Contents

1. NSA Director Says the US Must Secure the Internet
2. Researchers Say Happiness Costs $75k
3. NYT Password Security Discussion Overlooks Universal Logins
4. The Gaping Holes In the UAE’s Net Firewall
5. Separating Hope From Hype In Quantum Computing
6. Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe
7. Former HP CEO Selected As Oracle Co-President
8. Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Tech From MIT
9. Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games
10. Australia To Fight iPod Use By Pedestrians
11. Google Says Microsoft Is Driving Antitrust Review
12. Aging Star System Leaves Strange Death Spiral
13. American Business Embraces ‘Gamification’
14. Plagiarizing a Takedown Notice
15. Sony Has Lost the PS3 Hacking War
16. UK’s Royal Mail Launches First Intelligent Stamps
17. WikiLeaks Calls For Assange To Step Down
18. Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier
19. Ryanair’s CEO Suggests Eliminating Co-Pilots

I don’t want a “protected” internet. - by wcrowe (Score: 2) Thread

The way to “protect” it is to not use it for stuff that, um, needs protecting.

The age old problem - by Pojut (Score: 2) Thread

So long as the smarter people remain outside the law, it will never be secure. /generalization

Can we have our money back? - by blair1q (Score: 2) Thread

We did make the Internet, and between government and business and private citizens we spent about $1 Trillion bringing it up to the state where Carly Fiorina and the other outsourcing robber-barons could use it to ship the whole information economy to India and China, cratering the return we expected from our investment, so they could pocket a few $billion in quick profit.

We’d like our money back. Someone tell Carly she owes us.

Are they joking? - by ak_hepcat (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Until you control all the INPUTS, you can’t control the OUTPUTS

I think these folks are actually trying to use scare-tactics in order to increase their own budgets short-term, 
knowing that there is no feasible method of performing such a task.

Re:The non-technical have lots of crazy ideas - by bsDaemon (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

He has a masters degree in systems technology and another in physics, according to his biography, in addition to an MBA and a BS undergrad, plus lots of experience in intelligence and counter-intelligence, including in active combat scenarios, according to his biography. I suspect he’s probably more “technical” than a large swath of people here, not to mention the general public. Just because he says folks doesn’t mean his ‘non-technical’, so stfu.

But this is America … - by TheABomb (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

Did they go by how much a person makes or how much a person spends?

even rich people hate life - by alen (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

few months ago the NY Times did a breakdown of a $250,000 salary in NYC. after the insane “progressive” taxes, the mortgage and HOA fees of living on the upper east side or UWS, the nanny or the crazy elite day care there is very little left.

Re:even rich people hate life - by CannonballHead (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Which is mostly their fault. I dislike taxes as much as anyone else, and I’m not usre our current system is exactly fair … but the HOA fees “of living on the upper east side or UWS,” the nanny, and the elite day care (and the elite private elementary schools that are $15k/yr or whatever, etc) are their choice.

Also, the five $60k+ cars eat into their income, too.

I’m glad we have a free country where people can make their own decisions, but being rich does not mean you necessarily make good money decisions. Seems like a lot of rich people have ended up poor because they didn’t know how to manage their own riches and they spent it all, gambled it, invested it stupidly, or whatever.

Double what you are earning - by EmperorOfCanada (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
What I have observed is that a happy income is double your present income. I have seen this with people earning less than 20k and more than a million. 
75K would be about double the national average.  
Also this 75k number would completely depend on where you are. 75K is poverty in NYC while in most Podunks 75K would make you near royalty.

Too much money also means no trust. - by elucido (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I would say that $75,000 is a good estimate because the more money you have the less trust you usually have along with it. At $75,000 you have just enough money to maintain your friends, and family relations, and to be able to trust your spouse. When you start to get over this amount your friendships may begin to change as some friends will start to envy you or get jealous, you may not be able to trust your family members anymore or your spouse, as it gets into the $100,000+ and $200,000+ and $500,000+ eventually you do reach a point where you simply can’t trust anybody anymore. Your spouse might have a life insurance policy on you and be waiting patiently for you to die. Your brothers and sisters might be fighting each other to win favor with you. Your friendships might be completely non-existent as none of these new friends might be real.

And if you aren’t married and you don’t have a strong family structure you may not even have that. What you’d have then is people dating you and you never knowing what their intentions are, who they are, or if they are trying to set you up, extort you, or marry you and try to take your money. You also wont be able to trust your friends either unless those friends make the same kind of money you are making because your poor friends could easily be bribed or payed off by your rich friends to spy on you.

Ultimately there is no increase to happiness with money beyond a certain amount because as money increases trust decreases. As trust decreases for most people stress increases. As stress increases for most people happiness decreases, unless they’ve had the kind of life experiences to allow them to have the emotional and psychological toolkit to manage stress of this sort.

This is why more money = more problems after a certain level. This is why getting to the top is usually more fun than being at the top.Trust is not a commodity, you cannot buy it or sell it. Love is not a commodity, you cannot buy and sell it.

Torn - by esocid (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I’ll admit, I feel torn when I see that OpenID login. Increase my chance of giving someone access to everything? Or make it simple? 
In the end I compromise and simply use a variation of one password for those. 
 
There is the problem with centralized logins: the masses don’t consider the first part, and only think of the convenience.

Single point of failure - by %24RANDOMLUSER (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Always a great idea. Windows registry anyone?

Re:Single point of failure - by tverbeek (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Maybe the NYT article doesn’t mention centralized login because such an obviously bad idea?

Idiots - by The_mad_linguist (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Why don’t you hunter2s shut the hunter2 up!

Re:Idiots - by Abstrackt (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Jeez, you really are a mad linguist.

it is to be expected - by Suchetha (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

10 years ago, i was flying from london to sri lanka via jordan airport.

I had a DJ magazine with me for a DJ friend in sri lanka, and lacking anything to read on the flight, i had it in my hand.

the guy at immigration saw the magazine in my bag and wanted to take a look. i knew what was going on, and i also knew that hte magazine didn’t have anything they could even REMOTELY consider “lascivious” so i let him have it.

he leafed through a few pages and asked me (with great disappointment) “no mwah mwah mwah?” while kissing his hand.

i had a hard time NOT telling him that i was an IT geek, and we can get our “mwah mwah mwah” from the internet.

the point i am trying to make is that when you try to suppress a biological impulse, nay NECESSITY, people will find a way to get access to it.

they are trying to implement a pornwall in sri lanka as well. a year ago the government blocked ELEVEN sites. now they want to block a hundred. I know the guys in charge of the pornwall. I know their abilities. i know at least two of them are in a porn mailing list that has been in existence in one form or the other since 1998

i would REALLY doubt it was incompetence on the part of the people running the firewall. that is created to make the politicians and the religious extremists feel better.

if the IT guys wanted to take down a site, they would, but most of them really don’t want to, and really don’t care. as far as they are concerned, they are doing their jobs, but when it comes to things like this “their job” is the bare minimum they are forced to do.

Re:Heh - by InfiniteWisdom (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Adulthood?

