Its a 100W APU. Its the king of the current batch of CPU's with on-die GPU's with regards to GPU performance (Intel's best is like 50% of the performance.) So unlikely to ever see a laptop anytime soon.
I believe you but its a pity. In the past I have bought laptops with discrete graphics even though they got crappy battery life just because I wanted to game on them on trains while travelling around here in the UK where you get a power socket in most of the seats. I only skimped on that on my current laptop because I do far less travelling now.
Wow, seems better than I expected but 18fps is going to be a bit noticeably ugly, especially if you had a huge fight going on with few enemies such as the stormcloak / empire battles.
Would be a good if someone started throwing these things into laptops though, I just checked quickly and can't see any yet. Hopefully that will change soon.
Having struggled through years of gaming on rigs with various GPUs, I have to wonder where it will hit the point that nobody needs any faster cards.
I started out gaming on the computer on computers with no GPU, and when I got one with a Rage Pro 4MB it was awesome. Then I got a Voodoo card from 3DFX with a whopping 8MB and it was more awesomer. Now you can get whatever that will do whatever for however many dollars.
I really don't see the game programming keeping up with the GPU power. I'm at least 2 GeForce's behind the latest series (560ti) and I can play any game at 1200p resolution with a very decent framerate. Yes I beta-tested Battlefield 4. How much more is enough? I don't want them to stop trying, but somebody needs to ask where it reaches the point of diminishing returns. They could focus on streamlining and cheapening the "good enough" lines...
I just upgraded from a GTX 480 to a GTX780 and the big difference it made to me is the ability to turn on proper 8x Anti Aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering at 1920x1200. It did not make a huge difference but it made enough to be noticeable. You might be able to make do with a cheaper card and still play most modern games, but getting something decent does give you nicer graphics for your money at the resolution you quoted.
Hell I recently picked up an A10-6800K APU and the integrated graphics are more than acceptable for the gaming that I do at 1920x1080 (Team Fortress 2, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Explorers, Skyrim,...).. and its not even with the fastest DDR3 the mobo supports.
Can you turn on 16x Anisotropic Filtering and 8x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing in Skyrim? In my opinion it just looks a little ugly without it.
The HR drone hiring you prefers schooling over education.
Actually, I think it usually that the HR drone prefers nice people who can interact with other human beings well.
Many people who come through STEM courses are slightly geeky, often to the point of being socially awkward. This often makes them a nightmare for non-techies to work with. The thing is though, learning to be a half decent techie is not that hard so for many roles you can hire someone who does not have a technical education but does have a passion for technology and train them to do what you need.
I remember myself and another very technical person talking about mistakes we made in our youth. We both came to the conclusion that our biggest mistakes had been related to not paying enough attention to learning soft skills like sales and people management. We thought technical skills were the be all and end all as that is what we enjoyed but now we have both come to the conclusion that technical skills are secondary to people skills and motivation when it comes to the world of work.
Actually there is a free market success in the medical field. Laser eye surgery started out expensive and not covered by insurance. Now it's cheap enough to pay for out-of-pocket. I saw an ad just the other day for Lasik eye surgery for just $299.00 per eye. Not bad at all - cheaper than buying glasses in the long run.
The free market works when you let it.
Laser Eye surgery is a luxury, try applying free market models to treatment for a flu epidemic.
With something like a Flu epidemic if treatment is not free then loads of people will try and make do without. That means the epidemic goes untreated amongst large parts of the population and spreads much more easily and damages productivity as more people call in sick.
The reason we in Britain came up with an NHS was not solely out of some do gooder nature, it was to make sure people were able to get their arse to work in factories and produce stuff without infecting all their co-workers with a disease that made even more people sick the next day.
The fact that Apple can read iMessages and hand them over to the authorities is hardly surprising, especially given that we know they co-operate with the NSA.
Excuse me, but how do we know this? Except for your prejudice and paranoia, do you have any actual evidence?
Any US based executive that refused to co-operate with an NSA request can be sent to prison. You can try challenging them in the relevant (secret) mickey mouse course of rubber stamps or you can look for the odd work around like just disclosing what you have from the logs then closing down your entire service so you do not have to do it again.
Endless fur balls shooting at each other like COD are just boring.
Actually, for some of us they are fun as hell. Charging round the map trying to react to incoming as fast possible, keeping moving at all time, racking up kills by never missing and getting accused of hacking twice a day even though we don't. I don't have enough time to play tactically any more as real life has taken over so reaction based, quick action shooters are all I can fit in a few games of now and then.
Playing Battlefield for the singleplayer is like getting Playboy for the articles. There wasn't even any singleplayer before Battlefield: Bad Company, only multiplayer maps with crude, terrible bots. The campaign was added later, probably at the request of execs to "compete" with Call of Duty. The BC campaigns weren't half bad, but BF3 went full Modern Warfare and suffered for it.
If your sole experience of the game is the campaign, then I'm sorry but you know nothing of the game. It's neither the draw nor the focus, and does not represent the rest of the game at all.
