Another thing I think an article labelled "What every Programmer should know..." should mention is that, while "Nearly all hardware and programming languages use floating-point numbers in the same binary formats", implementations can actually be very inconsistent, in the results of computations.
For example, mac and windows programs will have different rounding behaviors, and come up with different computation results in floating point math (at least with the default compiler settings - does anyone know if it is possible to change this?). This is constantly causing us trouble, when trying to write Unit tests only to realize the expected output values are slightly different on different machines to run the tests on.
I also think that, as somebody posted above, the non-associativity of floating point operations is important and should be mentioned. But, otherwise, a well written and helpful article!
Obviously competitors have realized that it's worth it to come out with clone or me-too products much faster than they did in the past with the iPhone. This suggests to me that they'll be at least somewhat more successful than before in taking market share from apple.
Just that the makers of the WePad don't actually seem to be as far as they claim to be. I know someone who was at the press conference were they showed the product yesterday. He said that current versions run windows, not Linux, the touch screen didn't work on the "show" device, and it had a fan which was running all the time. In it's current state it would not have a chance to compete well with the iPad (and I personally doubt it ever will).
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes'
And I 'dumb pipe' is all I ever expected from my ISP, and it is what I'm paying for! If they want Google to pay for delivering the content, I will get access for free, right? Bullshit.
Browser games will have the enormous potential to not run fullscreen and to be able to accidentally click the mouse outside the game area during a crucial moment.
In this particular game, you just right click -> "Go To Fullscreen". Voilà.
Once bandwidth is fast enough that you can stream 3d data roughly as fast as computers display them (and it is getting there - some decent caching may also help here), you will be able to have browser games with live updated in-game worlds much huger then feasible through downloaded content.
Check out FusionFall for a browser based 3d MMO based on the Unity plugin, which downloads it's content on the fly as you move through the world. It does take a while to initially load on small connections, but, as I wrote, the tech is getting there.
Security is very critical for these kinds of plugins, sure, and focus should be given to the scripting engine they use - but how you plan to write a malicious shader with today's tech is way beyond me. A shader is basically a program which takes some input values, and outputs a vertex position or a pixel color. Now how would a hacker abuse that? Make a shader to output pixels in that evil brown color which makes you shit yourself?
I'm pretty sure there's been 3D plugins before. One from Adobe springs to mind - it even had Havok physics engine....
Though Adobe never had decent Hardware 3d support, and Shockwave does not seem to be going anywhere these days.
But Unity has been around and gaining momentum for a while, and offers 3d acceleration, PhysX support, and much more. You can check out the latest installment of EA's Tiger Woods for a decent Unity browser game.
The Unity engine also mentioned in the caption (which is now also free, and even lets you make money with it) has always had a mac version (it actually used to be mac-only for content generation until earlier this year).
Actually I say occasional adverts. For some reason mine has completely stopped playing any. I have no idea why but I'm not complaining!
Same here - been using spotify on a daily base for months, and it has yet to play a single advert on me. But possibly they just don't have any advertising deals in germany yet.
Wait for the next election, elect some other party into the majority and hope they actually behave differently? Just seems like every year things get worse, no matter who's in office.
I, too find it very frustrating that allmost all political discussion these days seems to be about adding more restrictions in every field: Internet censorship, Smoking bans, Keeping minors from drinking, "Killerspiele", "Umweltzonen", etc... Trading freedoms for percieved security.
At least when it comes to free-speech and online rights, my hope lies in the pirate party. Maybe we can follow the swedes (they did get 7.1% at the EU elections in sweden - just 0.9% in germany so far). I don't expect enough people to vote them to have any significant influence any time soon, but if their polls go up to a few percent, the politicians can't help noticing that ignoring these matters is going to cost them votes, and we might see more critical reflection of these issues in mainstream political discussion.
While I like my CD collection, I have to admit that Spotify is really really handy for casual listening. I have a jukebox of ridiculous proportions at my disposal, for the relatively cheap price of a few audio ads a day. (Which I could also get rid of with the subscription option.)
I wonder why, after months of using Spotify for free, I have never heard a single ad? Are ads not supported in my country (Germany), yet? Well.. I'm not complaining!
AFAIK most european countries have had biometric passports for years. Certainly my (german) passport has an RFID tag with my photo's biometric information on it. More recent passports also include fingerprints.
AFAIK, this is also mandated by the US, for any foreigners wishing to enter the country visa free (visa waiver program countries). A friend from switzerland told me (in 2007), that he was actually allowed to choose whether he wanted a normal passport or a biometric one (enabling travel to the US).
So what is actually new here? It hasn't been EU-wide before? Not that I approve of this or anything, but most EU countries have this implemented already, anyways.
It's really disappointing that other vendors can't seem to get this right.
Indeed. Especially considering that this feature has been around for EVER. My father's first powerbook was a 520, bought in 1994, which had the same sleep capabilities as todays macs, and I believe it has been around longer then that (possibly already with the original Mac Portable).
