Or maybe Rust but with magic. What Rust seems to have is a bunch-of-new-players without pants running around bashing each others' skulls in with rocks kind of vibe. Now that I think about it, the new players on UO used to be similarly feral.
UO very much resembled a MUD. It was also a pretty awesome game until EA took it over and turned it into a WOW-style gear grind and started screwing with the skill balance. It was really the last MMO I've run across where player-crafted gear was the best gear in the game. Even in Eve Online, the best modules drop from rare spawns in low-security space, and although players can now research Tech 2 blueprints, the cartels that control the never-ending ones that were given out in the first couple years of the game have such a price advantage that crafting isn't all that satisfying in the game. At least not to me.
I used to make pretty decent coin in UO selling scrolls, spellbooks and location runes. That and making portals for people. The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas, item insurance that would allow you to bind your best items to you and gear that would affect your stats, all made the game significantly less fun. Not to mention the constant tinkering that was required to try to keep the game balanced in the face of all these changes, so that all the players wouldn't quit in droves. Which they pretty much did anyway.
1) Encrypt it with the recipient's public key. You know, exactly how encryption always works. If you're writing a client with encryption support, it wouldn't be that hard to hold the public keys on the server and note when they change. Hell, you could just make a space for it on a contact's list. For someone expecting a man in the middle attack, making other arrangements to get a public key ought not to be difficult. The client would just have to copy his private key to all the devices he expects to use the encryption on.
2) I would fucking love for spammers to have to encrypt each message to each person on the list they're trying to send to. You want a spam filter, set your filter to reject unencrypted mail. Boom. Done. Even if they can automate the process, the additional computing and time requirement of encrypting each message to each person's key would substantially raise the cost of sending spam and lower the number of people a spammer could hit in a specific period of time. Since the encryption would (have to) happen the client machine, sending a substantial number of messages would require far more horsepower than just blasting a mail off to a list would.
After decades of wondering what's wrong with programming, did you ever stop to think that perhaps the problem... is you? If you don't like programming, why do you do it? I'm a programmer too, and I love it. I love making a thing and turning it on and watching it work as I designed it to. While other programmers wring their hands and wish they had a solution to a problem, I'll just fucking write the solution. I don't understand why they don't. They know the machine can perform the task they need and they know how to make the machine do things, but it never seems to occur to them to put those two things together. And I never, not even ONCE, asked why a playing card representation can't just look like a playing card. This despite having written a couple of playing card libraries.
This guy seems to want an objects actions to be more apparent just from looking at the object, but he chose two rather bad examples. His math formula is as likely to look like gobbledygook to a non-math person as the program is. And the playing card has a fundamental set of rules associated with it that you still have to learn. You look at an ace of spades and you know that's an ace of spades, you know how it ranks in a poker hand, that it can normally be high or low (11 or 1) in blackjack or in a poker hand. But none of these things are obvious by looking at the card. If a person who'd never played cards before looked at it, he wouldn't know anything about it, either.
How about they build an encryption API right into their service? Encrypt the message locally before it ever goes to the network. Oh, they don't want to do that. I see. So Microsoft promises to not read your mail, while retaining the ability to easily do so whenever it's convenient for them. That makes me feel so much better.
I'm not a huge Walmart fan, but I'm a bit surprised they don't just bring their own card to the market, then. They wouldn't even have to be terribly competitive, just anally rape you just a little less than the other credit card companies. The money they'd save on transaction fees in their own stores alone would probably more than cover the cost of the venture.
Ooh, I like this list! My usual MO is to (try to) write reusable libraries for most of my project and glue the library code together with a main program that does as little extra processing as possible on the library objects. If I'm writing a library, I like to add the extra criteria that it to be easy for a programmer to pick up and use. The actual library code can be absolutely hideous but if it gets the job done and the interface is easy to use I'm not going to complain about it.