Piratebay Untouched? - by InfiniteWisdom (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

A somewhat amusing juxtaposition of a line from this story:

against the other just a couple of slots down on the front page article

I noticed the same effect - by gman003 (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
Whenever people try to block something, they only succeed in making the users smarter, and those in charge look less competent. High-school filter proxy blocking Slashdot and Wikipedia? Install firefox, set it to autodetect proxy settings, and it picked up the unfiltered teacher proxy, not the student. When they changed it around so the student proxy was preferred, we figured out the IP and configured it directly. College filter blocking Facebook? Use the VMWare helpfully installed by the admins, boot up Firefox in Linux, and it uses a direct connection. Heck, I discovered that one by accident. I’m actually starting to suspect that the real purpose behind school filters is education, not censorship.

HIT SQUAD INBOUND - by y86 (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

Before posting something like this, this genius should make sure he is out of the country and is never going back. They’ll kill him or send him to jail for “encouraging indecency” — or maybe a stoning?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/04/dubai-kissing-couple-jail_n_524736.html

These whack jobs in Dubai and other Tyrant controlled governments have SLAVE labor. Like they are going to respect “freedom of the press”.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/11/dark_side_of_du.html

W/O RTFA - by mathimus1863 (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
I took a class on Quantum computing, and studied many specific QC algorithms, so I know a little bit about them. If you don’t want to RTFA, then read this: Quantum Computers are not super-computers. On a bit-for-bit (or qubit-for-qubit) scale, they’re not necessarily faster than regular computers, they just process info differently. Since information is stored in a quantum “superposition” of states, as opposed to a deterministic state like regular computers, the qubits exhibit quantum interference around other qubits. Typically, your bit starts in 50% ‘0’ and 50% ‘1’, and thus when you measure it, you get a 50% chance of it being one or the other (and then it assumes that state). But if you don’t measure, and push it through quantum circuits allowing them to interact with other qubits, you get the quantum phases to interfere and cancel out. If you are damned smart (as I realized you have to be, to design QC algorithms), you can figure out creative ways to encode your problem into qubits, and use the interference to cancel out the information you don’t want, and leave the information you do want. For instance, some calculations will start with the 50/50 qubit above, and end with 99% ‘0’ and 1% ‘1’ at the end of the calculation, or vice versa, depending on the answer. Then you’ve got a 99% chance of getting the right answer. If you run the calculation twice, you have a 99.99% chance of measuring the correct answer. However, the details of these circuits which perform quantum algorithms are extremely non-intuitive to most people, even those who study it. I found it to require an amazing degree of creativity, to figure out how to combine qubits to take advantage of quantum interference constructively. But what does this get us? Well it turns out that quantum computers can run anything a classical computer can do, and such algorithms can be written identically if you really wanted to, but doing so gets the same results as the classical computer (i.e. same order of growth). But, the smart people who have been publishing papers about this for the past 20 years have been finding new ways to combine qubits, to take advantage of nature of certain problems (usually deep, pure-math concepts), to achieve better orders of growth than possible on a classical computer. For instance, factoring large numbers is difficult on classical computers, which is why RSA/PGP/GPG/PKI/SSL is secure. It’s order of growth is e^( n^(1/3) ). It’s not quite exponential, but it’s still prohibitive. It turns out that Shor figured out how to get it to n^2 on a quantum computer (which is the same order of growth as decrypting with the private key on a classical computer!). Strangely, trying to guess someone’s encryption key, normally O(n) on classical computers (where n is the number of possible keys encryption keys) it’s only O(sqrt(n)) on QCs. Weird (but sqrt(n) is still usually too big). There’s a vast number of other problems for which efficient quantum algorithms have been found. Unfortunately, a lot of these problems aren’t particularly useful in real life (besides to the curious pure-mathematician). A lot of them are better, but not phenomenal. Like verifying that two sparse matrices were mulitplied correctly has order of growth n^(7/3) on a classical computer, n^(5/3) on a quantum computer. You can find a pretty extensive list by googling “quantum algorithm zoo.” Unfortunately [for humanity], there is no evidence yet that quantum computers will solve NP-complete problems efficiently. Most likely, they won’t. So don’t get your hopes up about solving the traveling salesmen problem any time soon. But there is still a lot of cool stuff we can do with them. In fact, the theory is so far ahead of the technology, that we’re anxiously waiting for breakthroughs like this, so we can start plugging problems through known algorithms.

Who is going to watch this? - by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
We can’t even get people to read the articles referenced in submissions. That’s wildly optimistic to expect us to watch a video that is over 2 hours long.  
 
This is begging for an “executive summary” from anyone who has time to watch it, if there is such a person.

Re:Who is going to watch this? - by gandhi_2 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I just want to know what exactly is added to this presentation by using an avatar on a virtual stage.

People want to bash powerpoint but someone takes up half the video area with superfluous (and bad) VR and no one minds?

Re:Perhaps - by daveime (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If you’d categorized your porn collection properly, it wouldn’t need to all be in one folder :-(

Re:question: - by tom17 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Definitely commercial-only. The world only needs five quantum computers.

Why governments act against their interest? - by Peeteriz (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

In the world, USA is the only one net ‘exporter’ of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country’s best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.

Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.

Something Freenet-like this way comes? - by BenEnglishAtHome (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I tend to wonder when the pressure on normal people to get in line and shut up will go over the top and cause real action.

It’s not just file-sharers. Anyone who simply wants to be left alone as they travel the net is subject to monitoring and, maybe, serious trouble.

How many meritless lawsuits will have to be filed, how many knocks on doors in the night must happen, before some package of technology comes into general use, a group of tools that creates a situation where ISPs see nothing but encrypted streams going this way and that, with no idea what’s actually in them?

All the pieces exist. Some years ago, I would have predicted that we’d be to that point already.

But no. People just keep sending in the clear, writing all their important letters on the back of postcards unless the recipient forces them to put it in an envelope.

Is this weird? Or is my viewpoint skewed? I’d really like to know because I sure don’t understand it.

hey, close down craigslist - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

poof!: prostitution will disappear

close down pirate bay… poof!: piracy disappears

right, right?

regardless of your stand on media piracy or prostitution, simply from a law enforcement point of view that assumes these “vices” are simply something illegal to be fought: i don’t understand why you want to shut the hubs down

its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue, and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish in a barrel: just respond to what’s there. but without craigslist or the pirate bay, these “problems” are harder to catch and monitor

its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground again so they don’t have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind

which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability. its not like murder or rape, where the illegality of the actions are obvious and therefore the mandate and willpower to punish perps is 100%. instead, with stuff like prostitution and piracy, the willpower wanes, the commitment lapses, because the immorality of the actions is not clearcut

such that the law enforcement campaigns consist less of going after perpetrators, but just making them go underground and disappear from prominent view

insults are coopted by people who are smeared - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

my use of the word “pirate” is with full knowledge of the discrepancy you refer to

we are after all talking about the PIRATE bay. we both know the guys who run that site know full well that the traditional meaning of piracy is a poor descriptor of what copyright infringement is, but they wear the epithet “pirate” with pride on the name of their site. when someone smears and insults you, a good tactic is to take that insult or epithet, and use it yourself with pride as a descriptor. therefore nullifying the supposed power of the negative word. a negative becomes a positive. so i proudly call myself a pirate, when i know the sharing media is nothing like swashbucklers and theft. in this way, words are always constantly shifting in meaning and implication in popular culture, and this eventually filters down to dictionary terminology years later

the same can be found in the gay rights movement: “queer” is now a word of pride. or even right here on slashdot: “nerd” and “geek” are words which were meant as insults but are now marks of honor. there are many sociological and political arenas where insults menat to smear, scapegoat, and prejudice are turned around and used as marks of pride

for example, lately i am trying to proudly refer to myself as a socialist, here in the usa. socialism in europe is just obvious common sense. but in the usa it takes on mythic ridiculous proportions of evil, by people who barely understand the concept (ever hear of library? a highway system? social security? hellooooo?). such that using the word, as a mark of pride and a self-descriptor, is almost revolutionary and controversial, here in the usa at least, when of course, according to a strict interpretation of the meaning of the word, its completely humdrum

Not about TPB - by mikael_j (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

These raids were apparently not about TPB or other torrent sites but rather aimed at scene topsites.

