This happened three months ago, but I still haven't seen a copy of the game or heard anyone talk about it. This publicity stunt is so contrived and stupid that it is probably barely better than no publicity at all.
The entire world probably reacted the same way I did - they thought, "Wow, the game must be baaa-aaaad if Acclaim is having to pull a trick this cheap to sell any copies" and proceeded on with their lives.
Why would any software running on linux need to be open source? I'm assuming you're implying that the GPL might require all other applications put in the same computer must be GPL'ed too. That, of course, would mean running XFree86, Apache, OpenOffice, and Mozilla couldn't be run on Linux legally, since none of them are under the GPL.
It would be much better suited to embedded development.
OTOH, since it's a concept car and meant for the market, they may have just kludged something together with commodity PC parts for one or more of those 5 computers on that car, and it may have just been easier to have it running Win98, since it is only a concept car, so they don't need to worry as much about using a/real/ embedded OS.
50,000 years was chosen because in that amount of time, it's almost guaranteed that every glass disc on the satellite will be shattered by the billions of micrometeors that will most likely be perforating the hull of the sattellite on a continual basis after they sufficiently weaken the skin in a couple hundred years.
That way, the people of the future don't/really/ have to hear whatever inaneshit the humans of today decide might be cute to say and have put in orbit.
More than that, this is a good reason why having only one major OS cannot be secure. If you can write an extremely good sequence number predictor for Windows 2000 sessions and get yourself a few nice deer stands on the periphery of the backbone (or heck, in the backbone - I'm not sure how feasible that is), you can 0wn the majority of corporations you're interested in attacking.
Personally, I think Bush's Department of Homeland Defense is going to be a complete crock if nothing is done about this and other computer security issues. I can't figure out if none of Dubya's advisors understand computers or if they are so full of it as to actually think, for whatever reason, that nobody would ever attack the US electronically. I have a feeling it's the latter being caused by the former, though. . .
If you've invested a lot more that time into something (eg. bought lots of boosters) then getting kicked off for breaking the terms of use might be enough of a feedback loop to keep some modicum of control.
You've obviously never spent much time on AOL.
As a teenager speaking for all my peers across the planet, all I can really offer up in response is this: my peers are complete assholes, in both senses of the term. They have the common sense of your average toddler, and about the same amount of empathy for others, to boot. (DoNt FoRgEt, ThEsE aRe ThE pEoPlE wHo InVeNtEd TyPiNg LiKe ThIs.) Those two qualities, combined with the sense of invulnerability that the Internet provides, does not make for someone who feels they need to follow the TOS, even if failing to do so means a few bits on a distant server might be twiddled.
(I extend my deepest apologies to anyone reading this who is between the ages of 13 and 20 whose higher-order mental processes have survived puberty. You're a model to us all. really.)
Unless you have your computer sitting on top of a furnace, you won't have to worry much about overheating a 486 - my 486 doesn't even have a heatsink/fan, and, come to think of it, I've never seen a 486 with that going on.
Probably the easiest thing you can do is just attatch a heatsink and fan with some thermal compound, and maybe get one of those ball-bearing fans that fits into a PCI slot if you want some extra cooling. That alone should remove any worries you need to have about overheating the computer, so you won't even need a heat sensor.
I have to agree about the code reviews. There have been plenty of studies showing that frequent code reviews just work better - think of it as a way to suck up a large number of the advantages of pair programming without actually doing it.
Speaking of pair programming, it's also been shown that you'l save a lot of time and effort if you use pair programming to do the complicated or difficult chunks of code. Yeah, there's the cutting-your-productivity-in-half argument, but that really only holds true if you don't know how to use pair programming. If done correctly, you'll save more than enough time to justify the cost later on when you don't have to put nearly as much effort into debugging that code.
As for testing, it's overrated, almost worthless. I realize you gotta do it, but it does so much to distract from the best way to keep bugs out of your program (which is to not put them there in the first place), that I wonder if testing doesn't in some wierd indirect way actually create more bugs than it discovers.
Heck, with code reviews, your programmers will probably start writing better code just so they don't hvae to stuffer the embarassment of having someone notice a particularly stupid algorithm design flaw in the middle of a code review.
uhh. . . are you sure that all of those words that make up the acronym go back into history as far as the word fuck does?
