fixing security leaks the number of errors goes down. Having a standard library that is full of functions that make it trivial to introduce buffer overflows of course doesn't help either.
It's because programmers love their dangerous and primitive dinosaur language (least common denominator).
I think the real issue is simply that C (aside from Ada and C++) is basically the only language that lets you do low level stuff. If you use Python, Java or whatever you are too far away from the metal to do the interesting stuff. Also lots and lots of libraries are in C, you can use them from another language, but then you are stuck with wrapper code of varying quality. C is the language that doesn't need wrappers and stuff to work, it "just works". Which of course might not be much of a good argument to continue to use C, as you could use different languages for different parts of your application, but I still find it quite annoying that none of the "advanced" languages has bothered to allow the user to do what C can do.
in the middle of combat operations in a highly active and volatile war zone.
Two minutes after the van got shot (unedited version) you see a women and a child walk right past it. If this was a hot zone, somebody seems to have forgot to tell that to the civilians that live there.
It's also ridiculous for you to say who's a civilian and who isn't. Generally, civilians run away from the fight.
Which fight? The way the people where casually walking around didn't exactly look like they expected to be in any danger.
Also two minutes after the van was shoot up you can see a women with a child walking right by the van.
If unarmed man are casually walking around I expect them to be civilian unless proven otherwise.
Second, it may be a machine gun, perhaps a PKM, based on how the bearer is carrying it and how he leans up against it.
It could be a lot of things. The point is that you don't just shoot people because you suspect they might have a weapon, you better make sure that they do have the weapon, especially when you are flying around out of weapon range with a nice camera and good zoom on your helicopter.
Also lets not forget that while the video shows things that might be misidentified as weapon, it also shows a lot of unarmed civilians and people trying to rescue the wounded. The last two things are pretty damn clear from the video, the weapons and the thread they pose on the other side is not clear at all.
In the full version of the video you can also see them shooting Hellfires in a house while civilians are passing by, not exactly the best way to avoid collateral damage.
Thats a tripod, it is much to thin for an RPG and never identified by the Apache crew as RPG. Also they request permission to engage before they misidentify the camera as RPG at 4:07.
They responded to a preceived threat of a rocket propelled grenade launcher. A real threat to a gunship.
An RPG has a range of ~1000 meter before it self detonates, an AK-47 has a range of 400 meter, the Apache was flying at a distance of around 1600 meter (~2 sec delay between shooting and projectiles hitting the ground multiplied by ~800 meter projectile velocity). Even if the RPG would have been real, they where never in real danger. And thats ignoring the van incident, nothing there ever looked like a weapon.
Photographer vs man with RPG, when the the back half of the image is covered and you only see the silhouette, as in the video, then they look pretty much the same. However it is clear that its a camera,
RPGs are twice as long, you never ever see the "RPG" in full and you never see the "RPG" from any other angle.
The thing I don't understand is why they request permission to engage before they see the RPG, is it enough to kill people to see them walking around with an AK in a non threating pose? Also is it ok to shoot everybody that is near to an insurgent? They don't seem to make any effort to shoot the RPG guy, they just shoot everybody in sight, even the ones that come much later to the scene and never ever have anything on them that could be confused for a weapon.
And how many ways can you design a game controller?
When it comes to the pure shape: lots of ways. In terms of actual controls and button placement you are of course, as changing it to much would be the controller non-functioning. Anyway, while the controller does look similar to the original, thats nothing unusual really, third party controllers have always looked kind of like the original.
Thats a tripod and never identified by anybody as RPG. The only thing identified as RPG in the video is the camera, which can be mistaken for an RPG as the view is blocked by the wall at 4:08.
The page is still available, but they now have added this little text to the top:
I wonder how you would react if the House of Commons were to say that the e-mails are undeniable proof that global warming is a scam.
You don't honestly think that all of the climate change theories is based on a few hundred emails, do you? There is quite a bit more climate research floating around in peer reviewed journals and unless somebody debunks that and proposes an alternative theory there is no good reason do believe that the science is faulty, even when one group of scientists might have been fraudulent.
