If Microsoft makes applications and file formats that only work on windows, everyone screams "monopoly" and "antitrust" If Microsoft does the complete opposite, makes applications for linux and even makes linux applications work on windows, people scream "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish".
Seriously, is there something that Microsoft can do that won't be perceived as evil?
To clarify, it is not donations I am relying on. It is vanity items. People buy wings, hats, or other accessories for their characters. These vanity items have no effect on any stats, they are purely cosmetic and are not required to perform any task in the game.
I might also add a few convenience things, such as speeding a furnace with premium currency. I will drop premium currency randomly as part of the game.
There is nothing at all you would ever have to purchase to move forward, and you cannot level up or gain power by throwing money at it.
I might also rent servers for a subscription fee. You can rent a server and you will get to decide who gets to log in to that server. Completely optional because people can log in to public servers for free. This is also needed to cover the cost of running the servers themselves.
So I am trying to give a fun game to users for free, while being fair to myself and making some revenue to support development and grow further.
I know this is slashdot. I will probably be downvoted in flames as a capitalist pig. Still, I want to give you the scoop from this side:
I am currently making an MMO. I will have a few servers that people can connect to. Why don't I release a version of my server so people can run their own servers?
This is not my first game, and from experience I can tell you piracy is just rampant. By controlling the servers I don't have to worry about piracy anymore.
I can offer my game for free, which directly benefit my users, and support my game by having a built in vanity store. You can complete 100% of the game without paying a dime, but if you think those wings look pretty, fork a few bucks and support development. If I give the server away, I no longer have this revenue stream, and my servers will be competing with other people's servers and pirated servers. Thus it would be impossible for me to offer my game for free.
Now, Ideally the game will never die, I will keep developing it for ever. But let's say that it is not profitable, if I give away the code so people can run their own servers and I develop new games, I will end up competing with my own game. Worst, people will blame me for bugs, or their kids purchased something by accident. I will end up dragged into support even though I won't be making money.
Moreover, people might perceive my game as dead whether justified or not. They might decide to sue me to release the server. Now I have to deal with a lawsuit because I made a game.
So yes, forcing me to give away my servers now or in the future will hurt me.
Which makes you wonder if this is actually a flaw. A flaw is where something does not work the way it was designed to work.
It is working as designed.
The problem is that the design is bad to begin with.
So it is a flaw. To be specific: it is a design flaw.
Meltdown and Spectre are basically a brand new type of attack. Speculation works fine, out of order works fine, cache works fine, each was most likely designed by different teams, and each one works as designed. It never occurred to anyone that the way these features worked together could be exploited to leak privileged information.
The assumption here is that with longer release cycles there will be less bugs.
This just does not follow at all. You may think "but they would have more time to fix bugs", sure, but they will also have more time to add new bugs. Every new feature will have a corresponding number of bugs, having larger releases means having more features per release. Maybe you think "keep the amount of features the same just do more testing" sure, but they can do that with smaller releases as well.
If a company releases every 2 years, that means that a bug will be sitting there unpatched for 2 whole years. The new release may fix all those bugs, but it will also introduce a whole set of new bugs that will stay there for 2 more years. If the same company releases every month, then the worst bugs will be squashed within a month or two. The bugs that survive longer are the low priority ones. By having frequent releases and prioritizing the defects properly, the same company can keep a higher overall quality.
A customer may decide to upgrade only every 2 years, in which case, the customer is not affected by how many releases are made, so they are not worst off.
If you do software development right, the real question is not "is the software ready to be shipped?". Your software should ideally always be ready to be shipped. The real question is "which features are ready to be shipped", you would simply merge the features that are ready and tested. Anything that is half baked will be left for future releases. This model decouples release cycle and quality. The quality question then becomes an issue of how much testing each individual feature has (automated testing FTW).
I seriously doubt Vagg would give a rat's ass for Tourette's Syndrome. He is not trying to defend some minority here. He posted a link to that article because he does not like the code of conduct he is so often criticized for violating.
Apparently there is a whole set of incidents involving Vagg that people are upset about. There is nothing in the article itself that is offensive. It is about him dismissing the code of conduct people call him on.
Citing that tweet as a code of conduct violation makes the SJW look bad. Throwing the label "Men's Rights Activist" at that article is a red herring.
