Last time I played Civ 4 (as the English) the French declared war on me twice, followed by begging for peace a few years (turns) later. I didn't agree the second time.
The "help, we're being invaded, wave our white flags" seems to be true.
I timed (by counting) my Windows boot time today, and it came to 15 seconds from the bootloader to the login screen. After typing my password everything else seems to have started within 1-2 seconds.
That's a full boot, not hibernate or sleep/standby.
I haven't turned off any stock Windows services etc, I just haven't filled my pc with crap that launches at startup.
This kind of makes me wonder how fast "Splashtop" would boot on this pc.
Calling this "Instant-Boot" is a bit of a stretch. The 20 second boot time for Splashtop is decently fast, but hardly "instant", especially when you compare it to how fast some computers can recover from sleep or hibernate modes. Forget hibernate or sleep, my Windows install boots that fast. Of course, it's got a decent hard-disk and isn't loaded with a billion items of crap to launch at startup.
Yup, it's the same issue as programmers who saved pointers into 32-bit numbers, instead of storing them in, I don't know, a pointer; whose programs will probably compile (with warnings) but will crash horribly in a 64-bit version.
Also, most C libraries do have a time_64_t (or whatever its called) and most operating systems HAVE already been fixed to avoid this Y2038 bug. It's just software that still has problems.
Well obviously the timestamp was invented before Microsoft supported it, isn't that the case with everything? But still, officially, are negative timestamps supposed to be valid or not? I honestly don't know, I just know that they work in some implementations and indicate errors in others.
The 64-bit numbers thing was more referring to native cpu support, of course by writing a little clever code you can handle numbers as large as you want. It was also a jab at anyone using the 32-bit versions, given how long the 64-bit versions have been available.
It's "Number of seconds since midnight (0:00:00) January 1st 1970". Which in a SIGNED 32-bit number, overflows into negative in 2038.
If they'd used an unsigned 32-bit number, then they would have had dates up to 2106 covered. Unfortunately whoever invented these timestamps chose to make them use signed numbers, with negative numbers being allowed on some systems (representing dates before 1970) and being errors on other systems (e.g. Windows)...
Fortunately 64-bit numbers can now be handled by pcs, and can be used as an extended timestamp to get a few billion years of time. Most operating systems have already been converted, it's just legacy programs that would have issues.
Good explanation. Of course, as most of the more minor problems that cause a part of a chip to be locked are heat related, keeping the chip cool (aftermarket cooler, water cooling or even stronger) will prevent the problem cropping up.
In the case of the Athlon 2500+/3200+ and the XP/MPs, they weren't faulty, they were binned lower due to excess supply. At the time, something like 90% of all Athlon XPs produced were perfectly MP capable, but only 10% of the cpus they were selling were the MP variety. It was a similar thing with the 3200+, they had an unusually high yield, flooding them with top-end 3200+ cpus, but were selling far more of the ~2500+ chips, so they rebinned a whole lot of 3200+ as 2500+. An easy thing to do, as they had the same multiplier, already changed their name based on multi/fsb combination and the FSB was set by the motherboard, not the cpu. A whole series of motherboards ended up asking the user whether their new chip was a 2500+ or 3200+, as it couldn't tell the difference:)
I'm mostly out of the overclocking / unlocking scene now, I prefer to buy good parts instead of overclocking bad parts.
I've done this kind of thing. nVidia 6800LE with half it's shader processors disabled (had 4 blocks of 4, 2 blocks disabled), which could have half of those (1 block of 4) re-enabled without issue. Athlon XP 2500+ that could have the FSB changed to 200MHz instead of 166 and it would BECOME a Athlon XP 3200+ (name and all). And the best one: Two Athlon XP 2400+ cpus that I unlocked with a conductive pen to be Athlon MP 2400+s, and I still use in a dual-cpu board now.
Generally, unlocked or overclocked pc parts burn out faster than if they'd been left alone (e.g. the 6800LE I mentioned died a horrible death, and now doesn't work at all). However if the chip was DESIGNED to be able to be unlocked, it would be perfectly safe.