They should just make a CAPTCHA that requires strong AI to crack; we could make a great leap ahead in AI by letting the spammers solve all the problems for us!
Yeah: "To show that you are human, write the prove for P != NP (or P == NP) in this text field:"
They moved the battery indicator to the computer case, instead of being part of the battery. That, together with the "new unibody enclosure", makes me wonder: Did they hard-wire the battery, as in iPods and other devices? Because, that would sort of suck!
For every web site that asks for a password I randomly generate one.
If they have the audacity to ask for personal information, I randomly generate that data too.
Reminds me of the Apple Developer Connection website. When i signed up I just typed "this is stupid" into all the fields because I didn't feel like giving them any personal information (including street address, etc). This came back to embarass me later, though, as Apple at one point called me to give me a free ticket to WWDC, but they asked me to look into my ADC account, because some information there "didn't seem to be quite correct":)
Also, pirates do it for fun. No, really, they do. Read some nfos from respectable groups like Razor1911, Deviance or Fairlight, and you're bound to find a note on "why" etc. They also tell warez-users to go buy the stuff they pirate. "If you like it, buy the game - we did!", or something in this context.
Knowing this, I in the past added a section to the readme of my games, stating that If people manage to bypass the copy protection by their own skills (and not by using a crack they find online), I'd honor that, and they have my ok to keep the game, as long as they tell me, how they did it, and don't share the crack. I actually did get a cracker emailing me, describing exactly the shortcomings of my copy protection.
Moral: you wasted two weeks of your life writing ineffective copy protection that does nothing to slow down pirates but inconveniences any customers you might have. Why?
A protection which can/will be cracked (in other words any protection) is econimcally still better then no protection. I, too made a living from small shareware games, and I could definitely see a huge difference in sales between having no protection at all ("please pay if you like this"), and having some simple protection which got cracked (registration codes).
I can't find it online right now, but I once read a very interesting article on this. Somebody made a shareware application, which would randomly decide whether to use no protection at all, just nagging, or reduced features until registered at installation. I don't remember the exact results, but the "no protection" version sold something like 5 times less then the others.
The wikipedia ''community'' is already split by languages: An article that is almost unanimously accepted in the English wikipedia might be a candidate for deletion in the German version, where the laws are somewhat stricter. Which is exactly the reason that I (being a german) never bother checking the german wikipedia, and usually go straight to the english version (unless it is a topic of relevance specific to germany or german culture).
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing I think an article labelled "What every Programmer should know..." should mention is that, while "Nearly all hardware and programming languages use floating-point numbers in the same binary formats", implementations can actually be very inconsistent, in the results of computations.
For example, mac and windows programs will have different rounding behaviors, and come up with different computation results in floating point math (at least with the default compiler settings - does anyone know if it is possible to change this?). This is constantly causing us trouble, when trying to write Unit tests only to realize the expected output values are slightly different on different machines to run the tests on.
I also think that, as somebody posted above, the non-associativity of floating point operations is important and should be mentioned. But, otherwise, a well written and helpful article!
Obviously competitors have realized that it's worth it to come out with clone or me-too products much faster than they did in the past with the iPhone. This suggests to me that they'll be at least somewhat more successful than before in taking market share from apple.
Just that the makers of the WePad don't actually seem to be as far as they claim to be. I know someone who was at the press conference were they showed the product yesterday. He said that current versions run windows, not Linux, the touch screen didn't work on the "show" device, and it had a fan which was running all the time. In it's current state it would not have a chance to compete well with the iPad (and I personally doubt it ever will).
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes'
And I 'dumb pipe' is all I ever expected from my ISP, and it is what I'm paying for! If they want Google to pay for delivering the content, I will get access for free, right? Bullshit.
Browser games will have the enormous potential to not run fullscreen and to be able to accidentally click the mouse outside the game area during a crucial moment.
In this particular game, you just right click -> "Go To Fullscreen". Voilà.
Think of it this way:
Once bandwidth is fast enough that you can stream 3d data roughly as fast as computers display them (and it is getting there - some decent caching may also help here), you will be able to have browser games with live updated in-game worlds much huger then feasible through downloaded content.
Check out FusionFall for a browser based 3d MMO based on the Unity plugin, which downloads it's content on the fly as you move through the world. It does take a while to initially load on small connections, but, as I wrote, the tech is getting there.
Er, what?
Security is very critical for these kinds of plugins, sure, and focus should be given to the scripting engine they use - but how you plan to write a malicious shader with today's tech is way beyond me. A shader is basically a program which takes some input values, and outputs a vertex position or a pixel color. Now how would a hacker abuse that? Make a shader to output pixels in that evil brown color which makes you shit yourself?
I'm pretty sure there's been 3D plugins before. One from Adobe springs to mind - it even had Havok physics engine....
Though Adobe never had decent Hardware 3d support, and Shockwave does not seem to be going anywhere these days.
But Unity has been around and gaining momentum for a while, and offers 3d acceleration, PhysX support, and much more. You can check out the latest installment of EA's Tiger Woods for a decent Unity browser game.
