The source is the ultimate documentation. If I compile a copy of windows, and a Microsoft app doesn't work on the copy I compiled, but does on a binary copy I bought from Microsoft, then it's apparent they haven't opened the actual source to Windows, just something Windows-like. In other words, if the real source is truly available, there can no longer be any undocumented calls in Windows.
The madness will stop when you can store the sum total of every bit of information any intelligent being anywhere has ever recorded in something too small to be seen with the naked eye.
I've looked into my crystal ball and found some comments that will be posted to slashdot the day those are announced:
"Dammit, I just upgraded to the grain of sand sized sum-total of all knowledge, and now this!"
"Can you make a beowulf cluster out of these?"
"I tried installing linux on one of these, and I STILL had to put the kernel in the first 1024 cylinders. Will someone PLEASE fix that?"
"Mine is already full of archived natalie portman posts, I need another one."
This would be much more useful than the latest Netscape feature, the "Shop" button. What a waste of real-estate.
Have you noticed that "Shop" and "Stop" are very similar in appearance, and placed right next to each other on the toolbar? I guess it's only because I turn the images on that bar off, but I think it's kind of funny that they're trying to trick me into clicking "Shop" by mistake when I meant to click "Stop".
Do most people turn the images off, or do you like wasting all that space too?
I know I'm late to the party here, but there are lots of things wrong with this post:
1) You are not an @Home customer, you are a roadrunner customer.
2) Scans on ports 8000 and 8080 have jack squat to do with news proxies.
3) 2 proxies (and again your statistics are meaningless wrt news proxies) per 1024 addresses is PLENTY for them to be abused by non roadrunner customers (see point 1 for why this has nothing to do with @home customers). If roadrunner has 100,000 customers, that's almost 200 potential sites through which spam can be sent. And I believe @Home is much bigger than roadrunner.
I've seen Call to Power in CompUSA and Railroad Tycoon II in Fry's. In both cases, they were just lumped in with all the windows games, but they were there.
I thought W3 was silly for a long time too. I still do, for the most part, except that now VM knows how to use W3 to format HTML email. I'd still prefer it if people wouldn't send me HTML email, but now when they do, it actually gets formatted sensibly. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone sends me an emacs lisp virus in such a way that I don't even have to open the email, but hey, that would be cool enough I wouldn't even be all that upset when it wiped out my home directory.
On the other hand, as someone pointed out, "Because You Can" is a good reason too.
Since the US patent office are completely clueless, it is in EVERY company's best interests to try and patent every technology they use. If they don't, someone else will. We all agree that the patent office is out of control, but as long as they are, patenting your work is a no brainer in order to protect yourself.
What we need to watch is whether the companies who are granted these insane patents attempt to use them as clubs against other companies, or whether they're only getting them to avoid being sued themselves. I worked at a company that held at least one fairly silly patent that could have been used against several other companies, but never was. We had it just for our own protection, and I can tell you I would have quit at the first hint of our company actually suing someone over it. But it never came up, except jokingly.
So don't get mad at Yahoo for patenting this, only get mad if they try to use it as a weapon.
I was a programmer on the original version of CTP. This is actually the first time I've seen the list of Loki Hacks. I'll just comment on a few.
Flat map - The AI will probably have a lot of problems with this. As noted, pathing still thinks the world wraps, and the AI uses the same pathing...
Don't Panic - Very amusing!
Cows were in the original design. They worked like mobile farms, basically. The problem was people would surround their cities with cows, making it impossible to attack with stealth units and generally annoying to move through enemy territory at all. You can actually enable most of the functionality just by adding the right flags to the text files, but not the ability of other units to rustle them. The latter code is gone, sorry.
The 1.2 version (out for Windows already) has an autpilot feature available from the chat window. I forget the command, but it's in the readme (I hope!)
The customize your civ hack is pretty darn impressive for 48 hours with this code. Nice one!
All of this is awesome. I'd love to do this with future games too. Thanks a lot to all of you!
