Maybe some but C as a text generation and processing language (which is the basic function of CGI) is definitely a very bad choice. C strings are inherently fault-prone.
In Perl or PHP you do $y.= " $x \n"; and it is totally fault-proof. It is easy and straightforward, and totally foolproof. Now write something like that in C. Allocate buffers for x and y, check for overflows, reallocate if buffers are too short, make sure the number of arguments matches the format string, and within maybe 15 lines have the result ready, not nearly as readable, not a shade close to as fault-proof, and 1500% longer.
I'm not saying a compiled, secure language would be bad for CGI scripting. I'm just saying C is a horrible choice.
...oh, and it took me about a year and a half since finishing playing Oblivion to finally decide to buy it. I was MAD at Bethesda for dumbing it down. I hated them for making it a console hack&slash with RPG elements. The stupid linear mcGufin quests. The leveled everything. The pathetic railroading. I despised it for being so shitty comparing to the godly Morrowind.
Only in hindsight I realized it was NOT a bad game. It was actually rather good. It didn't reach the knees level of Morrowind but I did enjoy it, I loved to cast feather on my horse to be able to carry all the loot from a random dungeon back to the city, I loved sneaking after goblins along the mountain tops, I loved riding down the Niben bay on horseback at Mach 2, fortify speed and water walking the horse. As I got over my disappointment and looked at Oblivion as an independent game, and not as a successor to Morrowind, I decided it was worth the money.
Hey maybe the comdom was in the second slice of pizza but you kept eating to the end. Anyone can make an analogy that works for them.
That's what the cafe owner might claim. But I -know- where it was, and I have absolutely no intention to argue about the payment, I just walk away from the vomit-covered asshole.
Of course I stop playing if I don't like the game and it shows no promise of improving. The case where I get to the end, and still decide the game wasn't worth it is relatively rare. I buy most of games I finish. Sometimes I don't buy them simply because they are not available in my country. Sometimes the credit card payment online can't be completed, not my fault. Sometimes they piss me off by charging me more than if I was in US (for a download), and I say "fuck you, greedy assholes". That business method backfires badly, and as a rule I never buy such products, and this is a rule I don't break no matter what.
As you can notice, these are all not "lost sale" scenarios. They wouldn't get the money anyway, with me playing the game or not. But still, the wallet speaks the truth, it isn't as if I paid rarely. I have a pretty big shelf of originals, but often I don't even install them. SecuROM on Oblivion taught me not to insert original CDs in the drive, as they contain worse malware than you can get off the most shady warez sites. I have two versions of Morrowind (GOTY and Collector's) and still I play one I got from torrents - the No-CD crack gives about 30% FPS boost over the originals because the protection routine is a resource hog.
Currently, I'm waiting for Stalker: Call of Pripyat to appear in trade. They earned their money already. I'm 3/4 through the game on my third walk-through, veteran level this time.
That's true - but not all the way. Depending on the device, even the high-level languages are rarely the really high ones. You won't find many embedded devices running their core work in Perl or Python or Ruby. It will be C++ or Java Embedded Edition, or ObjC, or Pascal, on rare occasions Fortran. There may be an OS running and there will be small shell scripts for assorted works. There will be MySQL or SQLite, but the SQL used will be mostly very simple - no JOIN, no nested SELECT or any such heavy lifting. There may be PHP for webserver if the authors are feeling extravagant, but it will do the presentation and GUI, not for the real application.
Oh, I'm not hostile - I know the center is expanding, abstraction layers pile up and higher-level languages get developed. It's interesting, often useful. But the approach "Learn it, because what you're doing will be replaced with it in n years" is wrong. As the center grows, so do the frontiers. Embedded electronics enters new domains and while the phones replaced palmtops, the microwave ovens got bitmap displays, the GPS left the military and entered dog collars, there will always be a market for microcontrollers with 1KB of RAM.
Now they are used in car alarm remotes, but as car alarm remotes start running Linux, the 1K CPUs will be used in toothbrushes to indicate good time and pressure to kids. When the toothbrushes get Internet connectivity, the 1K CPUs will be found in disposable cigarette lighters to regulate flame size. When cigarette lighters get image recognition, the 1K CPUs will be installed in microbots in grains of soap to scrub your skin better. And there will always be demand for programmers who can write the 1KB of code in assembly to have these work.