I was impressed that the BT router my parents got recently came with encryption on (only WEP I think, but better than off), and the wireless password is set and different for every router (it's written on the router, and is a random set of characters, probably based off the serial number). That's the most secure "by-default" router I've seen so far.
At least here in the UK, you can use a credit/debit card to buy points directly through the Wii Shop. No need to buy a points card unless you find it cheaper. Or don't have a credit/debit card, I suppose.
(you try and keeping hundreds of enthusiastic kids from finding ways round microsoft security) Having been a schoolkid myself recently, I can vouch for the fact that a school's IT security isn't worth piss.
The server was locked in a cabinet, nice and secure, but students had full read/write/execute permissions on all the pcs in the school. I brought down the entire network for a week or two with a poorly written VB script, which I shouldn't have been able to run if the pcs had been secured. It was effectively a packet flood / DDOS, but the IT tech spent a week looking for dodgy cables. He was let go shortly after.
At the time, half the pcs ran Windows 98, which really didn't know what security was.
Nowadays, with XP and a decent Windows domain controller, permissions can be set to prevent students from executing software anywhere except the Windows folder and program files, don't give them write permissions to either, password the bios and set it to only boot off of a hdd, use case locking screws, etc. After that, the machine would be nearly impossible to compromise.
Oh, and use WSUS to forcibly roll out security updates.
The debugger is leaps and bounds ahead of the VC6 one. It supports parallel building of multiple projects on multicore cpus / multiple cpus (massively reducing build time). Built in x86-64 compiling / debugging (local machine and network) support. It supports link-time code generation (a major optimization improvement). The Pro version also supports profile-guided optimization. It supports OpenMP multithreading extensions for C++. Many many other improvements.
The C++.net extensions are optional. And, in my opinion, crap. If you want to use.net, you're better off with C#. Note: VC++ 2005 Express Edition (the free version) doesn't come with the Windows Platform SDK, and if you don't install it is only good for developing C++.net apps.
The ONLY advantages to VC6 are: that it links programs against the VC6 runtime dll, which comes with most versions of Windows, right back to some 9x editions, where with VC2005 it links against the VC8 runtime dll, which most people need to install / you need to distribute it with your program / you need to static link with it, resulting in a larger.exe; and that it supports building.exes that run on Windows 95. Basically VC6's only advantage is that it's old.
A little program called "QueTek File Scavenger" is capable of retrieving files from a broken raid array, given access to the disks and the raid settings (mode (0,1,5,10), stripe size (0,5,10 only), plus parity ordering if raid 5). There are other programs available (e.g raid reconstructor) that can figure out the raid settings given access to the disks, in case you don't know and can't figure it out through trial and error.
I used both recently to retrieve data from a broken raid-5 array (dead SiI3114 controller). I retrieved all hundreds of gigabytes of data, over the course of a couple of days.
I've used file scavenger in the past to completely recover all files from a single ntfs drive that had been quick-formatted, and a raid-5 set where one disk was completely dead (it happily reconstructed the disk from the raid-5 parity info).
The raid-5 capable version is fairly expensive, but not as expensive as having a professional data recovery company recover the data.
"500W" isn't necessarily high-end, there have been PC PSUs around for ages that quote "peak" power instead of "sustainable" power, with the former being twice the latter. IIRC any that is 80%+ efficient certified will be advertised based on its sustainable load, and any which advertise their colour, number of fans/huge size of fans, or glowing LEDs in huge letters on the box are likely to be advertising "peak" power, or about double what it can sustain. A good power supply will also generally advertise that it has "multiple 12V lines".
The most reliable test I've found is that a good PSU is really freaking HEAVY.
To summarise: Big brand supplies like any Tagan or any Antec (particularly TruePower) = Good qTec 650W Triple Fan Gold = Bad, can only sustain around 300-400W.
I was specifically looking for a "games programming" course for my uni degree (in the UK), and I had a hard time finding one that was in C/C++.
Some places were all Java for 3 years, one was Java/Flash. You should have seen some of the "student work" that they were proud enough of to show to visitors interested in the course. At one of them even my dad (who is by no means a gamer, though he is IT literate) was unimpressed enough to ask me if it was worth staying or if we should walk out.
