In the end, it's not really the code that matters much anyway. Apple has much better code than Microsoft, and yet Microsoft has the largest market share. IE has huge marketshare, even though it's been the worst browser for many years, it's only now starting to fail. Red hat and Mandriva both have Linux at the core (Mandriva actually started as a fork of Redhat) yet Redhat is doing well, and Mandriva is approaching bankruptcy. Code matters very little in the end, and there's a lot more to creating a good business than just having the code.
I hate those "progress" bars. To me, it's just frustrating, and makes it seem like things are actually going slower. Also up there in the annoyance category are "progress bars" which fill up many times, with no indication of how many times they will go back to 0.
Why not have a system with no cartridge or disk slot on it? That would probably be quite a good way to stop piracy. Assign a public key to each device, and have it so that it will only play games signed with the device's private key, which is kept secure at Nintendo headquarters. You buy games by downloading the over the internet, either through the built in web browser, or by some program you install on your computer, and it connects via WiFi to your computer. There could be hardware hacks, requiring that you open up the device, but that will stop a lot of piraters. Sony has already gone in this direction with the PSP Go. I think this is eventually where all consoles are headed. Download only, you can't plug anything in, and eventually encase the electronics in epoxy, so you can't add mod chips either.
PHP really is that bad. Because they still haven't removed the cruft. If they were really serious about any kind of security, they would have gotten rid of magic quotes completely, as well as things like mysql_escape_string. Instead they left these gaping security holes in there, for the sake of compatibility. Meanwhile you have a bunch of cheap web hosts who turn things like magic quotes on by default, thinking it will solve all their customers' security problems, when really it just extends the problem by leading them down the wrong path. While they've added things (MySQLi/PDO for prepared statements, mysql_real_escape_string, and others) the amount of legacy stuff they left in there is amazing, and for a language with so many novices working with it, ends up being a real disaster.
I see the big problem here is that they are specifically talking about web applications. When you're doing web applications, the major security holes are SQL Injection, XSS attacks, HTML/Javascript Injection, and other such things. Nobody (almost) uses C for programming on the web. Of all the popular web languages PHP,.Net, Java, Python, and all the others, none of them use pointers, none of them require you to manage your own memory. This cuts out a lot of security exploits found in languages like C, in which the only thing left is other bugs like SQL injection. SQL injection is not something you can solve with a programming language. Unless your programming language didn't provide a way to run strings against the database, and only gave you access to the database through some object layer, like Hibernate or Linq, then there's nothing the language could do to stop stupid programmers from doing stupid things. There are constucts like prepared statements in all web programming languages, and there's no reason to have an insecure website, but the problem is, is that everyone wants a website, and doesn't want to pay qualified people to do the job. So they end up with insecure web sites.
You see, this is the problem. When "Friends" was on the air, each star (there were 6 of them) wanted $1,000,000 an episode. So based on your model, at $.25 an episode, and only downloads, and everybody pays, you would need 24 million people downloading just to cover the main actors' salaries. Oh, and that's 24 million TVs. Because multiple people can and do watch the same TV. That's a lot of people. Now, I'm not saying these actors are worth that much, but it really puts into perspective how much it costs to produce a TV show, and why I think it will be a long time off before any hit show with a large production budget will go completely online. The amount of money actors demand, as well as producers and everybody else involved, will have to come way down if we want a commercial free, a la carte type offering that we all dream of. And I don't see people willing to pay for that.
Maybe you should try running an emulator with an anti-aliasing filter. Does anybody have experience with this increasing the visual quality of the games? I remember using it on old CRTs with Super Nintendo games, and recalling that it looked a lot smoother. Perhaps it would help with LCD displays.
You're right, if your goal is to pack a lot of processing power into a small volume. Because, let's face it, data center space is expensive. Way more than the CPUs. However, if you are building machines that don't need to be packed tightly, like for your home, or for employees in the office, then you don't really have to worry about density. In this usage scenario, you still need 1 PC per user, no matter how fast the machines are. So it makes sense to use cheaper machines, that may take up a bit more space, and may not be as powerful, if they still provide everything the user needs. In the server room, Intel makes the most sense, and probably will for a long time to come, but on the desktop, unless you go for the extreme high end, AMD is probably the better choice.
