Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:XB1 and PS4 Integration? (Score 2) 94

Funny you mention the Wii U and 3DS apps. They are just wrapped, unoptimized webkit wrappers. Their webkit versions is old, which is good for the homebrew community; but bad for people that want to use it, since it's so slow and unresponsive.

You can ask any big Twitch partner about Youtube; the ones that bother to comment about it all agree:Ttwitch takes care of their partners better than Youtube. They only upload some content to Youtube because the Twitch VODs don't show up on the Google searches as high.

In the end, everyone else did too little, too late. Twitch got the momentum, and the competitors can barely match the small list of features Twitch already has (such as chat moderation, IRC front-end, a balanced way to send money to content producers that doesn't alienate the viewers, etc).

Comment Re:Open Source Piracy/Plagarism (Score 1) 359

A company cannot "pirate" a GPL software without unambiguously violating copyright law. They can either distribute the software while intentionally violating the terms of the license, or distribute it without the (original) license. It's hard to tell which one will make the judge more furious, and that's why virtually no company will allow GPL violation cases to go to court.

Comment Re:He had it treated in June 2014 (Score 5, Informative) 56

Cancer is hardly something you "cure". You fight it off, with a painful treatment, in the hopes your body outlives the cancer. Then you keep an eye on it, until it pops back up; rinse and repeat.

It's entirely possible that at the time he already had a terminal case, and the surgery (and the clear weight loss, possibly due to chemo therapy) only gave him a few more months. And we never heard about it because either he didn't want Nintendo's stocks to be affected by an uncertain future, or maybe he just considered it as his own burden to carry (Japanese culture and all.)

No doubt Miyamoto will be under pressure to take the position, shoes, since they both shared the same views about the company's direction. Iwata backtracked a lot with the NX hardware and the DeNA partnership, that was probably a sign he knew he didn't have much time left, and just wanted to try something radical before passing away. I wonder if the next CEO will keep this direction.

Comment Re:It depends (Score 1) 486

Replying to undo accidental moderation.

Also, the python code is a prepend (concatString = addString + concatString) to force a quadratic algorithm, when doin in-memory; which is completely different from the direct-to-file append. When they changed the order, to compare append vs append, in-memory-then-file was faster.

Comment Re:Not this shit again (Score 2) 834

Also, dev sabotages a game design contest for women, calling TFYC transphobic and exploitative, and creates her own "contest" with no date nor location defined, where she endlessly asks for donations to fund it, going all straight to her bank account.

Dev and her PR manager doxx TFYC while making the wild accusations, despite their efforts to ask her what was wrong with their contest; TFYC receives death threats. Dev denies having any involvement with her PR manager, and blames her for doxxing.

Dev then tries to bribe TFYC to not mention what she has been doing.

Few people would consider this behavior ethical or moral. But as I said, her character is of no concern to us; but it triggered chain of events that left a lot of people shocked; it's the context to explain what matters.

Comment Re:Not this shit again (Score 5, Informative) 834

The timeline is the single most important piece of information of this whole ordeal.

You don't even have to read too far into it to see what's really going on - when people started calling out on ZQ's lack of ethics and morals, she called in favors to shape the story so she appears to be a victim instead of a sociopath, and the whole thing snowballed into the shitstorm most people saw as "gamergate": the flood of articles and opinion pieces pushed by ZQ's friends trying to convince the uninformed they are fighting against trolls that are oppressing women, when in fact people are condemning journalistic corruption and malpractice.

The question is, who will denounce corrupt journalists? Not the journalist themselves, as it turned out.

It didn't help that a bunch of SJW jumped in to "fight for women's rights" without having a clue as to what was going on (other than ZQ's side of the story), and it became self-sustaining; their quixotic efforts were criticized by the community, and they pushed back, claiming that denying "gamergate = misogyny" validates their fight against misogyny. At this point their discourse is not even about the original issues, it's about how they are themselves becoming victims of criticism just because they are fighting for "the right cause". They keep tilting at windmills.