I have to admit, I fell for it:)
I have bought BF3 and BF:Bad Company 2 just for the single player. I ended up playing a fair bit of Bad Company 2 but I never really liked it that much. As soon as Black Ops came out I jumped straight in.
The thing with BlackOps and even more so with BlackOps2 is that it allows casual player to be halfway successful. You can join a server on your own and have a half decent game without being constantly murdered by some git in a helicopter or a clan who have forced your entire team back into spawn with concerted teamwork.
Games that encourage teamwork are all very well, but the problem is that financially it is a bit of a disaster for the company that make them if they get known as being filled with decent clans who relentlessly punish casual players such that they never get any kills.
When we had a solid clan playing BC2 on a friday night we would have the entrance to the enemy spawn constantly mined so as soon as they tried to get a tank out it blew up as we always had 2 engineers on. We also had a sniper, a guy on resupply duty (assault) and a few medics. We all generally put in at least an hours play a day as a minimum and had a few serving army peep in the clan to give us direction. If anyone joined the server for a casual game they got slaughtered and that simply cannot be fun.
So what a surprise, more and more games are now moving to the CoD idea where they use things like matchmaking, small teams, and nerfed guns to try and make things playable for people who only play a few hours occasionally as that is where the mass market is so where games companies make more sales.
Because whilst they may have had the time and resources to research it and come up with a solution, they don't necessarily have the time and resources to fight their patch past Commander Torvald's ego and army of protective zealots.
Or maybe now they have actually created a paper that may or may not define a real issue (I'll wait and see how this is peer reviewed as I have no idea about theoretical weaknesses created by different ways of combining sources of entropy in order to create random data) with the kernel in depth (not just some moronic bullshit petition based on a completely incorrect assessment of how someone guessed something would work with no real investigation of the actual system involved) the kernel team will actually look at this and make an assessment of how they could fix this.
In short this is far more likely to be well received and result in changes being made to the the kernel as these guys did some investigation. The previous petition starting moron just demanded changes without understanding what he was asking for changes to at all and without being able to recommend a better way of doing it, instead he just said "Don't do this" even though the kernel did not actually do that anyway.
These guys are not saying "Do not trust RdRand as intel might have been paid off by the NSA to make it crap", instead they are picking apart the minutiae of how the kernel combines sources of entropy (something the guy who started the petition did not know it did at all) and suggesting subtle changes to make it better. The two things are so far apart that there is no reason to even dream that both would garner the same response.
So let me get this straight, if you use government resources to break the law or fail to deliver on large government projects then you will be barred from further federal work? I think all you need to do is rename the company, e.g. "Blackwater" to "Xe" (or whatever they are called) and re-apply, No big deal.
All blackwater did wrong was kill a few innocent arabs. The US Military does this all the time and just calls it collateral damage.
The reality is that if you put soldiers, either privateers or attached to a state entity in a situation where they are paid to wait until they get attacked then do their best to react without dieing then sooner or later they are going to jump the gun and react wrongly. This is different to someone leaving a base in the middle of the night to go on a murderous rampage, this is just people trying not to get killed and seeing someone quickly produce something from under their clothing but not realising it was innocuous until after you shot them. Then once the shooting starts other people around you instantly react assuming you were in the right and shoot all their companions.
This was a PR disaster for blackwater which was why they changed their name but it did not show malicious intent on the part of the company executives in the same way that profiting from selling confidential information to a foreign government would.
Asking what we're getting in exchange for the acceptance of DRM means one's priorities are misplaced—this question is entirely misplaced because nothing should restrict the reader. Trying to bargain for better terms after accepting a deal signals profound ignorance of how to get what readers need: the right to read.
Well done, you always get lots of up mods just for posting a 20 year old essay by someone who believes that all information should be free. The problem that Stallman did not realise when he wrote that and maybe has never realised is that money makes the world go around so most people need a way of making it.
He has some very interesting ideas and has given a lot to the computing community but large parts of life have simply passed him by, notably he has no children or dependants. For the majority of us who do decide to have kids we have a problem of having to make sure we have a steady income stream for the rest of our lives and any fluctuations in that stream can ruin your dependants lives or at the very least leave them suffering far more hardship and worry than you would like to see.
That leaves may of us in a position where we actually agree with the spirit of the right to read but have long since realised that our best hope of providing or our own family is in selling our services as software developers because it is one of the few things we are any good at. Unfortunately the people who want to pay us though often dictate that the code we produce belongs to them, not us.
I am sure I could eek out a living by trying to only write open source modules for stuff like drupal and doing software as service type jobs but I would be deny myself a way of making money from one of best assets which is my ability to sit down with a problem and invest a large amount of time in it, eventually coming up with a solution that nobody else has. If I instantly give that solution away to everyone then they can use it without recompensing me for the huge amount of time I invested in figuring out that solution I eventually get to was even possible.
Sharing all information freely might be better for society, but it is designed to be incredibly detrimental to us as individuals in the capitalist society we live in. In light of this I actually think that Stallman's entire movement is a completely misguided adventure. Instead of just taking aim at a few poxy restrictions on software he should have realised that the only thing that allowed the sharing of code he wanted was the academic nature of his environment at the time.