I am pretty sure the word fuck predates Middle English, which makes it older than a lot of now common words such as "fun" and "shower." (Fun just didn't exist until Shakespeare created it, shower derives from the Middle English word "shore.")
Kombat's Law: Before, the customer wanted a library of CGI scripts to run their e-commerce website. Now that've got a handle on scripting design patterns, the customer wants EJBs. By the time you learn what to expect to go wrong with EJBs, the customer will want a cell-phone interface to their inventory.
Observation on Kombat's Law:
Technologies become fashionable soon after they are introduced, usually when the libraries are still version 1.0 or one-point-epsilon.
Related observation on the software industry:
It's standard practise to push a buggy pile of kludges still in need of major debugging out the door to meet overly optimistic deadlines and call it version 1.0.
Sum conclusion of it all:
We're all fucked.
Those who like to use exciting new gizmos are even more fucked. Those with bosses who are attracted by shiny objects are the most fucked.
It may not be a private corporation, but it thinks it is.
I can boycott corporations, but the closest thing to a boycott of the US gov't is illegal.
The US government is the prime facilitator of most of the things coprorations do that we see as Evil. (DMCA, military action in Guatemala & Nicaragua, Saipan, heck, the amount of time copyrights are good for magically gets longer every time Disnay's copyright in a certain mouse is about to expire.)
History has shown that these limits on the power of the government that you speak of are fungible. Usually, they are only funged a little bit, for example with limitations on free speech w/r/t certain four-letter words in public. Sometimes, they're funged a lot more. For example with the WWII internment camps.
I'm still not convinced that the US government values me as anything other than a contributor to the GDP, in the same way that I know large corporations only care about me as a chump that may have a few loose dollars in his pocket.
As for the laws that limit the gov't, the constitution and laws in this country only hold water because our governing body agrees they do. Abraham Lincoln blatantly ignored the Constitution and a few other major laws, I'm sure. The gov't can do that just as easily today. At least corporations have a government standing above their heads waiting to put them in their place (or at least make a pathetic attempt to do so) every random interval unit of time or so. That may not be worth two shits in a can, but it's a psychological comfort.
Who's going to stop this abulatory conglomeration of tinker toys and assault rifles we Americans like to pretend is a government if it stretches things too far?
where the HELL can they say this? Especially if we're talking about viruses and hackers, diversity should be fairly obviously more secure than monopoly.
Finding a way to exploit one OS lets you into every computer if there is only one OS.
Thankfully, a lot of the notorious hacker groups who are known for finding security holes (l0pht and cDc come to mind) are also known for publishing information about those security holes, not with the interest of telling script kiddies and black hat hackers how to get into the system, but for the purpose of calling attention to the holes so they are closed.
I'm not hacking expert, but I have a feeling that finding security holes by reading the source code of software isn't much easier than prodding at it until a hole is found.
With buffer overflows, for example, I'd imagine it's much easier to find the overflows by setting up a computer running whatever software you are trying to exploit and letting a program designed to keep trying to exploit overflows until it finds the overflow. If you can figure out where in memory that buffer is with some sort of debugger, the job is probably even easier. There's also the good old OpenBSD poster child.
I doubt the greatest hackers in the world are doing this. Heck, I have a feeling it's mostly just amateur crackers who have never done anything seriously illegal.
Anybody who really has had much experience breaking into hardened networks would theoretically be way too paranoid to ever attatch something like a social security number to a hacking attempt, even an authorized one. I know I wouldn't. . .
/. mentioned quite a while ago that they would start having no more than one advertisement per day hidden in the articles.
Maybe they should charge a few bucks extra for consulting about ads, though, to avoid little quirks like Opera not seeming to realize that the browsers they should be FUDing about on Slashdot are Mozilla and Konqueror.
A couple of weeks ago, I destroyed the swap partition on my linux box without any prior preparations, just to see what would happen. The machine had been up and running for weeeks. . .
Sadly, nothing happened. I guess that's what I get for putting 1/2 gig of RAM in a machine that's primarily used for surfing the web . . .
More than anything, I miss NeoNet. 'twas like FidoNet, only it was restricted to my area code. There was a sense of community there I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.
However, I think you're a bit off on your distro timeline. I seem to remember RedHat being the first push towards a commercial Linux distro. SUSE came down the line. Mandrake was a test of the Linux fabric
Still a bit off. . .
