It might be better in practice, since PC operating systems are not low-latency environments, but it's not inherently better. If you'd run a minimal OS with the emulator as the only application, you could get extremely low latency with software emulation as well.
And that was on a system that was mostly still using the same parts. With an FPGA, there aren't any original parts: it's all new code, only the code is compiled to an FPGA configuration instead of an executable for a host CPU. If you know the exact functionality of the original hardware, you can recreate it in either software or new hardware.
Years ago there used to be cases where it wasn't feasible to do accurate emulation in software for performance reasons, but now there is so much difference in computational power between the original 8-bit and 16-bit machines and modern PCs that this is no longer an issue.
That's just a risk of doing business. A tech company with losses so heavy that it cannot pay a ~2% turnover tax likely wasn't going to survive without paying tax either.
Besides, if I understand the article correctly, this is an offer to the mentioned four tech companies as an alternative to thorough legal probing into their tax avoidance constructs, so they're free to reject it. And as far as I know all four are making a profit.
Playing a game that contains loot boxes and not buying them is indeed ineffective. And in multiplayer games you'll even be providing them a service by letting the whales feel superior to you.
But the OP suggested buying games that don't have loot boxes in them in the first place, of which there are plenty from indie developers, but even in the AAA space there are lots of games without loot boxes.
It seems more like a distraction than like part of a solution. Indeed the problem with loot boxes is the addictive nature of variable rewards (*), not the fact that it's an in-game purchase. Having a single label for all types of in-game purchases does very little to inform potential buyers. It would be useful if the label listed which types of purchases each game contains, but their announcement suggests that it won't.
(*) They claim "we were unable to find any evidence that children were specifically impacted by loot boxes", but the weasel word here is "specifically": there are behavioral studies that show that in general variable rewards have a bigger impact than fixed rewards and it's not a stretch to assume that applies to loot boxes too.
While "think of the children" is a strategy used to activate politicians, the controversy is larger than that. Many adult gamers also don't appreciate games applying psychological tricks to get them to keep spending money: even if they're not falling for it, they'll still be exposed to them. And there are justified fears that game balance is being tweaked to make a game less enjoyable if you don't buy anything. The question isn't whether you can complete a game without making any in-game purchases, but whether you'll have a good time doing so.
Opus at 64 kbit/s isn't terrible, probably as good as or possibly better than MP3 at 128 kbit/s (also depends on which MP3 encoder was used). Whether that's good enough depends on what you're using it for, but this change doesn't seem like a downgrade to me. I think the article writer underestimates how much progress was made in audio compression in the last ~20 years.
It differs per country. Here in the Netherlands, the value of the shares at the end of the year is measured and you'd have to pay income taxes over a fictional income you are assumed to generate from it, rather than over the actual profit you generate from selling the shares later.
So if you're under similar tax rules, owning a lot of Bitcoin on December 31st is pretty risky...
I only had a quick look at ZeroTier, but it doesn't seem to be a walled garden. It's a peer-to-peer network and their business model is to make money from support and closed-source licensing, while the software is available to the public under GPL.
What the ISPs won't like about this plan is that ZT traffic can't be read to determine what rules or pricing to apply. They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical.
If they can throttle popular destinations like NetFlix, or protocols like BitTorrent, why wouldn't throttling a VPN be practical?
Once all the video companies are on ZT, followed by social media and search, (don’t forget gaming!), that’s probably 80 percent of all Internet bandwidth.
For fast-paced games, low latency is very important and any kind of additional layer will add latency.
In the case of Overwatch, the loot boxes only contain cosmetics. In the case of Star Wars Battlefront II, they also contain items that offer gameplay advantages, such as lower cooldowns for special abilities.
Besides, whether cosmetics change the way you experience a game differs from player to player. Some people only care about mechanics, while for other people having a cool-looking character is an important part of the experience. If cosmetics didn't matter in any way, no-one would buy them.
SNES games were ROM cartridges, which are more expensive to produce than pressing DVDs or offering digital downloads. Also the gaming market as a whole has grown since then and multi-platform releases are now easier to do, which allows the development costs to be spread over more players. So inflation isn't the only factor to consider when comparing prices.
And while I doubt that a game with such a mass-market appeal like this one cannot be sold cost-effective at $60, for the sake of the argument let's assume that is the case. It's still EA's choice to get the extra money from players in the form of loot boxes containing items that give objective stats bonuses, instead of increasing the base price, selling DLC or selling cosmetics. Even selling stat upgrades would be less shady than putting them behind gambling mechanics that both obfuscate their actual price and prey on people with low self-control.
There is no ultimate process that is best for everyone. They might be right that when selling fashion, being able to make quick changes is more important to their customers than reliability. On the other hand, they do handle money and personal data, so discovering problems in production can have lasting consequences.