He often said that authors should be allowed to charge money for writing software, but you have two choices if you do this. One is that you sell the source code such that if the buyer needs a future modification they can do it themselves of hire someone cheaper than you. Second is that you only give them the end product so for any modifications they HAVE to come back to you so you have a closed market and can charge more. People who choose the latter are simply bad at capitalism and the world we live in punishes you remorselessly for that, even if it would be better for society.
The first submissions from someone the maintainer doesn't know are going to be reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and a skeptical eye, and very few black-hats are going to be willing to spend years submitting high-quality code to build up enough of a reputation with the maintainer to be able to get code in with only a cursory review. It's the difference between a development team and a developer community.
Exactly.
I remember the Con Kolivas strop a few years ago and thought it indicated a pretty good state of affairs in that some supposedly very good work got rejected just because there were confidence issues in the long term reliability of the developer (ie, Con could not work on the what he produced full time and drop everything to fix any bugs discovered later) and that the code itself was difficult to thoroughly review and merge with what was current by the time he submitted it.
Although as with any human interaction Linus seems to be involved in he probably could have handled it better on a personal level:)
Skip that. How about we go with "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." We're talking about a single character that turns what everyone seems to agree would be an error-check, into an exploit. This sort of thing happens all the time, and nobody says the butler did it, in the observatory, with the lead pipe, when it does. They say "Hey, man, your last diff patch might have a bug." (explains bug)... a few hours to days later, they reply back with "Oh hey thanks for catching that!"
Did you bother reading the full article? If you did you might have picked up on what made them think it was a backdoor attempt:
"Further investigation determined that someone had apparently broken in (electronically) to the CVS server and inserted this change."
That is not the normal behaviour of developer submitting a patch to the linux kernel. It is also not normal for the developer who has his name next to the patch in the CVS log to deny categorically ever committing the patch.
In this case it seems weird as well because Linus did not use CVS at all since he used BitKeeper so the only way this change would find its way into the kernel was if a trusted developer pulled the code from CVS, did a chunk of development work then submitted a patch to Linus which he approved containing this bug. There are a million reasons why this was probably never going to happen though, starting with that fact that the developer would have to be editing this same line for the patch to contain it.
You're right though in that if this was a patch that went into BitKeeper trunk or whatever (hey guess what, I know nothing about bitkeeper) via the normal process this would be more clearly down to a developer screwing up but the weird nature of this going straight to CVS rather than than via BitKeeper is what makes it look suspicious.
They certainly do above all sense. If you have a 1920x1080 monitor there is only so much GPU power you need for all current games at max detail. Doesn't stop people spending far too much.
As someone who just went from a Nvidia 480 to an Nvidia 780 I noticed an improvement. Firstly I could turn on full Antialiasing which made a big difference in things like Skyrim and BlackOps2. I imagine it will make a bigger difference in Black Ops Ghosts that comes out next month though which is what I really bought it for.
Or have we reached a diminishing return point and/or a point where money is being spent elsewhere (consoles, mobile, tablets, etc)?
The problem is that PC games have been cripppled for years by being developed on consoles and ported to PCs. Some do take advantage of the extra power of PC GPUs, but the majority will run fine on a GPU that's several years old, because it's more powerful than the crap in the consoles.
But most of the nice visual effects like antialiasing are done in the drivers without the game needing to know to much about it so this is not necessarily true. Also, there are plenty of companies that develop for PC then port to consoles. Compare Skyrim on the PC on a NVidia 680 or 780 to running on the Xbox 360 to see the difference. Another example of a game that looked far better on PC than on consoles is BF3.
Maybe you should have caveated your post by saying that a lot of crap studios release crippled games on PC that are designed for consoles but their are plenty of companies out there who view the PC as important to their strategy and so put the work in making their product on PC take advantage of the good stuff modern graphics card provide. This is especially true when it is just a case of making very minor changes to leverage improvements in versions of DirectX 10 and 11 not available on the Xbox360.
"I dare say I could write one pretty quickly if asked, but it would be a much more efficient use of my time to just google for one since there are tons of them out there without any licence restrictions. "
Please read what I wrote a bit more carefully. I did not write that I think you should be writing such things on a daily basis. And I certainly don't recommend it. But you should be able to, should the need arise.
I read what you posted very carefully and what I posted still stands. Although I could do this there is no reason to so why SHOULD I bother when Googling for an optimized free solution is quicker. Providing I understand everything that the code I find does and it is unencumbered by licence restrictions then that is fine, that does not mean I would make knowing how to rewrite a 30 year old, hardly used (in code we actually write anyway) algorithm part of a recruitment process for new developers.
But if you don't know a Quicksort from a Bubble sort, or how to write them, you're not a programmer by any standard I ever heard of, and I've been around.
I have been a professional developer for the past 10 to 15 years and have not had to write a sorting algorithm in almost 2 decades (since college, at least 15 years ago). I dare say I could write one pretty quickly if asked, but it would be a much more efficient use of my time to just google for one since there are tons of them out there without any licence restrictions. What I could do though is understand every line of what I found at a glance and easily make any subtle changes needed to drop it into what ever project I was working on.