In the end, I took the "Computer Games Programming" course at the University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, and found out fairly soon that I'd made the right choice. By the end of the course I'd had experience with C, C++ (the course's 2 main languages); Java (half of the online games programming module, the other half was C/C++); Perl, PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, SQL (in a website context, and I know some of those aren't really programming languages as such); and 68000 assembler. Vector, Matrix, Quaternion and Boolean Algebra maths were taught. There was even a module on low-level computer design, from basic logical layout, to designing simple structures (adder, etc) with logic gates, and even how to construct the various logic gates with transistors. Understanding of a topic was mostly proved by implementing it, so by the end of the course I had small libraries and programs doing everything from vector/matrix maths, stack/list/queue etc data structures, sorting and so on; up to a command-line program that rendered a 3D scene using a renderer we had to write completely by hand (supporting object instances, texturing, lighting, normal maps and semi-transparent object rendering), an A* pathfinding implementation, and an app rendering (D3D this time IIRC) a set of coloured balls interacting with full rigid-body physics (custom written by us), including friction against the "floor" that meant that they "rolled" instead of "slid".
My portfolio and experience gained from this course helped me to land my current job before I'd even got my final year's results back. Incidentally I got a fail mark for my final year's project, so had to resit it to get my degree. I as much as said to the person when I handed it in (they commented that it hadn't changed much from the version that narrowly failed) that I'd already got a job thanks to the course, so not getting the degree didn't matter much to me. If I failed again I wouldn't be resitting the final year anyway, because I'd be too busy working, and having the degree wouldn't get me anything I didn't already have. I passed.
I don't doubt that had I done one of the Java/Flash courses, I'd have graduated with honours among some people that thought that what having a 2D image moving on screen was really neat. There's little chance I would have got a job so soon, and even littler chance that I'd be working in a team of 10, let alone 100.
The mark of a good programmer isn't proficiency with a programming language, it's knowledge of the theory behind the language, so that he can then pick up any other programming language or proprietary extensions quickly and use them well. Teaching just a single language doesn't get you that.
DRM free doesn't mean Sony couldn't (or wouldn't) place a unique key in the MP3 header. Your 8 year old daughter places a copy of the downloaded file in a public location and then Sony can track you down and sue your rear-end off. Personally, I find the idea of watermarked files acceptable. If I illegally share an mp3 to a hundred thousand people, then I should be prosecuted. The professional pirates would be able to remove the watermark anyway (or, would probably rip the stuff from the cds themselves), and the home user would be able to listen to their mp3 on any mp3 player, or recode it for a non-mp3 player, without drm getting in the way.
The studio I work for used to use "SourceSafe", but before I arrived they switched to Perforce. Might have had something to do with having a "Midway" budget instead of an "independent studio" budget.
We've upgraded to VC++ 2005 SP1, mostly for the "parallel-build on multi-core machines" feature, which has dramatically improved our build times. The debugger is also leaps ahead of VC6 in terms of the expressions you can put in the immediate/watch window and have work.
We've mostly upgraded to Office 2007, but some of the studio still uses 2003 (myself included) and haven't yet had a reason to upgrade.
We're ALL still running XP. IT might have a Vista machine set up to evaluate it, but it hasn't been rolled out to us yet. Upgrading to an x64 OS has been mentioned, to get around memory limits, but I don't think it's planned. Our development machines have 4GB of ram, but can Windows can only use 3GB, any single app can only use 2GB, and we've hit that 2GB limit a couple of times on complex operations.
Maybe we'll be moved to Vista after our current project is finished.
Unfortunately money can't be turned directly into servers. They need to be built and delivered, and have software loaded and configured. Give it a few weeks.
At a guess, they might even need so many new servers that they need to hire or buy a new location and have it rigged with power and internet. That could take months.
You know, there's a "protected mode" -like thing in xp too, it goes like this:
Make sure "Secondary Logon" (service) is enabled. Create a shortcut to whatever app you'd like to jail. Go to the shortcut's properties, "Advanced..." Tick on "Run with different credentials" OK OK When you run the program through the shortcut, it will prompt you whether to run the program as yourself but with significantly reduced permissions (default) or as another user (useful to run programs as Administrator if you're not).