I’ve read some media industry “information” about the scene lately where they’ve compared it to organized crime (in the “making money from illegal activities” sense, not the “being organized” sense). Of course, approx 99% of those involved in the scene don’t make money from their involvement but I guess it’s a bit harder to make them out to be evil mafioso types if they’re not actually making any money…

I feel bad for the EX SUN employees - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Hurd drove all of the R&D and creativity out of HP. As an HPer we competed with SUN alot but I always thought they had some great tech just not the ability to make money off of it. Hurd will just cut\cut\cut until there is nothing left. Guess it’s not really a surprise as my guess Larry is just interested in buiolding massive Oracle solution on his own high margin hardware and nothing else…

Thank god I survived the Hurd years at HP. I just hope we don’t screw it up with another Hurd like CEO.

Re:Long Live Crony Capitalism - by Overzeetop (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

As always - it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

I’m torn on this one… - by scosco62 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Is this a case of a “good old boys” club, where one of the insiders takes care of his buddy -or- He believe that Hurd is really that good…sounds like the latter… This contractor thing is idiotic, both that a guy in such a position would get himself into such a ridiculous position - and that the board would make a big deal about it. I suspect that if they really wanted to keep him … the whole thing would have just “gone away”… so there’s some subtext here, somewhere.

Re:At Oracle you get fired - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I thought it was only for failing to “COMMIT” your “TRANSACTION”?

Larry Ellison Doesn’t BS - by MogNuts (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Hey you gotta give it to the man. Larry Ellison puts his money where his mouth is (when saying HP made the worst decision ever in firing him).

Re:Concidentally.. - by martin-boundary (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

This is /., you have to say “Infringe the copyright of some nanos for my female instance”.

FAIL. She’s not his female instance, she’s a derived class.

Re:This is incredible news - by Geoffrey.landis (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

You’re in luck.

Existing solar cells do capture everything from 720 nm on down— in fact, silicon responds out to about 1000 nm. Existing solar cells do respond to all the wavelengths currently covered by terrestrial and marine plant life.

Re:This is incredible news - by Bayoudegradeable (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
I hate to be a crazy fanboi, but is this a “Holy shit” news moment?? I have been telling my middle school geography students for years that plants can harness solar power cheaply and easily. Are plants smarter than us? Maybe we are turning a corner with this one. Watch out plants, we are on to you! And we just might be on to the greatest break in energy production known to mankind. Once we harness the power of the sun we step up a rung on the advanced civilization ladder. Hooray for bad ass MIT scientists!!

Re:This is incredible news - by IndustrialComplex (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

No but many are more evolved then us. Plants have been around evolving on land much longer then the first bug left the oceans. They are quite adapted to their environment. Now humans and mammals are not so evolved but our evolutionary path took a different way where a more organized central nervice system took presendance over energy gathering.

That’s not quite the best description of evolution. It isn’t a race to some endpoint, there really isn’t much that can be classified as ‘less evolved or more evolved’ unless you slice the requirements so thin that only one organism could survive based on such criteria and therefore make the whole concept of evolution meaningless. Let’s say a landslide washes a very niche species of plant into the ocean where the saline content promptly kills the entire species. Does that make a salmon more evolved since it didn’t die?

And for that matter, unless we assume some multiple genesis theory for life on Earth, every species today has been subject to evolutionary forces for the exact length of time as any other species.

Re:WTF? - by mr_mischief (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Per the article it’s not nearly as biological as “plant-inspired” makes it sound.

They are using the photovoltaic effect to generate electricity on some set of proteins. Then carbon nanotubes conduct the electricity from the proteins to a common circuit. They are using phospholipids (whatever phospholipids are) along with the nanotubes to coerce proper alignment between the nanotubes and the proteins in the photovoltaic reaction sites.

The combination works pretty well (40% efficiency with sparsely populated functional structures in the solution for the prototype) until it starts to break down. The inspiration from plants is mainly that they can introduce a substance (a surfactant more specifically, although the blurb doesn’t specify which) that breaks the stuff down fast, then filter the surfactant out through a membrane and the working portion self-assembles again at full efficiency.

It’s this repeatable self-assembly that was biologically inspired, and it’s probably necessary for high-efficiency photovoltaic solar cells since pretty much everything more efficient than silicon does break down over time. By not just accounting for the breakdown, but doing it early and often and performing a repair phase through self-assembly, it is hoped they can have high efficiency solar cells with long lifespans.

That’s gleaned from TFA, which isn’t much longer than what I wrote.

Text, I think - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

In the Beginning

It all started about a month ago, when one friend of mine had decided to follow his dreams and was moving to the states, and he had to get rid of a lot of stuff. Among his discard pile was a bunch of Wing Commander games, which I bought off him, figuring they might be interesting research material, as I’m planning on a game with similar game play structure (as in story combined with game play, not a 3d space shooter).

So, I found myself in the possession of Wing Commanders 1, 2, 3 and 4, all Windows versions - the Kilrathi Saga and WC4CD to be specific. I installed the first and tried it out. My Win7 switched to 256 colors at a 640x480 resolution, but the game ran.. with completely wrong palette.

Bugged by this I played with the compatibility options, and got the game to almost work well, with the palette going wrong at some points.. so the game was sort of playable, but I hated the fact that Windows changed to 256 colors and I couldn’t see my mailbox properly in the other screen, etc.

I also tried WC2 and WC3, and they had similar - or worse - problems. I even learned the steps to get WC3 to work properly:

      1. Find the WC3W.EXE executable, turn on (basically) all the compatibility options. 
      2. Start task manager. 
      3. Find and kill all instances of explorer.exe. Your desktop will disappear, along with the task bar. 
      4. Using task manager, launch WC3W.EXE

Naturally the screen resolution and color mode will be 640x480 and 256 colors, but if you’ve bent backwards that much, you probably don’t care all that much.

Seeing that the games use DirectDraw, I decided to roll my own.

Doing the Homework

The first step is always to look for prior art. Maybe someone had written a new ddraw.dll already, and I could just use it. As it happens, lots of people have, but nothing that’s useful for me. Most of the ddraw.dll hacks are actually wrappers - that get between the game and the real ddraw.dll, change something subtle, but let the real ddraw.dll do the heavy lifting.

The point of these hacks is to fix small problems, like games that ignore surface pitch, require cleared surfaces or some such. In one case I found a forum thread claiming that deleting ddraw.dll from the game’s directory fixes something, so in this case it’s a hack gone wrong.