Ah, but as the story said, these are free. I agree that it's pretty silly, but it doesn't actually cost anything to use it above what you're paying for the cab ride.
Everyone's encountered websites that are totally unusable even if you can see. What recourse do we have then? If the blind have a right to sue a site because it's hard to use, I want the same right.
Setting aside the stupidity of granting this patent for a moment, it seems to me that this is a particularly hard patent to enforce. If I were a large corporation and McDonnel-Douglas came to me asking to see the code running my in house systems, wouldn't I just laugh at them? Can they somehow legally gain access to the code of every company that might have conveivably fixed a Y2K bug to see how it was done? Some programs are out in the world for anyone to examine, sure, but an awful lot of Y2K non-compliant code is tied up in ancient in-house systems. Does having any software patent at all entitle me to look at all the code in the world to make sure it isn't violating my patent? That seems far fetched, but only a bit more so than granting this patent in the first place.
It's not every day one's own code gets reviewed on slashdot! I really like what Loki did, but I saw the particular reaction to the code presented here coming a mile away. I don't want to sound too defensive. I'm more amused than anything else, in fact. I'm not offended. I agree with magenta's assessment. Trying to make the map zoom smoothly would have been a particularly awful thing to try to trace through, that was an unfortunate choice. I'm glad you found something else interesting to do.
Without DCOM, COM is for reference counting. That's absolutely correct. The windows version isn't really any different in how the code for the map generator plugin works. The only reason I used COM as an interface is that I happen to be familiar with it from a previous job (which also included plugins on Unix systems using COM, there really isn't anything to it)
Anyway, thanks for the review. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, eh? I'm glad the experience on the whole was a positive one.
On a tangent, I hate to ruffle anyone's feathers , but the compile times on windows are quite a bit faster than Linux. A complete build from scratch on a P2/450 takes less than an hour, and linking just a minute or two at most (much less for non-full builds). I'm guessing the major factor is precompiled headers. EGCS doesn't have them. If we turn them off on windows, it takes hours there too. Incremental linking also helps. With the linux version, the whole program has to be linked from scratch every time. VC however just relinks the object files that have changed, when possible. I'd really like to be able to write games using emacs and GCC again, but the compile times for large projects really need to come down.
So, you get to use your "spare" cycles to help determine just how much the energy you're burning is going to damage the environment. Hmm. I'd like to see some estimates of which will do more good for the environment - participating in this program, or just turning your computer off.
Yes, RoadRunner is Time Warner, I knew that. However, I can't find any evidence that @Home is owned by Time Warner, can you provide a link? I found the Broadband Report at http://www.catv.org/ but can find any reference to Time Warner and @Home having anything to do with each other. @Home is an independent publically traded company that acts as an ISP for many different cable companies. RoadRunner is owned by Time Warner and is a direct competitor with @Home.
I'm assuming "NotHome" is a joke on "@Home". I did look for a company named "NotHome" just in case I was finding a joke where there wasn't meant to be one. But there isn't any.
MediaOne merged with RoadRunner, not with @Home. But I agree, I had a MediaOne cable modem for more than a year before the merge with RoadRunner and the service was excellent. Since then it's been all downhill.
Well sure, no one's born knowing Unix, or any other OS, but in the olden days, learning how to use Unix was a separate task from learning how to install and maintain Unix. Your college would have machines running Unix with everything already set up for you. A quick intro to a couple of commands (man, ls, vi or emacs, how to start X if you had X terminals, etc.) and you're on your way. No need to set up networking, printing, X, or any of the other systems that are needed. It was all done for you.
As you use the system, you're bound to start picking up on how some of the configuration is done. So that by the time Linux was available and you decided you wanted to run it, you already knew a whole lot about Unix.
In my own case, it was Unix at school (SunOS and NeXT), and an Amiga at home, with GCC and an accompanying suite of Unix utils (including a nice port of csh) that helped me learn Unix. I used Unix for years before I ever had to worry about being my own sysadmin.
