Nope, they're deciding what's good for *them* by ensuring their customers don't see anything controversial on someone else's laptop, and Americans are somewhat puritanical in their views about sex. You can easily imagine lawsuits being filed over some accidental view of some T&A rather than someone getting shot up in an action movie, which might be grumbled about but probably ignored.
Also... one would hope that most people have a sense of proprietary about what sort of material one should view in public, because of the possibility of other people seeing your screen, but given the experiences our public libraries have had with this, I don't blame McDonalds or Starbucks in the slightest. These are private establishments, so they're under no obligation to provide free access to porn.
And no, no one cares in the slightest if you're looking at a political page, which is a somewhat implausible slippery slope arguments (although beware looking at Wolfram-Alpha with those dangerous looking symbols). These companies have *no* interest in what you're looking at, just that it doesn't bother other customers. Our typical societal mores dictate that sex is something that's done in private. We have no such taboo about political discourse. Besides, let's get real... no one cares enough to actually read a wall of text on your screen.
Also, for those insisting on lathering up that slippery slope, this is a *long* way from any supposed reports of media bias by companies like Facebook, which, I think, was more a reflection of the bias that was held by the people they hired to mark the trending news. Young, recently graduated journalism students tend to be left-leaning? Color me shocked!
Frame rate is a complicated beast, depending on the *worst* performing aspect among many. But for graphics rendering, you absolutely do need shader computational ability proportional to the numbers of pixels on the screen. A fragment / pixel shader is a tiny program that's executed on every pixel, every frame. There's no getting around that requirement, except by reducing the complexity of the shaders as much as you can.
Another bottleneck when increasing screen size is memory buffers used for off-screen processing. Nearly all games I know of use at least a couple of offscreen buffers, for various effects. These screen effects also have to be processed on each pixel, and the memory requirements increase enormously when the resolution increases. You've often heard of games that use buffers that are actually *smaller* than the final resolution for intermediate processing, and then scale the output to the final resolution. A lack of memory and GPU horsepower is why they're forced to do this - they have to make some tradeoff between shader complexity and raw resolution.
So, if this is intended to do VR, it makes sense that the GPU has been significantly boosted, as most of the heavy requirements fall on that side of the system, from what I understand. It's likely the CPU is boosted simply because they have an opportunity to do so for roughly the same requirements as the original, so that will just be a bonus.
Personally, I don't think these consoles will do 4K gaming. They'll probably do 4K video and will finally have the horsepower to do true 1K resolution videogames as well as VR of some sort.
How do you identify ISIS sympathizers without violating people's rights?
The same way one would identify links to organized crime, perhaps? I'm not a police investigator, but I'd imagine it would probably start by investigating known associates of ISIS criminals, following money or funding trails to or from those organizations, and so on. I'm not advocating blanket fishing expeditions - that's explicitly what I'm arguing against.
Or do you just take the route a disturbing number of politicians have and legislate away annoying things like the Fourth Amendment, and put everyone under mass surveillance?
Apparently you didn't read to this point in my post, or you purposefully chose to ignore it: "so long as it's not a witch hunt just because of someone's religion or country of origin, and based on actual leads."
Solution: STOP supporting the terrorists with FREE publicity. I'm not saying that the journalists shouldn't report the terrorist incidents, but they need to stop using deliberate publicity-seeking disaster porn as part of their business model.
I know where you're coming from, but what about the reporting of the latest attack in Nice, France was "disaster porn"? The reporting I've seen didn't seem sensationalist, but then, I suspect the sensationalism is directly proportional to which news source one consumes. But I fear you're asking for the impossible for *everyone* to show reasonable restraint, and what's more, you're implicitly putting partial blame on the media, not the barbarians who incite others to attack innocent people or support them through funding, training, or other support - and I'm not sure that's really fair.
No one likes to hear that there simply isn't a reasonably way of preventing all such attacks in a free society while still remaining free. Our law enforcement agencies will simply have to do the best they can under the constraints we ALL have to live with to root out these monsters and keep us as safe as possible. And our job is to not let terror attacks do what they're intended to do, which is to intimidate and terrorize us.
People are dying. Mass murder has been made popular by ISIS and there have been several in just the last few weeks.
And there will be more.
Ok, so you don't like what Newt has to say. What is your solution?
Or is your solution to do nothing and ignore it?
I'm about as anti-ISIS as you can get, and a Republican. I also have a lot of respect for Newt for the way he reigned in the budget in the 90's, for which Bill Clinton gets a lot of credit. I'm completely fine with investigating ISIS sympathizers or those who identify as actual members, so long as it's not a witch hunt just because of someone's religion or country of origin, and based on actual leads. ISIS is a known terrorist and criminal organization, and I'm pretty sure there are laws on the books against aiding and abetting criminals or enemies of your country.