Comment Re:~$7500 per transaction? (Score 1) 69

Sounds like they replace the barcode to redirect the payment to an account they own, so they are really stealing the whole amount. Funny thing is, after you enter the code (by scanning or typing) you get a confirmation screen (either on the ATM or on the online system) with the name of the receiving entity; it's hard to imagine the bank would allow somebody to create an account with a name that looks like an utility company or something like that.

I agree, the average amount seems way too high; things at that range are usually paid with credit cards, cheques, or direct transfers between bank accounts. I'm really curious to find out what kinds of transactions average at 100 times the typical boleto value. Was every victim buying a 65" 3D 4k LED TV over the internet?

Comment Blame the banks (Score 4, Insightful) 69

From TFA:

In Brazil, when banking customers access their online banking site for the first time, they are often asked to install a security plugin. [,,,] However, the Boleto malware [,,,] searches for specific versions of client side security plug-ins detects their shared libraries and patches them in real-time to dodge security.

I've closed my account in 3 different banks for pulling this bullshit. So it turned out the "security plugin" is full of security holes; worse than that, they are educating their users that they need to install/update software every time they access their bank online, so most accept plugin installation confirmations right away.

The fact that it attacks boletos is a minor detail, it's a traceable and reversible money transfer once suspicious activity is identified.

Comment Re:Bad marketing (Score 2) 127

Nintendo's marketing after the Wii was not effective.

I agree with this statement, but for a different reason. I have a Wii U and a 3DS, and none of the competitors'. Google knows that very well due to searches and through the websites I visit. Yet, I only see ads for the other systems, and PC games (my gaming laptop is more than 3 years old, so every "recent" game has to be on lowest settings to be playable... so I don't play on it).

Maybe they are too full of themselves and think they don't need to make the effort? Maybe they don't really understand how to use the internet? My theory is that they didn't learn how to grow. The industry grew, the competitors came from companies that already knew how to grow, yet Nintendo still works centralizing everying in Kyoto with little human resources to manage a global market. Their strategy of disruption from the DS/Wii era went tot heir heads, now they think they can do it again on a whim (like their new "Quality of Life" strategy... heck, let me sync my Fit Meter with my phone or my 3DS, and make my data available on the web) whenever they get cornered.

Comment Re:OK, before somebody else points it out... (Score 2) 470

There are actually 3 categories:

  • Implementation Defined: the implementation (compiler, standard library, execution environment) has to document what happens. Code relying on this is not portable.
  • Unspecified: the implementation can choose to do what makes sense, and not tell you. Even reverse-engineering and relying on what you found out, is unreliable. The actual address returned by malloc is unspecified; is it aligned? Does it always grow in value if nothing was free-ed? You shouldn't even care about this detail, so the standard leaves it unspecified.
  • Undefined Behaviour: you wrote something that doesn't make sense, if you get lucky the compiler/standard library/operating system will react in a sensible way, but the standard says it's not the implementation's fault you get something wrong as a result. Things like reading variables before initializing them.

Diagnosing UB can be too demanding from the implementation, so the standard doesn't even require it. How would you diagnose incorrect usage of realloc? Add run-time checks? Write a special rule in the compiler so it knows about realloc? Extend the language with metadata? What if realloc is hidden behind a user-defined function? At some point you have to stop, otherwise you could even solve the halting problem.

Comment Re:OpenCL (Score 1) 66

The gpuocelot project has been able to run CUDA in non-NVIDIA hardware for some time now, including x86 CPUs and AMD GPUs.

Too bad the CUDA compiler often segfaults on ordinary C++ libraries even when they are host-only (in which case nvcc is supposed to just forward it to GCC). Hopefully the LLVM-based compiler for OpenCL 2.0 won't be as buggy.

Slashdot Top Deals

Their idea of an offer you can't refuse is an offer... and you'd better not refuse.

Working...