MrBooga - Slashdot User

NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project 218

Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 02, 2010 @06:30PM from the chasing-ghosts dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The core of how people first learn to do stuff — programming, music, writing, etc. — is to imitate others. It's one of the best ways to learn. Apparently a bunch of students using MIT's educational Scratch programming language understand this. But not everyone else does. NAMCO Bandai sent a takedown notice to MIT because some kids had recreated Pac-man with Scratch. The NAMCO letter is pretty condescending as well, noting that it understands the educational purpose of Scratch, but 'part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.'"

Eight PHP IDEs Compared 206

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @11:32AM from the colonic-extraction dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"

PS3 Hacked? 296

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 25, 2010 @07:35AM from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

Data Locking In a Web Application? 283

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 24, 2009 @10:46PM from the get-offa-my-cloud dept.

An anonymous reader writes "We recently developed a multi-user application and deployed it to our users. This is a web-based application that used to be a Windows application which was written in Delphi using Paradox databases for the client database. In the Windows application, we used the ability in Paradox to lock records which would prevent users from editing the same data. However, in the web application we did not add in a locking facility for the data due to its disconnected nature (at least that's how I was shot down). Now our users are asking to have the locking back, as they are stepping on each others' edits from time to time. I have been assigned to look at best practices for web application locking of data, and figured I would post the question here to see what others have done or to get some pointers to locations for best practices on doing locking with in a web application. I have an idea of how to do this, but don't want to taint the responses so I'll leave it off for the time being."

How To Get Out of Developer's Block? 601

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 25, 2009 @07:08PM from the how-do-you-feel-about-get-out-of-developer's-block dept.

Midnight Thunder writes "I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can't seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can't concentrate. I don't know whether this is akin to writer's block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference."

Comment Re:Games don't support GameSpy (Score 1) 188

by MrBooga on Monday January 20, 2003 @06:40PM (#5121763) Attached to: Multi-vendor Game Server (GameSpy) DDoS Attack

GameSpy supplies the game status code for the majority of on-line game servers. They sell an SDK which you can bake into you game to make it GameSpy compatible. Since many of the game servers are using this SDK, they're all capable of hosting a third-party DOS or DDOS. If they fix their SDK, then many games could release server patches and greatly reduce the problem. (so, this is very much a GameSpy issue, but the biggest game,
Half-Life, does not use GameSpy SDK)

The best fix is a short-lived-cookie based protocol. But this will double the number of packets needed to get game server status information, and require client patches. A server-side throttling fix is best we can really hope for.

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