> Not to mention all that over priced food/drinks the theater sells you.
Somehow, I doubt the studios are getting that. The overall figures quoted are from studios, not theaters. And box office receipts for movies still running are just that: tickets, not concessions.
A few movies are worth it "on the big screen". Lord of the Rings was breathtaking. But my merely 29" tv and DVD surround speakers placed kinda roughly where they should be is just dandy for watching something like Collateral, most of which takes place in a taxi cab. Pretty much any comedy works on small screens too. Cost for two people to watch it? A buck. Having a DVDstation two blocks away is nice:)
Bah. Linus and Charlie Brown's chats on the fence or at the pitcher's mound were the closest that insipid strip got to thought-provoking philosophical musings. Of course then Calvin and Hobbes came along...
If you think that the UN really cares about the poor and destitute, then ask why Kofi Annan and company were personally involved in the Oil for Food scandal.
Oh cool, so UNICEF and the WHO (not the band, folks) have the black helicopters on the pad? So who should I leave it up to, the Pope? No birth control for you ladies. And good doctors never use the A-word.
But hey, two can play this game. I wonder which party, ideology, and entire government I can challenge the legitimacy of due to the existence of a few mendacious hypocritical zealotrous idealogues?
If you look to the right, travellers, we can see a row of glass houses.
Rentals hurt development of games where the answer is the first option in "rent or buy?", a bit of advice given in many game reviews. Frankly, if a game is that short, I have a problem with paying $40 or $50 for it anyway. A movie for two with popcorn and soda still doesn't cost $40.
Rentals force developers to create games with enough depth and/or replay value to want to own. Otherwise, the price has to come down. I like Katamari Damacy for its replay value, but I'm rather glad I only paid $20 for it. GTA San Andreas however was worth every penny. And so was Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance 2, worth all five bucks I spent on a used copy.
Besides, you can't download demos of console games, so rentals are the demos.
One thing you can, uh, "admire" about Linus is his complete lack of fear about sounding like a complete ass when he goes off about things he knows nothing about. His comments on/dev/poll and Solaris's implementation of it (years before this open solaris thing) were really instructive. Then there's his initial attitude toward SMP. And of course, his really choice bits on microkernels. Those are just off the top of my head.
I guess what works is that he's surrounded (on lkml) by folks who do gladly tell him when he's full of shit.
> For Europeans, 100 miles is a long way to go. > For Americans, 100 years is a long time ago.
For the "new kid on the block", we (the USA) are the world's oldest continuous democracy. I think that counts for something. 100 miles is pretty damn far for me too... with no car. For some people I know, that's a commute.
> Dunkin Donuts has some of the best coffee I've ever had in the United States.
Sure, if you hate coffee. I swear the stuff is so weak, it tastes like they forgot to use new grounds for the pot. Starbucks is semi-burnt, but it's still fresh, not "sitting in the pot for 4 hours" burnt, so it's not terribly bad with some roasts that take burning better (the african blends are horrible, but the indonesian ones are still all right).
I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco where we have Peets. Mind you, it's strong coffee, but it's roasted perfectly and so fresh the beans are always shining (that's the oils, the flavor of the coffee). People who wouldn't know Blue Mountain from Maxwell House can taste the difference, it's that good.
Unfortunately the line at the Peets is so damn long every morning that I rarely have time, and so I often still get Starbucks instead. I need to leave for work five minutes earlier...
> Why can't they be just a little teeny bit smarter and set up two or three lines, each with three registers!?!?!?!?!
Unions. Specifically, the unions don't want any reduction in the number of cashiers. You should have seen the stink they raised in Denver when King Soopers started installing the self-checkout machines (one line, you scan and bag your own stuff, four machines, one cashier for assistance). In California, these self-checkout machines don't exist at all. I wonder why...
I'm actually pro-union, but too many of them are purely self-serving, and would rather have 100 people in the union making minimum wage than 75 people making a living wage.
> Are building codes considered "law"? If so, there are MANY MANY codes that require one to purchase the code so you can see it.
Technically, they are "regulations", enforced by statute as law, the difference being that a regulation doesn't require a bill for every single minor change (and yes, there's differences of opinion as to what changes constitute minor). You might be able to find those on the amlegal.com online library (found it for San Francisco at any rate), and it's certainly available at the public library. You can damn sure bet there's no copyright on the law itself, so if you want to run off your own copies and give them away, go for it. Tthe typesetting may however be copyrighted, so you might have to OCR or retype it if your source is nongovernmental.
> Yet Valve are quite happy to leave the prices the way they are.
Vivendi Universal set the price, not Valve. But yes, they'll charge what the market will bear, which is typically 40-50 bucks. However, with a lot of these studios being private companies, a bigger share may well go back to the developers and not just fatten some corporate board that just coasts on by perpetuating the status quo.