After further searching I found a project which actually released sources, with a liberal license even. It was a wrapper project (meaning, again, that they just call the real ddraw.dll), only supported DirectDraw7 and only very small parts of it, but it showed me how to get going.

I also dug up old DirectX SDK:s from my personal CD stack, as Microsoft has helpfully nuked all old DirectDraw documentation off the online MSDN. Thanks, dudes.

Wing Commander 1

Wing Commander 1 for Windows uses DirectDraw2. There’s no real reason it couldn’t just use DirectDraw1, considering that all it does is locking the front buffer and dumping a frame to it, along with some palette manipulation.

Or well, that’s not the whole truth. If the game can set a 320x200 mode, it does what I described above. If this fails, it tries to set up 640x400, and after that fails, 640x480. In the two higher resolution modes, the game allocates a software 320x200 buffer, and uses blt() to scale it up 2x, meaning that in 640x480 mode, black bars are introduced to the top and the bottom, and the aspect ratio is wrong.

When playing WC1 it astonishes me just how much love has gone into the it when compared to later games. The later ones may be better in some ways, but the polish that can be experienced in WC1 is gone.

Anyway, I started by writing a wrapper that just dumps out log about what calls are made with what parameters, and then went on to implement a hack dll that only implements those calls.

The hack dll resizes the application’s window to desktop resolution, sets up an OpenGL context, uploads the frame as a texture and uses OpenGL to stretch the result on screen.

Yes, I know, I’m using OpenGL to fix a DirectX problem. Some find this rather ironic. To make things even more fun, vista and Win7 solve OpenGL problems by rendering OpenGL with DirectX. That is, if you’re not using ATI or Nvidia drivers..

Anyway, there were several little problems that had to be solved.

First was that if I resized the window to desktop resolution, Win7 figures something is going on and goes into self defence mode, disabling aeroglass. This could be solved by simply making a one-scanline too large window. It still looks the same to the user (assuming they don’t have a very, very multimonitor setup).

Second problem was with using OpenGL from a DLL. Everything went fine in Win7, but under XP it suddenly gave me the dreaded dialog “Runtime Error! R6030 - CRT not initialized”. Googling up what this means resulted in lots of threads pleading for help but a few answers. MSDN says to get this error I’ve done something weird which I’m sure I haven’t.

This got solved by delay-loading OpenGL, but this broke rendering in Win7. Forcing the OpenGL32.dll to load fixed Win7, but broke XP again. Finally I opted to just loop until OpenGL context creation succeeds; this works for both systems.

Thirdly I wanted to override some keys for options - something I later removed as Wing Commander games require all but four keys on the keyboard - and for that, I needed to hijack the window function. This came in handy later on when I started stealing other window functions, such as focus changes.

Hijacking the window function was a surprising experience. Apparently the legal way to do so is to use SetWindowLong, a function designed to access user-defined data padded after the window class structure, with a negative offset. This is documented in MSDN.

After this, the game ran fine.. more or less. Some input lag was introduced, but there’s little I could do about it. As an added bonus, the game could also be run in bilinear mode, which may or may not please some of the viewers more than the point-sample mode.

Wing Commander 2

After playing through WC1, I moved onto WC2. WC2 is very similar, uses DirectDraw2, is much more unstable, and as a game feels like a “what can we do more”-sequel. There’s more of a story, more frames of animation, speech, but.. less love.

WC2 ran with the unmodified dll from WC1, except that some screens were missing. In some cases, the game would update the screen, but not wait for retrace. I opted to start updating the screen on surface unlocks as well, and the problem went away.

WC2 also did some additional checking when returning from alt-tabbing, which got solved by adding some more “everything’s ok” responses from stubbed functions.

In some situations the music will stutter in the game (with or without the DLL). This is due to the fact that the game doesn’t poll its message pipe during these scenes. I assume they’re some sort of busy loops, and whoever did the port from dos to Windows didn’t hit this problem.. on his (or her) machine. In any case, there was little I could do about that.

As an additional enhancement, I added a “half’n‘half” output mode, which first upscales to 640x400 with point-sample (or nearest neighbor, same thing) sampling and then upscales this to full screen with bilinear. It’s a nice trade-off in that no pixel block information is lost, but the harsh pixel borders are gone.

At this point I also realized the keys I had used for configuration were also used by the game, so I whipped up a simple configuration file instead. The configuration file also let me add more options, like a funky “old lcd” simulation which some may find amusing.

Wing Commander 3

WC3 is a different beast. It only uses DirectDraw1, so it’s clearly older than the WC1/WC2 Windows ports. At first I hit a problem where the game went into some kind of fallback mode and managed to draw to screen around my code, by using GDI instead of DirectDraw. This was solved by implementing better answers to capabilities and features queries. I’m still not sure exactly what the game was looking for, as I just copied whatever the real ddraw.dll answered to those questions.

WC3 queries back buffer from the primary, and uses flipping. Support for this had to be added. Instead of actually supporting flipping, I hacked things so that the “backbuffer” actually points at the same front buffer data. After all, what the game thought to be a front buffer was actually our OpenGL back buffer, so this just saved some data copying.

WC3 also includes full-motion video cut-scenes instead of still (or crudely animated) images when you discuss with other people. These are, by default, shown in “interlaced” mode where every second line is black. This probably looked OK back when monitors were of the 14” variety, but on modern systems it’s just painful. I added code that detects when a movie is being played and doubles the scanlines. Naturally, I find after this that the game already has a commandline option to do this.

Using said commandline option brought up something interesting. Instead of locking the back buffer, the game had a separate 320x240 buffer into which it rendered the movie and then scale-blitted that on screen. I added an option not to scale but just do a “small video” window in the middle of the screen with black borders all around. I was rather amused later on to find that WC4 has this feature built in.

I also experimented with some blurring filters on top of the movies, but these do not necessarily make it look any better. Some harsh blockiness may be gone, but so are some details. A “smart blur” might work better.. Anyway, the option is there if someone wants to take it for a spin.

There’s an option in the game to run the in-game flight in “VGA” mode, as opposed to the “SVGA” mode which is the default. This mode also uses the smaller 320x240 buffer, scales up to 640x480, and then renders the HUD elements at full resolution on top of this.

Disregard the fact that “VGA” is usually 640x480 and “SVGA” 800x600; in this game VGA means 320x240 and SVGA 640x480.

Not that these are truly standardised terms anyway..

For some odd reason the mode only stays on for a second or so, and then the game turns back to “SVGA” mode. I’m guessing it detects a high frame rate and doesn’t want to torture you with blocky graphics.. in which case it’s odd to have the option at all. 
Wing Commander 4

WC4 introduced a pile of additional problems. The game added true-color (well, 15 bit) movies and wants to use GDI for some parts of the game.

Adding the 16bit mode support was relatively simple, just implementation work. There’s also an option to use 24bit graphics mode, which sounded promising, but ended up being 15bit with additional padding(!). So yes, the 24bit mode appears to be X1R5G5B5X8 (or 1:5:5:5:8). I have no idea how this could have ever worked. It’s entirely possible some capability flag the game expected is still missing, and thus I’m getting a weird response from the game.

