Anyone remember the Blitzkrieg server, which seems like the solution to all of the world's security needs? The expression Bruce Schneier used was "just too bizarre for words". I don't know if this was an elaborate trolling attempt or an actual real honest scam to deceive the terminally dumb, but it's fun to read, still, just for the amazing technobabble and ludicruous claims.
Spiritual side? WTF does that mean? Do we get Kool-aid if we format the drive?
Wouldn't be the first time they've claimed there's some "spiritual" meaning to the startup sound...
"The thing from the agency said, 'We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3¼ seconds long.'" - Brian Eno on the construction of Windows 95 MSSOUND.WAV
The 'cmd.exe' shell is more powerful than some people with memories of the limitations of 'command.com' know.
I believe the original poster was referring to PowerShell (nee Monad/MSH). You know, Microsoft promised a real, actual shell that no Unix guru would sneer at, and that actually had improvements over Unix shells and very nice integration with.NET......and then Microsoft said that it's a separate component afterall.
True, cmd.exe is better than command.com (tab completion, woohoo), but not quite as interesting as, say, Bash. Good enough for casual use if you don't do any of this "scripting" stuff much.
I think it was the difficulty of having a small market to begin with, and not getting enough of different releases out to keep people buying the stuff. They were probably understaffed and not getting enough porting contracts.
I mean, I bought Quake III Arena, SMAC and Myth II (the latest after their bankruptcy though)... that from the whole lineup of Loki, not exactly a whole lot. (Plus Q3A was an iD game - they would have got a Linux version out with or without Loki's help, anyway.) I mean, when I bought SMAC I thought "Okay, now they got a real game out, hope they get more of these real games out soon, oh look, Deus Ex - I'll be getting that when it comes out..."...and then they went belly up.
Had they been getting a different kind of game out every month, and maintaining all of that with the same respect and care, and doing this now when the market is slightly bigger too, they might have survived a little bit better.
Whatever pigfucker decided that a fucking web page should be able to override an application's ability to use a key such as Alt-F should be gutted like a fish and have his entrails wrapped around a pickle fork and shoved down his throat.
Ah, but being able to play Legend of the Green Dragon with keyboard shortcuts makes the experience so much smoother and closer to the original game. =)
You're right though, overriding application's own keybindings is almost always bad, and even so, the browser should have options like "Disallow JavaScript keybindings altogether" and "Allow only the listed sites to bind keys in JavaScript"... there's potential for abuse.
In other words, there's a HUGE difference between permitting edits from the general public, and inviting edits from the general public.
I'm a member of the "general public". Wikipedia folks, bless their kindness, made me an administrator. I guess we have a slightly different definitions of "general public" here.
My point was that Wikipedia is still permitting edits from anonymous users but restricting the anonymous users in places where they're making nuisance of themselves under the guise of anonymity. That happens on a tiny fraction of the pages.
In my view, Wikipedia wouldn't get anywhere without rules. If there weren't any rules, we wouldn't have anything but vandalism and copyright violations. Even the name of the project limits the stuff: We're Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. That alone limits the scope of the project. We have a policy that says vandalism is most annoying, we have a policy that says copyright infringements must be removed and people should write their own stuff. From early on, Wikipedia has had its rules that limit its "wiki nature".
And specifically, Wikipedia has had, and will have, rules that are supposed to deal with personal bias, with stable versions or not. I don't think it will be the Wrong Version mk. 2.
From relatively early in its existence it has been possible to ensure only administrators edit a page, but recent changes make it harder for ordinary users to create and update pages on the site.
For reference, this is supposed to be about the semi-protection. Which just happens to involve registering an user account and showing, just for a few passing moments, that you are capable of appropriate conduct.
That is, if you want to edit the couple of popular articles that happen to be semi-protected at the time.
There's 196 semi-portected articles at the moment in English Wikipedia. There's 1,355,706 articles. There's 70 articles at the moment that are full-protected, as well as handful of articles that show up in article count but are actually protected against recreation.
It still leaves you (...calculations, calculations, I'm a bit bad at math...) over 1.3 million articles for you to completely vandalise if you don't bother to spend a whole two minutes registering an user account.
You don't even need to confirm your email address.
And the separation of approved / unreviewed edits has not yet, as far as I know, even been implemented in MediaWiki.
Sorry if I sound a bit tired. I just find it a little bit vexing that people get stuck on small things like "hey, it says 'anyone can edit', and I get this error message that says that I can't". This is what happens when someone realises that you need some control. Regrettably, utopias where everyone can do anything don't work - human nature being what it is, you need some control. It's almost like saying "Oh, sure, everyone can come in our country!... except for people who don't have a passport and visa... and people who try to cross the border at a funny place... and armed, hostile soldiers of another country... obviously... But apart of that, everyone can come!"