I've been coding for the fun of it again in my spare time, and have a fair bit of code up on GitHub now. I've only been seriously using C++ for the last couple of years, and you can see a bit of a progression from my early code (fr_demo) to more recent code like the data library and resumetron. Stuff like cppxml which I use frequently gets updated more often than the old demo code.
I particularly like my factories. I have a relative going through a CS program right now and he's had some questions on a couple of his assignments and got a look at a piece of code with data readers provided by his professors. They always look like C code that was written 15 years ago. I know this because I also very recently was digging through some C code that was written 15 years ago. I like to think they're doing that on purpose, but they're not. So his introduction to design patterns could have been a nice clean data factory that requires three lines of code to write, but instead it's the singleton pattern, which every design review board on the planet will now reject immediately after the word leaves your mouth, whether it's actually justifiable or not.
One of these days real soon now I'm going to need to go back and replace all my std::string throws with std::logic_errors or other appropriate std::exception errors, and I'm kicking around the idea of building up a simple rest server around my old socket server code one of these days. That sounds like fun to me!
I find the prettier the graphics get, the less I seem to like their characters. If I hate the characters, I'm not going to get into the game enough to finish it. And I'm not going to drop $60 sight-unseen from a studio whose characters I typically hate. I've gotten to the point where I pretty much just ignore new game announcements from them, and that consider that to be an indicator of pretty bad health for the studio. They very much need to put some effort into making sure their games are actually fun and that people will give two shits about the characters in them. That's how you make an epic game, even with PS1 graphics.
I've worked at companies where they used temp workers like Kleenix; blow your nose in it once and throw away. Their in-house software is noticeably harder to maintain and lower quality than the rest of the industry. And that's saying a lot since the rest of the industry is shit. No one there knows anything about the company, its business process or anything in-depth about the software. If all you care about is making shit products for people who don't know any better and who probably won't sue you very often if your shit products suck, I guess that's a decent business practice. At least until a company that takes the smallest amount of pride in its work comes along and runs you out of business.
Justice isn't about revenge and not even about punishment. Though I see how you could make that mistake in the police state you live in. It's about removing someone who's an ongoing threat to society until such time as they are no longer a threat to society. The fact that it's so often used for revenge and for enslaving entire generations of otherwise-peaceful drug users is an indication that your society is broken. Someone who would come up with an idea like this sounds just as evil as the people they envision punishing. Sure, let's take helpless people under our control and torture them for what seems like an eternity. That's brilliant.
The endangered malaria mosquito! Once this majestic creature roamed the plains in the hundreds of millions! Due to habitat loss and human intervention, it now roams the plains in somewhat fewer hundreds of millions! Oh, when it's cute and fluffy like a panda, the eco nuts get all up in arms, but just because it happens to be a blood sucking parasite that spreads a nasty disease, no one wants any part of it! Hypocrites!
I'd be all for that if you could discharge educational debt via bankruptcy as you can with other forms of debt. Once you do that, I suspect lenders will start doing much better risk assessments on individual candidates. It might end up meaning fewer people go on to higher education, but it should also mean fewer people end up in minimum wage (or no) jobs with crushing amounts of student debt.
To be fair though, my nephew is going through a CS program at a university and has asked me about some of his assignments. They're similarly trivial and the example code provided by the professors is atrocious. I like to think they're doing that intentionally, but I know they're not. I was disillusioned with the business programming course I enrolled in right out of high school back in the '80's and ended up finding a small state school with instructors who had real world experience for the rest of my formal education. Even with that, I've learned far more on my own and through work experience than I was ever going to pick up in a university. If a person isn't motivated to learn on his own, he's never going to be a particularly good programmer. Perhaps the for-profit schools just attract a higher concentration of people who are only trying to get into CS for the money and don't have the love of the art that you need to get to that level.