So yeah, sure, everyone starts ignorant. But not everyone had to go from Unix novice to Linux expert overnight. That's gotta be rough, I feel for everyone in that position.
It's not 24/7, it's 8am to 6pm according to the page itself. But the story does say it's costing $1200 a week. Which makes me wonder, isn't there anything like Ricochet available for flat rate wireless in New York? A cell modem just can't be the most economical way to run something like this.
I don't know much about wireless communications. I'm just wondering, with an advertised range of 50 meters (according to the article), how likely would these things be to cause real problems for the French military? I would presume the military devices have ranges measured in kilometers. What kind of interference would you get, a mixing of sources, or would it be more like crossing a boundary from one source to the next when you entered the range where an airport's transmission was stronger? How likely would it be that a digital system could pick out only the signal it was interested in from two sources?
Is it possible they are also worried about people using airports to intercept their communications? Sounds silly given that they'd use encryption for anything important, but who says the military doesn't worry about silly things?
If I tried to bring an iBook into France, would they arrest me, or does this only affect actual sales in France?
There are a lot of different jobs, programming and otherwise, that need to be filled to create a modern game. I'm a game programmer, but I don't have a huge math background, nor do I need it since I'm doing any 3D programming. If you're good at math, and like math, then by all means, learn it and write a 3D engine. If you're not, learn something else. Learn about TCP/IP and be a network programmer. Learn about compilers and write scripting engines. Go with what you like to do.
If you're not a programmer, there are still lots of things you can do. Truly good artists are hard to come by, take some art classes. Asset management is something most people outside the gaming industry don't stop to think about. Someone has to coordinate all the stuff that goes into a game from many different sources - programming, art, music, sound effects, videos, manual, packaging, and so on. If you have strong organizational skills, there's a company out there that needs you to help them get organized, I promise.
If you really don't know what you want to do, sometimes you can get a job as a tester and work your way up. I've seen it happen. If you play games 8+ hours a day, you can't help but have some ideas on how to make them better. If you consistently have good ideas, someone will notice, and you'll be on your way to becoming a game designer.
Slashdot Mirror
From a few years back, the seminal Feline Reactions to Bearded Men.
The source is the ultimate documentation. If I compile a copy of windows, and a Microsoft app doesn't work on the copy I compiled, but does on a binary copy I bought from Microsoft, then it's apparent they haven't opened the actual source to Windows, just something Windows-like. In other words, if the real source is truly available, there can no longer be any undocumented calls in Windows.
I've looked into my crystal ball and found some comments that will be posted to slashdot the day those are announced:
There's a big list of recursive acronyms in the standard emacs distribution etc directory. My favorite two were always:
FINE Is Not Emacs
THIEF Isn't Even FINE
Have you noticed that "Shop" and "Stop" are very similar in appearance, and placed right next to each other on the toolbar? I guess it's only because I turn the images on that bar off, but I think it's kind of funny that they're trying to trick me into clicking "Shop" by mistake when I meant to click "Stop".
Do most people turn the images off, or do you like wasting all that space too?
This is an alpha version, don't expect perfection. But it did work on the G2 version of this video for me.
The G2 version works with the G2 Alpha player for Linux. You can get it from http://proforma.real.com/real /player/linuxplayer.html.
I know I'm late to the party here, but there are lots of things wrong with this post:
1) You are not an @Home customer, you are a roadrunner customer.
2) Scans on ports 8000 and 8080 have jack squat to do with news proxies.
3) 2 proxies (and again your statistics are meaningless wrt news proxies) per 1024 addresses is PLENTY for them to be abused by non roadrunner customers (see point 1 for why this has nothing to do with @home customers). If roadrunner has 100,000 customers, that's almost 200 potential sites through which spam can be sent. And I believe @Home is much bigger than roadrunner.
InfoAnarchy.org recently posted a related article about guerilla.net. Go check it out.