The GDI bit was more worrying. Unlike with WC3, this does not seem to be dependent on some information I’m giving the game, or at least the game works exactly the same with the wrapper DLL as with my hack dll. The first “load savegame” screen after the setup screen (if game is launched with -i) does run with DirectDraw, though, so it is entirely possible the whole game could be made to use DirectDraw. After a game is loaded, the game changes screen mode to 16 bit and starts using GDI, rendering the exact same screen with it.

To fix the GDI problem, I made the biggest kludge in this project yet; I resized the window so that it is 480 scanlines taller than the desktop, and let the game draw to the off-screen portion, and copied the data to the framebuffer from there whenever I detected we’re in the “GDI mode”. This works surprisingly well, but will look a bit strange for people with way too many monitors (i.e, if you have a monitor on top of the main one, you’ll see the top of the window there).

I could have made the game’s window hidden and created a new one - this would have been much cleaner solution, but much more complicated one. And hey, we’re talking about a hack here, and all I wanted was to get to play the game..

One remaining issue with WC4 has to do with the “mission briefing text” screens. From the looks of it, the game does perfectly normal lock/unlock cycle of the primary (not back buffer like everywhere else in this game!), but the result is just an odd blinking screen. After all the text has been outputted, the correct screen appears. This is annoying, but does not stop anyone from actually playing.

What disturbs me most about the blinking is that it sometimes seems to blink between the green grid and the hangar area picture, and the hangar area is from a different graphics mode from the game’s point of view.. so there may be some major brainfart from my part in play here. 
And So…

Next up would have been WC4DVD version, but that adds MCI, DirectShow, mpeg2, DirectDraw7, and all sorts of headaches to the mix, so I figured it’s time for this project to end. I’m releasing the sources, so anyone who wants to pick them up and continue hacking can feel free to do so; with Wing Commanders or other old DirectDraw games.

I’m fairly confident the Windows versions of Wing Commander 4 came first, then WC3, and then WC1 and 2, probably in that order.

Yes, getting the source code to these games would help a lot. I already know a few bugs I could fix easily, and I haven’t even seen the code. =)

Lots of thanks for the Wing Commander CIC community for their help, comments and suggestions.

Comments, etc, appreciated, as always.

Re:I wonder about this - by Rogerborg (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Funny you should mention DX3. Microsoft actually removed some surface caps flags in the transition from DX3 to DX5, and silently flipped the orientation that .BMP files were loaded (i.e. loaded them ‘right way up’ rather than ‘upside down’ as they’re stored in the file). I know that was like three ice ages ago in Dev Years, but it still hurts when I think about it.

I realise that TheFineSummary talks about Windows 7, but there’s still a fair number of XP boxen out there, for which Direct2D isn’t an option. That said, I’d guess (as the article is down) that it’s more of an ideological position, or - given that it’s clearly a hobby project - just what the author is familiar with, or enjoys using. Given that we’re talking about playing games here, I’d go with the latter explanation.

I do intend to RTFA when it recovers, since I find replacing/subverting dlls quite fun. I kludged up some code a while back to create a shim dll that can be used as the basis for selectively replacing functions in dlls, while calling through to the ‘real’ one for the other functions, so you can easily hack some functionality without having to re-implement the whole thing.

Re:I wonder about this - by TheThiefMaster (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Not 100% accurate. Windows 7 includes direct-x 9 itself (there’s not much to it), but not all the different d3dX9_??.dll extension files. Those are what you have to install.

The DX web setup will bring you up to date with all direct-x 9 onwards extension files, regardless of whether you’re running XP or 7, x86 or x64, Home or Ultimate (just look at the comprehensive supported OSs list!).

Any older versions of DX are supported, you shouldn’t need to install anything for them.

Who says DirectDraw is going away? - by Man On Pink Corner (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

My own DirectDraw apps from 1996 work great in Windows 7. The API is deprecated in the sense that Microsoft no longer recommends using it, and who knows if they’re still even shipping ddraw.h, for that matter. But as a COM component, runtime support for IDirectDraw isn’t any more endangered than CreateWindow().

Re:Who says DirectDraw is going away? - by Xest (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Indeed, in fact, this was precisely one of the problems DirectX was always designed to solve from the start, it was designed to provide a multimedia API that could both move with the times and retain backwards compatibility.

Issues with older games tend to come down to hardware specific optimisations, obsolete libraries such as Glide, or OS specific code.

For the most part, stuff written with Microsoft’s officially provided Windows APIs even back to Windows 95 (and sometimes even further back than that) tends to still run. It’s the stuff that doesn’t use those APIs that often causes the problems.

For better or worse, backwards compatbility is one thing that Microsoft certainly does tend to get right most the time. It’s just that companies often ignore backwards compatibility when building new apps and just build for the now. Sometimes this is excused, i.e. game companies doing low level optimisations to improve performance, other times it’s some MBA falling hook line and sinker for the sales pitch of some fly by night company providing an obscure set of code libraries and mandating all his developers use it.

I still have apps I wrote in C using the raw Win32 API back in 1995/1996 that work absolutely fine to this day.

Chances are if a game doesn’t run, DirectX version is the least of it’s troubles.

Cause of Death: Sony Walkman - by darkonc (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This is not a new problem.

Back in the late 90’s it was Sony Walkmans — Pretty much the same problems, except that the units were much bigger (just the batteries were bigger than an ipod nano), and a casette tape only held about 2 hours of music (non-random access.. although you could fast-forward at much peril to your batteries).

At the time a friend of my roommate volunteered for North Shore Search and Rescue, and a friend of his was a medical examiner who hated Walkman and like devices. He saw all too many fatal accidents, where the cause of the accident was a walkman preventing the victim from hearing the warning noises (horn, grinding machinery, evacuation siren and/or the desperate yells of onlookers, etc), but the official cause of death was always something else (smacked by a car, crushed by machinery, head ripped, suffocated, etc.).

Thus it was that the Sony Walkman was always the bridesmaid of death, but never on the certificate.

Then one day, a girl was hit by a train while walking on the train tracks, listening to a Walkman.

The interesting thing is that she wasn’t actually run over by the train. She was bounced off the track by the ‘cow catcher’ on the front of the train doing it’s job. The real problem was that she was wearing the Walkman on her belt around the back .. just over the spleen (a very normal place to wear a walkman, since they were a bit too large to fit in most pockets). As a result, when she was hit by the train, instead of the force of the impact being relatively evenly distributed over her body by the cow-catcher, a good bit of it was concentrated into the Walkman and directed into her internal organs. Much like is claimed to have recently happened to a girl in Crete.

Although she seemed to (more or less) walk away from the accident, she soon collapsed and died from her internal injuries.

Since the Walkman was a major contributing cause of the accident, and effectively delivered the killing blow, the examiner was finally able to put on a death certificate:

Cause of Death: Sony Walkman.

Will deaf people get punished too? - by evilsofa (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
How about people who are deaf like me? Will we get written up for walking around in a dangerous fashion and relying only upon our eyes to stay alive on the streets?

Re:Electric Cars will make it worse - by causality (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Electric cars emit much less noise.

Shit man, if we’re not careful people may even have to start paying attention when dealing with potentially dangerous situations. That’d be a real bummer, as it would waste a little precious time that could be spent on texting, music, and games. Thank God people have their priorities straight!  
 