I think reactive QA is the real story here, not whether QA is a role handled by developers or by dedicated testers.
Hearthstone is pretty tame compared to what other games do these days: while it takes a lot of money or a lot of patience to get all the good cards, once you have a card, it's equal to everyone else's copy. There are also games, especially for mobiles but it's sneaking its way into PC/console games too, where getting duplicates makes a card "level up" and improve its stats, so the pay2win never ends.
2) Ending subsidies would mean that many alternative sources (such as oil sands and shale) would simply go out of business. That reduces the worldwide output, in turn driving up the cost per barrel. Research and development of extraction from such sources would likely languish compared to the pace it now has.
If you reduce fossil fuel consumption, then of course fossil fuel production is going to decrease as well. So I don't think you can count this as a problem: it is an intended consequence.
7) I don't know what it's like in other countries, but here in North America, federal and state/province level governments get significant revenue from fuel taxes. When have you ever seen a political body voluntarily give up a revenue stream? Moreover, with the increase in cost of living, they will be under enormous pressure to increase aid (in one form or another) to the poor. That is hard to do in the face of reductions in revenue.
Over here in the Netherlands, there are huge energy taxes on all consumer energy bills, even if you are buying renewable energy. I don't think it makes sense, but that doesn't stop the government from getting their cut.
As far as I know JBoss is owned by Red Hat, so I wouldn't expect any news about it from Oracle. Since Java EE is a spec, not a code base, this move is good news for other implementations, as it means Java EE can continue without Oracle if needed.
People in most countries haven't stopped using trains; the USA is the exception.
A fixed schedule is not a problem as long as trains run frequently enough. The route I use most has a train leaving every 15 minutes, so no matter when I arrive at the station, it's never a long wait. Having trains at 15-minute intervals will only be profitable in densely populated areas, so this is not a solution that can be applied everywhere.
I'd file the first two under "things managers don't want to hear" rather than "developer secrets":
Managers want to have estimates for their planning, so they pressure developers to make estimates based on sometimes very incomplete information. The best way I found of dealing with this is to make an estimate for the work of investigating how long the actual work will take and only add the actual work to the planning after that investigation has completed.
When it comes to technical debt, in my experience it is often the developer pressuring the manager to give them time to do something about it and the manager wanting to postpone it in favor of feature development. Some of that pressure is justifiable, as polishing code can be a huge time sink and doesn't always repay itself. But in my experience developers don't shy away from talking about technical debt.
When it comes to building vs maintaining, I don't think it's the case that every developer prefers to build. However, there are different people who do well at different stages of a project's life cycle: some people are good at building new software from scratch, others are good at adapting and improving existing software. Instead of rewriting a project every few years just to keep the builders happy, I'd suggest moving them to a new (sub)project.
The other "secrets" shouldn't be secrets to any manager who understands software development. Developers are people too: they like playing with shiny new toys, they have strong opinions (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) and they may not see the big picture since they're focused on their specialty.
Having kids think about the future is a good idea. Making it a requirement for graduation is not, in my opinion.
Graduation is supposed to mark that the student has sufficiently mastered what they were supposed to learn. Maybe you could argue that "thinking about the future" is a skill that schools should be teaching, but then the way to test that would be to for example let them write an essay about it, not to require letters of acceptance.
What rubs me in the wrong way is that the school would have criteria for what are considered acceptable plans for the future. They would not only be judging whether the student has thought about the future, but also the decision itself.
One problem I encountered with btrfs is that at about 80% full, it will refuse to create any new files saying it is out of space. This happens because the free space is fragmented: apparently btrfs can only allocate space in blocks that are entirely empty, not in partially filled blocks. I then have to run a command manually to make btrfs move the data such that the free space is combined and usable again. To make it worse, that command needs a free block to do its job, so I either have to remove a large enough file to free up an entire block or add a second block device for temporary working space.
I don't understand why a file system is considered production ready when it is as clunky to use as this. I remember the days when Linux users could make fun of Windows users having to run defrag...
The version of Apache NAYANA used is run as a user of nobody(uid=99), which indicates that a local exploit may have also been used in the attack.
Oh wait. Maybe it was an inside job?
No, it just means that more than one exploit had to be used: a remote exploit to get any code running on the machine and a local exploit to get root privileges. With a system that hasn't been updated in almost a decade, there would be plenty of local exploits to choose from though.
It's not Apple's fault, that's just the journalistic tendency to want to tie all recent events together, even if the connection between them is very weak.
And as you point out, in this case the connection is not only weak, but also described incorrectly, as the 64-bit version of the chess app does not exhibit the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be better in practice, since PC operating systems are not low-latency environments, but it's not inherently better. If you'd run a minimal OS with the emulator as the only application, you could get extremely low latency with software emulation as well.