You can get the same dialog by right-clicking on the program/shortcut and choosing "run as" instead of "open".
It's a bit of a hassle to go through, and I don't know how secure it is.
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Forum sarcasm is a subtle art, and we're both so good at it.
Last time I played Civ 4 (as the English) the French declared war on me twice, followed by begging for peace a few years (turns) later. I didn't agree the second time.
The "help, we're being invaded, wave our white flags" seems to be true.
I timed (by counting) my Windows boot time today, and it came to 15 seconds from the bootloader to the login screen. After typing my password everything else seems to have started within 1-2 seconds.
That's a full boot, not hibernate or sleep/standby.
I haven't turned off any stock Windows services etc, I just haven't filled my pc with crap that launches at startup.
This kind of makes me wonder how fast "Splashtop" would boot on this pc.
Yup, it's the same issue as programmers who saved pointers into 32-bit numbers, instead of storing them in, I don't know, a pointer; whose programs will probably compile (with warnings) but will crash horribly in a 64-bit version.
Also, most C libraries do have a time_64_t (or whatever its called) and most operating systems HAVE already been fixed to avoid this Y2038 bug. It's just software that still has problems.
Well obviously the timestamp was invented before Microsoft supported it, isn't that the case with everything?
But still, officially, are negative timestamps supposed to be valid or not? I honestly don't know, I just know that they work in some implementations and indicate errors in others.
The 64-bit numbers thing was more referring to native cpu support, of course by writing a little clever code you can handle numbers as large as you want. It was also a jab at anyone using the 32-bit versions, given how long the 64-bit versions have been available.
It's "Number of seconds since midnight (0:00:00) January 1st 1970". Which in a SIGNED 32-bit number, overflows into negative in 2038.
If they'd used an unsigned 32-bit number, then they would have had dates up to 2106 covered. Unfortunately whoever invented these timestamps chose to make them use signed numbers, with negative numbers being allowed on some systems (representing dates before 1970) and being errors on other systems (e.g. Windows)...
Fortunately 64-bit numbers can now be handled by pcs, and can be used as an extended timestamp to get a few billion years of time. Most operating systems have already been converted, it's just legacy programs that would have issues.
Good explanation. Of course, as most of the more minor problems that cause a part of a chip to be locked are heat related, keeping the chip cool (aftermarket cooler, water cooling or even stronger) will prevent the problem cropping up.
:)
In the case of the Athlon 2500+/3200+ and the XP/MPs, they weren't faulty, they were binned lower due to excess supply.
At the time, something like 90% of all Athlon XPs produced were perfectly MP capable, but only 10% of the cpus they were selling were the MP variety. It was a similar thing with the 3200+, they had an unusually high yield, flooding them with top-end 3200+ cpus, but were selling far more of the ~2500+ chips, so they rebinned a whole lot of 3200+ as 2500+. An easy thing to do, as they had the same multiplier, already changed their name based on multi/fsb combination and the FSB was set by the motherboard, not the cpu. A whole series of motherboards ended up asking the user whether their new chip was a 2500+ or 3200+, as it couldn't tell the difference
I'm mostly out of the overclocking / unlocking scene now, I prefer to buy good parts instead of overclocking bad parts.
I've done this kind of thing. nVidia 6800LE with half it's shader processors disabled (had 4 blocks of 4, 2 blocks disabled), which could have half of those (1 block of 4) re-enabled without issue. Athlon XP 2500+ that could have the FSB changed to 200MHz instead of 166 and it would BECOME a Athlon XP 3200+ (name and all).
And the best one: Two Athlon XP 2400+ cpus that I unlocked with a conductive pen to be Athlon MP 2400+s, and I still use in a dual-cpu board now.
Generally, unlocked or overclocked pc parts burn out faster than if they'd been left alone (e.g. the 6800LE I mentioned died a horrible death, and now doesn't work at all). However if the chip was DESIGNED to be able to be unlocked, it would be perfectly safe.