If I find my food at restaurant disgusting, I will send it back to kitchen without paying. You could argue I shouldn't do so if I ate more than half. But if I was feeling it tasted funny but kept on, until I found a used condom baked into the last piece of my pizza, fuck you, I will return all your food, all over your clothes and let's see if you demand money on top of that.
Argue lies with my wallet. It doesn't lie. Good games get rewarded. Decent games get rewarded when their price drops to their value. Bad games get the hose.
I've seen people writing webservers and web applications in assembly.
When the webserver for monitoring runs on an off-the-shelf $3 PIC microcontroller, assembler is the only viable option. Shell out $3 more and double the power consumption and you can use C. Give another $20 and quadruple the power and you can use PHP on top of Apache.
Of course if you can afford ethernet or GPRS in the device -and- intend to run a webserver on it, the $20 makes little difference, and so does the power. These projects are made by fanatics with too much free time. But they happen, and not infrequently too.
Failure to react (detect the condition and perform action) within the regulatory 300 milliseconds since a green light occurring on two colliding directions (~100ms to detect current, ~100ms for the mechanical switch to cut off power, leaves 100ms for the software) equals our fault. If someone dies - Unintentional causing of road traffic accident with a fatality as consequence. The same rules apply as if I ran over someone by car, as result of my own traffic violation.
Of course the 15 years option would be for malicious intent, like a hidden "all green" mode resulting in multiple deaths.
And of course the level of redundancy of the cut-off systems and general paranoia in the software is awe-inspiring.
I can say one thing. You've never done embedded programming.
No chips that have to work in temperatures between -40C and +120C. No devices that work 120 meters under surface of water which is 1800 meters above sea level and good 4 hours of march from the last road where you can get by car. No chips for appliances, toys and small devices where $0.03 per unit savings by choosing a model with 64 bytes(!) of RAM instead of 128 bytes of RAM converts to a six-digit profit. No devices where failure to perform according to specs and fail gracefully will land you in prison for between 2 and 15 years. No devices that run a dozen sensors and send the results every hour over GPRS running off a single battery the size of a standard "A/R20" for a year. No devices where you measure time between sending out a beam of light and receiving it bounced off the obstacle, to determine distance with 5cm resolution. No devices where you have to do error correction, encoding and driving control and data lines at 100 megabit/second - or more precisely, at one bit per 10 nanoseconds plus/minus 1.5 nanosecond.
This kind of applications won't have the hardware catching up to let you replace C, Asembly and VHDL with Ruby or Java for decades yet.
Oh, but why? It's the opposite! Teach the sniveling snitches that snitching about of our brave boys who treat the degenerate scum as it deserves is not welcome here.
Next time you will think twice if you want to cry foul about someone "having some fun" with a genetically inferior!
If anyone posts video of someone performing some illegal activity, delete it ASAP, don't tell anyone and sweep everything under the rug. The video was never there, you never saw anything and I'm sorry, Officer that I can't help you, am I free to go now?
At least that's what the court is trying to teach them.
I have three tiers of deciding on purchase of the game.
1. I read the review about what the game contains. I thoroughly ignore any "positive personal thoughts" about the game as marketing fluff. The negative ones do add to the value of the review but aren't all that important. I just read what is the concept of the game, and whether it is anything original, with potential - a good idea. If the review talks loads about graphics and sound and development time and prior franchise, even in total superlatives, it means the game is junk. A reviewer would concentrate on the really good points if it had any.
2.I check some Internet fora to see what people complain about. If there is a number of complaints about the same thing, it may turn me away again. The thing being "awful execution of the wonderful idea" is one of possible choices.
3. Then I grab the game off a torrent. After I'm through with it, I look back at how it felt. The only deciding factor is "I enjoyed it". Yeah, I enjoyed Stalker: Clear Sky, despite hopeless story, dull ending and reuse of content. I enjoyed Oblivion despite being dumbed down to knees level of Morrowind.
