What I find intollerable is that their status page lies. I was pretty nervous on Saturday night, when I couldn't log into steam with my account, but my friend could login with his. I immediately imagined Valve mistakenly blowing up my account for cheating, or piracy, or some-such.
It would be nice if the "Steam Network Status" page would, you know, display the network status, instead of just displaying "online" through an outage.
Actually, exactly the opposite. DRM has no power without the DMCA to back it up. Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet, so you can really only have "effective" DRM in an environment where you're only legally allowed to decrypt things for specific uses.
It's pretty stupid when you think about it; "We'll give you encrypted content, and a key, but decrypting the content may or may not be illegal, depending on what you do with the content after you decrypt it". It's doubly pointless since copying it was illegal in the first place.
Looking at their screenshots (can't run it from work, I'm on an aging Solaris workstation), it appears that the "layers" pannel lists the layers backwards. And when I say "backwards", I don't mean "opposite from Photoshop", I mean backwards.
The whole point of layers is that you can stack them, so that you can see through a layer ON TOP to a layer ON THE BOTTOM. "On top" is generally synonymous with "above", not "below", and if you keep that mentality, you can view the layer window as a horizontal cross-section of your image.
This is, perhaps, a minor quibble (this is not going to make or break it for me), but it just jumpped out at me as being strange. I can't think why anyone would reverse the layer ordering except to make their software look "not-Photoshop"ish.
Admittedly the NYT article is extremely light on details (and those details don't show up until the end of the article), but from what it sounds like, the Google search tool sends a brief chunk of each search result, whether of local or network origin, to Google, so Google can display some ads.
These guys tricked the google search tool into sending that information somewhere else.
So, we have a "composition flaw", between two components; Google's search tool, and... uh... a Java attack script. Hmm...
The "flaw" here is that Google's search tool sends personal information to an external host, plain and simple. If I don't want a third party attacker seeing arbitrary parts of my hard drive's contents, I probably don't want Google seeing them either.
Welcome, and thank you for visiting. If you are here in search of the original "EA_spouse" article, you can find that here. The following is my update as of 12/15/2004.
So much has happened in the past month, I find it difficult to grasp. One essay written months ago set off a powderkeg of response, not just from the game industry but from the entire software development community. Truly, the power of the Internet is astounding, and all other things aside, we live in a positive age when so much information can be shared so easily and quickly.
The thing that lifted this up into public view, though, was not my essay so much as the response to it, so I will keep this brief. I have left the original essay and comments intact, and you can find them below. To supplement the original essay, I have organized my own comments and links to others' commentary into a FAQ. I have also put together a press page that links to all of the news stories related to this blog.
I am pleased and a little flabbergasted to announce that "EA: The Human Story" was nominated for Joel Spolsky's Best Software Essays of 2004. More details on this as they come.
I also would like to announce the initial inception of Gamewatch.org -- don't visit it yet, there's still nothing there. =) But there will be. It is my intent to start a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry. As much as I would like to extend this to the entire software industry, games are what I know, and where I need to stay right now. However, this project will be as open-source as I can possibly make it. All code written for the maintenance of the site will be available to the public, and all financial information for the organization (which will be a volunteer one) will likewise be made public. While GameWatch will occasionally run articles, its primary purpose will be to provide a reporting site where employees from any company in the industry can come to share their experiences. Our goal is to hold up and reward those companies that operate ethically, the better to ensure that top talent can seek out employment where they will be respected and best provided with the resources to do their jobs, namely family time, sleep, and sanity. Employees will be able to post anonymously or publically, as they so choose, and will also be offered an in-between option to register with the site but have only their testimonial posted, not their name or contact information. Registered testimonials will be given a greater weight than anonymous ones, but both options will be available. We will also provide forums for advice and discussion for all game industry affiliates, including existing employees, veterans, and aspiring students.