It’s also a great thing that laws could be made to sort this out. That would work like a charm, of course. It’s only natural that people don’t care if poor decision-making gets them killed, but they’ll wise up really quick when it might get them fined.

iWalking - by martin-boundary (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
They should call the offense iWalking. Every modern country should reserve at least two letters of the alphabet for traffic offenses.

Harold Scruby is a known nut-job - by Phurge (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I just googled “harold scruby wiki” http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&q=harold+scruby+wiki&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=  
 
first result I got was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanker !!!

A simple search shows MS is full of it - by similar_name (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Search ‘search engines’ on Bing. Google doesn’t even make the first page. Although it’s picture is used to define what a search engine is. lol Yeah that’s an unbiased search. Search the same on Google and Bing is listed second.

Googling MS - by varmittang (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Does anyone else use use Google to search for something thats on a MS website? I mean, their search on their own site is so horrible in finding what I’m looking for that I use google. I can’t be the only person that does this.

Microsoft has learned nothing - by Omnifarious (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The lesson they took away from the antitrust trial was “Antitrust is a way for competitors to use the government to interfere with your business.” not “We were being evil and wrong and got into trouble for it.”. The wrong lesson. They got off way too lightly and too many people were sympathetic.

Since they took that lesson away, now they think they can do the same thing to Google. They might be right, but I hope not. Though if their allegation has merit (which I strongly suspect it doesn’t) I will stop trusting Google and be pretty angry at them.

Oh, come on. - by pedantic bore (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Try finding three major tech companies that aren’t linked with Microsoft in some way.

And when the link is “the lawyers hired by TradeComet include some of the same lawyers Microsoft hired to do similar work in the past” and you’re getting pretty close to playing “six degrees of Kevin Bacon”.

If there’s a smoking gun somewhere, this ain’t it. If this is the best Google’s general counsel can do, maybe there isn’t a smoking gun anywhere.

Re:Oh, come on. - by nedlohs (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

They managed since the reported connection between two of them and Microsoft is that their attorneys have also represented Microsoft on anti-trust issues.

Because you wouldn’t want experienced counsel or anything like that, that’s just as good as being a Microsoft subsidiary.

Re:I’ve always wondered - by Abcd1234 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

It’s a point. What you’re seeing is lens flare and glare in the optics. The only star whose surface has been resolved into a disk is Betelgeuse, a red giant star located in Orion.

Re:Lucky us to see it this way: - by MollyB (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

There are many ways to detect extrasolar planets besides the angle of our line of sight. And, as the above poster noted, they’ve probably got those weird angles figured out, too.

Strange Death Spiral - by CarpetShark (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Strange Death Spiral

What? Doesn’t everyone know this is due to The Last Starfighter?

Re:Strange Death Spiral - by RMingin (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Reference fail. TLS had the Death BLOSSOM. Please hand in your card.

Re:*Another* strange phenomenon? - by JoshuaZ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

That’s a misquote. It is a garbled quote of a line actually due to biologist J. B. S. Haldane who said “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” The line is from “Possible Worlds” (sometimes titled “Possible Worlds and Other Papers.”)

Ribbon Hero - by DavidD_CA (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

A few years ago, Microsoft Research Labs created a “game” add-on for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that turned training and using the software features into a bit of a game.

Basically, in challenge mode it gave you some task to perform with an example (such as “Turn on columns and add a vertical line”). When you got it right, you got points.

And in regular mode, the more features of the app you used, the more extra points you got.

A few other twists let you get points for repeating tasks a few times, doing them quickly, using shortcut keys, etc.

And to wrap up it all up, you could post your scores to Facebook automatically and “compete” with your friends.

Everyone I’ve shown it to really likes it, and it’s totally unobtrusive during your normal work unless you’re in Challenge Mode.

Re:Achievements… - by smellsofbikes (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

If you truly feel this way, there’s probably something wrong with you. If you just don’t feel this way about, say, Farmville, but do feel it about other things (and probably don’t realize that you do) then you’re merely normal and not paying attention.

“Gamification” is a fuzzy description of operant conditioning. Anything with a bit of intelligence (dogs, parrots, maybe even sheep, and certainly humans) are wired to get a little jolt of pleasure after successfully negotiating a crisis situation. It’s how we learn. What games do is short-circuit this by providing lots and lots of crisis situations, and providing the player with ways to get through them and win, and get that little burst of success-feeling. Some people are seriously susceptible to this kind of shenanigans and spend all their time enjoying their imagined success at Farmville. Others do the same thing climbing the corporate ladder and running companies. In that case, of course, it’s not imagined success, it’s the intended result of how we’re wired, operating in a complex social environment. In any case, it’s an essential system for learning in humans, and while it sucks that people are getting really good at twisting it to manipulate other people, it’s still vitally important and ubiquitous.

Re:Achievements… - by clifyt (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“Am I only the one who doesn’t need a pat on the back every 5 minutes in order to enjoy something or derive satisfaction from it?”

No, while the vast majority of individuals out there enjoy praise as a motivator, a subset enjoy snark and haughty comments to provide their motivation.

Then again, some us prefer both.

Re:Achievements… - by Xtifr (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

You’re probably not the only one on Slashdot. To the semi-mythical average Joe, those achievements probably seem like some sort of triumph over the incomprehensible computing device, while a slashdotter is more likely to recognize it as merely a subroutine in the code triggered by some arbitrary numbers.

I wonder if adding “achievements” to other types of software might be useful, though, to help counter computerphobia. “Congrats, you have typed 50,000 words in your Word Processor.” “Achievement: 20 different programs executed.” “Opaquemastery: you have successfully shoved more than fifty elements into a single PowerPoint slide!” :)

Re:Achievements… - by SilverHatHacker (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Way ahead of you. 
http://live.gnome.org/OMG  
https://projecthamster.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/gnome-achievements-the-alternative/

Commodore USA already seen on Slashdot… - by SheeEttin (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
When I clicked the link to TFA, I thought I recognized some of those pictures… 
Sure enough, from back in March: Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June. 
 
Basically, this is a Chinese knockoff company selling PCs built into the keyboard and/or monitor (from modern hardware) with a Commodore logo slapped on.

Stolen Picture Too? - by StarWreck (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
The top CGI picture of an Amiga with a CD-ROM, at http://www.commodoreusa.net/products.html, I recognize from an Amiga forum from at least 3 years ago. It was made by a forum user, not any employee of Amiga or related company.

‘OCGA’ - by 93 Escort Wagon (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Official Code of Georgia Annotated, in case you were wondering.

Re:sounds pretty libelous to me - by KibibyteBrain (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
He didn’t saying that Commodore USA is a hoax or con merely that he is “assuming” they are, which I presume is a way of trying to say he will treat them with such skepticism in his actions. While probably not the clearest wording those still mean different things. Something like the difference between writing“Joe is a murderer.” and “Until proven otherwise, I am going to assume Joe committed the murder.”

Clearly, - by slimjim8094 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

The correct situation in this, as in all cases, is for the original author to issue a takedown notice. I bet they already have one on hand…

good news for PC gamers - by 0111 1110 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Now that there is no unhacked console left, maybe the consolization of PC games will slow down a bit. And maybe Sony will finally release the PS4, so that PC graphics can finally move ahead. It has been 3 years since Crysis. PC games have been stalled in terms of graphics because the better the graphics are on the PC version the more difficult it is to port to the old tech on the consoles.

pc piracy rates are the problem - by judeancodersfront (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
While there is piracy on the consoles it isn’t like the pc where most of the people playing the games aren’t paying for them.  
 