Still it's pretty unfair to malign the distributors. They're the ones that do the marketing as well, which is more than just sticking a few banner ads up.
Got an athlon 3200 myself, and a Radeon 9800 Pro EZ which has a little bitty sink and fan on it. Put a $35 Zalman circular cooler on the CPU, got a plain 80mm case fan for $5 to vent out. Put that inside one of the cheapest cases I could buy that had a side intake fan. Played Dawn of War for 6 hours. 33 degrees. Who the hell needs this watercooling nonsense?
Yes, and Ubisoft burned out their own employees as well. And when they quit and dared to make a living at another game company, Ubisoft sued them. If you want a company with a good rep, try Activision, but it still depends on which game studio you work for (Activision is still largely a distributor). And corporate heads can change: Sierra used to be one of the best until Ken and Roberta Williams got the boot.
A Steam-like service might not be ideal for small developers, though, as it would take a sizable investment in bandwidth. What might happen is a new trend in smaller online publishers that take a significantly smaller portion of profits for the service of providing the bandwidth and trusted client through which to distribute games.
The problem is that the way every other company out there would is just buying competency.
There's the problem: maybe they should be buying competence instead. It's a simple rule: "ent" -> "ence". John Hancock did not sign the Declaration of Independency.
While many programming languages have "tainting" mode, are there any IDEs which use syntax-highlighting to display tainted variables in red, up until the line where they're sanitized (for various configurable definitions of sane)?
Taint checking is a runtime thing. The same variable can be tainted or untainted depending on the code path it took to get there. The static analysis necessary to do this for a dynamic language is a very hard problem, and undecideable in the face of first-class functions. If you need bulletproof tainting, I suggest using static typing instead:
template<typename T> class Tainted {
T untaint()... left as an exercise }
You could extend this to a "Dangerous" class that any data has to be wrapped in, with dangerous commands only taking Dangerous instances. But this is all a cheap tainting mechanism -- follow proper type discipline and you get this sort of protection for free. No, it's not terribly fun, but discipline rarely is.
Still, I don't get the concern... I thought arrays were values like any other, and put in variables like any other. Functions should expect a single type, be it scalars, objects, or arrays, so there shouldn't be any confusion. Am I misunderstanding something about PHP here?
They're still around: http://www.volition-inc.com/. Among their credits is the rather popular Red Faction, and they're about to release a licensed game of The Punisher (yeah, ugh), and after that are working on Red Faction II.
Freespace 2... what a game. You really felt like an ant fighting it out amidst these colossal cap ships and their beams. But at the end, when I ran back in a desperate but successful attempt to save a couple ships in the convoy, only to find myself too late to get through the gate in time, screaming "come on, come on!!!" as I'm pushing the burner, diverting all shields to the engines... I realize I won't make it. So I turned the engines off and watched the end in silence, and realized how well and truly outclassed the TVA is, thankful that humanity got away just in time to survive to fight another day. It leaves me aching for a sequel to wrap up the storyline, but it doesn't look like Volition is all that interested.
If a game or a book or a date fails to make a decent impression after 6 hours, it's just not going to at all. Ever. Seriously, I'm glad for the heads up. But the whole "cartoonish cackling evil" thing... what do you expect from the Star Wars franchise? Since when has the Dark Side ever been portrayed as anything but Disfigured Maniacal Murderous Wretches With Power? Since when was George Lucas capable of subtlety?
I see the two specific items linked to are buffer overflow exploits. Anyone learning to program in C needs to have good buffer dicipline beaten into their heads.
Or use a library that provides it. Providing a buffer length exactly the size of your expected input often leaves you open to single-byte overruns from off-by-one errors, which can indeed be easily exploited. I always pad my buffers with a whole 64 bits extra, and work with arrays and memcpy and the like (treating them as raw memory and not strings) if space is really critical.
These days though, I write almost everything in python and glue it with Pyrex if I need something in C.
> If I am an employer and I see this on your transcript, I will have a real problem hiring you if security is a concern to me
When was the last time you saw an employer look at individual classes on a transcript? Most of them just care about the degree and possibly the GPA.
Just say DJB taught the class. They'll look at you sympathetically, and ask you "so is he as much of an asshole in real life as he comes across online"? Might really break the ice, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think "The Wizard" counts here. Yes it shilled a particular video game, but it wasn't derivative of it, so to speak.
The FF movie just capitalized on the name. Still a bomb of course. Visually interesting, but hokey. Good brainless rental flick tho.
Pokemon was card game -> saturday cartoon -> game -> movie, so it's more of a "tv show to movie" effect.