If you are interested in helping out with Gamewatch, please contact me with 'Gamewatch.org' or similar in your subject line. In particular, I would also like to announce a logo contest for Gamewatch. Simply, I'm looking for a one or two-color vector graphic (black with single-color highlighting, or simply black and white), approximately 200x200 pixels, on the GameWatch theme -- a couple of ideas we've tossed around are a caricature of an English Bulldog or Doberman Pinscher with a controller in its mouth, or some variant on an actual wristwatch theme, but do not by any means feel restricted by these suggestions. I will accept entries at ea_spouse@hotmail.com for one month, until January 15, 2005, and then a winner will be selected. I will pay the winner $20.00 -- $25.00 if the entry is provided in a standardized vector graphic format (Adobe Illustrator.ai, for instance). It isn't much, but it's what I've got -- and the artist will of course be credited on the GameWatch website.
For those interested in discussing Gamewatch.org as a concept and in its details, I have added a page here for that purpose.
All of this aside, the most important thing I have to say is -- thank you, to everyone who has visited this page, and especially t
Kyocera made about $2.7B US in profit last year. If they say "Our cell phones are dangerous", they'll loose sales. If they instead, let one or two people blow up every year, they only have to pay out a couple million in lawsuit damages each year. Do the math.
60 MPH is about 26.82 m/s. Divide that by 5.4 x 10^-9s, and you get a net acceleration of around 4.97x10^9 m/s^2. Acceleration due to gravity on Earth is about 9.8 m/s^2, so you're talking the equivalent of just a little over 500 million Gs.
You would quite litterally be "all over" the interior of that Mustang.
The article is quite light on details; is it just video sent over the firewire link, or is all car data sent by firewire? If it's the later, this could be quite an improvement. If you've ever had to pull out and reinstall a wiring harness, then you know you average car has 8 bazillion wires in it, all of which are unlabeled aside from some obscure color code. A single firewire jack on everything that needs data would be WAY nicer...
Of course, I doubt you could pull the requisite 15W to power brake lights from a firewire port.:P
You know, we did word processing before...
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to do word processing on a 4.77 MHz 8086, with a monochrome screen. It wasn't WYSIWYG, but it got the job done, and WordStar was quite quick and spritely. WordPerfect 5.1 ran just fine on all the machines in my highschool's lab, and they were, IIRC, 16 Mhz? (Possibly 8? It was a long time ago. They were IBM PS/2s, with MCGA graphics adapters.)
That could be electronic malfunction or the throttle cable could get stuck.
why can't you just shift into neutral and coast to a stop?
Some modern cars are "drive-by-wire". There is no physical connection between the shifter and the transmission, and there is no throttle cable to get stuck. Everything is under computer control. GM's HyWire concept car is a good example of this. Even the brakes are under computer control on the HyWire.
I don't know of any production cars are entirely drive-by-wire, but this may become a concern in the future. One would imagine that engineers would ensure these systems are each handled seperately, so that any single systems failure doesn't end with your car flying off the side of the road, but one can imagine all kinds of things which aren't true.
Now even if all those three items happened, what about your emergency break?
Here I CAN tell you that the Vel Satis is "drive-by-wire". The Vel Satis parking break is automatic, engaging when the car is turned off. The car has a small lever on the dash, which can be used to instruct the computer to manually engage the parking brake (Renault even notes
that the ABS will engage, so the parking brake can be used as an emergency brake to safely bring the car to a halt... Mind you, if the parking brake lever engages with full ABS, it probably uses the same hydraulic system as the plain-old-regular brakes, so its use as an "emergency" brake is questionable at best. I suppose in a "loss of foot" emergency it might come in handy...).
That link to the Renault page even makes a big deal about the lack of a hand brake. They put it in bold: "Since there is no handbrake lever, there is space for a large storage compartment between the seats."
I remember reading about a similar case several years ago.
IIRC (and this was a long time ago, so take all of this with a grain of salt), the car was on a US freeway. There was a woman driving, the accelerator got stuck to the floor. She tried to shut off the engine, and the key broke off in the ignition, so she tried to shift into neutral and the gear-shift failed in some catastrophic way. She called the police on her cell phone, and they tried to clear a path for her. Eventually she caught up to traffic and decided that she didn't want to hurt anyone else, so she intentionally went off the side of the road at over 120 mph. I remember that she survived more or less unscathed. If memory serves the car flipped and landed upside down in a large haystack.