But what the fuck... A felony for looking at a pro-ISIS website? Does he not see the irony in adopting the same sort of tactics that a member of ISIS might propose - meting out punishment for anti-Islamic behavior or speech? Aren't we supposed to be better than that?
Even tiny computers these days are powerful enough that they could run these games in an emulator running inside another emulator. As long as it's a quality presentation, it shouldn't matter to the end-user what's happening under the hood. Given that this is Nintendo with many beloved first-party titles, I'll bet it will be quality emulation.
Or, just wait until the reviews come in before plunking down $60. We'll find out quickly enough.
C++ absolutely solves the "goto fail" issue. The term that describes this is RAII. C++ uses objects and smart pointers (which are just pointers wrapped in objects) to hold resources. When objects go out of scope, those resources are automatically destroyed. There's very little need to clean anything up manually with modern C++.
On the plus side, Japan has relatively few lawyers, their people tend to save a lot, are relatively healthy in general, and don't have nearly the violent crime problem we have in the US.
Japan has a lot going for it, but every society has its positives and negatives. It's typically not very practical to pick one single element and transplant it to a different society.
I'd guess contacts are so you can trade or play with your friends? E-mail/messages as well, I suppose. I don't have the game, so that's just speculation.
There are a few reasons. Many commercial games use a lot of middleware libraries, not just the game engine (just count the logos on some games' splash screen). I was working as a contractor for a port recently, and I think there was easily a dozen middleware components in the game. These types of libraries tend to be licensed on a per-platform basis. Even if they're available on Linux at all, the licensing costs alone might preclude any reasonable chance at profits. Moreover, it's never "free" to develop and deploy to a new platform - especially if your devs don't have a lot of experience there. You need new build servers, new dev and test stations or partitions. You need to officially support the new platform. Beyond that, there's also the sheer inertia of larger companies when making decisions that cost a lot of money or time up front. You actually have to make a business case for supporting a new platform before you can do it.
Indie games tend to have an advantage here because of their lightweight nature. The less middleware you have in your engine and the smaller your game's footprint is, the easier the port is. And if the devs want to support Linux, they don't have to justify it in a business case. They just decide and do it. It's the same reason indie games have such a wealth of creativity compared to larger dev companies. With larger companies, you spend a lot of money developing games, and that tends to make people a bit more risk-averse, which is understandable with many millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs on the line. Indie games can also make a reasonable profit with a lot fewer sales, so niche markets tend to look reasonably attractive to them.
That's why at my latest contract job, I'm helping to port a 100 million dollar game to OS X, but not Linux. As far as I know, no one's seriously even brought it up. For my own game using my own engine, I'll be adding Linux support simply because I want to. I wish it were different, but that's the reality, at least so far as I've seen.
I'd guess the surprise is more of a "why does this app need access to everything on my phone?" nature. At least on Android, you get a list of permission the app asks for, and you have to approve that before you install it. If it updates and requests new permissions, you have to explicitly approve those as well. I'd imagine iOS works the same way, but I don't have an iPhone, so can't say for sure.
So, yeah, it's up to the user to decide if they want to approve the app with those permissions or not. I saw a shopping list app that wanted access to my location data and contact lists, plus a few others. Seems excessive, right? It likely is able to recognize when you're at the grocery store and share your lists with family members, so it probably actually needed those permissions. I still didn't want it, because I knew I'd never need those features. Found one that asked for no permissions at all, like I'd expect.
I signed up for Prime mostly for the streaming, thinking that the free two day delivery would be a bonus. Unfortunately, the streaming service has a mediocre offering at best, and most of what I order these days comes from third-party retailers, so Prime's free shipping doesn't apply.
Hulu... I like their service enough, but the bug they paste in the corner of the stream drives me nuts. Why inflict that on viewers?
Anyone from Netflix listening? Know why I didn't sign up for your service instead of these two also-rans? Because you didn't give me an easy way to look at your site and see what product you're offering so I could tell if I was at all interested.
For me, it's not as much the hardware as the requirements of the software. I'm a game developer, so the engine and game are in C++, of course, no matter the platform. Our tools generally run on Windows, and productivity is more important than performance, so some of us use C#, while some other studios have used Java, from what I understand. If we need an extension language for our tools, maybe something like IronPython. If we're porting to Mac, toss in a bit of Objective-C. The web programmers use a lot of JavaScript, of course. Toss in some Lua as an embedded scripting language. There are probably a couple of minor cases I'm forgetting, but that's the bulk of it for my work.