I got a better one. www.bankofamerica.com. See, I used Unicode character 212e instead of the e. Looks the same to most people, and would probably fool quite a bit of people. I wonder how they hope to stop situations like this. (I actaully used an e, because slashdot wouldn't let me put in the HTML entity, but this is good enough to demonstrate the problem)
This is the answer. Make them so cheap, that people don't even have think about pirating, or even not buying it. These things should be so cheap that anybody who even remotely likes the style of game should just go ahead and buy it. Same goes for music and movies. These things cost almost nothing to replicate. So they should cost almost nothing to the end user. Make it up in volume.
On the other hand. Getting good marks in school signifies that you can learn how to do something that is extremely boring, even when you don't want to do it, in a limited amount of time. This has great value in the work place. Not everything you do at work is fun and/or interesting. It's advantageous to have employees and co-workers who can just bite the bullet and learn something really fast, and get the job done, even if it's not so exciting. In general, you want to keep the work interesting, but you still want people who can work hard when it isn't.
There's no reason you couldn't hack into a standard PC using a C64. There are web browsers for the C64 (Google it) with a full TCP/IP stack. If you can have a web browser that connects to the internet, there's no reason you couldn't write a program to attack an open port on somebody's computer.
Yeah, where I live, it's usually quite humid, and the A/C does nothing to stop that, so 24 is where things are comfortable. If it weren't for the humidity here, I would keep things at 30 degrees.
Because those applications probably still make a lot of assumptions for running on x86. I wouldn't even think that windows could be compiled to run on ARM in it's current state. There's probably a bunch of assembly thrown in for optimizations. Windows hasn't run on anything but x86 since Windows NT4. A lot has changed since then.
Which is immediately what surprised me. Why have a degree in such a narrow field? I could see a community college offering diplomas in a narrow field such as this, but I wouldn't expect a university to have a degree on something so focused. Seems to me like it could work from a marketing perspective to get students in initially, but that a lot would drop out. You would probably be better off going for a computer science degree and focusing your electives on courses that would help with video game design, as well as trying to get internships at video game companies.
Here's where we get into the point of "professional tool" vs. "something I install on my home PC". For professional people, the cost of software like Photoshop, VS.Net, Final Cut Pro, and others is almost completely insignificant. Compared to all the other costs of doing business, it's almost crazy not to pay for it. However for the home user, or hobbyist, these products seem completely out of range with what you get out of them. When you pay $300 for a computer, even $50 on a windows license, or $50 for a word processor seems like a lot of money. That's why in a lot of cases you'll see the companies offering cut down versions for much cheaper, or even free, which will get the job done. Keep the mindshare, and still get professionals to pay for the full product.
You do realize that the original downloader's MAC address isn't available from the outside internet because it changes at hop along the way. Your computer has a MAC, your router has a different MAC, your cable modem has another MAC. Your ISP gateway has yet another one. The only Mac you could end up reading with these methods would be your own, or that of your cable router.
I find the toys usually aren't that good. Maybe in Canada they just get different toys. Of the last 10 kinder surprises I've gotten my kids, 1 or 2 each at Christmas and Easter, so over the last 3 years, we have gotten 3 or 4 of the same toy some with varying colours, a couple of puzzles, and a couple other ones that didn't even require assembly (half the fun). I have to say, there is very little variety in the toys you get, and it seems like they definitely aren't as good as they used to be.
My wife and kids are home all day long. We kept the A/C at 24 degrees last summer. Which was a nice cool welcome change from the apartment we used to have. I think that a lot of the problem is that people (even healthy ones who have not medical reasons) are way too intolerant to changes in heat. We keep it at 17-19 in the winter, and 24 in the summer. If we are cold in the winter, we put on sweaters and socks. If we are hot in the summer, we have a glass of water. 24 isn't that hot. My grandpa used to keep his house at 15 in the summer. It was like walking into a walk in refridgerator.
I didn't find bittorrent all that different from eDonkey, which used a similar hashing system to figure out that a bunch of people had the same file, and would let you download multiple chunks from different people.
Any halfway decent password system only stores a hash of the password, and therefore can't tell if you only changed 1 character on your password, because it has no idea what your previous password was, only what your previous password hashed to.
You don't need a solid state drive for storing media. It's completely useless. There's only a few really good uses of these things. Mostly in places where you have a lot of reads all over the disk in a very short amount of time. Mostly for things like Databases and stuff. For personal use, it really only makes sense to store your programs and OS on it. There's no reason to store things like movies and MP3s on there. Get a second drive spinning platter drive for that.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end, it's not really the code that matters much anyway. Apple has much better code than Microsoft, and yet Microsoft has the largest market share. IE has huge marketshare, even though it's been the worst browser for many years, it's only now starting to fail. Red hat and Mandriva both have Linux at the core (Mandriva actually started as a fork of Redhat) yet Redhat is doing well, and Mandriva is approaching bankruptcy. Code matters very little in the end, and there's a lot more to creating a good business than just having the code.
