Maybe you should calm down and simply laugh at people that have no idea what they are saying, instead of pointlessly screaming at them. They don't CARE or they'd have made sure they had it right the first time.
Did I seem as though I was screaming at the author? I was observing that he had made a typo but that it actually made a lot of sense (as I said in my post). I found this funny, but maybe I should have put a smiley so that everyone would have got it.
The AMD guys certainly don't seem to be sure that AMD64 satisfies this. See this trail.
Further, I suspect that none of the processors support atomic writes of 64-bit values that are not aligned on an 8-byte boundary. If your code has not been written to ensure that values are always on appropriate boundaries (and it's very easy to get this wrong, even if you're aware of the issue), this will probably bite you. At work, we run a lot of software on both Intel and Sparc processors. It is far from unusual to hit SIGBUS exceptions on Sparc because code was written from Intel processors and doesn't worry about writing to unaligned addresses.
The simple fact that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers despite reverse-engineering demonstrates the level of complexity involved.
While I don't disagree with most of your post, I don't think you appreciate just how hard reverse-engineering a graphics driver is. I would suggest that the main reason that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers is primarily because they've had to reverse-engineer it.
and no, everything isn't going to compress 25x, but everything will compress some. There are repeated bitstreams in everything. a 64bit string has a finite number of patterns.
Yes, a 64-bit string has 2^64 different "patterns". Instead of storing the pattern itself, you could just store an identifier for the pattern, and that would only require log_2(2^64) bits.
Presumably you're using the open-source drivers developed at r300.sf.net (although now merged into X.org, I think)?
I've been considering switching to a Radeon card and using these drivers. It would be great to know how well you found them to work. In particular, how stable are they and how does their performance compare to the official drivers?
IANAL. I agree with most of your comment, but I believe the following is wrong.
If LAME was interested in going after the copyright infrigement, they would have to go and sue the company that licensed the software to Sony. Even though Sony might know that LAME was in rootkit, they can always play dumb, and would probably do so.
Since Sony was the company making the copies, Sony would be guilty of copyright infringement. Therefore, the LAME maintainers could sue Sony.
Sony would probably then sue F4I for licensing them a product which had LAME code in, but this would be a separate lawsuit.
"The server is the program which manages the shared ressource."
I think the fundamental confusion on this issue is the definition of "service". Your definition of server implies that the service must be access to a shared resource. This definition fits for X, but not for other situations.
Consider "application servers". In this case, the server is where the applications are run and the client is where the user interacts with it. The "service" in this case is use of the application itself. Could you not argue that the X clients are application servers and that the X server is actually an application server client?
I agree that this isn't the terminology that is used for X, but I think this decision is purely based on what the X concept of "service" is.
Matt
Re:Why is this even a question anymore?
on
RockStar Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Professionally, I write networking software. I have worked on open-source games, but never commercial ones.
In an ideal world, minigames would be completely isolated from core engine code. However, is that the case in the real world?
You mention that the minigame would probably share some APIs with the main game. I agree. How clean would these APIs be? Might the minigame need extra APIs, since it has different function from the main game? Possibly. Would you remove these APIs? Your post suggests not.
So, you now have a program with no have_sex_with_girlfriend_minigame() function but your engine still has a commit_lewd_act() API. How long before someone hacks their savegame to expose this function?
My example is almost certainly oversimplified, I know. I have no idea how well GTA's codebase is organized... but neither, I imagine, have you.
As I said before, I write networking software. If we want to ship a product without some function, it would be very unusual for us to comment (or #if, or whatever) out the code that implements the function. We will pretty much always simply disable the ability to configure the function. This is much simpler and much less error-prone. The only exception would be if the function (even when disabled) had significant memory or performance implications.
Essentially, I still think you're being naive about how easy it would be to actually remove support for this function, particularly when a serious bug in a release as big as GTA:SA could put a huge dent in their profits. Why risk it?
Matt
Re:Why is this even a question anymore?
on
RockStar Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Imagine that Rockstar had intended to include this in the game and then decided against it a few weeks before the release. I think this is a possible scenario.
They would have to be insane to "comment out" the code that implemented it. Even in a well-organized project (which games generally aren't), the potential for introducing bugs would be large. Why risk this when you could simply stop players from accessing the content?
I'm not saying that this is what happened, but I think your comment to just "comment out" the code is very naive.
No, but (from your link) it does "change its structure and design, and remove dead code, to make it easier for human maintenance in the future."
Refactoring might be a sensible thing to do during the two weeks between the first and second phases of the competition.
Having said that, from my (limited) experience, you tend to need less refactoring in functional programming languages than in imperative (or object-oriented) languages.
This is true, although 3b says "Accompany it with a written offer... to give any third party... a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code".