I was impressed that the BT router my parents got recently came with encryption on (only WEP I think, but better than off), and the wireless password is set and different for every router (it's written on the router, and is a random set of characters, probably based off the serial number). That's the most secure "by-default" router I've seen so far.
At least here in the UK, you can use a credit/debit card to buy points directly through the Wii Shop. No need to buy a points card unless you find it cheaper. Or don't have a credit/debit card, I suppose.
The server was locked in a cabinet, nice and secure, but students had full read/write/execute permissions on all the pcs in the school. I brought down the entire network for a week or two with a poorly written VB script, which I shouldn't have been able to run if the pcs had been secured. It was effectively a packet flood / DDOS, but the IT tech spent a week looking for dodgy cables. He was let go shortly after.
At the time, half the pcs ran Windows 98, which really didn't know what security was.
Nowadays, with XP and a decent Windows domain controller, permissions can be set to prevent students from executing software anywhere except the Windows folder and program files, don't give them write permissions to either, password the bios and set it to only boot off of a hdd, use case locking screws, etc. After that, the machine would be nearly impossible to compromise.
Oh, and use WSUS to forcibly roll out security updates.
Have you tried MSVC++ 2005?
.net extensions are optional. And, in my opinion, crap. If you want to use .net, you're better off with C#.
.exe; and that it supports building .exes that run on Windows 95.
The debugger is leaps and bounds ahead of the VC6 one.
It supports parallel building of multiple projects on multicore cpus / multiple cpus (massively reducing build time).
Built in x86-64 compiling / debugging (local machine and network) support.
It supports link-time code generation (a major optimization improvement). The Pro version also supports profile-guided optimization.
It supports OpenMP multithreading extensions for C++.
Many many other improvements.
The C++
Note: VC++ 2005 Express Edition (the free version) doesn't come with the Windows Platform SDK, and if you don't install it is only good for developing C++.net apps.
The ONLY advantages to VC6 are: that it links programs against the VC6 runtime dll, which comes with most versions of Windows, right back to some 9x editions, where with VC2005 it links against the VC8 runtime dll, which most people need to install / you need to distribute it with your program / you need to static link with it, resulting in a larger
Basically VC6's only advantage is that it's old.
A little program called "QueTek File Scavenger" is capable of retrieving files from a broken raid array, given access to the disks and the raid settings (mode (0,1,5,10), stripe size (0,5,10 only), plus parity ordering if raid 5). There are other programs available (e.g raid reconstructor) that can figure out the raid settings given access to the disks, in case you don't know and can't figure it out through trial and error.
I used both recently to retrieve data from a broken raid-5 array (dead SiI3114 controller). I retrieved all hundreds of gigabytes of data, over the course of a couple of days.
I've used file scavenger in the past to completely recover all files from a single ntfs drive that had been quick-formatted, and a raid-5 set where one disk was completely dead (it happily reconstructed the disk from the raid-5 parity info).
The raid-5 capable version is fairly expensive, but not as expensive as having a professional data recovery company recover the data.
"500W" isn't necessarily high-end, there have been PC PSUs around for ages that quote "peak" power instead of "sustainable" power, with the former being twice the latter. IIRC any that is 80%+ efficient certified will be advertised based on its sustainable load, and any which advertise their colour, number of fans/huge size of fans, or glowing LEDs in huge letters on the box are likely to be advertising "peak" power, or about double what it can sustain. A good power supply will also generally advertise that it has "multiple 12V lines".
The most reliable test I've found is that a good PSU is really freaking HEAVY.
To summarise:
Big brand supplies like any Tagan or any Antec (particularly TruePower) = Good
qTec 650W Triple Fan Gold = Bad, can only sustain around 300-400W.
I was specifically looking for a "games programming" course for my uni degree (in the UK), and I had a hard time finding one that was in C/C++.
Some places were all Java for 3 years, one was Java/Flash. You should have seen some of the "student work" that they were proud enough of to show to visitors interested in the course. At one of them even my dad (who is by no means a gamer, though he is IT literate) was unimpressed enough to ask me if it was worth staying or if we should walk out.