Writing this sort of basic stuff is a useful educational tool since the model answer is pretty well established, but you very rarely have to rewrite the same previously solved tasks once you are getting paid for your time.
Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.
That might apply if you want to create decent C code or something similar but if you are talking about web development or similar then learning assembler is just a complete waste of time due to the many layers of abstraction involved between the code and the hardware
Then there is the issue that in many cases the code being slightly slower than it could be is not as important as it being easy to work on. When you end up with a huge project it makes sense to do things like modularise the code at the expense of performance so that each module can be looked at as a distinct entity.
Sit down with a 6809 system emulation and learn about stacks and heaps and PIC and addressing modes and registers and memory and IO and optimizing loops and etc. Then you've got a foundation.
A foundation that is completely irrelevant in many types of programming. People can be amazing developers without knowing any of that and just having a deep understanding of the language they actually use.
You best learn to solve problems by... wait for it... solving problems.
Exactly, but there is not need to solve problems on completely irrelevant platforms. Instead you can learn to develop perfectly well be picking a platform you might want to use and learning your way round that. Then pick another platform you are likely to use and learn your way round that as well.
Then C and a linker AND a debugger, then something OO, then HTML, CSS, Python, PostgreSQL, follow the basic PostgreSQL with detailed DB stuff, make sure the math is there through at least algebra and geometry, explain 3D from acos() as pooltable reflection to the various lighting tech... this would be a good first year or possibly two.
Now you start to get more useful. I would skip all that crap at the start and just go straight into learning a procedural language and an object orientated language. When I say learn them though, I mean REALLY learn them making sure you learn the shortfalls of both.
The only reason I would say to skip some of the stuff you recommend is due to time. We only have a limited amount of hours available in life and so I would concentrate on learning languages that are relevant to what you want to do. We simply do not have enough time to become expert in enough languages to learn everything so try and concentrate on things that are relevant to what you want to do.
Fuck oil and electricity. I want a *nuclear* powered engine. Now THAT will be an accident!
I'm sure that in 2043, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 2013, it's a little hard to come by.
Screw that, by 2043 I want to be driving (or flying) round in a vehicle with a small sun under the bonnet generating power. That way when I crash it can go supernova.
I mean when you buy something it's yours -- you can resell it or give it away. Can you still do that? If not, you didn't buy anything, you paid for a service.
Ok, I understand more what you mean now. Although in this case I think I still bought something, it's just what I actually bought is a single user license for something. I would not use the word rent though since the licence never expires.
Back in the day when we were playing Quake we ran our own servers, and QuakeSpy (later GameSpy) made it easy to find and connect.
I think back then though most online gamers were more trust worthy. I used to play Quake and then Unreal Tournament online and never remember people cheating as being much of an issue whereas now without things like punkbuster and VAC there just seem to be too many damn cheats. I think if we moved back to hosting your own server for this sort of stuff you would find too many people just moving from server to server cheating until they got kicked.
Then there is the other problem which I have run into recently where clans rent a server that is really just for them boost their fragrates so as soon as you beat them they just ban you.
I think a lot of the moves recently towards moving online gaming towards online matchmaking is actually trying to make it more fun to casual gamers as they actually start standing a chance instead of spending the whole time being owned by cheats and people who spend 80+ hours a week practicing.
Not sure what you mean about buying games as you mostly still do that now for what I play. I have never rented anything although I am one of the suckers who has bought all the add-on maps for BlackOps 2 so I guess that is what you mean. I also bought all the add-ons for Skyrim (and Oblivion before it) too though and even went back to Oblivion just before Skyrim came out to get some practice.
I can safely say though that I have never found myself unable to play anything I have bought previously apart from through things like not being compatible with newer versions of windows or running to fast to be playable on newer hardware (try playing Commander Keen or Duke Nukem 1 on a new PC for a laugh).
Why do you care? Is your mobile phone on? Do you pay it in your own name? Then it continuously transmits its location, triangulated by cellular towers to within 30 feet, screaming your name. The towers need this info to route your calls to you.
One of my mates used to work for a UK mobile phone company as a network engineer and as such he got a free mobile phone. It was quite an interesting model though as it always displayed the tracking data on screen instead of a crappy network logo. It just used to have the closest 4 cell towers it was communicating with at the time and the signal strength to each tower. This might not be tremendously accurate at pinpointing the phones exact location due to buildings and such making the signal strength needed not entirely relational to distance but was still quite an eye opener to us at the time.
Of course it would make sense for this same data to be logged at the other end since in the modern age it is easier to just log everything then decide later if it is useful since data storage is cheap.
This sort of thing can be very useful for tracking things like who you spend time with as they can look at when your signal strength data converges.
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Its a 100W APU. Its the king of the current batch of CPU's with on-die GPU's with regards to GPU performance (Intel's best is like 50% of the performance.) So unlikely to ever see a laptop anytime soon.