And that was on a system that was mostly still using the same parts. With an FPGA, there aren't any original parts: it's all new code, only the code is compiled to an FPGA configuration instead of an executable for a host CPU. If you know the exact functionality of the original hardware, you can recreate it in either software or new hardware.
Years ago there used to be cases where it wasn't feasible to do accurate emulation in software for performance reasons, but now there is so much difference in computational power between the original 8-bit and 16-bit machines and modern PCs that this is no longer an issue.
That's just a risk of doing business. A tech company with losses so heavy that it cannot pay a ~2% turnover tax likely wasn't going to survive without paying tax either.
Besides, if I understand the article correctly, this is an offer to the mentioned four tech companies as an alternative to thorough legal probing into their tax avoidance constructs, so they're free to reject it. And as far as I know all four are making a profit.
Playing a game that contains loot boxes and not buying them is indeed ineffective. And in multiplayer games you'll even be providing them a service by letting the whales feel superior to you.
But the OP suggested buying games that don't have loot boxes in them in the first place, of which there are plenty from indie developers, but even in the AAA space there are lots of games without loot boxes.
It seems more like a distraction than like part of a solution. Indeed the problem with loot boxes is the addictive nature of variable rewards (*), not the fact that it's an in-game purchase. Having a single label for all types of in-game purchases does very little to inform potential buyers. It would be useful if the label listed which types of purchases each game contains, but their announcement suggests that it won't.
(*) They claim "we were unable to find any evidence that children were specifically impacted by loot boxes", but the weasel word here is "specifically": there are behavioral studies that show that in general variable rewards have a bigger impact than fixed rewards and it's not a stretch to assume that applies to loot boxes too.
While "think of the children" is a strategy used to activate politicians, the controversy is larger than that. Many adult gamers also don't appreciate games applying psychological tricks to get them to keep spending money: even if they're not falling for it, they'll still be exposed to them. And there are justified fears that game balance is being tweaked to make a game less enjoyable if you don't buy anything. The question isn't whether you can complete a game without making any in-game purchases, but whether you'll have a good time doing so.
It probably really is already paying huge dividends, just exclusively to the board and shareholders, not the customers.
You mean it's literally paying huge dividends? ;)
Opus at 64 kbit/s isn't terrible, probably as good as or possibly better than MP3 at 128 kbit/s (also depends on which MP3 encoder was used). Whether that's good enough depends on what you're using it for, but this change doesn't seem like a downgrade to me. I think the article writer underestimates how much progress was made in audio compression in the last ~20 years.
It differs per country. Here in the Netherlands, the value of the shares at the end of the year is measured and you'd have to pay income taxes over a fictional income you are assumed to generate from it, rather than over the actual profit you generate from selling the shares later.
So if you're under similar tax rules, owning a lot of Bitcoin on December 31st is pretty risky...
I only had a quick look at ZeroTier, but it doesn't seem to be a walled garden. It's a peer-to-peer network and their business model is to make money from support and closed-source licensing, while the software is available to the public under GPL.
What the ISPs won't like about this plan is that ZT traffic can't be read to determine what rules or pricing to apply. They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical.
If they can throttle popular destinations like NetFlix, or protocols like BitTorrent, why wouldn't throttling a VPN be practical?
Once all the video companies are on ZT, followed by social media and search, (don’t forget gaming!), that’s probably 80 percent of all Internet bandwidth.
For fast-paced games, low latency is very important and any kind of additional layer will add latency.
Futures for something that is already in a speculative bubble; maybe gamble commisions should take a look at this too...
In the case of Overwatch, the loot boxes only contain cosmetics. In the case of Star Wars Battlefront II, they also contain items that offer gameplay advantages, such as lower cooldowns for special abilities.
Besides, whether cosmetics change the way you experience a game differs from player to player. Some people only care about mechanics, while for other people having a cool-looking character is an important part of the experience. If cosmetics didn't matter in any way, no-one would buy them.
SNES games were ROM cartridges, which are more expensive to produce than pressing DVDs or offering digital downloads. Also the gaming market as a whole has grown since then and multi-platform releases are now easier to do, which allows the development costs to be spread over more players. So inflation isn't the only factor to consider when comparing prices.
And while I doubt that a game with such a mass-market appeal like this one cannot be sold cost-effective at $60, for the sake of the argument let's assume that is the case. It's still EA's choice to get the extra money from players in the form of loot boxes containing items that give objective stats bonuses, instead of increasing the base price, selling DLC or selling cosmetics. Even selling stat upgrades would be less shady than putting them behind gambling mechanics that both obfuscate their actual price and prey on people with low self-control.
There is no ultimate process that is best for everyone. They might be right that when selling fashion, being able to make quick changes is more important to their customers than reliability. On the other hand, they do handle money and personal data, so discovering problems in production can have lasting consequences.