If game developers were to move away from Direct X, and on to something cross-platform, then the bar is much lower to supporting Linux and friends.
Speaking as a game developer... I'd suggest its not any technical hurdles that keep games away from Linux. Most game engines, whether commercial or custum, are written in portable C++, and use abstraction layers to hide any platform-specific code. In my own game engine, I'd estimate that platform-specific code only amounts to less than 5% of the total code.
Rather, I think it's simply the market-share of Linux... or rather, the lack thereof. Many games have Mac ports, meaning they obviously have an OpenGL renderer and POSIX compliant backend, but still no Linux support. It's pretty hard to get motivated to support an entirely new platform that only has 1% market-share, and it doesn't help matters when that 1% is further fragmented into a bunch of different distros, further complicating support and compatibility testing.
It's the same problem Windows phones have. By all accounts, Windows phones are pretty nice, but no one makes apps for them because of the abysmal market-share, which in turn drives more users away. It's sort of a catch-22 for platforms with a small market-share, making it extremely difficult to break in.
If this was a typical bomb disposal "robot", then it was as much a robot as a toy RC car. They're just specialized tele-operated vehicles. They're called "robots" because they *look* like a robot, I suppose, but I've always thought that some sort of autonomy was required before you could legitimately apply that term. This isn't some brand new technology that can now be exploited. You could easily create a remote-controlled bomb-delivery vehicle half a century ago.
The only difference was that the police happened to have such a vehicle handy, and a terrible situation in which police were actively being targeted. There were no hostages, and so it makes no sense for police to rush in and try to take him out using guns. The shooter was obviously not interested surrendering, only taking out as many white people (especially police) as he could, and was a very real threat. We lost enough people without risking more lives.
Layering encryption on top of an unsecured line and that is dynamically routed/switched and co-mingles signals from others doesn't make the internet a secure communication medium.
I think perhaps you're conflating the transportation mechanism with the content itself. The internet was *designed* to layer different content and protocols on top of simple, insecure, and even *unreliable* transport protocols.
If you're talking about remaining anonymous on the internet, no, we don't yet have a reliable way to do that, because ultimately you need to give someone your IP address to receive content back. If you're talking about securing content transmitted over the internet, then yes, we absolutely have a reliable way to do that - so far as we know.
You neither have control over the pipe nor what the router at the end of it does.
And that doesn't matter at all. I'm perfectly happy to blast my encrypted traffic over the internet or even over the air where anyone can listen to it, because all they'll hear is the initial handshake followed by a whole lot of pseudo-random noise. It sounds like you're saying that you believe you need a secure, dedicated line to secure your traffic. If so, either this means you don't understand how modern encryption works, or you're trying to play the cool pessimist by saying "well, someone could find a flaw" (which is like claiming airline travel is not safe because airplanes occasionally crash). No decent encryption scheme should rely on a secure transportation mechanism, because that's more or less impossible... or at least impractical... with today's technology.
Security isn't a black and white issue, because you can never actually prove something is secure. It's about degrees of confidence that can only be established over time and lots of cryptographers and researchers trying to break said security. At the moment, we have a pretty high degree of confidence in TLS, because we haven't yet seen a single example of anyone breaking it. Unless you think all the government complaining about the internet "going dark" is a false flag operation, that's a pretty good indicator that no one has been able to break modern encryption methods.
My prediction: as soon as their technical support costs skyrocket when those 80% can't figure out how to get their porn, or when customers cancel service and sign up with a different ISP, they'll rethink their position.
It's really when the government starts mandating this sort of thing that I have a real problem with it, or if there's no competition for ISPs and no way to disable this "feature". Obviously, I'd prefer that ISPs remain a "dumb pipe", but we live in an imperfect world. As such, I use a commercial VPN service, and hope that the entire web is encrypted in the near future, making man-in-the-middle snooping much more difficult.
That's fine by me. I actually upgraded to Windows 10 voluntarily (I write Windows software, so I need to be up-to-date) and don't buy the spyware boogieman stories (it's simple to turn most of that crap off), but frankly, Microsoft's heavy-handed tactics to trick people into upgrading without their explicit consent has been absolutely inexcusable, and shouldn't be rewarded.
I was... moderately hopeful that we were seeing a new Microsoft, embracing open source, less hostile to others, slightly more humble now that they're not the only dominant player in the industry. Nope, instead, we see a new "fuck you, paying customer, we know what's best for you" attitude. They've always played hardball with competitors. Customers, if not treated *well*, per se, were at least left the hell alone once they had Windows installed. Now, they're being actively harassed and pushed into Microsoft's monetization plan.
