There is another argument which is all too prevalent among enthusiastic language designers, that efficiency of object code is no longer important; that the speed and-capacity of computers is increasing and their price is coming down, and the programming language designer might as well take advantage of this.
This is an argument that would be quite acceptable if used to justify an efficiency loss of ten or twenty percent, or even thirty and forty percent. But all too frequently it is used to justify an efficiency loss of a factor of two, or ten, or even more; and worse, the overhead is not only in time taken but in space occupied by the running program.
In no other engineering discipline would such avoidable overhead be tolerated, and it should not be in programming language design.
The most common dark matter candidate (the lightest neutralino) is a mixture of the supersymmetric partners of these particles: the neutral bino and neutral wino (and two neutral higgsinos). We could just as well say that we're mixing the photino and zino (and two neutral higgsinos), but bino and wino are more common terminology.
I do believe you are making this up. Why not mix the dino, schmino, albino, and hellifino also?:-)
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical (X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I'm not sure what you're describing is actually possible.
There shouldn't be any observable difference between encrypted traffic and, say, a ZIP file. They're both high entropy data streams with no apparent structure to analyze. I don't see how they could distinguish your VPN from any other binary file.
Golden Axe 2 (the arcade ROM) has a good chunk of it's source code contained in there too, including the source for it's security routine (oh the hilarity...)
And the PAL version of ICO (PS2) had an objdump of the entire ELF on the disc, which is basically a disassembly with full symbol information.
Heh, I think 'cracked' is too strong a word for simply reading the contents.:-)
I miss the days when computers actually encouraged the users to experiment around with them. I remember my +2 manual actually explained and documented how the hardware worked. Don't seem to get that much any more...
Nyet. The GeForce 3 hardware had pretty much the same setup, under a different name. The pixel shader compiler could translate the assembly language into the necessary texture stage parameters.
So it does at least have a pixel shader. Admittedly not a great one.
Despite what you may have read in the popular press, the Xbox isn't just a modified PC running Windows.
It runs it's own kernel, which is based loosly from the NT kernel. There's no GUI code at all present. There's no GDI/USER stuff. Also, you get almost direct access to the GPU, which is the essential path needed for any decently-performing console.
If Apple were to try this themselves, they'd need to throw out most of OS X and drop back to just running the Darwin kernel. They'd need to pick a GPU and stick with it for a few years, and give the developers complete access to it's internals.
You seem to be under the impression that most BASIC programs would only print out text and numbers.
Most of the stuff I grew up with as a kid (Spectrum BASIC, AMOS, QBasic, etc) could quite happily read controls, draw things on screen, and play sounds - all the things you need to start messing around with.
They should be able to comply to a standard, certainly, but if the standard is too complex to be able to comply to, I would imagine that says more about the standard than it does their support for it. They shouldn't need to include 3rd party code just to support an image format...
So am I the only one who played Ocarina of Time, and Ico?
For some reason this guy thinks Myst is the pinnacle of art in games. Well, each to their own...
He then goes on to say how he's watched people playing Doom 3 and decided that it doesn't count on account of that type of game being "purely mechanical". Now admittedly, Doom 3 isn't exactly renowned for it's artistic merit, but it seems to me that he simply doesn't actually like playing anything that isn't a series of static images. He's not actually been playing any games at all, despite what he himself might think.
The games he mentions he has played - 7th Guest, Myst, and The Resident's Bad Day on the midway - these were all FMV "interactive movie" games released around 93-95. If that's what he considers the peak of the artform then he's very misguided indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this basically Windows 1.0? All applications tiled onto fullscreen?
What goes around comes around...
There is another argument which is all too prevalent among enthusiastic language designers, that efficiency of object code is no longer important; that the speed and-capacity of computers is increasing and their price is coming down, and the programming language designer might as well take advantage of this.
This is an argument that would be quite acceptable if used to justify an efficiency loss of ten or twenty percent, or even thirty and forty percent. But all too frequently it is used to justify an efficiency loss of a factor of two, or ten, or even
more; and worse, the overhead is not only in time taken but in space occupied by the running program.
In no other engineering discipline would such avoidable overhead be tolerated, and it should not be in programming language design.
