vxxzy - Slashdot User

Comment Setup Bug Tracking/Reporting (Score 1) 1

by vxxzy on Saturday June 26, 2010 @03:48PM (#32704142) Attached to: Security for open source web projects

You may want to setup a sort of "Bug Reporting" feature so that your users can easily tell you of bugs they find. There are many ways to go about this. I'm not sure of the details to your particular game but one suggestion would be to "reward" players for finding bugs by giving them bonus points/items within the game. This would encourage users to find bugs and help out with game stability. It may also help (Not sure if you already have this) to create a project page on sourceforge/googlecode. This will allow you to manage updates/version more efficiently and distribute source code to more developers. This will allow and encourage people to contribute regarding bugs they have discovered when examining the actual programming.

Submission + - Security for open source web projects 1

Submitted by PoissonPilote on Saturday June 26, 2010 @01:57PM

PoissonPilote writes: I'm currently developing a multi-player browser based game, using the good old HTML, Javascript, PHP & MySQL. Progress is good so far, and my number of players is slowly but steadily increasing.
At the beginning of the project, I decided to put the entirety of my game under the MIT licence, so that anyone could study the code or even start their own server for the game.
However, with the increasing popularity of my project, I am starting to worry about security issues. Even though I consider myself decent at web development and am pretty sure I'm not making any classic mistakes (SQL injection, cross-site scripting, URL forgery, etc.) I am no web security expert. I didn't find any relevant examples to compare my game to, as most open source games are written in a compiled language, and no web server is at stake in those cases. Some web developers friends told me not to release the source code at all, others told me to release it only when the game will be shut down- naturally I'm not satisfied by either of these solutions.

What approach does Slashdot recommend ?

Submission + - "Telecommuting" in Formula 1 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by flewp on Saturday June 26, 2010 @01:18PM

flewp writes: So it may not be as technical a story as most /. readers might like, but it gives a nice little insight into the basics of the workings of one of the most high tech sports (consider that a few years ago, Sauber's supercomputer ranked towards the top of all the supercomputers in Europe) on the planet. While the teams bring dozens of mechanics, support personnel, etc, to each race, back at their home bases there's countless more engineers working (with the help of gobs of computing power) to give each team that added extra edge.

Comment Re:Dear Microsoft (Score 1) 497

by vxxzy on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @08:17AM (#32589306) Attached to: Miscreants Exploit Google-Outed Windows XP Zero-Day

Unfortunately... To quote you "...this is more like Google lashing out at MS, which again, is childish and indicates a company that I don't really want to do business with..." As I understand it this really has nothing to do with Google. Was not this guy acting on his own behalf? Or am I misinformed?

Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform? 531

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 29, 2010 @04:12PM from the triple-word-score dept.

andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."

Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting 390

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 25, 2010 @12:26AM from the one-man's-readable dept.

An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:49PM from the type-A-negative-personality dept.

trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Submission + - No Country for Old Typewriters 1

Submitted by saddleupsancho on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @05:41PM

saddleupsancho writes: Today's New York Times reports that Cormac McCarthy is auctioning his 45-plus-year-old Olivetti manual typewriter, on which all his novels, screenplays, plays, short stories, and much of his correspondence were written, to benefit the Sante Fe Institute where he is a Research Fellow. What would happen decades from now if, say, Richard Powers or Neal Stephenson attempted to auction their desktops or laptops? Settling aside completely any comparison between the three authors, is there something more intrinsically interesting and valuable, less ephemeral and interchangeble, about a typewriter as part of the act of creation than a computer? Or are computer-based devices just as sentimental to the current generation as McCarthy's Olivetti is to his? Would you offer more for McCarthy's Olivetti than if it were a generic PC, Mac, or Linux box?

Submission + - Sprint Reveals Customer GPS Data 8 Million Times (dubfire.net) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @02:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: Sprint started a portal for law enforcement to access Sprint customer data. It's been a hit. According to a researcher covering the story:
"Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009"
To put that in perspective, Sprint has ~50 million customers. One request per six customers seems a little steep.

Software Piracy At the Workplace? 1006

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 13, 2009 @01:18PM from the anonymous-call-to-the-bsa dept.

An anonymous reader writes "What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated? Bringing this up did not endear me at all to the president of the company. I was given a flat 'We don't pirate software,' and 'We must have paid for it at some point.' Given that I was only able to find one burnt copy of Office Pro with a Google-able CD-Key, and that version of Office is on at least 20 computers, I'm not convinced. Some of the legit software in the company has been installed on more than one computer, such as Adobe Acrobat. Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions. As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities? If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it. When I told management that WinZip has a timeout counter that counts off one second per file previously opened, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money. Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?"

Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks 781

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 05, 2009 @04:10PM from the such-things-need-more-context-than-substance dept.

twitter writes "Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: 'Is it faster than GNU/Linux?' Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware. From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."

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