What's baffling to me is that Microsoft took what should have been a golden PR opportunity (free Windows upgrade), and turned it into a PR disaster.
Sure, Y2K was actually a real problem (and there's another one coming up), but there was a lot of ridiculous doomsday scenarios floating around - planes falling out of the sky, mass blackouts, water treatment plant shutdowns, etc. So, yes, it was an issue, but the problem was dealt with, and life went on.
It's the same as this issue. Yes, decisions will have to be made about how to deal with emergency situations. People will still die in auto accidents, but probably not nearly as many. Life will go on.
And the number of situations in real life where a car AI has to decide between running over a group of nuns on the left or a group of schoolkids on the right will hover very close to zero. I think a lot of people forget that the "trolley problem" is nothing but an ethics-related thought experiment, not something we're expecting to see in real life.
Fans of closed platforms like iOS and game consoles would agree.
Do you realize that just a hundred and fifty years we abolished actual slavery, fighting an incredibly bloody war in the process, where one person could own another person as actually property? Yes, I like open platforms too, but damn, if my Xbox gets all tyranical-like, I can throw it in the garbage and stop paying Microsoft $60 a year. Let's not get carried away with hyperbole.
Well, actual data say otherwise. If you've got some data that points to contrary trends, I'd be happy to take a look. The good news is that it's trending in the correct direction, albeit slowly.
If that's what you think, then your knowledge is about 7 years out of date.
You're telling me that only a year or so after Python 3 was released, most people were using it? Funny, that's not how I seem to recall things. Yes, there are tools like 2to3 (and even 3to2), but automated tools aren't magic, and can't fix everything.
Nearly all new Python development is done using Python 3, and this has been the case for many years now.
Well, yeah, no kidding. You don't have to worry about legacy code when writing something new.
Look, I've got nothing against Python - it's a great language. I'm certain Python 2 will be phased out completely at some point, but the point I was making was that the transition was a lot slower and more painful than most people anticipated. No need to get all defensive about it.
Agreed. This ridiculously overplayed scenario is the Y2K scare of our time. Watch... nothing will come of it, because (gasp) computers are so bloody fast, they'll have been slowing down in a dangerous situation long before a human driver was aware of the problem. Or they'll be able to get away with simple braking, again, because they can react instantly, perhaps not avoiding a collision, but avoiding a fatal injury. But one thing a car AI must *never* do is decide to sacrifice the passengers, no matter the circumstance.
And if people are jumping out in front of fast moving cars, as sad as that is, there's a perfect Darwinian solution to that problem too.
You'll need to program your car to hunt down Murray and the rest of the city council. Only then will their war on cars come to it's inevitable conclusion.
But hey, if you want to let them keep replacing parking places with "parklets", it's on you. We're certainly not as hip over here on the Eastside, but at least we can find a parking spot.
The C++ committee (rightly so, I think) tends to prefer library-based solutions whenever possible, because there's less chance of disruptive changes when you add new libraries. Only when a library solution won't work do they turn to new language features. You'll also notice they really don't like adding new keywords at this point.
A lot of people seemingly don't understand how important this backwards compatibility is (presumably because they're always rewriting stuff using the latest new-and-shiny tech), but there are many places that have code that's decades old. It's a terrible idea to go and tinker with robust, well-tested code just because it's not the latest new-and-shiny. The careful attention to backwards-compatibility causes a lot of issues (like slow compile time / language complexity, etc), but it's also one of C++'s greatest strengths. People know that an investment in C++ code will be working just fine for decades to come. I mean, they're just now depreciating trigraphs, for pete's sake. Apparently IBM still has code that uses those and opposed their removal in the last standards round, but they're a tiny minority and couldn't sway the committee this time. No one else even knows what the hell they are.
Look how much of a rift the Python 2 to 3 change caused. Even if it's good for the language, incompatible changes that occur too quickly can cause real problems for a programming community. Even after 8 years, a significant percentage of Python programmers are still using 2.x instead of 3, mostly because of dependencies holding them back.
Nothing would kill new C++ features faster than incompatibility with legacy code. And in fact, one of the nice things about C++ is that it typically allows programmers to start adding those new features piecemeal as they get more familiar with them and as they get compiler support.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, they're deciding what's good for *them* by ensuring their customers don't see anything controversial on someone else's laptop, and Americans are somewhat puritanical in their views about sex. You can easily imagine lawsuits being filed over some accidental view of some T&A rather than someone getting shot up in an action movie, which might be grumbled about but probably ignored.