40% of the people agreed with the SJWs
It is so much more complicated than that. That 40% is just 4 people (there are only 10 in the TSC). It boils down to 6 vs 4 votes in favor of keeping one of their own in place, which makes it look like favoritism. The question is how would that vote go if they were voting on a random developer that is not member of the TSC.
I agree with you the post makes it look like a SJW gone wild. But the actual situation is more complicated.
A girl that has too much food available, takes a plane for an event celebrating her artistic performance. But ohh no, she now has to go shopping because her luggage will be a day late.
That is the definition of first world problem.
Meanwhile children starve in Africa and nobody bats an eye.
X11's main flaw is that it's supposed to be inefficient.
It's so much more than just inefficient.
First the there is the security issue. X securityisinexistent. The problem in the last link is by design and it is simply unfixable.
X is big, as in really big, old, poorly written and it typically runs as root. Any buffer overflow or unchecked parameter is a potential privilege escalation vulnerability. Do yourself a favor and don't that dinosaur in your servers.
X is bloated. It has stuff in there like font rendering, drawing primitives, printers, mode setting, dozens of extensions and things that nobody uses. Nowadays, toolkits render their own fonts, and manage their own windows and essentially hand over a large image to the X server. The X server does not even render the image, it handles it to the compositor. X does not set the video mode, the kernel does that. X does not handle keyboard and mouse, it sends the data to the compositor, the compositor tells which window should receive the input and X sends the input event to the corresponding application. In short all X does nowadays is IPC, and there are millions of lines of code just sitting there doing nothing right next to this IPC.
It turns out that it is even terrible at IPC. An application does hundreds of requests to the X server just to display a simple window. You know what the worst case is for that? yeap, remote display. All the back and forth is really disastrous over a slow connection like the internet.
People say network transparent. Well, more like network capable. DRI does not work over the network at all.
Something supported by Mac OS X and Windows for decades like VSync so your don't see tearing is not doable in X.org, there is no way to wait for a screen refresh or prevent X.org from rendering your partially drawn window even with double buffering.
I am guessing you embrace the unix philosophy? if so, what is the one thing X does and how is it doing it well?
Heck, the wayland developers are the same X.org developers. They did miracles to keep X.org alive for so long, but they are moving on to greener pastures.
I would highly recommend this talk by Daniel Stone. He does an excellent job explaining why X.org is obsolete and unfixable.
I am not sure how I could "throw users under the bus" replying to customers. The worst I could possibly do is not give refunds (I do give refunds when asked, a couple bucks here and there are not worth fighting for). But that is off topic because people do send emails when they want a refund.
I have been contacted by companies selling 5 stars reviews. You pay them and they guarantee X number of 5 star reviews. I don't care whether it is legal or not, as a matter of principle I don't buy reviews. But again, it is off topic because we are talking about responding to customers.
Yes, of course I want to help my users, I put a lot of effort into my game and I care whether people enjoy it or not. I am simply pointing out that there is also an economic incentive to be respectful and helpful when replying.
If you don't have a really easy way to get you a support message before they even think of dropping a one-star review, then you have only yourself to blame for one-star reviews.
I provide email, forum, website, and even chat which I link to within the app. Still many users prefer to just ask a question in a review. There is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I don't blame the users, they expect an answer to their review, I just want to meet them where they want to be met.
I have responded to thousands of reviews in google play for my app. Sometimes users just want to know that I am reading what they post, sometimes users don't know how to do something, sometimes they want more features, sometimes they want to report a bug, sometimes they just want to curse at someone.
Whatever the case may be, from the perspective of a developer, responding to a customer has 1 objective: turning that 1 star to a 5 star. This means a developer has a powerful incentive to be polite and helpful to customers. There is absolutely nothing to gain by being rude to customers so Apple is not "protecting" them.
My customers are frustrated because they get no help and they don't know whether I am listening. I get frustrated because I could easily help my customers if I had a way to reach them.
This was my #1 beef with iTunes and I am glad that Apple is finally adding that feature.
WSL is better than cygwin. It is a lot faster and it has apt-get instead of that dreadful install wizard that cygwin has.
However, the console in windows is stuck in the 80's. It is the same DOS command prompt that we saw in windows 3.1. The terminal emulators in linux or macOS support multiple tabs, text selection that reaches the end of the line instead of a rectangular shape, split panes, your default directory is your home directory.
