Whoever, in their right mind thought it was a good idea to expose SQL query inputs on the Web?
Most people are not doing it because they want to, but because the software they use allows such things to silently happen behind their back. It is a classic case of in-band signaling, you are pumping data through the same pipe as code and when the data isn't properly escaped, things break in bad and unexpected ways. To get rid of this once and for all you need to seperate the pipes, seperate the data and the code and don't allow them to be mixed. LINQ for example does that by moving the query language into your programming language, instead of having it as string-magic somewhere outside the languages syntax.
Mass Effect 1 came out on XBox360 first and the PC port wasn't even done by Bioware, Mass Effect 2 came out on both systems at the same time.
That aside Bioware so far has been doing great on porting consoles to PC or visa versa, as they actually redesign the user interface for each system, instead of just mapping mouse moving to an analog stick, which never really works.
My wife's seems to surf the web pretty easily, and the connection is free (as in Beer).
Web access on the Kindle is limited to Amazon and Wikipedia in most countries, thus it is of not much use as a webbrowsing tool when you are not living in the USA.
A tablet computer at an affordable price. When I want to read a webpage or a book, a laptop just isn't comfortable enough, a iPhone or even Nokias N800 is just to small and a Kindle doesn't support the web. The iPad fixes all of that. Yeah, its not a perfect device, it has overblown Apple hype behind it and plenty of stupid limitations, but that doesn't stop it from being among the first serious and affordable tablet computers out there.
Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.
The problem is that you can only evaluate the historic value of something years or decades after it happened. That's why plenty of movies and early TV shows got lost or even destroyed. Even the original moon landing footage is gone. All that stuff just wasn't considered valuable enough and the self space or the reusable magnetic tape was considered more important than the data contained in them.
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it and we seem to be doing exactly that when it comes to archiving the Internet.
That's a strawman argument. People are for most part not proclaiming that piracy is good and should be practices by everybody, but that it is doing no harm or at least far less harm then the media companies want you to believe and well, looking at the evidence seems to confirm that as movie industry profits are still on the rise.
Watch a so-called science-focus skeptic phase out the same way when you point out that a recording of Dallas police broadcast has scientifically proven there were more than 3 shots fired in Dealey Plaza.
A quick google brought me to a paper that said the chance of the shot being random noise was 0.037 or in other worlds 1:27. That's not much, but far away from a solid irrefutable proof that it was a real gunshot, especially considering that other evidence seems to be missing (shooter, bullet, bullethole,...). Which would leave me to conclude that there is no solid evidence for more then three shots and that this is simply a case of anomaly hunting, i.e. when you search long enough, you are guaranteed to find something that is unlikely to have happened.
I accept that PG-rated "sex scenes" are a step towards mature themes in games, but i don't understand why more developers aren't targeting truly adult audience.
I think the core problem is simply that nobody has figured out how to do interesting and reusable gameplay for adult themed games. Having space marines shoot aliens is easy and well understood, but when it comes to emotions and stuff things get really difficult, as there no longer is a well understood way to implement it. And without well understood gameplay such games become much more risky to do and thus fewer people are doing them.
IMO, what it actually means is that the so-called image is deliberately designed to be as catastrophically horrible as possible when scaled down.
Yes, the image is designed to exploit the bug in way that makes it very obvious that the scaling is wrong, but no, the gray rectangle is not the correct solution. The problem is that the browser or the image application assumes that the brightness is stored on a linear scale, while in reality its stored exponential one. Thus when you scale things or apply other filters the brightness will be messed up. In real photos it will be less noticeable then here, but it will still happen.
The correct way would be to transform the image to a linear scale before applying the filter and then restoring it the exponential one for display. A simple example of how to do that in Gimp (using gausian blur instead of scale, but it is the same bug) would be this. The left image is the original from the article, the middle one is blur applied and the right one is applying a gamma of 0.5 to get it to a linear scale, then the blur and then a gamma 2 to restore it to its original scale. As you can easily see the right one looks like the left one, but blurred, while the middle one has no resemblance to the original, all the information got lost due to the bug. In practice you would need a higher bit depth to make this trick practical, as else you would end with banding artifacts.