Both sides of this debate stopped caring about the facts a long time ago.
Its not about debating, its about science and data. And when all that points into the direction of climate change, there might be some truth behind it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it?
The story goes something like this: Back in the good old days happy little trees got bigger rings when it was warm and smaller rings when it was cold, so tree ring data correlated quite nicely with temperatures and provided data for several hundreds of years. But then came men with its industrialization and polluted the air. Trees in turn didn't like the pollution and got sick, but a sick tree makes smaller rings and thus smaller rings no longer correlate with temperature data, thus making the tree ring data useless for temperature measurements. But scientists aren't stupid and actually figured that out and thus where able to clean up the wrong data and replacing it with good data.
I say bullshit! There's evidence that Mars is also warming. No man made CO2 there-- so what does that say?
Absolutely nothing.
It says Heightened-Solar-Activity.
Solar activity is already taken into account. How stupid do you think scientists are?
In the 70s the scientists all said we were going to be freezing our asses off at this point in time.
They weren't, thats pretty much a modern myth.
I don't know if I could handle genuine AI in video games.
That wouldn't be a problem in reality, as a game that has realistic AI would be designed and balanced around having realistic AI.
The reason why you encoder dozens and dozens of enemies today is simply because enemies are dead stupid, so they have to make up what they lack in AI by just higher numbers of enemies.
And if all game design fails with a hyper intelligent AI enemy you could still switch around and simply make the clever AI your teammate, while the enemies are some kind of stupid zombie. So I wouldn't really worry about to much AI, especially not in times where AI still has trouble with pathfinding its way around a box. We are still far away from good AI in games.
Realism is difficult - I appreciate this. Designing a world to give players maximum freedom is much more complex than the very tightly-controlled worlds we're currently being offered,
To a certain degree its actually much easier to do a game with lots of freedom, as you simply do not have to care about each and every detail in the game world. You don't have to script and motion capture an enemy falling down the stairs when physics engine can do those situations automatically for you. You however of course give up tight control over the story. If you give the player maximum freedom you can't stop him from not doing what you have planed without falling back to invisible falls and other hacks, so its best to just not plan much, instead give the player a goal that he has to accomplish, but let him rather free hand in how exactly to accomplish that goal.
GTA4: Liberty City is insanely big, open world, no invisible borders, ...
Not quite, GTA4 lacks persistence. Vehicles might disappear when you look into the other direction and missions are completly inaccessible unless triggered by a cutscene. Its kind of a bummer when you shall kill some thugs, but you can't shot them from a distance, as they are not even there unless you get close enough and the script triggers inserts them into the gaming world. The GTA-kind of open world games are really just simple linear games that share the same huge level for each mission, but between missions everything is basically reset to zero. Also the ending of GTA4 sucked a lot and the lack of choice in the outcome was annoying, but thats another story.
With Mass Effect I kind of agree, those games are amazing, but more because of the good story then RPG or choice. In Mass Effect 1 people got annoyed by the Mako driving and the inventory, in Mass Effect 2 then, instead of improving the issues, they ripped them out completly. You can't even upgrade the armor of your team mates anymore. Thus reducing the rather open RPG game world of ME1 to a rather small set of linear levels, you still can take the levels in different orders, but the levels themselves are very linear and flat in ME2. Choice in Mass Effect is also an illusion, you have basically the choice between playing a nice guy or an asshole, but you can really chose to actually do anything that will impact the story.
In the end it really comes down to expectations, when one has played the likes of Elite, XCom, Syndicate or EF2000 well over a decade ago, I just expect more from my games in 2010. And as much as I love Mass Effect, its basically just Wing Commander with space marines instead of fighter pilots, thats not a bad thing, but neither something that goes beyond games of the past. In terms of graphics and physics games have improved a lot, but in terms of what your character is allowed to do in the game world very little has changed in a long while.
Exactly. The thing to realize is that almost no game these days tries to emulate reality, instead they all emulate what one could call movie-reality or hyper-reality or whatever, i.e. that kind of reality where cars explode when you shot a few bullets and interesting things only happen when the game designer tells them to.