Now someone will raise their hand and say "PowerShell ISE". It looks promising, but at this point it is unusable because console programs cannot read input in PowerShell ISE
Until they have a console from this century, WSL is worth using only when you don't have linux or macOS available.
In pretty much any other language, you already indent your code to represent blocks. If you don't, it because very hard to read whether there are curly braces or not.
When I first started learning python I also had a knee jerk reaction to the indentation thing, especially because I had used fortran before and I hated it. But after writing a few lines of code, you quickly realize that the indentation is not an issue at all. I was already going through the trouble of properly indenting all my code in C++, java, perl, etc..., so removing the curly braces did not make any difference. They are in fact redundant.
That said, there are a couple annoyances related to the indentation (pretty minor in my opinion): If you try to embed python inside a template tool, like how you do in php or embedding java inside jsp, then it really gets in the way. If you sometimes use tabs and sometimes use spaces, it can get in the way. It is best to use an IDE that will enforce tabs or spaces but never mix them.
The burden of proof is on the person doing the accusation.
It is not up to Zuckerberg to show that facebook did not influence the elections. It is up to the people accusing facebook to show that the fake news influenced the elections.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft makes applications and file formats that only work on windows, everyone screams "monopoly" and "antitrust"
If Microsoft does the complete opposite, makes applications for linux and even makes linux applications work on windows, people scream "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish".
Seriously, is there something that Microsoft can do that won't be perceived as evil?
To clarify, it is not donations I am relying on. It is vanity items. People buy wings, hats, or other accessories for their characters. These vanity items have no effect on any stats, they are purely cosmetic and are not required to perform any task in the game.
I might also add a few convenience things, such as speeding a furnace with premium currency. I will drop premium currency randomly as part of the game.
There is nothing at all you would ever have to purchase to move forward, and you cannot level up or gain power by throwing money at it.
I might also rent servers for a subscription fee. You can rent a server and you will get to decide who gets to log in to that server. Completely optional because people can log in to public servers for free. This is also needed to cover the cost of running the servers themselves.
So I am trying to give a fun game to users for free, while being fair to myself and making some revenue to support development and grow further.
I know this is slashdot. I will probably be downvoted in flames as a capitalist pig. Still, I want to give you the scoop from this side:
I am currently making an MMO. I will have a few servers that people can connect to.
Why don't I release a version of my server so people can run their own servers?
This is not my first game, and from experience I can tell you piracy is just rampant. By controlling the servers I don't have to worry about piracy anymore.
I can offer my game for free, which directly benefit my users, and support my game by having a built in vanity store. You can complete 100% of the game without paying a dime, but if you think those wings look pretty, fork a few bucks and support development. If I give the server away, I no longer have this revenue stream, and my servers will be competing with other people's servers and pirated servers. Thus it would be impossible for me to offer my game for free.
Now, Ideally the game will never die, I will keep developing it for ever. But let's say that it is not profitable, if I give away the code so people can run their own servers and I develop new games, I will end up competing with my own game. Worst, people will blame me for bugs, or their kids purchased something by accident. I will end up dragged into support even though I won't be making money.
Moreover, people might perceive my game as dead whether justified or not. They might decide to sue me to release the server. Now I have to deal with a lawsuit because I made a game.
So yes, forcing me to give away my servers now or in the future will hurt me.
Which makes you wonder if this is actually a flaw. A flaw is where something does not work the way it was designed to work.
It is working as designed.
The problem is that the design is bad to begin with.
So it is a flaw. To be specific: it is a design flaw.
Meltdown and Spectre are basically a brand new type of attack. Speculation works fine, out of order works fine, cache works fine, each was most likely designed by different teams, and each one works as designed. It never occurred to anyone that the way these features worked together could be exploited to leak privileged information.
I am relieved for Brian Krzanich, Intel's CEO. He was lucky enough to sell all the stock he could right before this made the news:
https://www.fool.com/investing...
Otherwise God forbid, he would have lost a lot of money.
Nothing wrong with twice a day updates (we sometimes do even 3). But only if you have a comprehensive automated test suit.
If Agile means to you having less testing, you are doing it wrong.
To the contrary, the best thing you can do in agile and DevOps in general is add automated testing and run all the tests on every single commit.