Yggdrasil (anyone remember that? I still have a CD. . . ) came first with Plug 'n Play Linux, which I believe is the very first linux distro to come with an automated install. Yggdrasil never made a version that included post 1.2.x kernels and libc5. You can still see their website here.
Good ol' Slackware was next. . . its heydey had to be Slackware 96, although the first version of Slack was put out way back in '93. Slack as in the ultimate goal of any subgenius. It's well named; all its competitors really do have no slack.
Then we had Red Hat. Mmmmm. . . Red Hat. . .
I think SuSE was pretty big everywhere but the USA around the time Red Hat got popular, but it still hasn't grabbed much of a foothold around here. Except in my college's computer science department, where all the professors fell in love with YaST because they're too lazy to edit/etc/fstab themselves.
Oh yeah, and Mandrake figured out how to make money by stealing the latest version of Red Hat and filling it with bugs a couple of years ago, too. =D
I tried installing it as user and it failed since it didn't have permission to write to the proper directories/files. It then told me to fix the problem by giving everyone read/write access to/usr/lib/mozilla !!! since when is doing stuff like that "done right?" (Then again, I might just be paranoid since I let a lot of people have accounts on my machines for evangelical reasons.)
I try to do everything without a mouse, too. I've gotten to the point where I use a crappy old laptop that won't run X as a sort of thin client that I use to telnet into my real machine, and do all the working from there. This allows me to position my entire working environment however I want it rather than being a slave to the "ergo desk" (which, by the way, is the most horrible case of false advertising I've seen in a while) when positioning myself.
I think the difference is great. My typing speed on my laptop keyboard is faster because the distance to press the keys is shorter, my arms and wrists don't start aching after hours of typing because I can actually put myself in a comfortable position, and I never have to use the mouse because I can do everything from the keyboard in emacs. JOY!
Slashdot Mirror
This happened three months ago, but I still haven't seen a copy of the game or heard anyone talk about it. This publicity stunt is so contrived and stupid that it is probably barely better than no publicity at all.
The entire world probably reacted the same way I did - they thought, "Wow, the game must be baaa-aaaad if Acclaim is having to pull a trick this cheap to sell any copies" and proceeded on with their lives.
really, I do.
Why would any software running on linux need to be open source? I'm assuming you're implying that the GPL might require all other applications put in the same computer must be GPL'ed too. That, of course, would mean running XFree86, Apache, OpenOffice, and Mozilla couldn't be run on Linux legally, since none of them are under the GPL.
It would be much better suited to embedded development.
/real/ embedded OS.
OTOH, since it's a concept car and meant for the market, they may have just kludged something together with commodity PC parts for one or more of those 5 computers on that car, and it may have just been easier to have it running Win98, since it is only a concept car, so they don't need to worry as much about using a
50,000 years was chosen because in that amount of time, it's almost guaranteed that every glass disc on the satellite will be shattered by the billions of micrometeors that will most likely be perforating the hull of the sattellite on a continual basis after they sufficiently weaken the skin in a couple hundred years.
/really/ have to hear whatever inane shit the humans of today decide might be cute to say and have put in orbit.
That way, the people of the future don't
HAND!
More than that, this is a good reason why having only one major OS cannot be secure. If you can write an extremely good sequence number predictor for Windows 2000 sessions and get yourself a few nice deer stands on the periphery of the backbone (or heck, in the backbone - I'm not sure how feasible that is), you can 0wn the majority of corporations you're interested in attacking.
Personally, I think Bush's Department of Homeland Defense is going to be a complete crock if nothing is done about this and other computer security issues. I can't figure out if none of Dubya's advisors understand computers or if they are so full of it as to actually think, for whatever reason, that nobody would ever attack the US electronically. I have a feeling it's the latter being caused by the former, though. . .
If you've invested a lot more that time into something (eg. bought lots of boosters) then getting kicked off for breaking the terms of use might be enough of a feedback loop to keep some modicum of control.
You've obviously never spent much time on AOL.