DM 1,000,000 = EUR 511,291.88
There fixed it for you.
The Unity engine also mentioned in the caption (which is now also free, and even lets you make money with it) has always had a mac version (it actually used to be mac-only for content generation until earlier this year).
Dude, that was 20 years ago. Technology has evolved!
Actually I say occasional adverts. For some reason mine has completely stopped playing any. I have no idea why but I'm not complaining!
Same here - been using spotify on a daily base for months, and it has yet to play a single advert on me. But possibly they just don't have any advertising deals in germany yet.
Wait for the next election, elect some other party into the majority and hope they actually behave differently? Just seems like every year things get worse, no matter who's in office.
I, too find it very frustrating that allmost all political discussion these days seems to be about adding more restrictions in every field: Internet censorship, Smoking bans, Keeping minors from drinking, "Killerspiele", "Umweltzonen", etc... Trading freedoms for percieved security.
At least when it comes to free-speech and online rights, my hope lies in the pirate party. Maybe we can follow the swedes (they did get 7.1% at the EU elections in sweden - just 0.9% in germany so far). I don't expect enough people to vote them to have any significant influence any time soon, but if their polls go up to a few percent, the politicians can't help noticing that ignoring these matters is going to cost them votes, and we might see more critical reflection of these issues in mainstream political discussion.
While I like my CD collection, I have to admit that Spotify is really really handy for casual listening. I have a jukebox of ridiculous proportions at my disposal, for the relatively cheap price of a few audio ads a day. (Which I could also get rid of with the subscription option.)
I wonder why, after months of using Spotify for free, I have never heard a single ad? Are ads not supported in my country (Germany), yet? Well.. I'm not complaining!
I don't think many people would guess the name of my first pet was OIYNTDttye7it867t&%&^%&^T(
AFAIK most european countries have had biometric passports for years. Certainly my (german) passport has an RFID tag with my photo's biometric information on it. More recent passports also include fingerprints.
AFAIK, this is also mandated by the US, for any foreigners wishing to enter the country visa free (visa waiver program countries). A friend from switzerland told me (in 2007), that he was actually allowed to choose whether he wanted a normal passport or a biometric one (enabling travel to the US).
So what is actually new here? It hasn't been EU-wide before? Not that I approve of this or anything, but most EU countries have this implemented already, anyways.
It's really disappointing that other vendors can't seem to get this right.
Indeed. Especially considering that this feature has been around for EVER. My father's first powerbook was a 520, bought in 1994, which had the same sleep capabilities as todays macs, and I believe it has been around longer then that (possibly already with the original Mac Portable).
It taxes (more like fines) those who did nothing wrong.
I thought that's what taxes do..
They should just make a CAPTCHA that requires strong AI to crack; we could make a great leap ahead in AI by letting the spammers solve all the problems for us!
Yeah:
"To show that you are human, write the prove for P != NP (or P == NP) in this text field:"
I like bad taste.. but then again, I'm German.
They moved the battery indicator to the computer case, instead of being part of the battery. That, together with the "new unibody enclosure", makes me wonder: Did they hard-wire the battery, as in iPods and other devices? Because, that would sort of suck!
For every web site that asks for a password I randomly generate one.
If they have the audacity to ask for personal information, I randomly generate that data too.
Reminds me of the Apple Developer Connection website. When i signed up I just typed "this is stupid" into all the fields because I didn't feel like giving them any personal information (including street address, etc). This came back to embarass me later, though, as Apple at one point called me to give me a free ticket to WWDC, but they asked me to look into my ADC account, because some information there "didn't seem to be quite correct" :)
Also, pirates do it for fun. No, really, they do. Read some nfos from respectable groups like Razor1911, Deviance or Fairlight, and you're bound to find a note on "why" etc. They also tell warez-users to go buy the stuff they pirate. "If you like it, buy the game - we did!", or something in this context.
Knowing this, I in the past added a section to the readme of my games, stating that If people manage to bypass the copy protection by their own skills (and not by using a crack they find online), I'd honor that, and they have my ok to keep the game, as long as they tell me, how they did it, and don't share the crack. I actually did get a cracker emailing me, describing exactly the shortcomings of my copy protection.
Moral: you wasted two weeks of your life writing ineffective copy protection that does nothing to slow down pirates but inconveniences any customers you might have. Why?
A protection which can/will be cracked (in other words any protection) is econimcally still better then no protection. I, too made a living from small shareware games, and I could definitely see a huge difference in sales between having no protection at all ("please pay if you like this"), and having some simple protection which got cracked (registration codes).
I can't find it online right now, but I once read a very interesting article on this. Somebody made a shareware application, which would randomly decide whether to use no protection at all, just nagging, or reduced features until registered at installation. I don't remember the exact results, but the "no protection" version sold something like 5 times less then the others.
he meant guessing the center of earth each time. That will usually get you a distance of ~6378km from any photo location.