Games that actually try to emulate real reality, i.e. simulations, basically just get better for it, as a large part of emulating reality is the removal of artificial restrictions. Take flightsims for example or Operation Flashpoint/ARMA, those games don't have invisible walls, you can literally go into any direction for an hour and not see an end. What makes those games great is that all the interesting stuff that happens, happens due to the game mechanics, not duo to fake scripting events.
That said, I don't mind the Mario64 or Katamari style game, quite the opposite, but the thing that makes those games so great isn't just that its a colorful comic world, but also that they, just like a hard core sim, lack the artificial scripting madness that has invested so many of todays games, instead the games provide you with some core gameplay mechanics and everything that follows is basically a result of those. Its the player that plays those games and not the game designer that is playing the player.
The point here is that they will extinguish OtherOS support in old consoles, consoles that they sold containing that feature. Nobody is getting up in arms about PS3-slim being sold without OtherOS, but when they deliberately cripple their hardware with a firmware upgrade thats kind of a big deal.
First off, how could PC exclusives have "almost died out" when they have entire *genres* for them?
When all you have left is RTS and MMORPG you have a problem. Just look at FPS, once dominated by PC, now its a console-first, PC-later kind of genre. RTS are slowly getting there to, see Command&Conquer and a bunch of other EA RTS. CRPG, same thing, Fable, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, DeusEx2, Bioshock, etc. are also already console-first, PC-later. DA:O is the rare exception, most developers don't even bother to develop that kind of game any more. Also see flightsims, yeah, its still kind of a PC exclusive genre, but its also a dead genre, the flux of new good games in the genre stopped a long time ago.
And secondly, my definition of "hardcore gamer" is and always has been those who play games obsessively, and as far as I can see neither the Starcraft nor the Counter-Strike community has been affected much by console gaming.
Playing the same game for 10 years is not what I call hardcore, I prefer to call those crazy people ;) Anyway, thats kind of the friggin point, if you hang on to some decade old games for so long, that is a clear indication of a lack of other good games on the market and not a sign for how great the PC gaming market is.
and for "colorful fun" games there's quite obviously PopCap so... yeah, I don't think you got many things right in your post, sorry.
I meant the Nintendo style of colorful fun, PopCap is doing more the Solitar2.0 style of game and even they have started doing console ports.
As I see it, the PC gaming marked is basically Valve and Blizzard, most other developers already went to the consoles.
Nobody was forcing you to install the firmware..
Wrong, Sony is forcing you all the time to upgrade the firmware. Using new games might require a firmware upgrade, using the shop requires firmware upgrade, using Home requires firmware upgrade, using DRMed videos requires firmware upgrade and so on. Of course you can say "no" to the upgrade, but then you have basically a brick, as you can't do anything that requires a firmware upgrade.
Sony gives you basically the "choice" to play games or run Linux, to bad that what I bought from them was a machine that could play games *and* run Linux. Stuff like this really should result in a lawsuit, as you shouldn't be allowed to remove features that the costumer payed for.
Where have all the smart people gone from Slashdot? It seems to be full of clueless kneejerk reaction retards now...
And you seem to be one of them...
Something that ideally lets you put in a seed and that is your first connection and then web-of-trust from there!
A WoT sounds nice in theory, but has it ever worked out in practice? The problem is that you need lots of friends to make it work, but hardly anybody has enough friends for that, even less so trusted ones that also use the same software. And when you then fall back to friends you found on the Internet you are opening yourself up to untrusted people.
Have you actually played the demo? I have and from what I have seen it looked pretty good, maybe not AAA potential, but as a indie game it was pretty impressive and certainly more interesting then most third party crap that makes it to Nintendo consoles these days. Its hard to judge how the full game would turn out from a short demo, but heck, even if it doesn't turn out so great, make it a download or something like that. Microsoft has its Xbox Live Community Games for stuff like that, Nintendo sadly doesn't have anything similar.