I hate those "progress" bars. To me, it's just frustrating, and makes it seem like things are actually going slower. Also up there in the annoyance category are "progress bars" which fill up many times, with no indication of how many times they will go back to 0.
Why not have a system with no cartridge or disk slot on it? That would probably be quite a good way to stop piracy. Assign a public key to each device, and have it so that it will only play games signed with the device's private key, which is kept secure at Nintendo headquarters. You buy games by downloading the over the internet, either through the built in web browser, or by some program you install on your computer, and it connects via WiFi to your computer. There could be hardware hacks, requiring that you open up the device, but that will stop a lot of piraters. Sony has already gone in this direction with the PSP Go. I think this is eventually where all consoles are headed. Download only, you can't plug anything in, and eventually encase the electronics in epoxy, so you can't add mod chips either.
PHP really is that bad. Because they still haven't removed the cruft. If they were really serious about any kind of security, they would have gotten rid of magic quotes completely, as well as things like mysql_escape_string. Instead they left these gaping security holes in there, for the sake of compatibility. Meanwhile you have a bunch of cheap web hosts who turn things like magic quotes on by default, thinking it will solve all their customers' security problems, when really it just extends the problem by leading them down the wrong path. While they've added things (MySQLi/PDO for prepared statements, mysql_real_escape_string, and others) the amount of legacy stuff they left in there is amazing, and for a language with so many novices working with it, ends up being a real disaster.
I see the big problem here is that they are specifically talking about web applications. When you're doing web applications, the major security holes are SQL Injection, XSS attacks, HTML/Javascript Injection, and other such things. Nobody (almost) uses C for programming on the web. Of all the popular web languages PHP, .Net, Java, Python, and all the others, none of them use pointers, none of them require you to manage your own memory. This cuts out a lot of security exploits found in languages like C, in which the only thing left is other bugs like SQL injection. SQL injection is not something you can solve with a programming language. Unless your programming language didn't provide a way to run strings against the database, and only gave you access to the database through some object layer, like Hibernate or Linq, then there's nothing the language could do to stop stupid programmers from doing stupid things. There are constucts like prepared statements in all web programming languages, and there's no reason to have an insecure website, but the problem is, is that everyone wants a website, and doesn't want to pay qualified people to do the job. So they end up with insecure web sites.
You see, this is the problem. When "Friends" was on the air, each star (there were 6 of them) wanted $1,000,000 an episode. So based on your model, at $.25 an episode, and only downloads, and everybody pays, you would need 24 million people downloading just to cover the main actors' salaries. Oh, and that's 24 million TVs. Because multiple people can and do watch the same TV. That's a lot of people. Now, I'm not saying these actors are worth that much, but it really puts into perspective how much it costs to produce a TV show, and why I think it will be a long time off before any hit show with a large production budget will go completely online. The amount of money actors demand, as well as producers and everybody else involved, will have to come way down if we want a commercial free, a la carte type offering that we all dream of. And I don't see people willing to pay for that.
Maybe you should try running an emulator with an anti-aliasing filter. Does anybody have experience with this increasing the visual quality of the games? I remember using it on old CRTs with Super Nintendo games, and recalling that it looked a lot smoother. Perhaps it would help with LCD displays.
You're right, if your goal is to pack a lot of processing power into a small volume. Because, let's face it, data center space is expensive. Way more than the CPUs. However, if you are building machines that don't need to be packed tightly, like for your home, or for employees in the office, then you don't really have to worry about density. In this usage scenario, you still need 1 PC per user, no matter how fast the machines are. So it makes sense to use cheaper machines, that may take up a bit more space, and may not be as powerful, if they still provide everything the user needs. In the server room, Intel makes the most sense, and probably will for a long time to come, but on the desktop, unless you go for the extreme high end, AMD is probably the better choice.
I got a better one. www.bankofamerica.com. See, I used Unicode character 212e instead of the e. Looks the same to most people, and would probably fool quite a bit of people. I wonder how they hope to stop situations like this. (I actaully used an e, because slashdot wouldn't let me put in the HTML entity, but this is good enough to demonstrate the problem)
Two is a significant sample if we're talking about the number of "high profile chess players" in the world.