So read "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" just like you would read "a city where everyone can perform on the streets." (don't be surprised if, in such city, the police asks you to get the hell away from the way of the traffic and move to the sidewalk like everyone else.)
Secondly, what the heck is wrong with the concept of reviewed versions? It doesn't prevent anyone from editing the stuff or even seeing the unreviewed edits, it just prevents people from seeing stuff we don't know to be good. It's a quality control measure, not a barrier to contributing.
Actually, one line might be considered fair-use excerpting...:-)
Actually, it's more likely fall below the threshold of what's considered copyrightable at all. Fair use, by comparison, is borrowing chunks that are recognisable parts of a larger copyrighted work (and copyrightable in their own right), with proper attribution.
The games wave Big Freaking Hints in front of my nose, and while I'm personally able to duly note each and every one of them, I sometimes fail to make sense of them. Or, when I repeatedly fail at following the clues, I start to wonder if what I deduced was right. "Okay, I did a, b, and c; why isn't this boss dying?"
In a sense, its good that there's something with which to confirm that yes, in fact, I'm on a right track with this one. That's one thing that increases motivation to play in case the thing is seemingly impossible to beat even when I know exactly what to do...
Force them to watch a couple hours of Big Brother or (your country) Idol. That's torture to me.
It's torture to any h. sapiens watching the shows to see members of their race to sink so low, but the monkeys will probably be just happy to see the so-called higher simians to fall from grace... Or has someone proved conclusively that schadenfreude is exclusive to humans? I doubt that, given that the monkeys punch each others to genitals and all that. =)
There's already a few common libraries like you mention - wxWidgets for C++, SWT for Java, just as examples. Oh, and Mozilla's XUL, too. The good news: Cross-platform stuff is easier. The bad news: The apps have very very small hitches that make them feel non-native no matter what widget set you use, so you need to tune and tweak the stuff very carefully - though I bet Mozilla folks have much less headaches with XUL than rewriting Firefox GUI in three different GUI libraries and trying to keep those in sync...
but I remember booting to DOS games that had their own drivers.
You wanted graphics then? We had this standard called VGA - or VESA, if you want to go really fancy. (3D graphics? Hardware accelerated? You've got to be kidding. Oh, you probably mean that "3DFX Voodoo" thing that's coming in a couple of years.) You wanted sound then? We had this standard called "Sound Blaster compatible". You wanted file access? We had this standard called FAT16, for which every monkey can write driver for. You wanted keyboard? Well, this BIOS thing apparently let you use this "PS/2" stuff pretty easily. You wanted mouse? Well, the only standard is "Microsoft compatible", and there's tons of drivers, but who games with a mouse, anyway?
The point is, these days we have shitloads of more complexity on the driver side. Every 3D card has different drivers (though the game API is the same). Sound? No standards anymore, apart of some things that may still in this day and age claim some compatibility with ye olde ancientye SB. HD? NTFS, which is everywhere, is proprietary, and there's a bunch of really funny ways to attach the hard drive on the machine (ATA? SATA? USB 2.0? Firewire? SCSI, for crying out loud?)
Back in the DOS era, writing a miniature OS to handle all "standard" hardware was simple when we didn't have to worry about all graphics jargon that Carmack spouts.
Someone please reprimand FBI for invalid HTML, not using a doctype at all, images without alt attributes, goddamnfrigging <p> </p>, and misusing <h1> and <h3> to change font size rather than using them for headings.
I thought all public US government sites were supposed to follow some accessibility guidelines or something? (Text versions, support for screen readers, all that good junk...) And since that is a public US government site now...
We are mobilizing armies of lawyers for a legal battle between a show about a stuffed purple dinosaur and a website that makes fun of the stuffed purple dinosaur.
That should be "between copyright owners of a show, and a website that makes fun of the show."
People should be allowed to make fun of anything they please. The target should have every right to be enraged, of course, but they should have no right to lawsuit the said fun-makers out of existence, or even threaten with that. Both sides have their rights, you know.
It just happens that in this case, there's purple dinosaurs involved.
can anyone name a single text-based browser that supports AJAX? A text-based browser where CSS positioning actually works? A text-based browser which has tabbed browsing?
ELinks? Supports limited Javascript, limited CSS, and does tabs. Can't quite run most Ajax stuff, but it's still a surprisingly capable text-based browser. The world isn't stuck in Lynx, you know =)
As everyone knows, Commodore VIC-1541 Toaster is a very, very odd thing.
I once got a C64 game collection. The store was half across the country. Got home. Tried playing the games. A few didn't work. We mailed the games back to the store for replacement.
The games came back with a note "If the games do not work, turn the floppy drive to its side." With a helpful diagram.
Flipped the drive to its side, tried running the game, and wham - time to enjoy some games.
I later ran into some games that had such a weird copy protection that, in turn, didn't work while the drive was on its side...