I remember this pretty vividly, as this was when cell phones were still newish, and they made a big deal over how if she hadn't had a cell phone, the police would probably have tried to shoot her off the road. They also had a spokesman from the car company, who had some interesting numbers with respect to the odds of all of those components failing simultaneously, and it was pretty unreal.
Unfortunately, having pilots wear colored laser safety glasses would be impractical as that would make it impossible to interpret the colored symbols on paper maps and cockpit displays.
Why not make the glass of the cockpit windows out of laser safety glass? Or, have a "laser safety shield" that rolls down in front of the glass for landings?
This isn't much of a security threat. Most commercial airliners are quite capable of landing themselves without pilot intervention. Pilots are handy to have around when things go wrong (ILS is deflected, some kind of serious software problem, etc...) but otherwise the plane can land itself safely, and autopilot is frequently used to land planes today.
Really, if someone is pointing lasers at planes as they land, they're just being a bit of a jerk.
Ethernet port (no adapter required). Sony also says that there will be 120 new Playstation 2 games with online compatibility by the end of the year. That equates to thirty games per month or about one game per day for the rest of 2004.
Or, 120 games on Dec. 20th, ready for the xmas season.
You can't really measure "quality" with a benchmark. This is really a performance comparison of compilers, rather than a quality one.
Quality is usually defined as the number of delivered defects in a product, in this case the compiler. The only "quality" measurement comes from the fact that one of the produced executables generated a segfault. We have identified a single fault in one of the compilers. This is hardly an adequate sample size to determine the relative quality of either.
See, you say that, and I agree with you. I'm not going to keep every episode of "Six Feet Under" on my PVR, because then there'd be no room for anything else, and I actually like to, you know, record video on my personal video recorder.
On the other hand, this MUST be a business concern. Businesses don't spend time, money, and effort to secure these kinds of deals unless they see a return on that investment.
So either; 1) The content suppliers just "don't get it". They don't understand that this technology will ultimately benefit them, and not threaten thim.
Or, 2) *WE* don't get it. Something is going on here that we don't understand. This is some kind of tactical positioning and posturing.
A code review on "90% debugged" software that finds an error strikes me as more useful than a code review that finds several errors in 0% debugged software.
That may be what your intuition tells you, but you're wrong. That is the most expensive way to debug software.
When you find a defect in code inspect, you have your finger on it. You know exactly which line of code is faulty, and you know how it is faulty. Fixing it is trivial.
When you find a defect in unit test, you know which subsystem is at fault, but you may have to spend some time digging around to find the acutal problem and fix it.
When you find a defect in system test, you may not know anything about it. Your problem could exist anywhere inside your system, and it may take considerable time to track it down.
This is born out by statistics. In my particular large-nameless-software-company, we spend, on average, about an hour to fix a defect found in code inspect, about 1-2 days to fix a defect found in unit test, and about 3-4 days to fix a defect found in system test.
If I have 100 defects to remove, I'd rather spend 100 hours fixing them, than 400 days.
It's also much faster and easier to find defects in code inspect than in unit test or system test. You spend less effort to find a defect in code inpsect than you do in unit test.
Ideally, though, you want to remove your defects long before code inspect, in design inpections and requirements inspections. They are an order of magnitude cheaper yet to find in these stages.
System test, by the way, should never be used as a tool to remove defects. It is a method for verifying the quality of a system. Verify is an important word there. If you test your system, and your rate of defect discovery (vs. effort) is high, it is because your system is of very poor quality. If it is low, it is because your system is of very high quality. Either way, any "reasonable" ammount of system test effort will find a small fraction of the defects in your system. You should still fix any defects you find, of course, but if you find a lot, you're in trouble, and extra testing won't get you out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find intollerable is that their status page lies. I was pretty nervous on Saturday night, when I couldn't log into steam with my account, but my friend could login with his. I immediately imagined Valve mistakenly blowing up my account for cheating, or piracy, or some-such.
It would be nice if the "Steam Network Status" page would, you know, display the network status, instead of just displaying "online" through an outage.