If the game passes the three tiers of classification, I buy it.
Every year Ubuntu reaches out to 450,000 fans of various alternative music - punk rock, folk and many others, at Woodstock Stop in Poland. (they have a small tent where they give out CDs and leaflets, and talk about the system.)
Government wants to ban a proprietary tool serving obtaining vast amounts of data about the net users by a big corporation, without the users' content. The government suggests an open-source alternative.
Slashdot crowd violently opposes.
brb checking if RMS applied for a job at Microsoft.
We were talking about Opera Mini, which is strictly based on this mobile compression, adapting advanced HTML to phones that don't have resources to render it.
Maybe you have confused it with Opera Mobile which skips the editing proxy, connects directly to webpages it wants, and renders full, unmodified HTML best to its abilities? But it requires an operating system - Symbian or Windows Mobile, and way more powerful phones.
I don't know what they -do- but they definitely -can- read it.
Note this is not a transparent proxy and a fully-featured browser. It's more like a mix between heavily packet-mangling NAT and VNC/Remote Desktop, running a full browser remotely (on the proxy) and only displaying the heavily processed remote version locally (on the mobile device).
So Opera Mini can outsource all the HTTPS encryption, authentication, certification and so on to the proxy, and download the decrypted (and then re-encrypted by Opera with its own keys) "secure" content.
What the User sees: luser@victim.net% Evil-ssh bonus@treasure.com bonus@treasure.com's password: ******* bonus@treasure.com% cat ~/secret
The connection between Victim and Evil is encrypted (Evil is a reputable company which provides a convenient ssh client that can run on hardware on which normal ssh has problems running.)
The connection between Evil and Treasure is encrypted, because Treasure is a public service anyone with the password can access, and Evil can do encryption just fine.
Evil can intercept all the communication just fine. After all, it's their private key they encrypt connection to Treasure with.
So how comes Carl takes Bob's letter and translates it from written text to Braille Alice needs to read and Bob can't write?
Opera's proxy server modifies the incoming pages, stripping HTML tags which Opera Mini can't interpret, lowering resolution of hi-res images, decreasing their color depth, and generally editing the page to be viewable on the low-resource mobile device in a stripped down simple browser.
First it can't do so without access to plaintext content, because it can't edit content of a cryptogram it doesn't understand, and second only a small percent of pages on the net use https (and even then the server could serve as man-in-the-middle, authenticating itself instead of the source browser), the rest are unencrypted so what kind of bullshit are you trying to feed me?
Alice wants to send postcard to Bob. So she puts it in sealed envelope, mails it to Carl and asks Carl to open the envelope, put a stamp on the postcard and mail it to Bob. Yeah, there is no way in hell Carl can learn what is written on the postcard, after all it has been closed in a sealed envelope only Alice and Carl can open...
Opera proxy acts like man-in-the-middle attack by design, that is its fundamental function, with consent and awareness of both parties whose communication is intercepted. It modifies outgoing data to have replies directed to itself instead to the source, then it heavily modifies incoming data to make it displayable on mobile devices. It is free to do anything it desires with the data on top of that.
...happens to whatever is filtered through Opera proxy. Stats, passwords, preferences, online purchases, banking - this all goes through the Opera proxies and is wide open to employees. Although a small slice of the WWW market, Opera gets an insight into much larger piece of online activities of its users than, say, Google does - it has "phone home and report everything, ever" built in as its fundamental design decision.
I used a table very similar to this one (but yearly instead of monthly) http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html 15 US cents seemed to be about the average residential price, 4 cents was the low of the industrial - and considering the massive bulk purchase, the lowest pick seems fair here. The $1000 was the first google hit for 100W solar panel.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some but C as a text generation and processing language (which is the basic function of CGI) is definitely a very bad choice. C strings are inherently fault-prone.
In Perl or PHP you do $y .= " $x \n"; and it is totally fault-proof. It is easy and straightforward, and totally foolproof. Now write something like that in C. Allocate buffers for x and y, check for overflows, reallocate if buffers are too short, make sure the number of arguments matches the format string, and within maybe 15 lines have the result ready, not nearly as readable, not a shade close to as fault-proof, and 1500% longer.