It sounds as though the the original troll^W poster doesn't want to have to give the source to anyone outside the company.
(It's also possible that I've misinterpreted this and it actually means that the offer is made only to the receivers, but they could ask the distributor to give the source to a third party. Any thoughts?)
Matt
To save anyone else looking it up, the GPL is here.
Uh, no. There is no gray - it is very much black and white.
I'm not a lawyer. I suspect you aren't either.
As I understand the situation, the author of the website wrote new text but copied many of the images. The parody was of Walmart's website's text, not the images.
How much is covered under parody? Does section 107 permit copying of images that are not parody but are related to content that is?
I don't know. Do you?
I'm not suggesting that Walmart's lawyers are right or that the courts would uphold their complaint but I suspect the law is not as black-and-white as you suggest.
In the US, I understand that corporations have most of the rights that individuals have. However, they have additional benefits, such as limited liability.
Sorry, I might not have been clear. I was referring to the frequent small patches rather than something like SP2.
As I understand it, Micosoft produces a large number of ongoing patches. There's some software (Windows Update?) that determines which of these patches you need and downloads them from the Internet.
If you know the patch number, you can download these individually as EXEs. You could then burn them onto CD, as you suggest.
However, how do you determine which patches you need without having a connection to the Internet?
You say "if your windows machine isn't on the internet then surely the patches dont matter _as much_ anyhow". Surely the same argument can be applied to Linux? Why does it need to be patched?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should calm down and simply laugh at people that have no idea what they are saying, instead of pointlessly screaming at them. They don't CARE or they'd have made sure they had it right the first time.
Did I seem as though I was screaming at the author? I was observing that he had made a typo but that it actually made a lot of sense (as I said in my post). I found this funny, but maybe I should have put a smiley so that everyone would have got it.
Matt
<grammar-nazi>
On his development box, he used to keep the source code to unpublished exploits in his home directory that effected the current version of sendmail.
So the unpublished exploits actually brought about the current version of sendmail? That explains quite a lot actually.
Here is a description of the difference between "effect" and "affect."
</grammar-nazi>
The AMD guys certainly don't seem to be sure that AMD64 satisfies this. See this trail.
Further, I suspect that none of the processors support atomic writes of 64-bit values that are not aligned on an 8-byte boundary. If your code has not been written to ensure that values are always on appropriate boundaries (and it's very easy to get this wrong, even if you're aware of the issue), this will probably bite you. At work, we run a lot of software on both Intel and Sparc processors. It is far from unusual to hit SIGBUS exceptions on Sparc because code was written from Intel processors and doesn't worry about writing to unaligned addresses.
Matt
You can get a similar result with the PS2's dance mat controller.
It's quite fun after you've had a few beers.
Matt
The simple fact that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers despite reverse-engineering demonstrates the level of complexity involved.
While I don't disagree with most of your post, I don't think you appreciate just how hard reverse-engineering a graphics driver is. I would suggest that the main reason that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers is primarily because they've had to reverse-engineer it.
Matt
FYI, I believe there's going to be a Power Stone Collection release for the PSP which includes Power Stone 1 and 2.
Matt
and no, everything isn't going to compress 25x, but everything will compress some. There are repeated bitstreams in everything. a 64bit string has a finite number of patterns.
Yes, a 64-bit string has 2^64 different "patterns". Instead of storing the pattern itself, you could just store an identifier for the pattern, and that would only require log_2(2^64) bits.
Oh wait...
Thanks for your response.
It sounds like I should hold off for the moment, or at least treat it as a project if I do decide to upgrade.
Cheers,
Matt
This is very OT...
Presumably you're using the open-source drivers developed at r300.sf.net (although now merged into X.org, I think)?
I've been considering switching to a Radeon card and using these drivers. It would be great to know how well you found them to work. In particular, how stable are they and how does their performance compare to the official drivers?
Thanks,
Matt
IANAL. I agree with most of your comment, but I believe the following is wrong.
If LAME was interested in going after the copyright infrigement, they would have to go and sue the company that licensed the software to Sony. Even though Sony might know that LAME was in rootkit, they can always play dumb, and would probably do so.Since Sony was the company making the copies, Sony would be guilty of copyright infringement. Therefore, the LAME maintainers could sue Sony.
Sony would probably then sue F4I for licensing them a product which had LAME code in, but this would be a separate lawsuit.
Matt
I play PS1 games a lot on my PS2. There are three main reasons.
- There are some great games for the PS1 that didn't come out for PS2, e.g. MGS1.
- Second-hand PS1 games are dirt-cheap (£2-£3) and, assuming you pick sensibly, can be a lot of fun.