As a teenager speaking for all my peers across the planet, all I can really offer up in response is this: my peers are complete assholes, in both senses of the term. They have the common sense of your average toddler, and about the same amount of empathy for others, to boot. (DoNt FoRgEt, ThEsE aRe ThE pEoPlE wHo InVeNtEd TyPiNg LiKe ThIs.) Those two qualities, combined with the sense of invulnerability that the Internet provides, does not make for someone who feels they need to follow the TOS, even if failing to do so means a few bits on a distant server might be twiddled.
(I extend my deepest apologies to anyone reading this who is between the ages of 13 and 20 whose higher-order mental processes have survived puberty. You're a model to us all. really.)
Unless you have your computer sitting on top of a furnace, you won't have to worry much about overheating a 486 - my 486 doesn't even have a heatsink/fan, and, come to think of it, I've never seen a 486 with that going on.
Probably the easiest thing you can do is just attatch a heatsink and fan with some thermal compound, and maybe get one of those ball-bearing fans that fits into a PCI slot if you want some extra cooling. That alone should remove any worries you need to have about overheating the computer, so you won't even need a heat sensor.
Give Carnage Heart a try.
It's a similar game, that was made for the Sony Playstation.
It was surprisingly fun to program in, and believe it or not the battles were actually interesting to watch (unlike in Robocode)
I have to agree about the code reviews. There have been plenty of studies showing that frequent code reviews just work better - think of it as a way to suck up a large number of the advantages of pair programming without actually doing it.
Speaking of pair programming, it's also been shown that you'l save a lot of time and effort if you use pair programming to do the complicated or difficult chunks of code. Yeah, there's the cutting-your-productivity-in-half argument, but that really only holds true if you don't know how to use pair programming. If done correctly, you'll save more than enough time to justify the cost later on when you don't have to put nearly as much effort into debugging that code.
As for testing, it's overrated, almost worthless. I realize you gotta do it, but it does so much to distract from the best way to keep bugs out of your program (which is to not put them there in the first place), that I wonder if testing doesn't in some wierd indirect way actually create more bugs than it discovers.
Heck, with code reviews, your programmers will probably start writing better code just so they don't hvae to stuffer the embarassment of having someone notice a particularly stupid algorithm design flaw in the middle of a code review.
uhh. . . are you sure that all of those words that make up the acronym go back into history as far as the word fuck does?
I am pretty sure the word fuck predates Middle English, which makes it older than a lot of now common words such as "fun" and "shower." (Fun just didn't exist until Shakespeare created it, shower derives from the Middle English word "shore.")
So that's not really a catch at all, just further support for my hypothesis =)
Kombat's Law:
Before, the customer wanted a library of CGI scripts to run their e-commerce website. Now that've got a handle on scripting design patterns, the customer wants EJBs. By the time you learn what to expect to go wrong with EJBs, the customer will want a cell-phone interface to their inventory.
Observation on Kombat's Law:
Technologies become fashionable soon after they are introduced, usually when the libraries are still version 1.0 or one-point-epsilon.
Related observation on the software industry:
It's standard practise to push a buggy pile of kludges still in need of major debugging out the door to meet overly optimistic deadlines and call it version 1.0.
Sum conclusion of it all:
We're all fucked.
Those who like to use exciting new gizmos are even more fucked. Those with bosses who are attracted by shiny objects are the most fucked.
It may not be a private corporation, but it thinks it is.
I can boycott corporations, but the closest thing to a boycott of the US gov't is illegal.
The US government is the prime facilitator of most of the things coprorations do that we see as Evil. (DMCA, military action in Guatemala & Nicaragua, Saipan, heck, the amount of time copyrights are good for magically gets longer every time Disnay's copyright in a certain mouse is about to expire.)
History has shown that these limits on the power of the government that you speak of are fungible. Usually, they are only funged a little bit, for example with limitations on free speech w/r/t certain four-letter words in public. Sometimes, they're funged a lot more. For example with the WWII internment camps.
I'm still not convinced that the US government values me as anything other than a contributor to the GDP, in the same way that I know large corporations only care about me as a chump that may have a few loose dollars in his pocket.
As for the laws that limit the gov't, the constitution and laws in this country only hold water because our governing body agrees they do.
Abraham Lincoln blatantly ignored the Constitution and a few other major laws, I'm sure. The gov't can do that just as easily today. At least corporations have a government standing above their heads waiting to put them in their place (or at least make a pathetic attempt to do so) every random interval unit of time or so. That may not be worth two shits in a can, but it's a psychological comfort.