Can anyone tell me how close we are to being able to render Toy Story in real time? Say 1080p?
We should be getting pretty close, however a fundamental difference between early CGI and todays realtime graphics still exist, namely artifacts like pixels and polygons.
Even Tron managed to have round wheels on the vehicles, yet even the best looking games like Crysis still have noticeable edges on surfaces that should be round. The reason for this is simply the way the graphics and art pipelines are build, they expect polygons, not geometric description, thus a round surfaces will have edges when you look close and not automatically get more polygons as they should. Offline rendering doesn't suffer from this problem. Renderman, which is used for most Pixar stuff, for example will break all the polygons down to pixel size before the rendering stage, so you will never have a big edgy polygon in the picture as its all smoothed out. Geometry Shaders, which are available in the latest generation of GPUs, should allow similar effects in realtime. I however haven't yet seen a game that makes use of them.
With pixel artifacts it is the same thing, in offline rendering you can go the extra mile to get rid of them, be it by fine tuning the size of your shadow buffer or enabling anti-aliasing. While in realtime rendering you often spend the left over CPU power on a smoother picture or improvements of the graphics in other aspects. Things are however also slowly changing, on the PC anti-aliasing is pretty standard these days and consoles also seem to be slowly getting their. Shadow buffers can also be smoothed out by post processing effects and other trickery, so the artifacts, even so they might technically still be there, are much harder to spot.
One remaining point we might not get rid of so quickly is however simply the framing. In a movie everything is carefully layouted so that it looks good and every object that might be getting close to the camera will have enough detail. In a video game the camera is mostly handled automatically and so it will get into ugly spots and you can't stop it from going really close on some low-detail object. That is an issue we won't get rid of anytime soon. Fully procedural graphics might help, but those aren't exactly ready for mainstream video games yet, a few experimental things like Spore aside.
Inflation and skyrocketing development costs should imply that game prices should have gone up, yet despite that they have stayed mostly constant for 20 years.
Back in SNES days you'd pay 65EUR or even 75EUR for a third party title and 50EUR for a first party title, on the Wii now you pay 50EUR for third party and 40EUR for first party and thats not even taking inflation into account.
The only area where prices have gone up a little is PS3/Xbox360, some titles go for 70EUR on launch day instead of 60EUR as on the PS2/Xbox, but even that is cheaper then what you would pay in N64 days.
And thats of course not all, prices now fall far faster then before, wait six month and you can get most games for half the money. iPhone game prices are ridiculous cheap. And thanks to the Internet its far easier to buy used games for as little as 5 or 10EUR.
There is absolutely no reason to complain about game prices, they are basically cheaper then ever and provide far higher production values then before. And when thats not enough for you, just buy used games.
This doesn't look as impressive as it sounds. It seems all the app can do is display a histogram and adjust the levels and then save the result. So its more like a little toy then a full application.
And lets not forget to put some blame on the OS. If the OS would provided a framework to properly isolate applications from each other most exploids would simply turn into a harmless denial of service. I couldn't care less if a broken PDF crashes the PDF reader, but I if that broken PDF can get access to my whole system something is seriously wrong with the underlying OS. There is no reason why a PDF reader, webbrowser or most other tools should ever need access to my whole system. Access to a window to draw their stuff, access to the data they need (i.e. just the byte-stream, not the filesystem) and to a location to store their config data would be enough for most applications, yet instead they get access to everything that a user account can reach.
There is happening some slow progress in that area with AppArmor and such, but we are still quite far away from having a native application be as secure a Flash app or a Java Applet by default. And yes, those aren't 100% safe either, but there is a different between being secure and having an exploid every now and then and providing no security whatsoever from the start.
The difference is that all of those behaviors are predictable according to the theory of gravity.
What happens if you throw some more balls into the game? Don't you then end up with a n-body problem which lead to chaotic behavior and thus unpredictable results? Climate happens to be a chaotic system too, which naturally makes exact predictions tricky.
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming. If a hurricane hits it is because of Global Warming. If there is a drought anywhere it is because of Global Warming. But if we get a blizzard it is bacause of Global Climate Change....
