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Comment Paper Rules (Score 2) 292

For an intro (and I mean intro) course in Computer Science at uni, we were assigned to write a Java client in a game called Paper Rules. Establish TCP connection, wait for the master server to find an opponent (another client) for you, and then repeatedly send either ROCK, PAPER or SCISSORS to the server and read the result of the match. To make it interesting, the rules were enhanced so winning a round yielded 1 point, losing -1 point, except when paper won, in which case 2 points were assigned to the winner and -2 to the loser. Our task was to write an "AI" to outsmart the other students' AI.

I wrote a simple algorithm that kept track of the statistics for each of the 18 combinations of [my choice in round n, round n result, opponent's choice in round n+1] and chose based on what the opponent had picked the most in the past. In a match, the winner was declared after 1000 rounds.

Of course, the so-called PaperServer was a <1000-SLOC inefficient by-students-for-students Java one-system-thread-per-connection server running in a Java VM inside a Java VM (yes, really - an IDE called BlueJ) on a terribly underpowered virtual server, so it didn't last long, and anything educational was lost on us that day. Fun times.

Comment Re:Roboticus Superioritis (Score 1) 54

I no longer login because I feel that while attacking a company's products is fair game (specifically Apple), having stories singling out their users as "selfish" and unkind is not "news for nerds stuff that matters". Am I an Apple fanboi? Let's just say I've used NIX for decades (yes I'm old) and I'm not talking OS X.

You know, registered users can have signatures.

Comment Useless (Score 1) 150

Encrypted voice is US only, so that's no good for the rest of the world. Also, searching for TextSecure on Market doesn't yield any results on my Android 1.5 device (although the FAQ claims it works on all versions of Android), though 2.2 is fine. Sending encrypted texts to myself didn't work either, it says "Bad encrypted message..." but that might just be me doing something wrong.
Bug

Microsoft Dynamics GP "Encrypted" Using Caesar Cipher 206

scribblej writes "Many large companies use Microsoft's Dynamics GP product for accounting, and many of these companies use it to store credit card numbers for billing customers. Turns out these numbers (and anything else in GP) are encrypted only by means of a simple substitution cipher. This includes the master system password, which can be easily selected and decrypted from the GP database by any user. Quoting: '[Y]ou DON'T HAVE TO GIVE ACCESS TO THE DYNAMICS DATABASE. What that means is if you create a base user in GP, that user can log into the SQL server and run a select statement on the table containing the "encrypted" GP System password. Not good.'" Update: 05/22 02:57 GMT by T : The original linked post has been revised in a few places; significantly, the following has been added as a correction: "By default, GP gives the user access to the DYNAMICS database but the user CANNOT login to the SQL server using SQL Enterprise Manager."

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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