I believe you but its a pity. In the past I have bought laptops with discrete graphics even though they got crappy battery life just because I wanted to game on them on trains while travelling around here in the UK where you get a power socket in most of the seats. I only skimped on that on my current laptop because I do far less travelling now.
Ultra then switching AA/AF:
0AA/0AF - 23 / 63 / 32.497 (min / max / ave)
8AA/16AF - 16 / 32 / 19.283
Wow, seems better than I expected but 18fps is going to be a bit noticeably ugly, especially if you had a huge fight going on with few enemies such as the stormcloak / empire battles.
Would be a good if someone started throwing these things into laptops though, I just checked quickly and can't see any yet. Hopefully that will change soon.
Having struggled through years of gaming on rigs with various GPUs, I have to wonder where it will hit the point that nobody needs any faster cards.
I started out gaming on the computer on computers with no GPU, and when I got one with a Rage Pro 4MB it was awesome. Then I got a Voodoo card from 3DFX with a whopping 8MB and it was more awesomer. Now you can get whatever that will do whatever for however many dollars.
I really don't see the game programming keeping up with the GPU power. I'm at least 2 GeForce's behind the latest series (560ti) and I can play any game at 1200p resolution with a very decent framerate. Yes I beta-tested Battlefield 4.
How much more is enough? I don't want them to stop trying, but somebody needs to ask where it reaches the point of diminishing returns. They could focus on streamlining and cheapening the "good enough" lines...
I just upgraded from a GTX 480 to a GTX780 and the big difference it made to me is the ability to turn on proper 8x Anti Aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering at 1920x1200. It did not make a huge difference but it made enough to be noticeable. You might be able to make do with a cheaper card and still play most modern games, but getting something decent does give you nicer graphics for your money at the resolution you quoted.
Hell I recently picked up an A10-6800K APU and the integrated graphics are more than acceptable for the gaming that I do at 1920x1080 (Team Fortress 2, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Explorers, Skyrim, ...) .. and its not even with the fastest DDR3 the mobo supports.
Can you turn on 16x Anisotropic Filtering and 8x Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing in Skyrim? In my opinion it just looks a little ugly without it.
The HR drone hiring you prefers schooling over education.
Actually, I think it usually that the HR drone prefers nice people who can interact with other human beings well.
Many people who come through STEM courses are slightly geeky, often to the point of being socially awkward. This often makes them a nightmare for non-techies to work with. The thing is though, learning to be a half decent techie is not that hard so for many roles you can hire someone who does not have a technical education but does have a passion for technology and train them to do what you need.
I remember myself and another very technical person talking about mistakes we made in our youth. We both came to the conclusion that our biggest mistakes had been related to not paying enough attention to learning soft skills like sales and people management. We thought technical skills were the be all and end all as that is what we enjoyed but now we have both come to the conclusion that technical skills are secondary to people skills and motivation when it comes to the world of work.
Actually there is a free market success in the medical field. Laser eye surgery started out expensive and not covered by insurance. Now it's cheap enough to pay for out-of-pocket. I saw an ad just the other day for Lasik eye surgery for just $299.00 per eye. Not bad at all - cheaper than buying glasses in the long run.
The free market works when you let it.
Laser Eye surgery is a luxury, try applying free market models to treatment for a flu epidemic.
With something like a Flu epidemic if treatment is not free then loads of people will try and make do without. That means the epidemic goes untreated amongst large parts of the population and spreads much more easily and damages productivity as more people call in sick.
The reason we in Britain came up with an NHS was not solely out of some do gooder nature, it was to make sure people were able to get their arse to work in factories and produce stuff without infecting all their co-workers with a disease that made even more people sick the next day.
The fact that Apple can read iMessages and hand them over to the authorities is hardly surprising, especially given that we know they co-operate with the NSA.
Excuse me, but how do we know this? Except for your prejudice and paranoia, do you have any actual evidence?
Any US based executive that refused to co-operate with an NSA request can be sent to prison. You can try challenging them in the relevant (secret) mickey mouse course of rubber stamps or you can look for the odd work around like just disclosing what you have from the logs then closing down your entire service so you do not have to do it again.
Endless fur balls shooting at each other like COD are just boring.
Actually, for some of us they are fun as hell. Charging round the map trying to react to incoming as fast possible, keeping moving at all time, racking up kills by never missing and getting accused of hacking twice a day even though we don't. I don't have enough time to play tactically any more as real life has taken over so reaction based, quick action shooters are all I can fit in a few games of now and then.
(I play as nohax in case you ever see me online)
Playing Battlefield for the singleplayer is like getting Playboy for the articles. There wasn't even any singleplayer before Battlefield: Bad Company, only multiplayer maps with crude, terrible bots. The campaign was added later, probably at the request of execs to "compete" with Call of Duty. The BC campaigns weren't half bad, but BF3 went full Modern Warfare and suffered for it.
If your sole experience of the game is the campaign, then I'm sorry but you know nothing of the game. It's neither the draw nor the focus, and does not represent the rest of the game at all.
I have to admit, I fell for it :)
I have bought BF3 and BF:Bad Company 2 just for the single player. I ended up playing a fair bit of Bad Company 2 but I never really liked it that much. As soon as Black Ops came out I jumped straight in.