Also... one would hope that most people have a sense of proprietary about what sort of material one should view in public, because of the possibility of other people seeing your screen, but given the experiences our public libraries have had with this, I don't blame McDonalds or Starbucks in the slightest. These are private establishments, so they're under no obligation to provide free access to porn.
And no, no one cares in the slightest if you're looking at a political page, which is a somewhat implausible slippery slope arguments (although beware looking at Wolfram-Alpha with those dangerous looking symbols). These companies have *no* interest in what you're looking at, just that it doesn't bother other customers. Our typical societal mores dictate that sex is something that's done in private. We have no such taboo about political discourse. Besides, let's get real... no one cares enough to actually read a wall of text on your screen.
Also, for those insisting on lathering up that slippery slope, this is a *long* way from any supposed reports of media bias by companies like Facebook, which, I think, was more a reflection of the bias that was held by the people they hired to mark the trending news. Young, recently graduated journalism students tend to be left-leaning? Color me shocked!
Frame rate is a complicated beast, depending on the *worst* performing aspect among many. But for graphics rendering, you absolutely do need shader computational ability proportional to the numbers of pixels on the screen. A fragment / pixel shader is a tiny program that's executed on every pixel, every frame. There's no getting around that requirement, except by reducing the complexity of the shaders as much as you can.
Another bottleneck when increasing screen size is memory buffers used for off-screen processing. Nearly all games I know of use at least a couple of offscreen buffers, for various effects. These screen effects also have to be processed on each pixel, and the memory requirements increase enormously when the resolution increases. You've often heard of games that use buffers that are actually *smaller* than the final resolution for intermediate processing, and then scale the output to the final resolution. A lack of memory and GPU horsepower is why they're forced to do this - they have to make some tradeoff between shader complexity and raw resolution.
So, if this is intended to do VR, it makes sense that the GPU has been significantly boosted, as most of the heavy requirements fall on that side of the system, from what I understand. It's likely the CPU is boosted simply because they have an opportunity to do so for roughly the same requirements as the original, so that will just be a bonus.
Personally, I don't think these consoles will do 4K gaming. They'll probably do 4K video and will finally have the horsepower to do true 1K resolution videogames as well as VR of some sort.
How do you identify ISIS sympathizers without violating people's rights?
The same way one would identify links to organized crime, perhaps? I'm not a police investigator, but I'd imagine it would probably start by investigating known associates of ISIS criminals, following money or funding trails to or from those organizations, and so on. I'm not advocating blanket fishing expeditions - that's explicitly what I'm arguing against.
Or do you just take the route a disturbing number of politicians have and legislate away annoying things like the Fourth Amendment, and put everyone under mass surveillance?
Apparently you didn't read to this point in my post, or you purposefully chose to ignore it: "so long as it's not a witch hunt just because of someone's religion or country of origin, and based on actual leads."
Solution: STOP supporting the terrorists with FREE publicity. I'm not saying that the journalists shouldn't report the terrorist incidents, but they need to stop using deliberate publicity-seeking disaster porn as part of their business model.
I know where you're coming from, but what about the reporting of the latest attack in Nice, France was "disaster porn"? The reporting I've seen didn't seem sensationalist, but then, I suspect the sensationalism is directly proportional to which news source one consumes. But I fear you're asking for the impossible for *everyone* to show reasonable restraint, and what's more, you're implicitly putting partial blame on the media, not the barbarians who incite others to attack innocent people or support them through funding, training, or other support - and I'm not sure that's really fair.
No one likes to hear that there simply isn't a reasonably way of preventing all such attacks in a free society while still remaining free. Our law enforcement agencies will simply have to do the best they can under the constraints we ALL have to live with to root out these monsters and keep us as safe as possible. And our job is to not let terror attacks do what they're intended to do, which is to intimidate and terrorize us.
People are dying. Mass murder has been made popular by ISIS and there have been several in just the last few weeks.
And there will be more.
Ok, so you don't like what Newt has to say. What is your solution?
Or is your solution to do nothing and ignore it?
I'm about as anti-ISIS as you can get, and a Republican. I also have a lot of respect for Newt for the way he reigned in the budget in the 90's, for which Bill Clinton gets a lot of credit. I'm completely fine with investigating ISIS sympathizers or those who identify as actual members, so long as it's not a witch hunt just because of someone's religion or country of origin, and based on actual leads. ISIS is a known terrorist and criminal organization, and I'm pretty sure there are laws on the books against aiding and abetting criminals or enemies of your country.