I'm not saying a compiled, secure language would be bad for CGI scripting. I'm just saying C is a horrible choice.
...oh, and it took me about a year and a half since finishing playing Oblivion to finally decide to buy it. I was MAD at Bethesda for dumbing it down. I hated them for making it a console hack&slash with RPG elements. The stupid linear mcGufin quests. The leveled everything. The pathetic railroading. I despised it for being so shitty comparing to the godly Morrowind.
Only in hindsight I realized it was NOT a bad game. It was actually rather good. It didn't reach the knees level of Morrowind but I did enjoy it, I loved to cast feather on my horse to be able to carry all the loot from a random dungeon back to the city, I loved sneaking after goblins along the mountain tops, I loved riding down the Niben bay on horseback at Mach 2, fortify speed and water walking the horse. As I got over my disappointment and looked at Oblivion as an independent game, and not as a successor to Morrowind, I decided it was worth the money.
Hey maybe the comdom was in the second slice of pizza but you kept eating to the end. Anyone can make an analogy that works for them.
That's what the cafe owner might claim.
But I -know- where it was, and I have absolutely no intention to argue about the payment, I just walk away from the vomit-covered asshole.
Of course I stop playing if I don't like the game and it shows no promise of improving. The case where I get to the end, and still decide the game wasn't worth it is relatively rare. I buy most of games I finish. Sometimes I don't buy them simply because they are not available in my country. Sometimes the credit card payment online can't be completed, not my fault. Sometimes they piss me off by charging me more than if I was in US (for a download), and I say "fuck you, greedy assholes". That business method backfires badly, and as a rule I never buy such products, and this is a rule I don't break no matter what.
As you can notice, these are all not "lost sale" scenarios. They wouldn't get the money anyway, with me playing the game or not. But still, the wallet speaks the truth, it isn't as if I paid rarely. I have a pretty big shelf of originals, but often I don't even install them. SecuROM on Oblivion taught me not to insert original CDs in the drive, as they contain worse malware than you can get off the most shady warez sites. I have two versions of Morrowind (GOTY and Collector's) and still I play one I got from torrents - the No-CD crack gives about 30% FPS boost over the originals because the protection routine is a resource hog.
Currently, I'm waiting for Stalker: Call of Pripyat to appear in trade. They earned their money already. I'm 3/4 through the game on my third walk-through, veteran level this time.
That's true - but not all the way. Depending on the device, even the high-level languages are rarely the really high ones. You won't find many embedded devices running their core work in Perl or Python or Ruby. It will be C++ or Java Embedded Edition, or ObjC, or Pascal, on rare occasions Fortran. There may be an OS running and there will be small shell scripts for assorted works. There will be MySQL or SQLite, but the SQL used will be mostly very simple - no JOIN, no nested SELECT or any such heavy lifting. There may be PHP for webserver if the authors are feeling extravagant, but it will do the presentation and GUI, not for the real application.
Prolog? Rev4? Matlab? Nope. Totally out of scope.
Oh, I'm not hostile - I know the center is expanding, abstraction layers pile up and higher-level languages get developed. It's interesting, often useful. But the approach "Learn it, because what you're doing will be replaced with it in n years" is wrong. As the center grows, so do the frontiers. Embedded electronics enters new domains and while the phones replaced palmtops, the microwave ovens got bitmap displays, the GPS left the military and entered dog collars, there will always be a market for microcontrollers with 1KB of RAM.
Now they are used in car alarm remotes, but as car alarm remotes start running Linux, the 1K CPUs will be used in toothbrushes to indicate good time and pressure to kids. When the toothbrushes get Internet connectivity, the 1K CPUs will be found in disposable cigarette lighters to regulate flame size. When cigarette lighters get image recognition, the 1K CPUs will be installed in microbots in grains of soap to scrub your skin better. And there will always be demand for programmers who can write the 1KB of code in assembly to have these work.