-- C.A.R. Hoare, 1973
ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL
The most common dark matter candidate (the lightest neutralino) is a mixture of the supersymmetric partners of these particles: the neutral bino and neutral wino (and two neutral higgsinos). We could just as well say that we're mixing the photino and zino (and two neutral higgsinos), but bino and wino are more common terminology.
I do believe you are making this up. Why not mix the dino, schmino, albino, and hellifino also? :-)
I put it to you, madam, that you do not exist.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
> The MSX did very well in Japan, South America (there are 400.000 MSX machines only in Brazil!) and quite well also in Europe.
What's your point then?
Computer company in successful-business-plan shocker!
Am I the only person who thinks it somewhat wrong to post on Slashdot a link to stolen, unreleased source code?
Geez, why not just upload a GTA4 ISO while you're at it.
That's not really strictly true.
They their own custom API, that just happens to resemble DirectX in many ways.
Pac-Land wasn't a platformer.
On account of it not having any platforms in.
I'm not sure what you're describing is actually possible.
There shouldn't be any observable difference between encrypted traffic and, say, a ZIP file. They're both high entropy data streams with no apparent structure to analyze. I don't see how they could distinguish your VPN from any other binary file.
Golden Axe 2 (the arcade ROM) has a good chunk of it's source code contained in there too, including the source for it's security routine (oh the hilarity...)
And the PAL version of ICO (PS2) had an objdump of the entire ELF on the disc, which is basically a disassembly with full symbol information.
> come across the odd Artillery shell filled with mustard
That certainly is an odd shell.
> Anyway, the Spectrum ROM was cracked
:-)
Heh, I think 'cracked' is too strong a word for simply reading the contents.
I miss the days when computers actually encouraged the users to experiment around with them. I remember my +2 manual actually explained and documented how the hardware worked. Don't seem to get that much any more...
Nyet.
The GeForce 3 hardware had pretty much the same setup, under a different name.
The pixel shader compiler could translate the assembly language into the necessary texture stage parameters.
So it does at least have a pixel shader.
Admittedly not a great one.
Despite what you may have read in the popular press, the Xbox isn't just a modified PC running Windows.
It runs it's own kernel, which is based loosly from the NT kernel. There's no GUI code at all present. There's no GDI/USER stuff. Also, you get almost direct access to the GPU, which is the essential path needed for any decently-performing console.
If Apple were to try this themselves, they'd need to throw out most of OS X and drop back to just running the Darwin kernel. They'd need to pick a GPU and stick with it for a few years, and give the developers complete access to it's internals.
It'd be a Mac in spirit, but not in practice.
ZOMG RSS Aggregator!
It's like the future, except now.
Well, that's not strictly accurate.
You seem to be under the impression that most BASIC programs would only print out text and numbers.
Most of the stuff I grew up with as a kid (Spectrum BASIC, AMOS, QBasic, etc) could quite happily read controls, draw things on screen, and play sounds - all the things you need to start messing around with.
Unfortunately, this is all too true. People tend to assume malice when human nature is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
They should be able to comply to a standard, certainly, but if the standard is too complex to be able to comply to, I would imagine that says more about the standard than it does their support for it. They shouldn't need to include 3rd party code just to support an image format...
What the hell planet are you living on? :-)
The AMC on 3rd and Santa Monica charges $10. I think that's pretty standard...
> YOU PLAY ONLINE WITH PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD!
I'm curious as to how well this works with a ~100ms ping time.
Wot no Superfrog?
Seriously - the best platformer on the best home computer? Pah.
Oh, and my mistake. It appears he's talking about Doom 1, not Doom 3.
Cutting edge, I tell you.
Sigh.
So am I the only one who played Ocarina of Time, and Ico?
For some reason this guy thinks Myst is the pinnacle of art in games. Well, each to their own...
He then goes on to say how he's watched people playing Doom 3 and decided that it doesn't count on account of that type of game being "purely mechanical". Now admittedly, Doom 3 isn't exactly renowned for it's artistic merit, but it seems to me that he simply doesn't actually like playing anything that isn't a series of static images. He's not actually been playing any games at all, despite what he himself might think.
The games he mentions he has played - 7th Guest, Myst, and The Resident's Bad Day on the midway - these were all FMV "interactive movie" games released around 93-95. If that's what he considers the peak of the artform then he's very misguided indeed.