And I can't believe you forgot Resident Evil
> Not to mention all that over priced food/drinks the theater sells you.
Somehow, I doubt the studios are getting that. The overall figures quoted are from studios, not theaters. And box office receipts for movies still running are just that: tickets, not concessions.
A few movies are worth it "on the big screen". Lord of the Rings was breathtaking. But my merely 29" tv and DVD surround speakers placed kinda roughly where they should be is just dandy for watching something like Collateral, most of which takes place in a taxi cab. Pretty much any comedy works on small screens too. Cost for two people to watch it? A buck. Having a DVDstation two blocks away is nice :)
Bah. Linus and Charlie Brown's chats on the fence or at the pitcher's mound were the closest that insipid strip got to thought-provoking philosophical musings. Of course then Calvin and Hobbes came along ...
If you think that the UN really cares about the poor and destitute, then ask why Kofi Annan and company were personally involved in the Oil for Food scandal.
Oh cool, so UNICEF and the WHO (not the band, folks) have the black helicopters on the pad? So who should I leave it up to, the Pope? No birth control for you ladies. And good doctors never use the A-word.
But hey, two can play this game. I wonder which party, ideology, and entire government I can challenge the legitimacy of due to the existence of a few mendacious hypocritical zealotrous idealogues?
If you look to the right, travellers, we can see a row of glass houses.
I am sorry, sir, but I am going to have to ask you to hand over your geek card.
Says the guy with a sig in BASIC.
Rentals hurt development of games where the answer is the first option in "rent or buy?", a bit of advice given in many game reviews. Frankly, if a game is that short, I have a problem with paying $40 or $50 for it anyway. A movie for two with popcorn and soda still doesn't cost $40.
Rentals force developers to create games with enough depth and/or replay value to want to own. Otherwise, the price has to come down. I like Katamari Damacy for its replay value, but I'm rather glad I only paid $20 for it. GTA San Andreas however was worth every penny. And so was Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance 2, worth all five bucks I spent on a used copy.
Besides, you can't download demos of console games, so rentals are the demos.
One thing you can, uh, "admire" about Linus is his complete lack of fear about sounding like a complete ass when he goes off about things he knows nothing about. His comments on /dev/poll and Solaris's implementation of it (years before this open solaris thing) were really instructive. Then there's his initial attitude toward SMP. And of course, his really choice bits on microkernels. Those are just off the top of my head.
I guess what works is that he's surrounded (on lkml) by folks who do gladly tell him when he's full of shit.
> For Europeans, 100 miles is a long way to go.
... with no car. For some people I know, that's a commute.
> For Americans, 100 years is a long time ago.
For the "new kid on the block", we (the USA) are the world's oldest continuous democracy. I think that counts for something. 100 miles is pretty damn far for me too
> Dunkin Donuts has some of the best coffee I've ever had in the United States.
Sure, if you hate coffee. I swear the stuff is so weak, it tastes like they forgot to use new grounds for the pot. Starbucks is semi-burnt, but it's still fresh, not "sitting in the pot for 4 hours" burnt, so it's not terribly bad with some roasts that take burning better (the african blends are horrible, but the indonesian ones are still all right).
I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco where we have Peets. Mind you, it's strong coffee, but it's roasted perfectly and so fresh the beans are always shining (that's the oils, the flavor of the coffee). People who wouldn't know Blue Mountain from Maxwell House can taste the difference, it's that good.
Unfortunately the line at the Peets is so damn long every morning that I rarely have time, and so I often still get Starbucks instead. I need to leave for work five minutes earlier...
> Why can't they be just a little teeny bit smarter and set up two or three lines, each with three registers!?!?!?!?!
Unions. Specifically, the unions don't want any reduction in the number of cashiers. You should have seen the stink they raised in Denver when King Soopers started installing the self-checkout machines (one line, you scan and bag your own stuff, four machines, one cashier for assistance). In California, these self-checkout machines don't exist at all. I wonder why...
I'm actually pro-union, but too many of them are purely self-serving, and would rather have 100 people in the union making minimum wage than 75 people making a living wage.
> Uh... There ARE no minorities in Finland.
Tell that to Linus Torvalds (he's Swedish)
> Are building codes considered "law"? If so, there are MANY MANY codes that require one to purchase the code so you can see it.
Technically, they are "regulations", enforced by statute as law, the difference being that a regulation doesn't require a bill for every single minor change (and yes, there's differences of opinion as to what changes constitute minor). You might be able to find those on the amlegal.com online library (found it for San Francisco at any rate), and it's certainly available at the public library. You can damn sure bet there's no copyright on the law itself, so if you want to run off your own copies and give them away, go for it. Tthe typesetting may however be copyrighted, so you might have to OCR or retype it if your source is nongovernmental.