Who's going to stop this abulatory conglomeration of tinker toys and assault rifles we Americans like to pretend is a government if it stretches things too far?
where the HELL can they say this? Especially if we're talking about viruses and hackers, diversity should be fairly obviously more secure than monopoly.
Finding a way to exploit one OS lets you into every computer if there is only one OS.
Thankfully, a lot of the notorious hacker groups who are known for finding security holes (l0pht and cDc come to mind) are also known for publishing information about those security holes, not with the interest of telling script kiddies and black hat hackers how to get into the system, but for the purpose of calling attention to the holes so they are closed.
I'm not hacking expert, but I have a feeling that finding security holes by reading the source code of software isn't much easier than prodding at it until a hole is found.
With buffer overflows, for example, I'd imagine it's much easier to find the overflows by setting up a computer running whatever software you are trying to exploit and letting a program designed to keep trying to exploit overflows until it finds the overflow. If you can figure out where in memory that buffer is with some sort of debugger, the job is probably even easier.
There's also the good old OpenBSD poster child.
I doubt the greatest hackers in the world are doing this. Heck, I have a feeling it's mostly just amateur crackers who have never done anything seriously illegal.
Anybody who really has had much experience breaking into hardened networks would theoretically be way too paranoid to ever attatch something like a social security number to a hacking attempt, even an authorized one. I know I wouldn't. . .
/. mentioned quite a while ago that they would start having no more than one advertisement per day hidden in the articles.
Maybe they should charge a few bucks extra for consulting about ads, though, to avoid little quirks like Opera not seeming to realize that the browsers they should be FUDing about on Slashdot are Mozilla and Konqueror.
A couple of weeks ago, I destroyed the swap partition on my linux box without any prior preparations, just to see what would happen. The machine had been up and running for weeeks. . .
Sadly, nothing happened. I guess that's what I get for putting 1/2 gig of RAM in a machine that's primarily used for surfing the web . . .
More than anything, I miss NeoNet. 'twas like FidoNet, only it was restricted to my area code. There was a sense of community there I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.
*sigh*
-handler
However, I think you're a bit off on your distro timeline. I seem to remember RedHat being the first push towards a commercial Linux distro. SUSE came down the line. Mandrake was a test of the Linux fabric
/etc/fstab themselves.
Still a bit off. . .
Yggdrasil (anyone remember that? I still have a CD. . . ) came first with Plug 'n Play Linux, which I believe is the very first linux distro to come with an automated install. Yggdrasil never made a version that included post 1.2.x kernels and libc5. You can still see their website here.
Good ol' Slackware was next. . . its heydey had to be Slackware 96, although the first version of Slack was put out way back in '93. Slack as in the ultimate goal of any subgenius. It's well named; all its competitors really do have no slack.
Then we had Red Hat. Mmmmm. . . Red Hat. . .
I think SuSE was pretty big everywhere but the USA around the time Red Hat got popular, but it still hasn't grabbed much of a foothold around here. Except in my college's computer science department, where all the professors fell in love with YaST because they're too lazy to edit
Oh yeah, and Mandrake figured out how to make money by stealing the latest version of Red Hat and filling it with bugs a couple of years ago, too. =D
Fooled around with it for about 2 hours last night. This is easily the best toolbar plugin I've used yet. Awesome! =D
(offtopic - about the StumbleUpon sig)
/usr/lib/mozilla !!! since when is doing stuff like that "done right?" (Then again, I might just be paranoid since I let a lot of people have accounts on my machines for evangelical reasons.)
I tried installing it as user and it failed since it didn't have permission to write to the proper directories/files. It then told me to fix the problem by giving everyone read/write access to
I try to do everything without a mouse, too. I've gotten to the point where I use a crappy old laptop that won't run X as a sort of thin client that I use to telnet into my real machine, and do all the working from there. This allows me to position my entire working environment however I want it rather than being a slave to the "ergo desk" (which, by the way, is the most horrible case of false advertising I've seen in a while) when positioning myself.
I think the difference is great. My typing speed on my laptop keyboard is faster because the distance to press the keys is shorter, my arms and wrists don't start aching after hours of typing because I can actually put myself in a comfortable position, and I never have to use the mouse because I can do everything from the keyboard in emacs. JOY!