The thing with BlackOps and even more so with BlackOps2 is that it allows casual player to be halfway successful. You can join a server on your own and have a half decent game without being constantly murdered by some git in a helicopter or a clan who have forced your entire team back into spawn with concerted teamwork.
Games that encourage teamwork are all very well, but the problem is that financially it is a bit of a disaster for the company that make them if they get known as being filled with decent clans who relentlessly punish casual players such that they never get any kills.
When we had a solid clan playing BC2 on a friday night we would have the entrance to the enemy spawn constantly mined so as soon as they tried to get a tank out it blew up as we always had 2 engineers on. We also had a sniper, a guy on resupply duty (assault) and a few medics. We all generally put in at least an hours play a day as a minimum and had a few serving army peep in the clan to give us direction. If anyone joined the server for a casual game they got slaughtered and that simply cannot be fun.
So what a surprise, more and more games are now moving to the CoD idea where they use things like matchmaking, small teams, and nerfed guns to try and make things playable for people who only play a few hours occasionally as that is where the mass market is so where games companies make more sales.
Because whilst they may have had the time and resources to research it and come up with a solution, they don't necessarily have the time and resources to fight their patch past Commander Torvald's ego and army of protective zealots.
Or maybe now they have actually created a paper that may or may not define a real issue (I'll wait and see how this is peer reviewed as I have no idea about theoretical weaknesses created by different ways of combining sources of entropy in order to create random data) with the kernel in depth (not just some moronic bullshit petition based on a completely incorrect assessment of how someone guessed something would work with no real investigation of the actual system involved) the kernel team will actually look at this and make an assessment of how they could fix this.
In short this is far more likely to be well received and result in changes being made to the the kernel as these guys did some investigation. The previous petition starting moron just demanded changes without understanding what he was asking for changes to at all and without being able to recommend a better way of doing it, instead he just said "Don't do this" even though the kernel did not actually do that anyway.
These guys are not saying "Do not trust RdRand as intel might have been paid off by the NSA to make it crap", instead they are picking apart the minutiae of how the kernel combines sources of entropy (something the guy who started the petition did not know it did at all) and suggesting subtle changes to make it better. The two things are so far apart that there is no reason to even dream that both would garner the same response.
So let me get this straight, if you use government resources to break the law or fail to deliver on large government projects then you will be barred from further federal work? I think all you need to do is rename the company, e.g. "Blackwater" to "Xe" (or whatever they are called) and re-apply, No big deal.
All blackwater did wrong was kill a few innocent arabs. The US Military does this all the time and just calls it collateral damage.
The reality is that if you put soldiers, either privateers or attached to a state entity in a situation where they are paid to wait until they get attacked then do their best to react without dieing then sooner or later they are going to jump the gun and react wrongly. This is different to someone leaving a base in the middle of the night to go on a murderous rampage, this is just people trying not to get killed and seeing someone quickly produce something from under their clothing but not realising it was innocuous until after you shot them. Then once the shooting starts other people around you instantly react assuming you were in the right and shoot all their companions.
This was a PR disaster for blackwater which was why they changed their name but it did not show malicious intent on the part of the company executives in the same way that profiting from selling confidential information to a foreign government would.
Asking what we're getting in exchange for the acceptance of DRM means one's priorities are misplaced—this question is entirely misplaced because nothing should restrict the reader. Trying to bargain for better terms after accepting a deal signals profound ignorance of how to get what readers need: the right to read.
Well done, you always get lots of up mods just for posting a 20 year old essay by someone who believes that all information should be free. The problem that Stallman did not realise when he wrote that and maybe has never realised is that money makes the world go around so most people need a way of making it.
He has some very interesting ideas and has given a lot to the computing community but large parts of life have simply passed him by, notably he has no children or dependants. For the majority of us who do decide to have kids we have a problem of having to make sure we have a steady income stream for the rest of our lives and any fluctuations in that stream can ruin your dependants lives or at the very least leave them suffering far more hardship and worry than you would like to see.
That leaves may of us in a position where we actually agree with the spirit of the right to read but have long since realised that our best hope of providing or our own family is in selling our services as software developers because it is one of the few things we are any good at. Unfortunately the people who want to pay us though often dictate that the code we produce belongs to them, not us.
I am sure I could eek out a living by trying to only write open source modules for stuff like drupal and doing software as service type jobs but I would be deny myself a way of making money from one of best assets which is my ability to sit down with a problem and invest a large amount of time in it, eventually coming up with a solution that nobody else has. If I instantly give that solution away to everyone then they can use it without recompensing me for the huge amount of time I invested in figuring out that solution I eventually get to was even possible.
Sharing all information freely might be better for society, but it is designed to be incredibly detrimental to us as individuals in the capitalist society we live in. In light of this I actually think that Stallman's entire movement is a completely misguided adventure. Instead of just taking aim at a few poxy restrictions on software he should have realised that the only thing that allowed the sharing of code he wanted was the academic nature of his environment at the time.