> Yet Valve are quite happy to leave the prices the way they are.
Vivendi Universal set the price, not Valve. But yes, they'll charge what the market will bear, which is typically 40-50 bucks. However, with a lot of these studios being private companies, a bigger share may well go back to the developers and not just fatten some corporate board that just coasts on by perpetuating the status quo.
Still it's pretty unfair to malign the distributors. They're the ones that do the marketing as well, which is more than just sticking a few banner ads up.
Got an athlon 3200 myself, and a Radeon 9800 Pro EZ which has a little bitty sink and fan on it. Put a $35 Zalman circular cooler on the CPU, got a plain 80mm case fan for $5 to vent out. Put that inside one of the cheapest cases I could buy that had a side intake fan. Played Dawn of War for 6 hours. 33 degrees. Who the hell needs this watercooling nonsense?
Yes, and Ubisoft burned out their own employees as well. And when they quit and dared to make a living at another game company, Ubisoft sued them. If you want a company with a good rep, try Activision, but it still depends on which game studio you work for (Activision is still largely a distributor). And corporate heads can change: Sierra used to be one of the best until Ken and Roberta Williams got the boot.
A Steam-like service might not be ideal for small developers, though, as it would take a sizable investment in bandwidth. What might happen is a new trend in smaller online publishers that take a significantly smaller portion of profits for the service of providing the bandwidth and trusted client through which to distribute games.
Like this?
The problem is that the way every other company out there would is just buying competency.
There's the problem: maybe they should be buying competence instead. It's a simple rule: "ent" -> "ence". John Hancock did not sign the Declaration of Independency.
Taint checking is a runtime thing. The same variable can be tainted or untainted depending on the code path it took to get there. The static analysis necessary to do this for a dynamic language is a very hard problem, and undecideable in the face of first-class functions. If you need bulletproof tainting, I suggest using static typing instead:You could extend this to a "Dangerous" class that any data has to be wrapped in, with dangerous commands only taking Dangerous instances. But this is all a cheap tainting mechanism -- follow proper type discipline and you get this sort of protection for free. No, it's not terribly fun, but discipline rarely is.
Are you seriously suggesting hungarian notation?
... I thought arrays were values like any other, and put in variables like any other. Functions should expect a single type, be it scalars, objects, or arrays, so there shouldn't be any confusion. Am I misunderstanding something about PHP here?
Still, I don't get the concern
> I assume Volition, Inc. simply got gobbled up.
... what a game. You really felt like an ant fighting it out amidst these colossal cap ships and their beams. But at the end, when I ran back in a desperate but successful attempt to save a couple ships in the convoy, only to find myself too late to get through the gate in time, screaming "come on, come on!!!" as I'm pushing the burner, diverting all shields to the engines ... I realize I won't make it. So I turned the engines off and watched the end in silence, and realized how well and truly outclassed the TVA is, thankful that humanity got away just in time to survive to fight another day. It leaves me aching for a sequel to wrap up the storyline, but it doesn't look like Volition is all that interested.
They're still around: http://www.volition-inc.com/. Among their credits is the rather popular Red Faction, and they're about to release a licensed game of The Punisher (yeah, ugh), and after that are working on Red Faction II.
Freespace 2
If a game or a book or a date fails to make a decent impression after 6 hours, it's just not going to at all. Ever. Seriously, I'm glad for the heads up. But the whole "cartoonish cackling evil" thing ... what do you expect from the Star Wars franchise? Since when has the Dark Side ever been portrayed as anything but Disfigured Maniacal Murderous Wretches With Power? Since when was George Lucas capable of subtlety?
I see the two specific items linked to are buffer overflow exploits. Anyone learning to program in C needs to have good buffer dicipline beaten into their heads.
Or use a library that provides it. Providing a buffer length exactly the size of your expected input often leaves you open to single-byte overruns from off-by-one errors, which can indeed be easily exploited. I always pad my buffers with a whole 64 bits extra, and work with arrays and memcpy and the like (treating them as raw memory and not strings) if space is really critical.
These days though, I write almost everything in python and glue it with Pyrex if I need something in C.
> If I am an employer and I see this on your transcript, I will have a real problem hiring you if security is a concern to me
When was the last time you saw an employer look at individual classes on a transcript? Most of them just care about the degree and possibly the GPA.
Just say DJB taught the class. They'll look at you sympathetically, and ask you "so is he as much of an asshole in real life as he comes across online"? Might really break the ice, actually.
> Have you actually tried removing notepad?
Delete it from C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache
Then delete it from C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\system32 (don't ask me why it's in two places)
Gee wiz, that was freakin hard. I do this on every windows box I get and replace it with metapad.