But what the fuck... A felony for looking at a pro-ISIS website? Does he not see the irony in adopting the same sort of tactics that a member of ISIS might propose - meting out punishment for anti-Islamic behavior or speech? Aren't we supposed to be better than that?
Even tiny computers these days are powerful enough that they could run these games in an emulator running inside another emulator. As long as it's a quality presentation, it shouldn't matter to the end-user what's happening under the hood. Given that this is Nintendo with many beloved first-party titles, I'll bet it will be quality emulation.
Or, just wait until the reviews come in before plunking down $60. We'll find out quickly enough.
He was hoping OP had a giant p0rn stash to share.
C++ absolutely solves the "goto fail" issue. The term that describes this is RAII. C++ uses objects and smart pointers (which are just pointers wrapped in objects) to hold resources. When objects go out of scope, those resources are automatically destroyed. There's very little need to clean anything up manually with modern C++.
So, is that why their economy has been stagnant for the past few decades? They've had *two* "lost decades" now? Oh, don't forget being overworked until you commit suicide, a phenomenon common enough to get its own term. How about making a whopping $26K a year as a key animator for anime? It's not exactly a fantastic place for women's equality in the workplace. And they're worried about their increasingly elderly population and how to care for them as fewer young people are choosing to have kids, resulting in a negative birth rate.
On the plus side, Japan has relatively few lawyers, their people tend to save a lot, are relatively healthy in general, and don't have nearly the violent crime problem we have in the US.
Japan has a lot going for it, but every society has its positives and negatives. It's typically not very practical to pick one single element and transplant it to a different society.
I'd guess contacts are so you can trade or play with your friends? E-mail/messages as well, I suppose. I don't have the game, so that's just speculation.
There are a few reasons. Many commercial games use a lot of middleware libraries, not just the game engine (just count the logos on some games' splash screen). I was working as a contractor for a port recently, and I think there was easily a dozen middleware components in the game. These types of libraries tend to be licensed on a per-platform basis. Even if they're available on Linux at all, the licensing costs alone might preclude any reasonable chance at profits. Moreover, it's never "free" to develop and deploy to a new platform - especially if your devs don't have a lot of experience there. You need new build servers, new dev and test stations or partitions. You need to officially support the new platform. Beyond that, there's also the sheer inertia of larger companies when making decisions that cost a lot of money or time up front. You actually have to make a business case for supporting a new platform before you can do it.
Indie games tend to have an advantage here because of their lightweight nature. The less middleware you have in your engine and the smaller your game's footprint is, the easier the port is. And if the devs want to support Linux, they don't have to justify it in a business case. They just decide and do it. It's the same reason indie games have such a wealth of creativity compared to larger dev companies. With larger companies, you spend a lot of money developing games, and that tends to make people a bit more risk-averse, which is understandable with many millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs on the line. Indie games can also make a reasonable profit with a lot fewer sales, so niche markets tend to look reasonably attractive to them.
That's why at my latest contract job, I'm helping to port a 100 million dollar game to OS X, but not Linux. As far as I know, no one's seriously even brought it up. For my own game using my own engine, I'll be adding Linux support simply because I want to. I wish it were different, but that's the reality, at least so far as I've seen.
I'd guess the surprise is more of a "why does this app need access to everything on my phone?" nature. At least on Android, you get a list of permission the app asks for, and you have to approve that before you install it. If it updates and requests new permissions, you have to explicitly approve those as well. I'd imagine iOS works the same way, but I don't have an iPhone, so can't say for sure.
So, yeah, it's up to the user to decide if they want to approve the app with those permissions or not. I saw a shopping list app that wanted access to my location data and contact lists, plus a few others. Seems excessive, right? It likely is able to recognize when you're at the grocery store and share your lists with family members, so it probably actually needed those permissions. I still didn't want it, because I knew I'd never need those features. Found one that asked for no permissions at all, like I'd expect.
I signed up for Prime mostly for the streaming, thinking that the free two day delivery would be a bonus. Unfortunately, the streaming service has a mediocre offering at best, and most of what I order these days comes from third-party retailers, so Prime's free shipping doesn't apply.
Hulu... I like their service enough, but the bug they paste in the corner of the stream drives me nuts. Why inflict that on viewers?
Anyone from Netflix listening? Know why I didn't sign up for your service instead of these two also-rans? Because you didn't give me an easy way to look at your site and see what product you're offering so I could tell if I was at all interested.