When I'm in charge of hiring, a degree doesn't really factor into my decision. I can tell if you're the sort of person who enjoys programming. I'd take a high school dropout over someone with a Master's, if the high school dropout had a substantial portfolio of open source code he could show me. Assuming the guy with the Master's didn't, naturally. If they both did, I'd want to hire them both, and I'd make a damn good argument to management about it.
It seems likely that it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere. A really surreal option I thought about was that all the passengers could have been in on it and wanted to go somewhere else for some reason. That seems very unlikely, but hey, if it turns out that's what happened, I called it!
We'd be better off if I just rewrote this entire application.
How many times have we witnessed this? We know how it goes down. That shitty application has two decades worth of bug fixes and business process embedded in it. Some of the business process might look like bugs or random side effects. An effort will be launched to rewrite it, and it will fail miserably, well over budget and several years late.
If the team is unfortunate enough to actually manage to create a working executable, they will find that it doesn't offer half the functionality of the old application and does not deliver the correct results half the time. So the team will start hurriedly patching code, accumulating rushed bug fix after bug fix until the entire thing is an unmaintainable quiltwork of patches and side effects. At which point the company will decide that the new application is awful and attempt to rewrite it. It's just the circle of life...
Bwahaha! A few years back, they had a contest to rename The Gimp. I can't help but notice that it's still called The Gimp. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to shoehorn an acronym for "GOATFUCKER," but petered out at 4 or 5 letters. You know if I'd managed to pull it off, that's what they would have renamed it to...
Indeed! My 70's-era assembly language book speculates that in the future we may have 32 bit processors but 64 bit processors will most likely be too expensive to ever enjoy widespread availability!
Well once we get good at this we COULD just grow the tusk part, in 3' by 3' cubes. Then you could glue a bunch of them together to make a minecraft-style ivory castle.
The C++ mentality is that you should catch as many errors as you can at compile time. When you're launching a satellite, you want to be sure your code's as bulletproof as possible before it leaves the ground. Every time I've seen reflection used, it was by some terrible programmer who'd just learned about reflection and was looking for an excuse to use it. And every single time, they were using it as a crutch so they wouldn't have to think about the system they were building. You can almost hear them thinking "Cool! I don't really know what this bit here is supposed to do, so I'll just use reflection and once I've collected my paycheck and left, some other programmer can drop random objects in there later!" I've never seen its use actually improve a design. I've never even seen it make more loosely-coupled or reusable code, now that I think about it. Somehow they ended up with introspective systems that were so tightly coupled that you couldn't just break one object out to run a unit test on it. If they'd written unit tests. Which they didn't, because they were bad programmers.
Hey everyone! Welcome to our Privacy tour! Let's meet everyone in the room! Hi, what's your name? Eric? I think we have a picture of Eric's dong... yes, here it is! We got this while you were Yahoo web chatting. Who else is here? Dave? Do we... yes we have a picture of Dave's dong. This one wasn't too hard to get, since he uses Chat Roulette. Who else do we have here? Sam? Sam was quite a difficult one, but we finally got a picture of his dong after our agents set up a gay men playing with olive oil site... hey... where's everyone going?
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone's autistic to some degree, and no one bothered to check before.
Or maybe Rust but with magic. What Rust seems to have is a bunch-of-new-players without pants running around bashing each others' skulls in with rocks kind of vibe. Now that I think about it, the new players on UO used to be similarly feral.
I used to make pretty decent coin in UO selling scrolls, spellbooks and location runes. That and making portals for people. The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas, item insurance that would allow you to bind your best items to you and gear that would affect your stats, all made the game significantly less fun. Not to mention the constant tinkering that was required to try to keep the game balanced in the face of all these changes, so that all the players wouldn't quit in droves. Which they pretty much did anyway.
2) I would fucking love for spammers to have to encrypt each message to each person on the list they're trying to send to. You want a spam filter, set your filter to reject unencrypted mail. Boom. Done. Even if they can automate the process, the additional computing and time requirement of encrypting each message to each person's key would substantially raise the cost of sending spam and lower the number of people a spammer could hit in a specific period of time. Since the encryption would (have to) happen the client machine, sending a substantial number of messages would require far more horsepower than just blasting a mail off to a list would.