That isn’t an exaggeration, numerous indy developers have reported piracy rates of over 80%. Just be glad there are enough sales on the pc to still justify console ports.

Re:pc piracy rates are the problem - by julesh (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

While there is piracy on the consoles it isn’t like the pc where most of the people playing the games aren’t paying for them.

Yes. But until now, piracy on consoles has required hardware modifications, or at least unauthorized firmware updates that have a non-zero chance of bricking your console. This is now changing. IUIC, this hack allows you to run pirate games without modifying your console, just by hooking an external device (that large numbers of people already have) up to its USB port.

That is to say, unlike previous hacks, this is a no-risk, no-cost hack that doesn’t invalidate your warranty. Uptake is going to be *much* higher.

Yo dawg! - by xaosflux (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

“It makes you smile that you can use one homebrew console to hack another to get homebrew on that console.”

Yo dawg! I heard you like hacking homebrew, so we we put hack in your homebrew so you can hack homebrew while you hack!

Re:Naturally, the usual OMGWTFPIRACY folks arrive. - by Nursie (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“And the latest report is that the next firmware update is going to disable the USB ports”

BULLSHIT.

Sorry, but I have to call this one out for what it is.

The USB ports are how the controllers are used during certain updates or if they’re out of power. The USB ports also are how you plug in things like the Playstation Eye, a peripheral that Sony themselves sell and are relying on for their “Move” push.

They will not now, nor ever, disable the USB ports, this is some sort of forum echo-chamber nonsense or an outright troll that’s somehow gained credence.

Especially when an update to their USB driver will destroy this jailbreak just as well.

Personally… - by gilesjuk (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I just wish they would stop wasting money on such gimmicks and actually bother to deliver the mail correctly. I received someone’s birthday card a while back, the house number was a match for mine but the rest of the address wasn’t close. Was in the same town of course, but rather than ruin someone’s birthday I hand delivered the card myself.

So to sum up, the Royal Mail can’t even be bothered to deliver until after noon and it seems like they now are employing people who can’t even be bothered to deliver to the correct address.

But hey, they have “cool” stamps.

Intelligent stamp, or phone? - by DamienRBlack (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
It’s kind of the phone that is providing all the intelligence, right? I mean, you have to dig pretty far before you can call an image intelligent.

Stamps for how long? - by CRCulver (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Except for philately (marketing to collectors is a somewhat lucrative way to raise money for postal services), are not stamps with nice designs on the way out? Go to the post office in many countries today, and what you’ll get on your letter is a simple sticker printed by a computer with a bar code or other machine-readable images. The recipient of your letter in another country no longer gets an exotic representation of some facet of your country’s culture.

Re:Stamps for how long? - by Jesus_666 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
In Germany we still have stamps (although they’re self-adhesive now). However, business mail often uses either barcodes (for packages) or alphanumeric codes or DataMatrix barcodes in the envelope’s window. I think that’s a good split; you still get nice stamps for personal mail but business mail can use much more efficient ways of franking their mail. 
 
Oh, we do however have stopped putting stamps on packages; those have a standardized adhesive label and are paid for directly at the post station. But at least the letters remain.

Barcodes - by sakdoctor (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

2D barcodes designed to be read by a phone, largely for marketing purposes, have been in use in Japan since forever.

Also, this is pointless.

Being a public figure is his best defense - by erroneus (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Other Wikileaks people are urging him to separate this personal situation from Wikileaks. Really? Why? So far, I haven’t seen any evidence and so all I know is that I have heard there is a rape and a case of molestation against him. I also know that the charges were initially dropped and I can only assume it was because the evidence is shaky if non-existent.

It seems to me that this has all come about because he is in charge of Wikileaks. If he were to go quiet and let someone else run the show, who knows what they will do? I’m not sure it is in his best interests to disconnect himself from Wikileaks.

Let’s see some evidence. Let’s get some details. If he was a “nobody” that no one has ever heard of and had nothing to fear from world governments, that would be one thing. But this guy is an enemy to some very powerful individuals and organizations. Remaining in the spotlight is all he has to defend himself at the moment. Asking him to give up his post now would be a problem.

Comment from Birgitta Facebook page… - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Birgitta Jónsdóttir 
things are being very seriously taken out of context… i think it is important to note that i am not suggesting that julian steps aside except as a spokesperson for wikileaks while this case is ongoing - it is important the messenger wont …become the message - as it seems then it is obvious that weaving together personal matters of this nature with wikileaks is not justifiable - as someone that has put effort into better support for rape victims and battered women i feel it would be out of character to write the allegations off in this case as a conspiracy - if people find me to be a traitor for not taking sides on such serious matter then so be it. i do not claim that Julian or the women are guilty or innocent until we have all the facts.

So she’s saying that Assange should temporarily step aside as spokesman for Wikileaks until the facts of the case have been sorted out. Not quite the earth-shattering denunciation the media has hyped, huh? Of course, I don’t see how she couldn’t anticipate this kind of reaction from all of Wikileaks detractors in the media. That was just naive.

Not enough info - by Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

There is a bit of a problem with not enough information about this case, so I’ll try to summary what I know so far.

1: Two women who had sex with Assange went to the police and were adviced to file charges of rape 
2: A prosecutor releases the accusations publicly to the press (not a common thing here in Sweden afaik) 
3: The case is withdrawn because they realize Assange cannot be nailed for rape. The remaining charge is something akin to sexual harassment. 
4: The rape charges are revived 
5: … 
6: Profit?

No seriously I’m starting to wonder what the fuck is up with the swedish legal system.

Re:Not enough info - by Scrameustache (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

ftfa: ”He acknowledges that the allegations might complicate his plans to obtain a residency permit to remain in Sweden, which has broad press freedom laws that could be used to shield WikiLeaks from American prosecutors. ”

You want to have legal protection in Sweden? We’ll give you legal TROUBLES in Sweden! Your move, skinny boy.

Re:Does the US-backed smear campaign include /.? - by mml (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

It sounds like you’ve missed the latest turn in the sequence of the prosecutor flip flopping. Here’s a recap:

    20. August 2010: Duty prosecutor Maria Häljebo Kjellstrand decides it looks like rape 
    21. August 2010: Higher ranking prosecutor Eva Finné decides it doesn’t 
      1. September 2010: Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny decides actually it does look like rape

Source #1: http://www.thelocal.se/28704/20100901/ 
Source #2: http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/

The Truth - by TheCount22 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

A few rules of thumb for a startup environment:

1. Don’t overengineer! Overengineering wastes time on things that may never be used. Features should be customer driven.

2. Functions and methods should be as small as possible. You should make it an obsession to split methods and functions into the smallest possible components. Only then can you have good code reuse. Don’t start thinking I will split it when I need it, you never will!