For me, it's not as much the hardware as the requirements of the software. I'm a game developer, so the engine and game are in C++, of course, no matter the platform. Our tools generally run on Windows, and productivity is more important than performance, so some of us use C#, while some other studios have used Java, from what I understand. If we need an extension language for our tools, maybe something like IronPython. If we're porting to Mac, toss in a bit of Objective-C. The web programmers use a lot of JavaScript, of course. Toss in some Lua as an embedded scripting language. There are probably a couple of minor cases I'm forgetting, but that's the bulk of it for my work.
If game developers were to move away from Direct X, and on to something cross-platform, then the bar is much lower to supporting Linux and friends.
Speaking as a game developer... I'd suggest its not any technical hurdles that keep games away from Linux. Most game engines, whether commercial or custum, are written in portable C++, and use abstraction layers to hide any platform-specific code. In my own game engine, I'd estimate that platform-specific code only amounts to less than 5% of the total code.
Rather, I think it's simply the market-share of Linux... or rather, the lack thereof. Many games have Mac ports, meaning they obviously have an OpenGL renderer and POSIX compliant backend, but still no Linux support. It's pretty hard to get motivated to support an entirely new platform that only has 1% market-share, and it doesn't help matters when that 1% is further fragmented into a bunch of different distros, further complicating support and compatibility testing.
It's the same problem Windows phones have. By all accounts, Windows phones are pretty nice, but no one makes apps for them because of the abysmal market-share, which in turn drives more users away. It's sort of a catch-22 for platforms with a small market-share, making it extremely difficult to break in.
If this was a typical bomb disposal "robot", then it was as much a robot as a toy RC car. They're just specialized tele-operated vehicles. They're called "robots" because they *look* like a robot, I suppose, but I've always thought that some sort of autonomy was required before you could legitimately apply that term. This isn't some brand new technology that can now be exploited. You could easily create a remote-controlled bomb-delivery vehicle half a century ago.
The only difference was that the police happened to have such a vehicle handy, and a terrible situation in which police were actively being targeted. There were no hostages, and so it makes no sense for police to rush in and try to take him out using guns. The shooter was obviously not interested surrendering, only taking out as many white people (especially police) as he could, and was a very real threat. We lost enough people without risking more lives.
Layering encryption on top of an unsecured line and that is dynamically routed/switched and co-mingles signals from others doesn't make the internet a secure communication medium.
I think perhaps you're conflating the transportation mechanism with the content itself. The internet was *designed* to layer different content and protocols on top of simple, insecure, and even *unreliable* transport protocols.
If you're talking about remaining anonymous on the internet, no, we don't yet have a reliable way to do that, because ultimately you need to give someone your IP address to receive content back. If you're talking about securing content transmitted over the internet, then yes, we absolutely have a reliable way to do that - so far as we know.
You neither have control over the pipe nor what the router at the end of it does.
And that doesn't matter at all. I'm perfectly happy to blast my encrypted traffic over the internet or even over the air where anyone can listen to it, because all they'll hear is the initial handshake followed by a whole lot of pseudo-random noise. It sounds like you're saying that you believe you need a secure, dedicated line to secure your traffic. If so, either this means you don't understand how modern encryption works, or you're trying to play the cool pessimist by saying "well, someone could find a flaw" (which is like claiming airline travel is not safe because airplanes occasionally crash). No decent encryption scheme should rely on a secure transportation mechanism, because that's more or less impossible... or at least impractical... with today's technology.
Security isn't a black and white issue, because you can never actually prove something is secure. It's about degrees of confidence that can only be established over time and lots of cryptographers and researchers trying to break said security. At the moment, we have a pretty high degree of confidence in TLS, because we haven't yet seen a single example of anyone breaking it. Unless you think all the government complaining about the internet "going dark" is a false flag operation, that's a pretty good indicator that no one has been able to break modern encryption methods.
My prediction: as soon as their technical support costs skyrocket when those 80% can't figure out how to get their porn, or when customers cancel service and sign up with a different ISP, they'll rethink their position.
It's really when the government starts mandating this sort of thing that I have a real problem with it, or if there's no competition for ISPs and no way to disable this "feature". Obviously, I'd prefer that ISPs remain a "dumb pipe", but we live in an imperfect world. As such, I use a commercial VPN service, and hope that the entire web is encrypted in the near future, making man-in-the-middle snooping much more difficult.
That's fine by me. I actually upgraded to Windows 10 voluntarily (I write Windows software, so I need to be up-to-date) and don't buy the spyware boogieman stories (it's simple to turn most of that crap off), but frankly, Microsoft's heavy-handed tactics to trick people into upgrading without their explicit consent has been absolutely inexcusable, and shouldn't be rewarded.