He often said that authors should be allowed to charge money for writing software, but you have two choices if you do this. One is that you sell the source code such that if the buyer needs a future modification they can do it themselves of hire someone cheaper than you. Second is that you only give them the end product so for any modifications they HAVE to come back to you so you have a closed market and can charge more. People who choose the latter are simply bad at capitalism and the world we live in punishes you remorselessly for that, even if it would be better for society.
The first submissions from someone the maintainer doesn't know are going to be reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and a skeptical eye, and very few black-hats are going to be willing to spend years submitting high-quality code to build up enough of a reputation with the maintainer to be able to get code in with only a cursory review. It's the difference between a development team and a developer community.
Exactly.
I remember the Con Kolivas strop a few years ago and thought it indicated a pretty good state of affairs in that some supposedly very good work got rejected just because there were confidence issues in the long term reliability of the developer (ie, Con could not work on the what he produced full time and drop everything to fix any bugs discovered later) and that the code itself was difficult to thoroughly review and merge with what was current by the time he submitted it.
Although as with any human interaction Linus seems to be involved in he probably could have handled it better on a personal level :)
Skip that. How about we go with "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." We're talking about a single character that turns what everyone seems to agree would be an error-check, into an exploit. This sort of thing happens all the time, and nobody says the butler did it, in the observatory, with the lead pipe, when it does. They say "Hey, man, your last diff patch might have a bug." (explains bug) ... a few hours to days later, they reply back with "Oh hey thanks for catching that!"
Did you bother reading the full article? If you did you might have picked up on what made them think it was a backdoor attempt:
"Further investigation determined that someone had apparently broken in (electronically) to the CVS server and inserted this change."
That is not the normal behaviour of developer submitting a patch to the linux kernel. It is also not normal for the developer who has his name next to the patch in the CVS log to deny categorically ever committing the patch.
In this case it seems weird as well because Linus did not use CVS at all since he used BitKeeper so the only way this change would find its way into the kernel was if a trusted developer pulled the code from CVS, did a chunk of development work then submitted a patch to Linus which he approved containing this bug. There are a million reasons why this was probably never going to happen though, starting with that fact that the developer would have to be editing this same line for the patch to contain it.
You're right though in that if this was a patch that went into BitKeeper trunk or whatever (hey guess what, I know nothing about bitkeeper) via the normal process this would be more clearly down to a developer screwing up but the weird nature of this going straight to CVS rather than than via BitKeeper is what makes it look suspicious.
They certainly do above all sense. If you have a 1920x1080 monitor there is only so much GPU power you need for all current games at max detail. Doesn't stop people spending far too much.
As someone who just went from a Nvidia 480 to an Nvidia 780 I noticed an improvement. Firstly I could turn on full Antialiasing which made a big difference in things like Skyrim and BlackOps2. I imagine it will make a bigger difference in Black Ops Ghosts that comes out next month though which is what I really bought it for.
Or have we reached a diminishing return point and/or a point where money is being spent elsewhere (consoles, mobile, tablets, etc)?
The problem is that PC games have been cripppled for years by being developed on consoles and ported to PCs. Some do take advantage of the extra power of PC GPUs, but the majority will run fine on a GPU that's several years old, because it's more powerful than the crap in the consoles.
But most of the nice visual effects like antialiasing are done in the drivers without the game needing to know to much about it so this is not necessarily true. Also, there are plenty of companies that develop for PC then port to consoles. Compare Skyrim on the PC on a NVidia 680 or 780 to running on the Xbox 360 to see the difference. Another example of a game that looked far better on PC than on consoles is BF3.
Maybe you should have caveated your post by saying that a lot of crap studios release crippled games on PC that are designed for consoles but their are plenty of companies out there who view the PC as important to their strategy and so put the work in making their product on PC take advantage of the good stuff modern graphics card provide. This is especially true when it is just a case of making very minor changes to leverage improvements in versions of DirectX 10 and 11 not available on the Xbox360.
"I dare say I could write one pretty quickly if asked, but it would be a much more efficient use of my time to just google for one since there are tons of them out there without any licence restrictions. "
Please read what I wrote a bit more carefully. I did not write that I think you should be writing such things on a daily basis. And I certainly don't recommend it. But you should be able to, should the need arise.
I read what you posted very carefully and what I posted still stands. Although I could do this there is no reason to so why SHOULD I bother when Googling for an optimized free solution is quicker. Providing I understand everything that the code I find does and it is unencumbered by licence restrictions then that is fine, that does not mean I would make knowing how to rewrite a 30 year old, hardly used (in code we actually write anyway) algorithm part of a recruitment process for new developers.
But if you don't know a Quicksort from a Bubble sort, or how to write them, you're not a programmer by any standard I ever heard of, and I've been around.
I have been a professional developer for the past 10 to 15 years and have not had to write a sorting algorithm in almost 2 decades (since college, at least 15 years ago). I dare say I could write one pretty quickly if asked, but it would be a much more efficient use of my time to just google for one since there are tons of them out there without any licence restrictions. What I could do though is understand every line of what I found at a glance and easily make any subtle changes needed to drop it into what ever project I was working on.