3. Never ever reinvent the wheel. Reinventing things that exist is overengineering.

4. Don’t optimize ahead of time. When I say that I don’t mean don’t use a hash table instead of an array where it makes sense. I mean don’t try to avoid exception handling or function calls or other minor optimizations. If it has an impact on readability don’t do it. Optimization always comes last. Often you’ll find there are only 1 or 2 “hotspots” in your code. If you spend time optimizing these “hotspots” after your application is built thats when you’ll get the best return on your investment. Another gotcha with optimization is using technologies that can’t deliver the level of performance you expect. You should test to make sure the underlying components you plan to use will perform as expected before you start coding.

5. Don’t cram as much code in a single statement as possible. Every compiler I know about today will produce identical code whether it’s one statement or 5 statements. It makes it hard to read so don’t do it!

6. Allocate time for testing. No one writes perfect code.You want to give a good impression to your customer so don’t skip this step.

7. Make unit testing an obsession. Always add unit tests for new code, it reveals errors in your code. When you find a bug in your code add a unit test to test for it. If in the future someone decides to rewrite some function or method you wrote because it’s not elegant enough they will not reintroduce old bugs.

8. Don’t rewrite code if possible. Refectoring is almost always easier and less error prone.

LISP/Scheme - by turgid (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

I wish I’d know about LISP 25 years ago. Stupid people told me it was “for processing lists.” If only I’d known better. Functional programming gives you wings and a jet engine.

I wish I hadn’t paid too much attention to people with limited imaginations. Just because they’re older, have more money and shout louder doesn’t mean they are clever or wise.

C++ is way over-rated but it’s worth knowing because it’s so widely used. Don’t let it detract you from mastering C and learning scripting languages. Understanding object-oriented design is more important than knowing the latest trendy language.

Objective-C.

Just because software is Free/Open doesn’t mean it’s “cheap” and poor quality. I could have saved myself 2-3 years there.

Ignore Windows and it will ignore you.

Version Control - by BluePeppers (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Put everything in version control. Everything. EVERYTHING!

Well. You could skip /home, but I know a roll back of /etc has saved me a couple of times on config upgrades.

Remember that once code is deleted, you can’t get it back. However, version control changes that. Version control is one of the most vital tools for anyone developing/working with a computer.

Oh and git rocks and stuff :)

Re:Emotional Things I Wish I Knew Earlier - by azmodean%2B1 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I think there are several factors that contribute to this: 
1. Programming is a very popular and easy to enter field. 
2. It’s actually pretty easy to get by as a programmer without really understanding what you are doing. 
3. Regardless of how much you hear about it, modularity, reusability, and highly structured programming do not have good penetration in Software Engineering. 
4. Because of #3, it is all to easy for otherwise competent programmers to paint themselves into a corner and generate software with really messy architecture and/or implementation. 
5. Programmers OFTEN have to clean up after other programmers.

So, due to #1 and #2, there actually are quite a number of really bad programmers running around. 
Due to #3 and #4, there are quite a number of otherwise decent programmers who produce working but unmaintainable code. 
Due to #5, most programmers have ample opportunity to experience a great deal of pain from other programmer’s incompetence. 
Due to human nature, programmers tend to assume that all that bad code comes from #1 and #2 rather than #3 and #4.

And more speculatively and unrelated to the above: 
6. Lots of programmers tend to hang out on Usenet, internet fora, mailing lists, and IRC, where harsh criticism is de rigeur, and internalize the habit of harsh criticism in their professional lives.

Comment your data too! - by LihTox (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m in a different boat from most commenters here, I think, because I am a scientist writing simulations; some simluations run a long time and create a lot of data which would be costly to reproduce, and what I wish someone had told me early on was that I should comment my *data files*, not just my code. Each file should include the exact parameters used to create it, an explanation of what each column represents, and preferably there should be a way of knowing what version of your simulation code was used to create it. A couple of times in grad school I had toss out months of data after I discovered a bug in my code, and didn’t know when the bug showed up and which data was affected by it.

(I’d welcome other advice from simulationists too; I’ve never had an advisor who was particularly programming-savvy, even though programming was always a large part of my research, and so I always had to make it up as I went along.)

Put your money where you mouth is, O’Leary - by Hans Lehmann (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
When Michael O’Leary starts flying on scheduled, commercial flights with no co-pilot, I’ll start doing the same. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to avoid Ryanair at all costs, since they sure don’t seem to be very concerned with my well being.

In other cost savings news… - by FranTaylor (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

RyanAir’s co-pilots suggest eliminating the CEO position as a way to cut costs.

After all, when cutting costs, start first with things that don’t contribute directly to the bottom line, and don’t affect safety…

Passengers - by SleepyHappyDoc (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

They should get rid of all the passengers. Think about it…they wouldn’t have to pay for meals, they could fire all the flight attendants and save that salary money, the seats on the planes wouldn’t be needed anymore. They’d even save on fuel, since the planes would be so much lighter without all those people on board.

Maybe, but not necessarily a bad idea - by Aquitaine (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Disclaimer: IANACP (I Am Not a Commercial Pilot) but IAAP (I Am A Pilot)

There are probably some flights, in some aircraft, where you could train a flight crew member to do enough to relieve the captain of enough tasks so that (s)he can concentrate on landing the plane. In some cases it isn’t that any one part of getting an aircraft from A to B is difficult so much as it’s the sheer number of tasks at hand — between monitoring a zillion instruments and talking to approach, then the tower, then the ground — that you just need a second person there. Even in a small plane, there are times when having a co-pilot just handle the radio makes things a lot easier.

The actual mechanics of flying an airplane are not especially difficult, but knowing how to handle bad or emergency conditions while keeping cool is. It’s easy to get overwhelmed just by the quantity of things you have to keep track of. It’s plausible that, on shorter, commuter flights, a computer could do enough of those things so that one person can reasonably fly a plane.

The problem is that, while most pilots are pretty safety-conscious, there is such a huge supply of them that there will always be people willing to fly for these companies under less than ideal conditions. Particularly with the minimum number of hours (in the US, anyway) jumping to 1500 (from something like 200-250, which was indeed too low), you’re going to see a lot of young guys with a lot of debt from flight school (where commercial loans are on the order of 12-18% interest) who will take any job just to pay the bills. They just don’t get paid very well these days, and airline margins are tiny as it is.

Re:Maybe, but not necessarily a bad idea - by vlm (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Pilots that I’ve talked to explain you’d pretty much need Nobel prize quality strong AI. Look at that squall line. Is it going to develop or get weaker? And how does that interact with my judgment of the quality of the plane and the quality of my flying? Meanwhile I see a fresh NOTAM shutting down the escape route to my backup airport… or is it? And trust me, even native English speakers misinterpret NOTAMs (with sometimes very bad consequences). Meanwhile fuel filter #5 is clogged but not enough to replace, while transfer pump 2 is running slow but not bad enough to replace, and the peculiar loading of cargo today means strange weight and balance issues … should I top up tank 3 and risk running out of gas due to transfer failure or top up tank 2 and burn so much extra fuel due to being out of balance that we might run out of gas … Or could I try a strange reconfiguration never tried before and pump tank 3 into tank 1 and then tank 1 into tank 2 bypassing all the questionable gear? And how does that interact with the development of the squall line storm meaning higher turbulence at least or maybe needing to divert.

Non-pilots think the work required is simple control system theory, just need a fancier autopilot. Can’t you replace that whole paragraph about with a simple linear equation or something?

Signal to Noise ratio over time