This is the answer. Make them so cheap, that people don't even have think about pirating, or even not buying it. These things should be so cheap that anybody who even remotely likes the style of game should just go ahead and buy it. Same goes for music and movies. These things cost almost nothing to replicate. So they should cost almost nothing to the end user. Make it up in volume.
On the other hand. Getting good marks in school signifies that you can learn how to do something that is extremely boring, even when you don't want to do it, in a limited amount of time. This has great value in the work place. Not everything you do at work is fun and/or interesting. It's advantageous to have employees and co-workers who can just bite the bullet and learn something really fast, and get the job done, even if it's not so exciting. In general, you want to keep the work interesting, but you still want people who can work hard when it isn't.
There's no reason you couldn't hack into a standard PC using a C64. There are web browsers for the C64 (Google it) with a full TCP/IP stack. If you can have a web browser that connects to the internet, there's no reason you couldn't write a program to attack an open port on somebody's computer.
Yeah, where I live, it's usually quite humid, and the A/C does nothing to stop that, so 24 is where things are comfortable. If it weren't for the humidity here, I would keep things at 30 degrees.
Because those applications probably still make a lot of assumptions for running on x86. I wouldn't even think that windows could be compiled to run on ARM in it's current state. There's probably a bunch of assembly thrown in for optimizations. Windows hasn't run on anything but x86 since Windows NT4. A lot has changed since then.
Which is immediately what surprised me. Why have a degree in such a narrow field? I could see a community college offering diplomas in a narrow field such as this, but I wouldn't expect a university to have a degree on something so focused. Seems to me like it could work from a marketing perspective to get students in initially, but that a lot would drop out. You would probably be better off going for a computer science degree and focusing your electives on courses that would help with video game design, as well as trying to get internships at video game companies.
Here's where we get into the point of "professional tool" vs. "something I install on my home PC". For professional people, the cost of software like Photoshop, VS.Net, Final Cut Pro, and others is almost completely insignificant. Compared to all the other costs of doing business, it's almost crazy not to pay for it. However for the home user, or hobbyist, these products seem completely out of range with what you get out of them. When you pay $300 for a computer, even $50 on a windows license, or $50 for a word processor seems like a lot of money. That's why in a lot of cases you'll see the companies offering cut down versions for much cheaper, or even free, which will get the job done. Keep the mindshare, and still get professionals to pay for the full product.
You do realize that the original downloader's MAC address isn't available from the outside internet because it changes at hop along the way. Your computer has a MAC, your router has a different MAC, your cable modem has another MAC. Your ISP gateway has yet another one. The only Mac you could end up reading with these methods would be your own, or that of your cable router.
I find the toys usually aren't that good. Maybe in Canada they just get different toys. Of the last 10 kinder surprises I've gotten my kids, 1 or 2 each at Christmas and Easter, so over the last 3 years, we have gotten 3 or 4 of the same toy some with varying colours, a couple of puzzles, and a couple other ones that didn't even require assembly (half the fun). I have to say, there is very little variety in the toys you get, and it seems like they definitely aren't as good as they used to be.
More like IPv4 is a 2" tube, and IPv6 is a 79228162514264337593543950336" tube. That's how many more addresses it contains.
My wife and kids are home all day long. We kept the A/C at 24 degrees last summer. Which was a nice cool welcome change from the apartment we used to have. I think that a lot of the problem is that people (even healthy ones who have not medical reasons) are way too intolerant to changes in heat. We keep it at 17-19 in the winter, and 24 in the summer. If we are cold in the winter, we put on sweaters and socks. If we are hot in the summer, we have a glass of water. 24 isn't that hot. My grandpa used to keep his house at 15 in the summer. It was like walking into a walk in refridgerator.
I didn't find bittorrent all that different from eDonkey, which used a similar hashing system to figure out that a bunch of people had the same file, and would let you download multiple chunks from different people.
Mr. Skullhead would be proud.
Any halfway decent password system only stores a hash of the password, and therefore can't tell if you only changed 1 character on your password, because it has no idea what your previous password was, only what your previous password hashed to.
You don't need a solid state drive for storing media. It's completely useless. There's only a few really good uses of these things. Mostly in places where you have a lot of reads all over the disk in a very short amount of time. Mostly for things like Databases and stuff. For personal use, it really only makes sense to store your programs and OS on it. There's no reason to store things like movies and MP3s on there. Get a second drive spinning platter drive for that.