Actually, exactly the opposite. DRM has no power without the DMCA to back it up. Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet, so you can really only have "effective" DRM in an environment where you're only legally allowed to decrypt things for specific uses.
It's pretty stupid when you think about it; "We'll give you encrypted content, and a key, but decrypting the content may or may not be illegal, depending on what you do with the content after you decrypt it". It's doubly pointless since copying it was illegal in the first place.
I'm glad I don't live in the USA.
Looking at their screenshots (can't run it from work, I'm on an aging Solaris workstation), it appears that the "layers" pannel lists the layers backwards. And when I say "backwards", I don't mean "opposite from Photoshop", I mean backwards.
The whole point of layers is that you can stack them, so that you can see through a layer ON TOP to a layer ON THE BOTTOM. "On top" is generally synonymous with "above", not "below", and if you keep that mentality, you can view the layer window as a horizontal cross-section of your image.
This is, perhaps, a minor quibble (this is not going to make or break it for me), but it just jumpped out at me as being strange. I can't think why anyone would reverse the layer ordering except to make their software look "not-Photoshop"ish.
Remember kids, bicycles WANT to be free.
Admittedly the NYT article is extremely light on details (and those details don't show up until the end of the article), but from what it sounds like, the Google search tool sends a brief chunk of each search result, whether of local or network origin, to Google, so Google can display some ads.
These guys tricked the google search tool into sending that information somewhere else.
So, we have a "composition flaw", between two components; Google's search tool, and... uh... a Java attack script. Hmm...
The "flaw" here is that Google's search tool sends personal information to an external host, plain and simple. If I don't want a third party attacker seeing arbitrary parts of my hard drive's contents, I probably don't want Google seeing them either.
Welcome, and thank you for visiting. If you are here in search of the original "EA_spouse" article, you can find that here. The following is my update as of 12/15/2004.
.ai, for instance). It isn't much, but it's what I've got -- and the artist will of course be credited on the GameWatch website.
So much has happened in the past month, I find it difficult to grasp. One essay written months ago set off a powderkeg of response, not just from the game industry but from the entire software development community. Truly, the power of the Internet is astounding, and all other things aside, we live in a positive age when so much information can be shared so easily and quickly.
The thing that lifted this up into public view, though, was not my essay so much as the response to it, so I will keep this brief. I have left the original essay and comments intact, and you can find them below. To supplement the original essay, I have organized my own comments and links to others' commentary into a FAQ. I have also put together a press page that links to all of the news stories related to this blog.
I am pleased and a little flabbergasted to announce that "EA: The Human Story" was nominated for Joel Spolsky's Best Software Essays of 2004. More details on this as they come.
I also would like to announce the initial inception of Gamewatch.org -- don't visit it yet, there's still nothing there. =) But there will be. It is my intent to start a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry. As much as I would like to extend this to the entire software industry, games are what I know, and where I need to stay right now. However, this project will be as open-source as I can possibly make it. All code written for the maintenance of the site will be available to the public, and all financial information for the organization (which will be a volunteer one) will likewise be made public. While GameWatch will occasionally run articles, its primary purpose will be to provide a reporting site where employees from any company in the industry can come to share their experiences. Our goal is to hold up and reward those companies that operate ethically, the better to ensure that top talent can seek out employment where they will be respected and best provided with the resources to do their jobs, namely family time, sleep, and sanity. Employees will be able to post anonymously or publically, as they so choose, and will also be offered an in-between option to register with the site but have only their testimonial posted, not their name or contact information. Registered testimonials will be given a greater weight than anonymous ones, but both options will be available. We will also provide forums for advice and discussion for all game industry affiliates, including existing employees, veterans, and aspiring students.
If you are interested in helping out with Gamewatch, please contact me with 'Gamewatch.org' or similar in your subject line. In particular, I would also like to announce a logo contest for Gamewatch. Simply, I'm looking for a one or two-color vector graphic (black with single-color highlighting, or simply black and white), approximately 200x200 pixels, on the GameWatch theme -- a couple of ideas we've tossed around are a caricature of an English Bulldog or Doberman Pinscher with a controller in its mouth, or some variant on an actual wristwatch theme, but do not by any means feel restricted by these suggestions. I will accept entries at ea_spouse@hotmail.com for one month, until January 15, 2005, and then a winner will be selected. I will pay the winner $20.00 -- $25.00 if the entry is provided in a standardized vector graphic format (Adobe Illustrator
For those interested in discussing Gamewatch.org as a concept and in its details, I have added a page here for that purpose.