This guy seems to want an objects actions to be more apparent just from looking at the object, but he chose two rather bad examples. His math formula is as likely to look like gobbledygook to a non-math person as the program is. And the playing card has a fundamental set of rules associated with it that you still have to learn. You look at an ace of spades and you know that's an ace of spades, you know how it ranks in a poker hand, that it can normally be high or low (11 or 1) in blackjack or in a poker hand. But none of these things are obvious by looking at the card. If a person who'd never played cards before looked at it, he wouldn't know anything about it, either.
How about they build an encryption API right into their service? Encrypt the message locally before it ever goes to the network. Oh, they don't want to do that. I see. So Microsoft promises to not read your mail, while retaining the ability to easily do so whenever it's convenient for them. That makes me feel so much better.
I'm not a huge Walmart fan, but I'm a bit surprised they don't just bring their own card to the market, then. They wouldn't even have to be terribly competitive, just anally rape you just a little less than the other credit card companies. The money they'd save on transaction fees in their own stores alone would probably more than cover the cost of the venture.
That rule is reversed on any of Murdoch's media.
I've been coding for the fun of it again in my spare time, and have a fair bit of code up on GitHub now. I've only been seriously using C++ for the last couple of years, and you can see a bit of a progression from my early code (fr_demo) to more recent code like the data library and resumetron. Stuff like cppxml which I use frequently gets updated more often than the old demo code.
I particularly like my factories. I have a relative going through a CS program right now and he's had some questions on a couple of his assignments and got a look at a piece of code with data readers provided by his professors. They always look like C code that was written 15 years ago. I know this because I also very recently was digging through some C code that was written 15 years ago. I like to think they're doing that on purpose, but they're not. So his introduction to design patterns could have been a nice clean data factory that requires three lines of code to write, but instead it's the singleton pattern, which every design review board on the planet will now reject immediately after the word leaves your mouth, whether it's actually justifiable or not.
One of these days real soon now I'm going to need to go back and replace all my std::string throws with std::logic_errors or other appropriate std::exception errors, and I'm kicking around the idea of building up a simple rest server around my old socket server code one of these days. That sounds like fun to me!
I'd sell my granny for a chance to do a skydive out of that thing.
I find the prettier the graphics get, the less I seem to like their characters. If I hate the characters, I'm not going to get into the game enough to finish it. And I'm not going to drop $60 sight-unseen from a studio whose characters I typically hate. I've gotten to the point where I pretty much just ignore new game announcements from them, and that consider that to be an indicator of pretty bad health for the studio. They very much need to put some effort into making sure their games are actually fun and that people will give two shits about the characters in them. That's how you make an epic game, even with PS1 graphics.
Yeah! Like some sort of... turkey!
I've worked at companies where they used temp workers like Kleenix; blow your nose in it once and throw away. Their in-house software is noticeably harder to maintain and lower quality than the rest of the industry. And that's saying a lot since the rest of the industry is shit. No one there knows anything about the company, its business process or anything in-depth about the software. If all you care about is making shit products for people who don't know any better and who probably won't sue you very often if your shit products suck, I guess that's a decent business practice. At least until a company that takes the smallest amount of pride in its work comes along and runs you out of business.
Justice isn't about revenge and not even about punishment. Though I see how you could make that mistake in the police state you live in. It's about removing someone who's an ongoing threat to society until such time as they are no longer a threat to society. The fact that it's so often used for revenge and for enslaving entire generations of otherwise-peaceful drug users is an indication that your society is broken. Someone who would come up with an idea like this sounds just as evil as the people they envision punishing. Sure, let's take helpless people under our control and torture them for what seems like an eternity. That's brilliant.