You are confusing the media with science. Media reporting is full of crap and false information, blaming every single weather event we might not like on AGW is one of those false informations, as global climate change is a global and statical thing not something you can detect by looking out of the window. So its best to just ignore the media when it comes to AGW.
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
You would have to either falsify most the collected evidence, which would be tricky as there are plenty of independent evidence around or you would have to come up with a climate model that does better predictions then the current one and comes up with different results. Coming up with some alternative theory what causes climate change would help to. And one interesting thing one could do is prove that climate change would be beneficial for humans, as currently there really isn't all that much reporting on what climate change would actually mean in detail.
Last not least I might refer you to this video on climate change (and the other one in the series), gives a good overview of where the science is and what alternative theories there actually are in the scientific community.
Ahhh, so my documentary is propaganda, but yours is not?
Mine isn't a documentary, but a simple look at the science and actual facts behind the issues. As said, please point me to the errors in the video series I linked, I'd love to read them. I already pointed you to the Wikipedia article with plenty of errors in your documentary.
As said, you look at the published peer reviewed literature (referenced plentiful in the video I linked to in my first post), not some random quote from an individual scientist in a propaganda movie.
Also note that being an university professor doesn't make you an expert in climate science. You can be expert in one field and have no clue about another.
who the hell would listen to multiple university professors anyway right?
People who fall for a argument from authority. Science isn't done by people posing with impressive titles in front of the camera, but by publishing peer reviewed research. And as said, go watch the movie I linked, its not hard and it answers plenty of your misconception by looking at the actual science.
Just go watch the video I linked and the other ones in the series, they do a great job of explaining many common climate myth, both from the skeptics side as well as the believers. And if you have any info explaining the errors in the video I linked I would love to read them.
It's really a shame that people believe politics over science.
You are confusing "green marketing" with science. The first one happens to be full of crap, but well, what do you expect from marketing? That however doesn't make the issue they peddle to a non-issue, climate scientist will tell you quite the opposite, CO2 is an issue and current evidence points to a man made climate change, go watch this and educate yourself.
We've had proper reflowing UI in Web applications for ages now
Thats not my experience. Increase the font size and close to 99% of all non-trivial webpages out there will break, some with just minor glitches, other will become unreadable thanks to overlapping text. Horizontal resize doesn't work all that great either, as by far most pages out there have a fixed min-width, get below that and welcome to the horror that is the horizontal scrollbar. Clever relayouting of the div boxes once you get below a certain size? Haven't seen those. Some portable browsers provide that, but with limited success. Wikipedia is pretty ugly and near unreadable on the PSP, thanks to the vertical navigation bar which takes away all the screenspace. Autoswitching to a horizontal one? Nope. And scaling images is also a clusterfuck, Firefox on Linux still can't do basic bilinear filtering so everything looks like crap on zoom and even with filtering everything will just turn into a blurry mush on larger scales. Higher res pictures for higher zoom levels? Haven't seen those.
The web these days is a bit of horizontal resize and the rest is not far away from pixel perfect placement. As soon as you throw a small screen, high dpi screen or a custom font at the web you run into tons of annoying issues.
I would say that this would make much of southern California uninhabitable, but that would be redundant.
And you don't think events like this could turn out to be a little problematic? It is not an easy feat to relocate millions of peoples and you can be pretty sure that you will get quite a few wars, terrorist attacks and what not as a result, as some people might not like it when their homeland turns into a desert or their island goes under water. The economic trouble from that chaos should be quite a little bit more troublesome then what you would get from reducing CO2 output right now.
Civilisations have been wiped out by climate change before, I wouldn't want to try if ours will have better chances of survival.
It is called "Global Warming" because it is the global average temperature that will raise, not because it will get warmer everywhere. Warmer temperatures in some area can mean colder ones in others.
Climate is a complicated thing and it took decades to figure out and we aren't even done, you can't honestly argue that your napkin logic there is better then decades worth of research?
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever, in their right mind thought it was a good idea to expose SQL query inputs on the Web?
Most people are not doing it because they want to, but because the software they use allows such things to silently happen behind their back. It is a classic case of in-band signaling, you are pumping data through the same pipe as code and when the data isn't properly escaped, things break in bad and unexpected ways. To get rid of this once and for all you need to seperate the pipes, seperate the data and the code and don't allow them to be mixed. LINQ for example does that by moving the query language into your programming language, instead of having it as string-magic somewhere outside the languages syntax.