Writing this sort of basic stuff is a useful educational tool since the model answer is pretty well established, but you very rarely have to rewrite the same previously solved tasks once you are getting paid for your time.
Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.
That might apply if you want to create decent C code or something similar but if you are talking about web development or similar then learning assembler is just a complete waste of time due to the many layers of abstraction involved between the code and the hardware
Then there is the issue that in many cases the code being slightly slower than it could be is not as important as it being easy to work on. When you end up with a huge project it makes sense to do things like modularise the code at the expense of performance so that each module can be looked at as a distinct entity.
Sit down with a 6809 system emulation and learn about stacks and heaps and PIC and addressing modes and registers and memory and IO and optimizing loops and etc. Then you've got a foundation.
A foundation that is completely irrelevant in many types of programming. People can be amazing developers without knowing any of that and just having a deep understanding of the language they actually use.
You best learn to solve problems by... wait for it... solving problems.
Exactly, but there is not need to solve problems on completely irrelevant platforms. Instead you can learn to develop perfectly well be picking a platform you might want to use and learning your way round that. Then pick another platform you are likely to use and learn your way round that as well.
Then C and a linker AND a debugger, then something OO, then HTML, CSS, Python, PostgreSQL, follow the basic PostgreSQL with detailed DB stuff, make sure the math is there through at least algebra and geometry, explain 3D from acos() as pooltable reflection to the various lighting tech... this would be a good first year or possibly two.
Now you start to get more useful. I would skip all that crap at the start and just go straight into learning a procedural language and an object orientated language. When I say learn them though, I mean REALLY learn them making sure you learn the shortfalls of both.
The only reason I would say to skip some of the stuff you recommend is due to time. We only have a limited amount of hours available in life and so I would concentrate on learning languages that are relevant to what you want to do. We simply do not have enough time to become expert in enough languages to learn everything so try and concentrate on things that are relevant to what you want to do.
Fuck oil and electricity. I want a *nuclear* powered engine. Now THAT will be an accident!
I'm sure that in 2043, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 2013, it's a little hard to come by.
Screw that, by 2043 I want to be driving (or flying) round in a vehicle with a small sun under the bonnet generating power. That way when I crash it can go supernova.
Jobs was not a micromanager and the writer is clueless.
Actually for the MD of huge multibillion pound business getting overly involved in product design might be considered micromanagement.
My definition of micromanagement:
When your boss stands behind you while you're on the phone talking to a client. That's micromanagement.
Actually in my case he is on skype, madly typing stuff while I completely ignore a silly little icon flashing in the corner of my screen :)
I mean when you buy something it's yours -- you can resell it or give it away. Can you still do that? If not, you didn't buy anything, you paid for a service.
Ok, I understand more what you mean now. Although in this case I think I still bought something, it's just what I actually bought is a single user license for something. I would not use the word rent though since the licence never expires.
Back in the day when we were playing Quake we ran our own servers, and QuakeSpy (later GameSpy) made it easy to find and connect.
I think back then though most online gamers were more trust worthy. I used to play Quake and then Unreal Tournament online and never remember people cheating as being much of an issue whereas now without things like punkbuster and VAC there just seem to be too many damn cheats. I think if we moved back to hosting your own server for this sort of stuff you would find too many people just moving from server to server cheating until they got kicked.
Then there is the other problem which I have run into recently where clans rent a server that is really just for them boost their fragrates so as soon as you beat them they just ban you.
I think a lot of the moves recently towards moving online gaming towards online matchmaking is actually trying to make it more fun to casual gamers as they actually start standing a chance instead of spending the whole time being owned by cheats and people who spend 80+ hours a week practicing.
Not sure what you mean about buying games as you mostly still do that now for what I play. I have never rented anything although I am one of the suckers who has bought all the add-on maps for BlackOps 2 so I guess that is what you mean. I also bought all the add-ons for Skyrim (and Oblivion before it) too though and even went back to Oblivion just before Skyrim came out to get some practice.
I can safely say though that I have never found myself unable to play anything I have bought previously apart from through things like not being compatible with newer versions of windows or running to fast to be playable on newer hardware (try playing Commander Keen or Duke Nukem 1 on a new PC for a laugh).
Why do you care? Is your mobile phone on? Do you pay it in your own name? Then it continuously transmits its location, triangulated by cellular towers to within 30 feet, screaming your name. The towers need this info to route your calls to you.
One of my mates used to work for a UK mobile phone company as a network engineer and as such he got a free mobile phone. It was quite an interesting model though as it always displayed the tracking data on screen instead of a crappy network logo. It just used to have the closest 4 cell towers it was communicating with at the time and the signal strength to each tower. This might not be tremendously accurate at pinpointing the phones exact location due to buildings and such making the signal strength needed not entirely relational to distance but was still quite an eye opener to us at the time.
Of course it would make sense for this same data to be logged at the other end since in the modern age it is easier to just log everything then decide later if it is useful since data storage is cheap.
This sort of thing can be very useful for tracking things like who you spend time with as they can look at when your signal strength data converges.