The endangered malaria mosquito! Once this majestic creature roamed the plains in the hundreds of millions! Due to habitat loss and human intervention, it now roams the plains in somewhat fewer hundreds of millions! Oh, when it's cute and fluffy like a panda, the eco nuts get all up in arms, but just because it happens to be a blood sucking parasite that spreads a nasty disease, no one wants any part of it! Hypocrites!
But I've noticed that the ability of bad ones to get hired tends to fluctuate with the boom-and-bust cycle. Are you a bad one?
I'd be all for that if you could discharge educational debt via bankruptcy as you can with other forms of debt. Once you do that, I suspect lenders will start doing much better risk assessments on individual candidates. It might end up meaning fewer people go on to higher education, but it should also mean fewer people end up in minimum wage (or no) jobs with crushing amounts of student debt.
When I'm in charge of hiring, a degree doesn't really factor into my decision. I can tell if you're the sort of person who enjoys programming. I'd take a high school dropout over someone with a Master's, if the high school dropout had a substantial portfolio of open source code he could show me. Assuming the guy with the Master's didn't, naturally. If they both did, I'd want to hire them both, and I'd make a damn good argument to management about it.
It seems likely that it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere. A really surreal option I thought about was that all the passengers could have been in on it and wanted to go somewhere else for some reason. That seems very unlikely, but hey, if it turns out that's what happened, I called it!
How many times have we witnessed this? We know how it goes down. That shitty application has two decades worth of bug fixes and business process embedded in it. Some of the business process might look like bugs or random side effects. An effort will be launched to rewrite it, and it will fail miserably, well over budget and several years late.
If the team is unfortunate enough to actually manage to create a working executable, they will find that it doesn't offer half the functionality of the old application and does not deliver the correct results half the time. So the team will start hurriedly patching code, accumulating rushed bug fix after bug fix until the entire thing is an unmaintainable quiltwork of patches and side effects. At which point the company will decide that the new application is awful and attempt to rewrite it. It's just the circle of life...
Bwahaha! A few years back, they had a contest to rename The Gimp. I can't help but notice that it's still called The Gimp. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to shoehorn an acronym for "GOATFUCKER," but petered out at 4 or 5 letters. You know if I'd managed to pull it off, that's what they would have renamed it to...
Indeed! My 70's-era assembly language book speculates that in the future we may have 32 bit processors but 64 bit processors will most likely be too expensive to ever enjoy widespread availability!
Well once we get good at this we COULD just grow the tusk part, in 3' by 3' cubes. Then you could glue a bunch of them together to make a minecraft-style ivory castle.
The C++ mentality is that you should catch as many errors as you can at compile time. When you're launching a satellite, you want to be sure your code's as bulletproof as possible before it leaves the ground. Every time I've seen reflection used, it was by some terrible programmer who'd just learned about reflection and was looking for an excuse to use it. And every single time, they were using it as a crutch so they wouldn't have to think about the system they were building. You can almost hear them thinking "Cool! I don't really know what this bit here is supposed to do, so I'll just use reflection and once I've collected my paycheck and left, some other programmer can drop random objects in there later!" I've never seen its use actually improve a design. I've never even seen it make more loosely-coupled or reusable code, now that I think about it. Somehow they ended up with introspective systems that were so tightly coupled that you couldn't just break one object out to run a unit test on it. If they'd written unit tests. Which they didn't, because they were bad programmers.
Hey everyone! Welcome to our Privacy tour! Let's meet everyone in the room! Hi, what's your name? Eric? I think we have a picture of Eric's dong... yes, here it is! We got this while you were Yahoo web chatting. Who else is here? Dave? Do we... yes we have a picture of Dave's dong. This one wasn't too hard to get, since he uses Chat Roulette. Who else do we have here? Sam? Sam was quite a difficult one, but we finally got a picture of his dong after our agents set up a gay men playing with olive oil site... hey... where's everyone going?