That was not the fault of the porting, but the underlying design, as the console UI wasn't just ported, but completely relayouted for the PC.
Mass Effect 1 came out on XBox360 first and the PC port wasn't even done by Bioware, Mass Effect 2 came out on both systems at the same time.
That aside Bioware so far has been doing great on porting consoles to PC or visa versa, as they actually redesign the user interface for each system, instead of just mapping mouse moving to an analog stick, which never really works.
My wife's seems to surf the web pretty easily, and the connection is free (as in Beer).
Web access on the Kindle is limited to Amazon and Wikipedia in most countries, thus it is of not much use as a webbrowsing tool when you are not living in the USA.
The iPad offers... what?
A tablet computer at an affordable price. When I want to read a webpage or a book, a laptop just isn't comfortable enough, a iPhone or even Nokias N800 is just to small and a Kindle doesn't support the web. The iPad fixes all of that. Yeah, its not a perfect device, it has overblown Apple hype behind it and plenty of stupid limitations, but that doesn't stop it from being among the first serious and affordable tablet computers out there.
Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.
The problem is that you can only evaluate the historic value of something years or decades after it happened. That's why plenty of movies and early TV shows got lost or even destroyed. Even the original moon landing footage is gone. All that stuff just wasn't considered valuable enough and the self space or the reusable magnetic tape was considered more important than the data contained in them.
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it and we seem to be doing exactly that when it comes to archiving the Internet.
That's a strawman argument. People are for most part not proclaiming that piracy is good and should be practices by everybody, but that it is doing no harm or at least far less harm then the media companies want you to believe and well, looking at the evidence seems to confirm that as movie industry profits are still on the rise.
Watch a so-called science-focus skeptic phase out the same way when you point out that a recording of Dallas police broadcast has scientifically proven there were more than 3 shots fired in Dealey Plaza.
A quick google brought me to a paper that said the chance of the shot being random noise was 0.037 or in other worlds 1:27. That's not much, but far away from a solid irrefutable proof that it was a real gunshot, especially considering that other evidence seems to be missing (shooter, bullet, bullethole, ...). Which would leave me to conclude that there is no solid evidence for more then three shots and that this is simply a case of anomaly hunting, i.e. when you search long enough, you are guaranteed to find something that is unlikely to have happened.
I accept that PG-rated "sex scenes" are a step towards mature themes in games, but i don't understand why more developers aren't targeting truly adult audience.
I think the core problem is simply that nobody has figured out how to do interesting and reusable gameplay for adult themed games. Having space marines shoot aliens is easy and well understood, but when it comes to emotions and stuff things get really difficult, as there no longer is a well understood way to implement it. And without well understood gameplay such games become much more risky to do and thus fewer people are doing them.
IMO, what it actually means is that the so-called image is deliberately designed to be as catastrophically horrible as possible when scaled down.
Yes, the image is designed to exploit the bug in way that makes it very obvious that the scaling is wrong, but no, the gray rectangle is not the correct solution. The problem is that the browser or the image application assumes that the brightness is stored on a linear scale, while in reality its stored exponential one. Thus when you scale things or apply other filters the brightness will be messed up. In real photos it will be less noticeable then here, but it will still happen.
The correct way would be to transform the image to a linear scale before applying the filter and then restoring it the exponential one for display. A simple example of how to do that in Gimp (using gausian blur instead of scale, but it is the same bug) would be this. The left image is the original from the article, the middle one is blur applied and the right one is applying a gamma of 0.5 to get it to a linear scale, then the blur and then a gamma 2 to restore it to its original scale. As you can easily see the right one looks like the left one, but blurred, while the middle one has no resemblance to the original, all the information got lost due to the bug. In practice you would need a higher bit depth to make this trick practical, as else you would end with banding artifacts.
Firefox 3.5.8 on Ubuntu 9.10 still does that and it and it makes zooming pretty much unusable.
Can anyone tell me how close we are to being able to render Toy Story in real time? Say 1080p?