I was... moderately hopeful that we were seeing a new Microsoft, embracing open source, less hostile to others, slightly more humble now that they're not the only dominant player in the industry. Nope, instead, we see a new "fuck you, paying customer, we know what's best for you" attitude. They've always played hardball with competitors. Customers, if not treated *well*, per se, were at least left the hell alone once they had Windows installed. Now, they're being actively harassed and pushed into Microsoft's monetization plan.
What's baffling to me is that Microsoft took what should have been a golden PR opportunity (free Windows upgrade), and turned it into a PR disaster.
Sure, Y2K was actually a real problem (and there's another one coming up), but there was a lot of ridiculous doomsday scenarios floating around - planes falling out of the sky, mass blackouts, water treatment plant shutdowns, etc. So, yes, it was an issue, but the problem was dealt with, and life went on.
It's the same as this issue. Yes, decisions will have to be made about how to deal with emergency situations. People will still die in auto accidents, but probably not nearly as many. Life will go on.
And the number of situations in real life where a car AI has to decide between running over a group of nuns on the left or a group of schoolkids on the right will hover very close to zero. I think a lot of people forget that the "trolley problem" is nothing but an ethics-related thought experiment, not something we're expecting to see in real life.
Happiness is slavery.
Fans of closed platforms like iOS and game consoles would agree.
Do you realize that just a hundred and fifty years we abolished actual slavery, fighting an incredibly bloody war in the process, where one person could own another person as actually property? Yes, I like open platforms too, but damn, if my Xbox gets all tyranical-like, I can throw it in the garbage and stop paying Microsoft $60 a year. Let's not get carried away with hyperbole.
Well, actual data say otherwise. If you've got some data that points to contrary trends, I'd be happy to take a look. The good news is that it's trending in the correct direction, albeit slowly.
If that's what you think, then your knowledge is about 7 years out of date.
You're telling me that only a year or so after Python 3 was released, most people were using it? Funny, that's not how I seem to recall things. Yes, there are tools like 2to3 (and even 3to2), but automated tools aren't magic, and can't fix everything.
Nearly all new Python development is done using Python 3, and this has been the case for many years now.
Well, yeah, no kidding. You don't have to worry about legacy code when writing something new.
Look, I've got nothing against Python - it's a great language. I'm certain Python 2 will be phased out completely at some point, but the point I was making was that the transition was a lot slower and more painful than most people anticipated. No need to get all defensive about it.
Agreed. This ridiculously overplayed scenario is the Y2K scare of our time. Watch... nothing will come of it, because (gasp) computers are so bloody fast, they'll have been slowing down in a dangerous situation long before a human driver was aware of the problem. Or they'll be able to get away with simple braking, again, because they can react instantly, perhaps not avoiding a collision, but avoiding a fatal injury. But one thing a car AI must *never* do is decide to sacrifice the passengers, no matter the circumstance.
And if people are jumping out in front of fast moving cars, as sad as that is, there's a perfect Darwinian solution to that problem too.
You'll need to program your car to hunt down Murray and the rest of the city council. Only then will their war on cars come to it's inevitable conclusion.
But hey, if you want to let them keep replacing parking places with "parklets", it's on you. We're certainly not as hip over here on the Eastside, but at least we can find a parking spot.
The C++ committee (rightly so, I think) tends to prefer library-based solutions whenever possible, because there's less chance of disruptive changes when you add new libraries. Only when a library solution won't work do they turn to new language features. You'll also notice they really don't like adding new keywords at this point.
A lot of people seemingly don't understand how important this backwards compatibility is (presumably because they're always rewriting stuff using the latest new-and-shiny tech), but there are many places that have code that's decades old. It's a terrible idea to go and tinker with robust, well-tested code just because it's not the latest new-and-shiny. The careful attention to backwards-compatibility causes a lot of issues (like slow compile time / language complexity, etc), but it's also one of C++'s greatest strengths. People know that an investment in C++ code will be working just fine for decades to come. I mean, they're just now depreciating trigraphs, for pete's sake. Apparently IBM still has code that uses those and opposed their removal in the last standards round, but they're a tiny minority and couldn't sway the committee this time. No one else even knows what the hell they are.
Look how much of a rift the Python 2 to 3 change caused. Even if it's good for the language, incompatible changes that occur too quickly can cause real problems for a programming community. Even after 8 years, a significant percentage of Python programmers are still using 2.x instead of 3, mostly because of dependencies holding them back.
Nothing would kill new C++ features faster than incompatibility with legacy code. And in fact, one of the nice things about C++ is that it typically allows programmers to start adding those new features piecemeal as they get more familiar with them and as they get compiler support.