- My girlfriend has a PS1 and she plays her PS1 games on my PS2.
Maybe I'm the only one who uses this function, or maybe you're mistaken.
Matt
"The server is the program which manages the shared ressource."
I think the fundamental confusion on this issue is the definition of "service". Your definition of server implies that the service must be access to a shared resource. This definition fits for X, but not for other situations.
Consider "application servers". In this case, the server is where the applications are run and the client is where the user interacts with it. The "service" in this case is use of the application itself. Could you not argue that the X clients are application servers and that the X server is actually an application server client?
I agree that this isn't the terminology that is used for X, but I think this decision is purely based on what the X concept of "service" is.
Matt
Professionally, I write networking software. I have worked on open-source games, but never commercial ones.
In an ideal world, minigames would be completely isolated from core engine code. However, is that the case in the real world?
You mention that the minigame would probably share some APIs with the main game. I agree. How clean would these APIs be? Might the minigame need extra APIs, since it has different function from the main game? Possibly. Would you remove these APIs? Your post suggests not.
So, you now have a program with no have_sex_with_girlfriend_minigame() function but your engine still has a commit_lewd_act() API. How long before someone hacks their savegame to expose this function?
My example is almost certainly oversimplified, I know. I have no idea how well GTA's codebase is organized... but neither, I imagine, have you.
As I said before, I write networking software. If we want to ship a product without some function, it would be very unusual for us to comment (or #if, or whatever) out the code that implements the function. We will pretty much always simply disable the ability to configure the function. This is much simpler and much less error-prone. The only exception would be if the function (even when disabled) had significant memory or performance implications.
Essentially, I still think you're being naive about how easy it would be to actually remove support for this function, particularly when a serious bug in a release as big as GTA:SA could put a huge dent in their profits. Why risk it?
Matt
Imagine that Rockstar had intended to include this in the game and then decided against it a few weeks before the release. I think this is a possible scenario.
They would have to be insane to "comment out" the code that implemented it. Even in a well-organized project (which games generally aren't), the potential for introducing bugs would be large. Why risk this when you could simply stop players from accessing the content?
I'm not saying that this is what happened, but I think your comment to just "comment out" the code is very naive.
Matt
No, but (from your link) it does "change its structure and design, and remove dead code, to make it easier for human maintenance in the future."
Refactoring might be a sensible thing to do during the two weeks between the first and second phases of the competition.
Having said that, from my (limited) experience, you tend to need less refactoring in functional programming languages than in imperative (or object-oriented) languages.
Matt
On second thoughts, probably my second reading is the correct one. This would fit with 3c.
Is this right? Can someone confirm?
Matt
This is true, although 3b says "Accompany it with a written offer ... to give any third party ... a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code".
It sounds as though the the original troll^W poster doesn't want to have to give the source to anyone outside the company.
(It's also possible that I've misinterpreted this and it actually means that the offer is made only to the receivers, but they could ask the distributor to give the source to a third party. Any thoughts?)
Matt
To save anyone else looking it up, the GPL is here.
Uh, no. There is no gray - it is very much black and white.
I'm not a lawyer. I suspect you aren't either.
As I understand the situation, the author of the website wrote new text but copied many of the images. The parody was of Walmart's website's text, not the images.
How much is covered under parody? Does section 107 permit copying of images that are not parody but are related to content that is?
I don't know. Do you?
I'm not suggesting that Walmart's lawyers are right or that the courts would uphold their complaint but I suspect the law is not as black-and-white as you suggest.
Matt
IANAL.
In the US, I understand that corporations have most of the rights that individuals have. However, they have additional benefits, such as limited liability.
Wikipedia gives a good description.
Matt
Who said anything about individuals giving up their rights?
I believe the grandparent was questioning the morality of corporations having rights in addition to those of their members.
Matt
Sorry, I thought he was referring to testing Linux.
Clearly, if you test GPL software and find bugs, the fixes are going to be GPL, which makes it more difficult to convince people to pay for them.
Matt
It sounds interesting, but how do you intend to make a proft?
Matt
Good research, but remember he's still going via Iceland for hot chocolate.
Matt
Sorry, I might not have been clear. I was referring to the frequent small patches rather than something like SP2.
As I understand it, Micosoft produces a large number of ongoing patches. There's some software (Windows Update?) that determines which of these patches you need and downloads them from the Internet.
If you know the patch number, you can download these individually as EXEs. You could then burn them onto CD, as you suggest.
However, how do you determine which patches you need without having a connection to the Internet?
Matt
I'm not sure I understand.
You say "if your windows machine isn't on the internet then surely the patches dont matter _as much_ anyhow". Surely the same argument can be applied to Linux? Why does it need to be patched?
Matt