I think reactive QA is the real story here, not whether QA is a role handled by developers or by dedicated testers.
Hearthstone is pretty tame compared to what other games do these days: while it takes a lot of money or a lot of patience to get all the good cards, once you have a card, it's equal to everyone else's copy. There are also games, especially for mobiles but it's sneaking its way into PC/console games too, where getting duplicates makes a card "level up" and improve its stats, so the pay2win never ends.
It's not a usual denomination: 50 euros is the largest bill you will get from ATMs. The largest denomination I've ever seen in person is 100 euros.
2) Ending subsidies would mean that many alternative sources (such as oil sands and shale) would simply go out of business. That reduces the worldwide output, in turn driving up the cost per barrel. Research and development of extraction from such sources would likely languish compared to the pace it now has.
If you reduce fossil fuel consumption, then of course fossil fuel production is going to decrease as well. So I don't think you can count this as a problem: it is an intended consequence.
7) I don't know what it's like in other countries, but here in North America, federal and state/province level governments get significant revenue from fuel taxes. When have you ever seen a political body voluntarily give up a revenue stream? Moreover, with the increase in cost of living, they will be under enormous pressure to increase aid (in one form or another) to the poor. That is hard to do in the face of reductions in revenue.
Over here in the Netherlands, there are huge energy taxes on all consumer energy bills, even if you are buying renewable energy. I don't think it makes sense, but that doesn't stop the government from getting their cut.
As far as I know JBoss is owned by Red Hat, so I wouldn't expect any news about it from Oracle. Since Java EE is a spec, not a code base, this move is good news for other implementations, as it means Java EE can continue without Oracle if needed.
Ubuntu tried with what they called "convergence", but they recently gave up on that.
People in most countries haven't stopped using trains; the USA is the exception.
A fixed schedule is not a problem as long as trains run frequently enough. The route I use most has a train leaving every 15 minutes, so no matter when I arrive at the station, it's never a long wait. Having trains at 15-minute intervals will only be profitable in densely populated areas, so this is not a solution that can be applied everywhere.
I'd file the first two under "things managers don't want to hear" rather than "developer secrets":
Managers want to have estimates for their planning, so they pressure developers to make estimates based on sometimes very incomplete information. The best way I found of dealing with this is to make an estimate for the work of investigating how long the actual work will take and only add the actual work to the planning after that investigation has completed.
When it comes to technical debt, in my experience it is often the developer pressuring the manager to give them time to do something about it and the manager wanting to postpone it in favor of feature development. Some of that pressure is justifiable, as polishing code can be a huge time sink and doesn't always repay itself. But in my experience developers don't shy away from talking about technical debt.
When it comes to building vs maintaining, I don't think it's the case that every developer prefers to build. However, there are different people who do well at different stages of a project's life cycle: some people are good at building new software from scratch, others are good at adapting and improving existing software. Instead of rewriting a project every few years just to keep the builders happy, I'd suggest moving them to a new (sub)project.
The other "secrets" shouldn't be secrets to any manager who understands software development. Developers are people too: they like playing with shiny new toys, they have strong opinions (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) and they may not see the big picture since they're focused on their specialty.
Having kids think about the future is a good idea. Making it a requirement for graduation is not, in my opinion.
Graduation is supposed to mark that the student has sufficiently mastered what they were supposed to learn. Maybe you could argue that "thinking about the future" is a skill that schools should be teaching, but then the way to test that would be to for example let them write an essay about it, not to require letters of acceptance.
What rubs me in the wrong way is that the school would have criteria for what are considered acceptable plans for the future. They would not only be judging whether the student has thought about the future, but also the decision itself.
One problem I encountered with btrfs is that at about 80% full, it will refuse to create any new files saying it is out of space. This happens because the free space is fragmented: apparently btrfs can only allocate space in blocks that are entirely empty, not in partially filled blocks. I then have to run a command manually to make btrfs move the data such that the free space is combined and usable again. To make it worse, that command needs a free block to do its job, so I either have to remove a large enough file to free up an entire block or add a second block device for temporary working space.
I don't understand why a file system is considered production ready when it is as clunky to use as this. I remember the days when Linux users could make fun of Windows users having to run defrag...
Oh wait. Maybe it was an inside job?
No, it just means that more than one exploit had to be used: a remote exploit to get any code running on the machine and a local exploit to get root privileges. With a system that hasn't been updated in almost a decade, there would be plenty of local exploits to choose from though.
It's not Apple's fault, that's just the journalistic tendency to want to tie all recent events together, even if the connection between them is very weak.
And as you point out, in this case the connection is not only weak, but also described incorrectly, as the 64-bit version of the chess app does not exhibit the problem.