The assumption here is that with longer release cycles there will be less bugs.
This just does not follow at all. You may think "but they would have more time to fix bugs", sure, but they will also have more time to add new bugs. Every new feature will have a corresponding number of bugs, having larger releases means having more features per release. Maybe you think "keep the amount of features the same just do more testing" sure, but they can do that with smaller releases as well.
If a company releases every 2 years, that means that a bug will be sitting there unpatched for 2 whole years. The new release may fix all those bugs, but it will also introduce a whole set of new bugs that will stay there for 2 more years. If the same company releases every month, then the worst bugs will be squashed within a month or two. The bugs that survive longer are the low priority ones. By having frequent releases and prioritizing the defects properly, the same company can keep a higher overall quality.
A customer may decide to upgrade only every 2 years, in which case, the customer is not affected by how many releases are made, so they are not worst off.
If you do software development right, the real question is not "is the software ready to be shipped?". Your software should ideally always be ready to be shipped. The real question is "which features are ready to be shipped", you would simply merge the features that are ready and tested. Anything that is half baked will be left for future releases. This model decouples release cycle and quality. The quality question then becomes an issue of how much testing each individual feature has (automated testing FTW).
I propose we give this bug a name: Superuser Login Absent Password, or SLAP for short.
"I don't care how much it costs because I'm spending taxpayer money"
And this ladies and gentlemen is precisely what is wrong with government.
I seriously doubt Vagg would give a rat's ass for Tourette's Syndrome. He is not trying to defend some minority here. He posted a link to that article because he does not like the code of conduct he is so often criticized for violating.
Apparently there is a whole set of incidents involving Vagg that people are upset about. There is nothing in the article itself that is offensive. It is about him dismissing the code of conduct people call him on.
Citing that tweet as a code of conduct violation makes the SJW look bad. Throwing the label "Men's Rights Activist" at that article is a red herring.
40% of the people agreed with the SJWs
It is so much more complicated than that. That 40% is just 4 people (there are only 10 in the TSC). It boils down to 6 vs 4 votes in favor of keeping one of their own in place, which makes it look like favoritism. The question is how would that vote go if they were voting on a random developer that is not member of the TSC.
I agree with you the post makes it look like a SJW gone wild. But the actual situation is more complicated.
A girl that has too much food available, takes a plane for an event celebrating her artistic performance. But ohh no, she now has to go shopping because her luggage will be a day late.
That is the definition of first world problem.
Meanwhile children starve in Africa and nobody bats an eye.
Moreover, why is this crap in Slashdot ?
This is ground breaking and truly innovative.
Who cares about having multiple tabs or unicode? The reason why millions switched to mac os x was that the blue in the console was too dark.
X11's main flaw is that it's supposed to be inefficient.
It's so much more than just inefficient.
First the there is the security issue. X security is inexistent. The problem in the last link is by design and it is simply unfixable.
X is big, as in really big, old, poorly written and it typically runs as root. Any buffer overflow or unchecked parameter is a potential privilege escalation vulnerability. Do yourself a favor and don't that dinosaur in your servers.
X is bloated. It has stuff in there like font rendering, drawing primitives, printers, mode setting, dozens of extensions and things that nobody uses. Nowadays, toolkits render their own fonts, and manage their own windows and essentially hand over a large image to the X server. The X server does not even render the image, it handles it to the compositor. X does not set the video mode, the kernel does that. X does not handle keyboard and mouse, it sends the data to the compositor, the compositor tells which window should receive the input and X sends the input event to the corresponding application. In short all X does nowadays is IPC, and there are millions of lines of code just sitting there doing nothing right next to this IPC.
It turns out that it is even terrible at IPC. An application does hundreds of requests to the X server just to display a simple window. You know what the worst case is for that? yeap, remote display. All the back and forth is really disastrous over a slow connection like the internet.
People say network transparent. Well, more like network capable. DRI does not work over the network at all.
Something supported by Mac OS X and Windows for decades like VSync so your don't see tearing is not doable in X.org, there is no way to wait for a screen refresh or prevent X.org from rendering your partially drawn window even with double buffering.
I am guessing you embrace the unix philosophy? if so, what is the one thing X does and how is it doing it well?