If I find my food at restaurant disgusting, I will send it back to kitchen without paying. You could argue I shouldn't do so if I ate more than half. But if I was feeling it tasted funny but kept on, until I found a used condom baked into the last piece of my pizza, fuck you, I will return all your food, all over your clothes and let's see if you demand money on top of that.
Argue lies with my wallet. It doesn't lie. Good games get rewarded. Decent games get rewarded when their price drops to their value. Bad games get the hose.
Square hall with 16x16 booths grid, 1/4 for organizations?
I've seen people writing webservers and web applications in assembly.
When the webserver for monitoring runs on an off-the-shelf $3 PIC microcontroller, assembler is the only viable option. Shell out $3 more and double the power consumption and you can use C. Give another $20 and quadruple the power and you can use PHP on top of Apache.
Of course if you can afford ethernet or GPRS in the device -and- intend to run a webserver on it, the $20 makes little difference, and so does the power. These projects are made by fanatics with too much free time. But they happen, and not infrequently too.
A traffic lights controller.
Failure to react (detect the condition and perform action) within the regulatory 300 milliseconds since a green light occurring on two colliding directions (~100ms to detect current, ~100ms for the mechanical switch to cut off power, leaves 100ms for the software) equals our fault. If someone dies - Unintentional causing of road traffic accident with a fatality as consequence. The same rules apply as if I ran over someone by car, as result of my own traffic violation.
Of course the 15 years option would be for malicious intent, like a hidden "all green" mode resulting in multiple deaths.
And of course the level of redundancy of the cut-off systems and general paranoia in the software is awe-inspiring.
I can say one thing.
You've never done embedded programming.
No chips that have to work in temperatures between -40C and +120C.
No devices that work 120 meters under surface of water which is 1800 meters above sea level and good 4 hours of march from the last road where you can get by car.
No chips for appliances, toys and small devices where $0.03 per unit savings by choosing a model with 64 bytes(!) of RAM instead of 128 bytes of RAM converts to a six-digit profit.
No devices where failure to perform according to specs and fail gracefully will land you in prison for between 2 and 15 years.
No devices that run a dozen sensors and send the results every hour over GPRS running off a single battery the size of a standard "A/R20" for a year.
No devices where you measure time between sending out a beam of light and receiving it bounced off the obstacle, to determine distance with 5cm resolution.
No devices where you have to do error correction, encoding and driving control and data lines at 100 megabit/second - or more precisely, at one bit per 10 nanoseconds plus/minus 1.5 nanosecond.
This kind of applications won't have the hardware catching up to let you replace C, Asembly and VHDL with Ruby or Java for decades yet.
Isn't it sad that mods miss irony in a post even if its title states it?
Oh, but why? It's the opposite! Teach the sniveling snitches that snitching about of our brave boys who treat the degenerate scum as it deserves is not welcome here.
Next time you will think twice if you want to cry foul about someone "having some fun" with a genetically inferior!
If anyone posts video of someone performing some illegal activity, delete it ASAP, don't tell anyone and sweep everything under the rug. The video was never there, you never saw anything and I'm sorry, Officer that I can't help you, am I free to go now?
At least that's what the court is trying to teach them.
I have three tiers of deciding on purchase of the game.
1. I read the review about what the game contains. I thoroughly ignore any "positive personal thoughts" about the game as marketing fluff. The negative ones do add to the value of the review but aren't all that important. I just read what is the concept of the game, and whether it is anything original, with potential - a good idea. If the review talks loads about graphics and sound and development time and prior franchise, even in total superlatives, it means the game is junk. A reviewer would concentrate on the really good points if it had any.
2.I check some Internet fora to see what people complain about. If there is a number of complaints about the same thing, it may turn me away again. The thing being "awful execution of the wonderful idea" is one of possible choices.
3. Then I grab the game off a torrent. After I'm through with it, I look back at how it felt. The only deciding factor is "I enjoyed it". Yeah, I enjoyed Stalker: Clear Sky, despite hopeless story, dull ending and reuse of content. I enjoyed Oblivion despite being dumbed down to knees level of Morrowind.
If the game passes the three tiers of classification, I buy it.
A booth.
Some news.