In the end, I took the "Computer Games Programming" course at the University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, and found out fairly soon that I'd made the right choice. By the end of the course I'd had experience with C, C++ (the course's 2 main languages); Java (half of the online games programming module, the other half was C/C++); Perl, PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, SQL (in a website context, and I know some of those aren't really programming languages as such); and 68000 assembler. Vector, Matrix, Quaternion and Boolean Algebra maths were taught. There was even a module on low-level computer design, from basic logical layout, to designing simple structures (adder, etc) with logic gates, and even how to construct the various logic gates with transistors.
Understanding of a topic was mostly proved by implementing it, so by the end of the course I had small libraries and programs doing everything from vector/matrix maths, stack/list/queue etc data structures, sorting and so on; up to a command-line program that rendered a 3D scene using a renderer we had to write completely by hand (supporting object instances, texturing, lighting, normal maps and semi-transparent object rendering), an A* pathfinding implementation, and an app rendering (D3D this time IIRC) a set of coloured balls interacting with full rigid-body physics (custom written by us), including friction against the "floor" that meant that they "rolled" instead of "slid".
My portfolio and experience gained from this course helped me to land my current job before I'd even got my final year's results back. Incidentally I got a fail mark for my final year's project, so had to resit it to get my degree. I as much as said to the person when I handed it in (they commented that it hadn't changed much from the version that narrowly failed) that I'd already got a job thanks to the course, so not getting the degree didn't matter much to me. If I failed again I wouldn't be resitting the final year anyway, because I'd be too busy working, and having the degree wouldn't get me anything I didn't already have. I passed.
I don't doubt that had I done one of the Java/Flash courses, I'd have graduated with honours among some people that thought that what having a 2D image moving on screen was really neat. There's little chance I would have got a job so soon, and even littler chance that I'd be working in a team of 10, let alone 100.
The mark of a good programmer isn't proficiency with a programming language, it's knowledge of the theory behind the language, so that he can then pick up any other programming language or proprietary extensions quickly and use them well. Teaching just a single language doesn't get you that.
The studio I work for used to use "SourceSafe", but before I arrived they switched to Perforce. Might have had something to do with having a "Midway" budget instead of an "independent studio" budget.
We've upgraded to VC++ 2005 SP1, mostly for the "parallel-build on multi-core machines" feature, which has dramatically improved our build times. The debugger is also leaps ahead of VC6 in terms of the expressions you can put in the immediate/watch window and have work.
We've mostly upgraded to Office 2007, but some of the studio still uses 2003 (myself included) and haven't yet had a reason to upgrade.
We're ALL still running XP. IT might have a Vista machine set up to evaluate it, but it hasn't been rolled out to us yet. Upgrading to an x64 OS has been mentioned, to get around memory limits, but I don't think it's planned. Our development machines have 4GB of ram, but can Windows can only use 3GB, any single app can only use 2GB, and we've hit that 2GB limit a couple of times on complex operations.
Maybe we'll be moved to Vista after our current project is finished.
A good wear-leveller will swap high-activity sectors with low activity ones every-so-often, so it would still get to wear-level the entire disk.
Some people can...
Sometimes I wish I was one of those people.
This could nearly be a reply to your post: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=407552&cid=21933006
Unfortunately money can't be turned directly into servers. They need to be built and delivered, and have software loaded and configured. Give it a few weeks.
At a guess, they might even need so many new servers that they need to hire or buy a new location and have it rigged with power and internet. That could take months.
Bad choice of words, I would say, when talking about nuclear anything. No, a bad choice of words would be: "explosive growth"
e.g. "I predict an explosive growth in demand for electrical power in the next century, which only nuclear may be able to satisfy."
You know, there's a "protected mode" -like thing in xp too, it goes like this:
Make sure "Secondary Logon" (service) is enabled.
Create a shortcut to whatever app you'd like to jail.
Go to the shortcut's properties, "Advanced..."
Tick on "Run with different credentials"
OK OK
When you run the program through the shortcut, it will prompt you whether to run the program as yourself but with significantly reduced permissions (default) or as another user (useful to run programs as Administrator if you're not).
You can get the same dialog by right-clicking on the program/shortcut and choosing "run as" instead of "open".
It's a bit of a hassle to go through, and I don't know how secure it is.