I've seen Call to Power in CompUSA and Railroad Tycoon II in Fry's. In both cases, they were just lumped in with all the windows games, but they were there.
You are mistaken. I'm one of them.
I thought W3 was silly for a long time too. I still do, for the most part, except that now VM knows how to use W3 to format HTML email. I'd still prefer it if people wouldn't send me HTML email, but now when they do, it actually gets formatted sensibly. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone sends me an emacs lisp virus in such a way that I don't even have to open the email, but hey, that would be cool enough I wouldn't even be all that upset when it wiped out my home directory.
On the other hand, as someone pointed out, "Because You Can" is a good reason too.
Since the US patent office are completely clueless, it is in EVERY company's best interests to try and patent every technology they use. If they don't, someone else will. We all agree that the patent office is out of control, but as long as they are, patenting your work is a no brainer in order to protect yourself.
What we need to watch is whether the companies who are granted these insane patents attempt to use them as clubs against other companies, or whether they're only getting them to avoid being sued themselves. I worked at a company that held at least one fairly silly patent that could have been used against several other companies, but never was. We had it just for our own protection, and I can tell you I would have quit at the first hint of our company actually suing someone over it. But it never came up, except jokingly.
So don't get mad at Yahoo for patenting this, only get mad if they try to use it as a weapon.
I was a programmer on the original version of CTP. This is actually the first time I've seen the list of Loki Hacks. I'll just comment on a few.
Flat map - The AI will probably have a lot of problems with this. As noted, pathing still thinks the world wraps, and the AI uses the same pathing...
Don't Panic - Very amusing!
Cows were in the original design. They worked like mobile farms, basically. The problem was people would surround their cities with cows, making it impossible to attack with stealth units and generally annoying to move through enemy territory at all. You can actually enable most of the functionality just by adding the right flags to the text files, but not the ability of other units to rustle them. The latter code is gone, sorry.
The 1.2 version (out for Windows already) has an autpilot feature available from the chat window. I forget the command, but it's in the readme (I hope!)
The customize your civ hack is pretty darn impressive for 48 hours with this code. Nice one!
All of this is awesome. I'd love to do this with future games too. Thanks a lot to all of you!
Ah, but as the story said, these are free. I agree that it's pretty silly, but it doesn't actually cost anything to use it above what you're paying for the cab ride.
Everyone's encountered websites that are totally unusable even if you can see. What recourse do we have then? If the blind have a right to sue a site because it's hard to use, I want the same right.
Setting aside the stupidity of granting this patent for a moment, it seems to me that this is a particularly hard patent to enforce. If I were a large corporation and McDonnel-Douglas came to me asking to see the code running my in house systems, wouldn't I just laugh at them? Can they somehow legally gain access to the code of every company that might have conveivably fixed a Y2K bug to see how it was done? Some programs are out in the world for anyone to examine, sure, but an awful lot of Y2K non-compliant code is tied up in ancient in-house systems. Does having any software patent at all entitle me to look at all the code in the world to make sure it isn't violating my patent? That seems far fetched, but only a bit more so than granting this patent in the first place.
It's not every day one's own code gets reviewed on slashdot! I really like what Loki did, but I saw the particular reaction to the code presented here coming a mile away. I don't want to sound too defensive. I'm more amused than anything else, in fact. I'm not offended. I agree with magenta's assessment. Trying to make the map zoom smoothly would have been a particularly awful thing to try to trace through, that was an unfortunate choice. I'm glad you found something else interesting to do.
Without DCOM, COM is for reference counting. That's absolutely correct. The windows version isn't really any different in how the code for the map generator plugin works. The only reason I used COM as an interface is that I happen to be familiar with it from a previous job (which also included plugins on Unix systems using COM, there really isn't anything to it)
Anyway, thanks for the review. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, eh? I'm glad the experience on the whole was a positive one.