Every year Ubuntu reaches out to 450,000 fans of various alternative music - punk rock, folk and many others, at Woodstock Stop in Poland.
(they have a small tent where they give out CDs and leaflets, and talk about the system.)
Government wants to ban a proprietary tool serving obtaining vast amounts of data about the net users by a big corporation, without the users' content. The government suggests an open-source alternative.
Slashdot crowd violently opposes.
brb checking if RMS applied for a job at Microsoft.
don't.
We were talking about Opera Mini, which is strictly based on this mobile compression, adapting advanced HTML to phones that don't have resources to render it.
Maybe you have confused it with Opera Mobile which skips the editing proxy, connects directly to webpages it wants, and renders full, unmodified HTML best to its abilities? But it requires an operating system - Symbian or Windows Mobile, and way more powerful phones.
I don't know what they -do- but they definitely -can- read it.
Note this is not a transparent proxy and a fully-featured browser. It's more like a mix between heavily packet-mangling NAT and VNC/Remote Desktop, running a full browser remotely (on the proxy) and only displaying the heavily processed remote version locally (on the mobile device).
So Opera Mini can outsource all the HTTPS encryption, authentication, certification and so on to the proxy, and download the decrypted (and then re-encrypted by Opera with its own keys) "secure" content.
What the User sees:
luser@victim.net% Evil-ssh bonus@treasure.com
bonus@treasure.com's password: *******
bonus@treasure.com% cat ~/secret
What really happens:
luser@victim.net% ssh sucker@evil.org
sucker@evil.org's password: ******
sucker@evil.org% ssh bonus@treasure.com
bonus@treasure.com's password: *******
bonus@treasure.com% cat ~/secret
The connection between Victim and Evil is encrypted (Evil is a reputable company which provides a convenient ssh client that can run on hardware on which normal ssh has problems running.)
The connection between Evil and Treasure is encrypted, because Treasure is a public service anyone with the password can access, and Evil can do encryption just fine.
Evil can intercept all the communication just fine. After all, it's their private key they encrypt connection to Treasure with.
And of course every Bob out there uses a crypt.
Last I checked https is less than 2% of the WWW traffic.
So how comes Carl takes Bob's letter and translates it from written text to Braille Alice needs to read and Bob can't write?
Opera's proxy server modifies the incoming pages, stripping HTML tags which Opera Mini can't interpret, lowering resolution of hi-res images, decreasing their color depth, and generally editing the page to be viewable on the low-resource mobile device in a stripped down simple browser.
First it can't do so without access to plaintext content, because it can't edit content of a cryptogram it doesn't understand, and second only a small percent of pages on the net use https (and even then the server could serve as man-in-the-middle, authenticating itself instead of the source browser), the rest are unencrypted so what kind of bullshit are you trying to feed me?
Can then the untransformed https pages display their content?
On top of that, there is nothing to stop the proxy from acting as man-in-the-middle, after all it does have all the keys and certs.
Alice wants to send postcard to Bob. So she puts it in sealed envelope, mails it to Carl and asks Carl to open the envelope, put a stamp on the postcard and mail it to Bob. Yeah, there is no way in hell Carl can learn what is written on the postcard, after all it has been closed in a sealed envelope only Alice and Carl can open...
Opera proxy acts like man-in-the-middle attack by design, that is its fundamental function, with consent and awareness of both parties whose communication is intercepted. It modifies outgoing data to have replies directed to itself instead to the source, then it heavily modifies incoming data to make it displayable on mobile devices. It is free to do anything it desires with the data on top of that.
...happens to whatever is filtered through Opera proxy. Stats, passwords, preferences, online purchases, banking - this all goes through the Opera proxies and is wide open to employees. Although a small slice of the WWW market, Opera gets an insight into much larger piece of online activities of its users than, say, Google does - it has "phone home and report everything, ever" built in as its fundamental design decision.
I used a table very similar to this one (but yearly instead of monthly)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
15 US cents seemed to be about the average residential price, 4 cents was the low of the industrial - and considering the massive bulk purchase, the lowest pick seems fair here.
The $1000 was the first google hit for 100W solar panel.