We should be getting pretty close, however a fundamental difference between early CGI and todays realtime graphics still exist, namely artifacts like pixels and polygons.
Even Tron managed to have round wheels on the vehicles, yet even the best looking games like Crysis still have noticeable edges on surfaces that should be round. The reason for this is simply the way the graphics and art pipelines are build, they expect polygons, not geometric description, thus a round surfaces will have edges when you look close and not automatically get more polygons as they should. Offline rendering doesn't suffer from this problem. Renderman, which is used for most Pixar stuff, for example will break all the polygons down to pixel size before the rendering stage, so you will never have a big edgy polygon in the picture as its all smoothed out. Geometry Shaders, which are available in the latest generation of GPUs, should allow similar effects in realtime. I however haven't yet seen a game that makes use of them.
With pixel artifacts it is the same thing, in offline rendering you can go the extra mile to get rid of them, be it by fine tuning the size of your shadow buffer or enabling anti-aliasing. While in realtime rendering you often spend the left over CPU power on a smoother picture or improvements of the graphics in other aspects. Things are however also slowly changing, on the PC anti-aliasing is pretty standard these days and consoles also seem to be slowly getting their. Shadow buffers can also be smoothed out by post processing effects and other trickery, so the artifacts, even so they might technically still be there, are much harder to spot.
One remaining point we might not get rid of so quickly is however simply the framing. In a movie everything is carefully layouted so that it looks good and every object that might be getting close to the camera will have enough detail. In a video game the camera is mostly handled automatically and so it will get into ugly spots and you can't stop it from going really close on some low-detail object. That is an issue we won't get rid of anytime soon. Fully procedural graphics might help, but those aren't exactly ready for mainstream video games yet, a few experimental things like Spore aside.
Inflation and skyrocketing development costs should imply that game prices should have gone up, yet despite that they have stayed mostly constant for 20 years.
Back in SNES days you'd pay 65EUR or even 75EUR for a third party title and 50EUR for a first party title, on the Wii now you pay 50EUR for third party and 40EUR for first party and thats not even taking inflation into account.
The only area where prices have gone up a little is PS3/Xbox360, some titles go for 70EUR on launch day instead of 60EUR as on the PS2/Xbox, but even that is cheaper then what you would pay in N64 days.
And thats of course not all, prices now fall far faster then before, wait six month and you can get most games for half the money. iPhone game prices are ridiculous cheap. And thanks to the Internet its far easier to buy used games for as little as 5 or 10EUR.
There is absolutely no reason to complain about game prices, they are basically cheaper then ever and provide far higher production values then before. And when thats not enough for you, just buy used games.
This doesn't look as impressive as it sounds. It seems all the app can do is display a histogram and adjust the levels and then save the result. So its more like a little toy then a full application.
And lets not forget to put some blame on the OS. If the OS would provided a framework to properly isolate applications from each other most exploids would simply turn into a harmless denial of service. I couldn't care less if a broken PDF crashes the PDF reader, but I if that broken PDF can get access to my whole system something is seriously wrong with the underlying OS. There is no reason why a PDF reader, webbrowser or most other tools should ever need access to my whole system. Access to a window to draw their stuff, access to the data they need (i.e. just the byte-stream, not the filesystem) and to a location to store their config data would be enough for most applications, yet instead they get access to everything that a user account can reach.
There is happening some slow progress in that area with AppArmor and such, but we are still quite far away from having a native application be as secure a Flash app or a Java Applet by default. And yes, those aren't 100% safe either, but there is a different between being secure and having an exploid every now and then and providing no security whatsoever from the start.
The difference is that all of those behaviors are predictable according to the theory of gravity.
What happens if you throw some more balls into the game? Don't you then end up with a n-body problem which lead to chaotic behavior and thus unpredictable results? Climate happens to be a chaotic system too, which naturally makes exact predictions tricky.
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
If a hurricane hits it is because of Global Warming.
If there is a drought anywhere it is because of Global Warming.
But if we get a blizzard it is bacause of Global Climate Change....
You are confusing the media with science. Media reporting is full of crap and false information, blaming every single weather event we might not like on AGW is one of those false informations, as global climate change is a global and statical thing not something you can detect by looking out of the window. So its best to just ignore the media when it comes to AGW.