All of this aside, the most important thing I have to say is -- thank you, to everyone who has visited this page, and especially t
DOH! I am teh sux0r.
Fixed.
The T-Shirt
Kyocera made about $2.7B US in profit last year. If they say "Our cell phones are dangerous", they'll loose sales. If they instead, let one or two people blow up every year, they only have to pay out a couple million in lawsuit damages each year. Do the math.
Imagine, Canadians in space. What a crazy idea.
Imagine if they put Canadian made parts on the shuttle or ISS.
Well, according to Alexa, slashdot's going to win. Of course, PA does have some impressive servers, and I doubt everyone will click-through...
And, the Flash is faster. I mean, c'mon. He's the FLASH.
60 MPH is about 26.82 m/s. Divide that by 5.4 x 10^-9s, and you get a net acceleration of around 4.97x10^9 m/s^2. Acceleration due to gravity on Earth is about 9.8 m/s^2, so you're talking the equivalent of just a little over 500 million Gs.
You would quite litterally be "all over" the interior of that Mustang.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Firewall-Piercing/
There's even a tool for automating the process.
The article is quite light on details; is it just video sent over the firewire link, or is all car data sent by firewire? If it's the later, this could be quite an improvement. If you've ever had to pull out and reinstall a wiring harness, then you know you average car has 8 bazillion wires in it, all of which are unlabeled aside from some obscure color code. A single firewire jack on everything that needs data would be WAY nicer...
:P
Of course, I doubt you could pull the requisite 15W to power brake lights from a firewire port.
I used to do word processing on a 4.77 MHz 8086, with a monochrome screen. It wasn't WYSIWYG, but it got the job done, and WordStar was quite quick and spritely. WordPerfect 5.1 ran just fine on all the machines in my highschool's lab, and they were, IIRC, 16 Mhz? (Possibly 8? It was a long time ago. They were IBM PS/2s, with MCGA graphics adapters.)
Kids these days...
Seth Schoen's notes are mirrored here.
That could be electronic malfunction or the throttle cable could get stuck.
why can't you just shift into neutral and coast to a stop?
Some modern cars are "drive-by-wire". There is no physical connection between the shifter and the transmission, and there is no throttle cable to get stuck. Everything is under computer control. GM's HyWire concept car is a good example of this. Even the brakes are under computer control on the HyWire.
I don't know of any production cars are entirely drive-by-wire, but this may become a concern in the future. One would imagine that engineers would ensure these systems are each handled seperately, so that any single systems failure doesn't end with your car flying off the side of the road, but one can imagine all kinds of things which aren't true.
Now even if all those three items happened, what about your emergency break?
Here I CAN tell you that the Vel Satis is "drive-by-wire". The Vel Satis parking break is automatic, engaging when the car is turned off. The car has a small lever on the dash, which can be used to instruct the computer to manually engage the parking brake (Renault even notes that the ABS will engage, so the parking brake can be used as an emergency brake to safely bring the car to a halt... Mind you, if the parking brake lever engages with full ABS, it probably uses the same hydraulic system as the plain-old-regular brakes, so its use as an "emergency" brake is questionable at best. I suppose in a "loss of foot" emergency it might come in handy...).
That link to the Renault page even makes a big deal about the lack of a hand brake. They put it in bold: "Since there is no handbrake lever, there is space for a large storage compartment between the seats."
I remember reading about a similar case several years ago.
IIRC (and this was a long time ago, so take all of this with a grain of salt), the car was on a US freeway. There was a woman driving, the accelerator got stuck to the floor. She tried to shut off the engine, and the key broke off in the ignition, so she tried to shift into neutral and the gear-shift failed in some catastrophic way. She called the police on her cell phone, and they tried to clear a path for her. Eventually she caught up to traffic and decided that she didn't want to hurt anyone else, so she intentionally went off the side of the road at over 120 mph. I remember that she survived more or less unscathed. If memory serves the car flipped and landed upside down in a large haystack.
