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10th May '13 2:47:26 PM Saber15

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* The original ''PlanetSide'', a 2003 MMOFPS with up to 111 players on each of the three empires fighting on each individual 20x20km continent, handled ''everything'' clientside, with the game only checking up with what the server knows every couple seconds. A significant amount of the gameplay was devoted to exploiting the hilariously bad netcode ("ADADA" strafing relied on the game not realizing when players shift their strafing direction, causing them to teleport from side to side on other player's screens). Because everything was clientside, the game was also one of the easiest MMO games to hack. Common hacks included warping all players on a continent to stand directly in-front of you (on your screen) and kill them, causing players from across the continent to spontaneously fall over dead, or enabling a hack to disable weapon cone-of-fire, resulting in sniper shotguns and gatling guns that could pick off players from a thousand meters out. Even without hacks, the game was pitifully easy to exploit. Players would stand somewhere safe, unplug their ethernet cable, then run around the battlefield knifing enemy players to death. Once the player is happy with the amount of kills, the player would plug the cable back in and bask in huge amounts of XP as half the battlefield drops over dead - though this was eventually fixed by locking the game's controls after a few seconds with no server communication. For a long time, having a certain type of dual-core processor would cause the game to run in turbo mode, causing vehicle and players to move and fire several times faster than normal. Thankfully, ''Planetside 2'' uses much more serverside authentication, which has fixed almost all the issues with the first game's idiotic netcode.

2nd May '13 2:27:15 PM Pykrete

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16th Apr '13 7:48:37 PM Roraborialis

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Added an unfortunate incidence.

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15th Apr '13 4:56:42 PM IsaacG

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15th Apr '13 4:54:22 PM IsaacG

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** They all have nothing on the infamous A20 line. Due to the quirk in how its addressing system worked [[hottip:*:Basically, they've skipped on the bounds check there]], Intel's 8088/86 [=CPUs=] could theoretically address slightly more than their advertised 1 MB. But because they ''physically'' still had only 20 address pins, the resulting address just wrapped over, so the last 64K of memory actually were the same as first. Some early programmers[[hottip:*:Among them, Microsoft. The CALL 5 entry point in MS-DOS relies on this behaviour.]] were, unsurprisingly, stupid enough to use this almost-not-a-bug [[IdiotBall as a feature]]. So, when the 24-bit 80286 rolled in, a problem arose -- nothing wrapped any more. In a truly stellar example of a "compatibility is God" thinking, IBM engineers couldn't think up anything better than to simply ''block'' the offending [=21st=] pin (the aforementioned A20 line) on the motherboard side, making the 286 unable to use a solid chunk of its memory above 1 meg until this switch was turned on. This might have been an acceptable (if very clumsy) solution had IBM defaulted to having the A20 line enabled and provided an option to disable it when needed, but instead they decided to have it always turned off unless the OS specifically enables it. By the 386 times no sane programmer used that "wrapping up" trick any more, but turning the A20 line on is ''still'' among the very first things any PC OS has to do. It wasn't until Intel introduced the Core i7 in 2008 that they finally decided "screw it," and locked the A20 line into being permanently enabled.

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** They all have nothing on the infamous A20 line. Due to the quirk in how its addressing system worked [[note]]Basically, they've skipped on the bounds check there[[/note]], Intel's 8088/86 [=CPUs=] could theoretically address slightly more than their advertised 1 MB. But because they ''physically'' still had only 20 address pins, the resulting address just wrapped over, so the last 64K of memory actually were the same as first. Some early programmers[[note]]Among them, Microsoft. The CALL 5 entry point in MS-DOS relies on this behaviour.[[/note]] were, unsurprisingly, stupid enough to use this almost-not-a-bug [[IdiotBall as a feature]]. So, when the 24-bit 80286 rolled in, a problem arose -- nothing wrapped any more. In a truly stellar example of a "compatibility is God" thinking, IBM engineers couldn't think up anything better than to simply ''block'' the offending [=21st=] pin (the aforementioned A20 line) on the motherboard side, making the 286 unable to use a solid chunk of its memory above 1 meg until this switch was turned on. This might have been an acceptable (if very clumsy) solution had IBM defaulted to having the A20 line enabled and provided an option to disable it when needed, but instead they decided to have it always turned off unless the OS specifically enables it. By the 386 times no sane programmer used that "wrapping up" trick any more, but turning the A20 line on is ''still'' among the very first things any PC OS has to do. It wasn't until Intel introduced the Core i7 in 2008 that they finally decided "screw it," and locked the A20 line into being permanently enabled.

11th Apr '13 12:39:44 PM Luigifan

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* Many streaming video websites have a ridiculously small buffer size; quite often only 3--4 seconds of video, and possibly even less at HD resolutions. In optimum conditions it's not so problematic, but if the site is particularly busy or if your Internet connection isn't too fast, it can make the videos all but unwatchable. Absurdly, Website/{{Youtube}} suffers from this restriction on its streaming videos, despite allowing an unlimited buffer on non-streamed videos, not to mention that when you watch videos, you may expect to get a black screen reading the message of "An error occurred. Please try again later."
* Computers don't really have random number generation. Instead, they take a number (often something like the system time) as a "seed" and use that to generate a stream of random numbers–and a given seed will ''always'' produce the same sequence each time it's used. This isn't Idiot Programming itself–the way computers work means that they ''can't'' actually generate proper random numbers without an of outside source of randomness–but considering that this fact is mentioned in every basic computer science class worth its salt, any code that fails to take it into consideration ''is'' Idiot Programming.

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* Many streaming video websites have a ridiculously small buffer size; quite often only 3--4 seconds of video, and possibly even less at HD resolutions. In optimum conditions, it's not so problematic, but if the site is particularly busy or if your Internet connection isn't too fast, it can make the videos all but unwatchable. Absurdly, Website/{{Youtube}} suffers from this restriction on its streaming videos, despite allowing an unlimited buffer on non-streamed videos, not to mention that when you watch videos, you may expect to get a black screen reading the message of "An error occurred. Please try again later."
* Computers don't really have random number generation. Instead, they take a number (often something like the system time) as a "seed" and use that to generate a stream of random numbers – and a given seed will ''always'' produce the same sequence each time it's used. This isn't Idiot Programming itself – the way computers work means that they ''can't'' actually generate proper random numbers without an of outside source of randomness – but considering that this fact is mentioned in every basic computer science class worth its salt, any code that fails to take it into consideration ''is'' Idiot Programming.

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8th Apr '13 8:30:48 PM Lirodon

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8th Apr '13 8:30:13 PM Lirodon