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
You would have to either falsify most the collected evidence, which would be tricky as there are plenty of independent evidence around or you would have to come up with a climate model that does better predictions then the current one and comes up with different results. Coming up with some alternative theory what causes climate change would help to. And one interesting thing one could do is prove that climate change would be beneficial for humans, as currently there really isn't all that much reporting on what climate change would actually mean in detail.
Last not least I might refer you to this video on climate change (and the other one in the series), gives a good overview of where the science is and what alternative theories there actually are in the scientific community.
Ahhh, so my documentary is propaganda, but yours is not?
Mine isn't a documentary, but a simple look at the science and actual facts behind the issues. As said, please point me to the errors in the video series I linked, I'd love to read them. I already pointed you to the Wikipedia article with plenty of errors in your documentary.
As said, you look at the published peer reviewed literature (referenced plentiful in the video I linked to in my first post), not some random quote from an individual scientist in a propaganda movie.
Also note that being an university professor doesn't make you an expert in climate science. You can be expert in one field and have no clue about another.
who the hell would listen to multiple university professors anyway right?
People who fall for a argument from authority. Science isn't done by people posing with impressive titles in front of the camera, but by publishing peer reviewed research. And as said, go watch the movie I linked, its not hard and it answers plenty of your misconception by looking at the actual science.
Real scientists will laugh at you for claiming CO2 is an issue,
Where can I read their papers? If they are real scientists they must have published their findings, right?
I'll see your enlightened video link and raise you one.
Sorry, but videos made by people that fabricated their data and misquoted scientists in a fraudulent way don't impress me much. They even tried to sue the misquoted scientist with the notorious UK libel laws after he complained, great way to react to criticism...
Just go watch the video I linked and the other ones in the series, they do a great job of explaining many common climate myth, both from the skeptics side as well as the believers. And if you have any info explaining the errors in the video I linked I would love to read them.
It's really a shame that people believe politics over science.
You are confusing "green marketing" with science. The first one happens to be full of crap, but well, what do you expect from marketing? That however doesn't make the issue they peddle to a non-issue, climate scientist will tell you quite the opposite, CO2 is an issue and current evidence points to a man made climate change, go watch this and educate yourself.
We've had proper reflowing UI in Web applications for ages now
Thats not my experience. Increase the font size and close to 99% of all non-trivial webpages out there will break, some with just minor glitches, other will become unreadable thanks to overlapping text. Horizontal resize doesn't work all that great either, as by far most pages out there have a fixed min-width, get below that and welcome to the horror that is the horizontal scrollbar. Clever relayouting of the div boxes once you get below a certain size? Haven't seen those. Some portable browsers provide that, but with limited success. Wikipedia is pretty ugly and near unreadable on the PSP, thanks to the vertical navigation bar which takes away all the screenspace. Autoswitching to a horizontal one? Nope. And scaling images is also a clusterfuck, Firefox on Linux still can't do basic bilinear filtering so everything looks like crap on zoom and even with filtering everything will just turn into a blurry mush on larger scales. Higher res pictures for higher zoom levels? Haven't seen those.
The web these days is a bit of horizontal resize and the rest is not far away from pixel perfect placement. As soon as you throw a small screen, high dpi screen or a custom font at the web you run into tons of annoying issues.
I would say that this would make much of southern California uninhabitable, but that would be redundant.
And you don't think events like this could turn out to be a little problematic? It is not an easy feat to relocate millions of peoples and you can be pretty sure that you will get quite a few wars, terrorist attacks and what not as a result, as some people might not like it when their homeland turns into a desert or their island goes under water. The economic trouble from that chaos should be quite a little bit more troublesome then what you would get from reducing CO2 output right now.
Civilisations have been wiped out by climate change before, I wouldn't want to try if ours will have better chances of survival.
It is called "Global Warming" because it is the global average temperature that will raise, not because it will get warmer everywhere. Warmer temperatures in some area can mean colder ones in others.
Climate is a complicated thing and it took decades to figure out and we aren't even done, you can't honestly argue that your napkin logic there is better then decades worth of research?