I remember this pretty vividly, as this was when cell phones were still newish, and they made a big deal over how if she hadn't had a cell phone, the police would probably have tried to shoot her off the road. They also had a spokesman from the car company, who had some interesting numbers with respect to the odds of all of those components failing simultaneously, and it was pretty unreal.
Unfortunately, having pilots wear colored laser safety glasses would be impractical as that would make it impossible to interpret the colored symbols on paper maps and cockpit displays.
Why not make the glass of the cockpit windows out of laser safety glass? Or, have a "laser safety shield" that rolls down in front of the glass for landings?
This isn't much of a security threat. Most commercial airliners are quite capable of landing themselves without pilot intervention. Pilots are handy to have around when things go wrong (ILS is deflected, some kind of serious software problem, etc...) but otherwise the plane can land itself safely, and autopilot is frequently used to land planes today.
Really, if someone is pointing lasers at planes as they land, they're just being a bit of a jerk.
Ethernet port (no adapter required). Sony also says that there will be 120 new Playstation 2 games with online compatibility by the end of the year. That equates to thirty games per month or about one game per day for the rest of 2004.
Or, 120 games on Dec. 20th, ready for the xmas season.
While we're picking appart semantics...
You can't really measure "quality" with a benchmark. This is really a performance comparison of compilers, rather than a quality one.
Quality is usually defined as the number of delivered defects in a product, in this case the compiler. The only "quality" measurement comes from the fact that one of the produced executables generated a segfault. We have identified a single fault in one of the compilers. This is hardly an adequate sample size to determine the relative quality of either.
You can find Dmitry (the inventor's) webpage here. Lots of interesting stuff, including some interesting facial recognition and tracking work.
> "Business concerns" my ass.
See, you say that, and I agree with you. I'm not going to keep every episode of "Six Feet Under" on my PVR, because then there'd be no room for anything else, and I actually like to, you know, record video on my personal video recorder.
On the other hand, this MUST be a business concern. Businesses don't spend time, money, and effort to secure these kinds of deals unless they see a return on that investment.
So either; 1) The content suppliers just "don't get it". They don't understand that this technology will ultimately benefit them, and not threaten thim.
Or, 2) *WE* don't get it. Something is going on here that we don't understand. This is some kind of tactical positioning and posturing.
That may be what your intuition tells you, but you're wrong. That is the most expensive way to debug software.
When you find a defect in code inspect, you have your finger on it. You know exactly which line of code is faulty, and you know how it is faulty. Fixing it is trivial.
When you find a defect in unit test, you know which subsystem is at fault, but you may have to spend some time digging around to find the acutal problem and fix it.
When you find a defect in system test, you may not know anything about it. Your problem could exist anywhere inside your system, and it may take considerable time to track it down.
This is born out by statistics. In my particular large-nameless-software-company, we spend, on average, about an hour to fix a defect found in code inspect, about 1-2 days to fix a defect found in unit test, and about 3-4 days to fix a defect found in system test.
If I have 100 defects to remove, I'd rather spend 100 hours fixing them, than 400 days.
It's also much faster and easier to find defects in code inspect than in unit test or system test. You spend less effort to find a defect in code inpsect than you do in unit test.
Ideally, though, you want to remove your defects long before code inspect, in design inpections and requirements inspections. They are an order of magnitude cheaper yet to find in these stages.
System test, by the way, should never be used as a tool to remove defects. It is a method for verifying the quality of a system. Verify is an important word there. If you test your system, and your rate of defect discovery (vs. effort) is high, it is because your system is of very poor quality. If it is low, it is because your system is of very high quality. Either way, any "reasonable" ammount of system test effort will find a small fraction of the defects in your system. You should still fix any defects you find, of course, but if you find a lot, you're in trouble, and extra testing won't get you out of it.
I do not think that a man such as Jobs would ever let minor concerns such as sound engineering or the laws of physics get in the way of his vision.