On a tangent, I hate to ruffle anyone's feathers , but the compile times on windows are quite a bit faster than Linux. A complete build from scratch on a P2/450 takes less than an hour, and linking just a minute or two at most (much less for non-full builds). I'm guessing the major factor is precompiled headers. EGCS doesn't have them. If we turn them off on windows, it takes hours there too. Incremental linking also helps. With the linux version, the whole program has to be linked from scratch every time. VC however just relinks the object files that have changed, when possible. I'd really like to be able to write games using emacs and GCC again, but the compile times for large projects really need to come down.
So, you get to use your "spare" cycles to help determine just how much the energy you're burning is going to damage the environment. Hmm. I'd like to see some estimates of which will do more good for the environment - participating in this program, or just turning your computer off.
I'm assuming "NotHome" is a joke on "@Home". I did look for a company named "NotHome" just in case I was finding a joke where there wasn't meant to be one. But there isn't any.
MediaOne merged with RoadRunner, not with @Home. But I agree, I had a MediaOne cable modem for more than a year before the merge with RoadRunner and the service was excellent. Since then it's been all downhill.
Well sure, no one's born knowing Unix, or any other OS, but in the olden days, learning how to use Unix was a separate task from learning how to install and maintain Unix. Your college would have machines running Unix with everything already set up for you. A quick intro to a couple of commands (man, ls, vi or emacs, how to start X if you had X terminals, etc.) and you're on your way. No need to set up networking, printing, X, or any of the other systems that are needed. It was all done for you.
As you use the system, you're bound to start picking up on how some of the configuration is done. So that by the time Linux was available and you decided you wanted to run it, you already knew a whole lot about Unix.
In my own case, it was Unix at school (SunOS and NeXT), and an Amiga at home, with GCC and an accompanying suite of Unix utils (including a nice port of csh) that helped me learn Unix. I used Unix for years before I ever had to worry about being my own sysadmin.
So yeah, sure, everyone starts ignorant. But not everyone had to go from Unix novice to Linux expert overnight. That's gotta be rough, I feel for everyone in that position.
It's not 24/7, it's 8am to 6pm according to the page itself. But the story does say it's costing $1200 a week. Which makes me wonder, isn't there anything like Ricochet available for flat rate wireless in New York? A cell modem just can't be the most economical way to run something like this.
I don't know much about wireless communications. I'm just wondering, with an advertised range of 50 meters (according to the article), how likely would these things be to cause real problems for the French military? I would presume the military devices have ranges measured in kilometers. What kind of interference would you get, a mixing of sources, or would it be more like crossing a boundary from one source to the next when you entered the range where an airport's transmission was stronger? How likely would it be that a digital system could pick out only the signal it was interested in from two sources?
Is it possible they are also worried about people using airports to intercept their communications? Sounds silly given that they'd use encryption for anything important, but who says the military doesn't worry about silly things?
If I tried to bring an iBook into France, would they arrest me, or does this only affect actual sales in France?
There are a lot of different jobs, programming and otherwise, that need to be filled to create a modern game. I'm a game programmer, but I don't have a huge math background, nor do I need it since I'm doing any 3D programming. If you're good at math, and like math, then by all means, learn it and write a 3D engine. If you're not, learn something else. Learn about TCP/IP and be a network programmer. Learn about compilers and write scripting engines. Go with what you like to do.
If you're not a programmer, there are still lots of things you can do. Truly good artists are hard to come by, take some art classes. Asset management is something most people outside the gaming industry don't stop to think about. Someone has to coordinate all the stuff that goes into a game from many different sources - programming, art, music, sound effects, videos, manual, packaging, and so on. If you have strong organizational skills, there's a company out there that needs you to help them get organized, I promise.
If you really don't know what you want to do, sometimes you can get a job as a tester and work your way up. I've seen it happen. If you play games 8+ hours a day, you can't help but have some ideas on how to make them better. If you consistently have good ideas, someone will notice, and you'll be on your way to becoming a game designer.