Heck, the wayland developers are the same X.org developers. They did miracles to keep X.org alive for so long, but they are moving on to greener pastures.
I would highly recommend this talk by Daniel Stone. He does an excellent job explaining why X.org is obsolete and unfixable.
I am not sure how I could "throw users under the bus" replying to customers. The worst I could possibly do is not give refunds (I do give refunds when asked, a couple bucks here and there are not worth fighting for). But that is off topic because people do send emails when they want a refund.
I have been contacted by companies selling 5 stars reviews. You pay them and they guarantee X number of 5 star reviews. I don't care whether it is legal or not, as a matter of principle I don't buy reviews. But again, it is off topic because we are talking about responding to customers.
Yes, of course I want to help my users, I put a lot of effort into my game and I care whether people enjoy it or not. I am simply pointing out that there is also an economic incentive to be respectful and helpful when replying.
I do provide a link in the app to my page, I provide forums, email, and even chat.
People still like to leave reviews and ask questions there. There is nothing wrong with that. I just want to meet people where they want to be met.
If you don't have a really easy way to get you a support message before they even think of dropping a one-star review, then you have only yourself to blame for one-star reviews.
I provide email, forum, website, and even chat which I link to within the app. Still many users prefer to just ask a question in a review. There is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I don't blame the users, they expect an answer to their review, I just want to meet them where they want to be met.
> responding to a customer has 1 objective: turning that 1 star to a 5 star.
I prefer the developers that respond because they actually want to help...
That is one and the same objective, the best way to get a 5 star is to help.
Customers usually just leave a review asking a question instead of emailing. There is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
I have responded to thousands of reviews in google play for my app. Sometimes users just want to know that I am reading what they post, sometimes users don't know how to do something, sometimes they want more features, sometimes they want to report a bug, sometimes they just want to curse at someone.
Whatever the case may be, from the perspective of a developer, responding to a customer has 1 objective: turning that 1 star to a 5 star. This means a developer has a powerful incentive to be polite and helpful to customers. There is absolutely nothing to gain by being rude to customers so Apple is not "protecting" them.
My customers are frustrated because they get no help and they don't know whether I am listening. I get frustrated because I could easily help my customers if I had a way to reach them.
This was my #1 beef with iTunes and I am glad that Apple is finally adding that feature.
WSL is better than cygwin. It is a lot faster and it has apt-get instead of that dreadful install wizard that cygwin has.
However, the console in windows is stuck in the 80's. It is the same DOS command prompt that we saw in windows 3.1. The terminal emulators in linux or macOS support multiple tabs, text selection that reaches the end of the line instead of a rectangular shape, split panes, your default directory is your home directory.
Now someone will raise their hand and say "PowerShell ISE". It looks promising, but at this point it is unusable because console programs cannot read input in PowerShell ISE
Until they have a console from this century, WSL is worth using only when you don't have linux or macOS available.
They had a ThinkPad with a second physical screen before ... they tried it and found it wasn't what the consumers wanted
As any Razer engineer will tell you: the problem was that the ThinkPad did not have enough monitors.
In pretty much any other language, you already indent your code to represent blocks. If you don't, it because very hard to read whether there are curly braces or not.
When I first started learning python I also had a knee jerk reaction to the indentation thing, especially because I had used fortran before and I hated it. But after writing a few lines of code, you quickly realize that the indentation is not an issue at all. I was already going through the trouble of properly indenting all my code in C++, java, perl, etc..., so removing the curly braces did not make any difference. They are in fact redundant.
That said, there are a couple annoyances related to the indentation (pretty minor in my opinion):
If you try to embed python inside a template tool, like how you do in php or embedding java inside jsp, then it really gets in the way.
If you sometimes use tabs and sometimes use spaces, it can get in the way. It is best to use an IDE that will enforce tabs or spaces but never mix them.
Listening to folks yell into their phones passing by or in a restaurant is bad enough, imagine sitting next to one for an eight hour flight. :|
With no way to escape it.
Would almost be worth opening the door and jumping to your death from 30,000 feet. . . .
Sure it can be annoying. But if that is a reason to ban it, then we should be consistent and ban it on busses and trains too.
The burden of proof is on the person doing the accusation.
It is not up to Zuckerberg to show that facebook did not influence the elections.
It is up to the people accusing facebook to show that the fake news influenced the elections.