Quantity is a quality of it's own. I think getting large number of people to try something is a good way to move forward. Sure it is not efficient, but fairly reliable.
i assure you it was intended to be a constructive combined effort. i only skimmed the article linked but it doesn't seem to reference the fact that the kid who was falsely identified was found dead, presumably by his own hand. "hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works", as they say.
on a lighter note, if you consider an open source project "crowdsourced" then i posit the current collaborative academic efforts to decode the manuscript are "crowdsourced" as well.
I would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.
It depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems
that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the
definition of "fairly unreliable" :)
I wish all distros will start compiling all its packages with a consistent policy to enable at least some level of stack protection (like Ubuntu and unlike Debian).
Can you elaborate? Debian has infrastructure for hardening their builds (look on their wiki), but each package has to make sure to use it. Unless Ubuntu patches each package source (which they don't), then they have the same hardening status as Debian. Where did I go wrong?
Ubuntu uses the packages that have been maintained and integrated by Debian, but they don't necessarily take the binaries. They compile it themselves, and that means they can specify whatever compile options they want.
Cool! Notably, it appears that it is based on TI MSP430, which is a real CPU with its own instruction set. At first I thought they had invented their own ISA, which would have been crazy.
I would have loved it to be some old ARM ISA to use it as a testcase for Avatar[0]. On the same topic, FIE paper may be an interesting reading for msp430 lovers[1] (but it needs source for symbolic execution, so doesn't directly apply here).
Just so I can be super clear here: none of the code in this challenge has anything whatsoever to do with anything Square ships. We deliberately made things less realistic to make the levels more fun, and easier to ramp up with.
[1] http://popcorn-time.tv/