Now, honest truth to tell, I've looked at modern attempts at DRM/copy protections with rather bleary eyes, but I think Starforce and the Sony XCP rootkits seem to have finally beaten this stuff - time to get worried about nasty copy protection schemes again...
And here I thought that if X server gets terminally messed up in Linux, the real key combo to do is MagicSysRq-E,I,E,I,S,S,S,U,B, and the real pro knows how to time the key presses properly =)
Selected bits from Thompson's tech support call, lead developer's comments:
"No, I'm sorry, this version doesn't have an installer, we basically dumped binaries and assets on a DVD-R. You need to copy the files by hand."
"Well, yeah, it might not run because you to move a few folders and files around. all files in data/txt32b1024/m00 to data/mission/00, depending on what texture depth and size you use, copy everything gfx/shaders/nv44 to gfx/shader - well, that kind of depends on what chipset you use, but that's the gist of it. They should be easy to figure out, because the bullyXXXXXXXX.log in your profile directory tells what's wrong. Just keep moving the folders and copying stuff around until it runs, okay?"
"Well, it's either in your profile directory or qc directory in wherever you put the binary.... that would be the same folder as the bully_dev.exe file."
"bully12039203.log? What the heck? Oh, you have that buggy build of Windows 2000 that had that weird weird WEIRD quirk in C library. Microsoft is just as clueless as we are. We think it's our fault though, somewhere deep in code, no one just bothered to fix it. It's supposed to be year-month-day, and not a random number. Yeah, it makes it kind of hard to find it. The release build of the game will just use bully.log. What? You have patched up XP? Well I'll be damned..."
"Oh darn, I forgot, some of the stuff needs to be rebuilt from assets to make it actually run - sorry, we sent you data straight off the freezer, and not all of the build data. Well, I can email you a script to make it run. You have ActivePerl, right? No? Well, just call back when you get it installed..."
"Oh right, you need to edit the script a bit. On the line 262, change the right hand side of regexp from "$2/$1" to "$2\\$1".... Right! Okay, now you're done. Start it up and you can leave it running overnight."
"Two backslashes. Not two forward slashes."
"No, please don't edit this on Word. Sorry, it won't work that way."
"You edited the bully_dev.ini file day before yesterday in Word too? Well, heck, no wonder it didn't work... Looks we need to start all over. But good that we got the script fixed. Might have ended up in great big problems soon anyway if we didn't do this now."
"You don't have Notepad icon there? Sorry, I was thinking of Windows 98, right now I'm sitting in front of my NetBSD toaster, which is an actual toaster by the way, can you believe that, ha ha..."
"Like I said days ago: two backslashes. Not two forward slashes."
"Well, that binary probably has debug catches turned on. And the warning logging. Just add -nolog -noprof -nodebug to the command line... How, you ask? Well, let me tell you..."
C language doesn't do string bounds checking. If you have char foo[123] and you say "foo[542] = 'b';", you're writing to part of memory that's somewhere after the space allocated for foo.
strcpy() basically does this: It copies, byte by byte, things from source string to destination string. If source has more bytes than destination string has, boom - you just overwrote the memory that follows the destination string.
The correct solution is to use strncpy(), with which you can specify the maximum size of the destination string.
You can also see the same concept art in Metroid Prime and Prime2 image galleries. They're unlocked when you scan tons of stuff in the game. Thanks for the links though, that's a whole lot more than there's in the in-game galleries =)
index.php this, index.php that... well, you know, it doesn't have to mean darn, we have this thing called "mod_rewrite" these days... =) And RoR website does use Rails apps, at least Typo and Instiki (I think).
But seriously, I wish there was a real Rails-based CMS there's Typo, which is more of a blogware than a general-purpose CMS, and I don't have any idea if we have anything quite comparable to, say, Drupal...
I have a belt bag for my Nintendo DS. I keep six GBA games on the side pocket. GBA games are small enough, yet not too small, easy enough to handle. But currently, I'm keeping one Nintendo DS game in the console itself and keeping the others in my bag in the retail packages. DS games are much smaller than GBA games. I keep worried that I might lose them. I'm trying to come up with a decent, safe enough solution. (Let's see if I can find my old wallet that had all those pockets, that ought to do the trick...) I always get the same sort of worries with memory cards, SIM cards, etc...
The point is, the smaller the storage media comes, the easier it is to lose.
I'm all for 1 cm disks, as long as they come with a caddy that is half the size of a 3.5" floppy.
Eh... PHP isn't exactly installed as widely as Perl, Python or even Ruby on non-web-server machines. And I usually see PHP just installed as Apache mod_php rather than the CGI interpreter.
Also, I'm kind of divided on whether the "everything in one place" is actually true. PHP can be compiled with different modules. So can other scripting languages, actually. Installing the stuff that's missing from your site's particular bit is either surprisingly simple if you're root (apt-get install php5-whatever) or surprisingly painful if you aren't (recompile the entire shebang), which is actually exact same thing as the other languages have.
And you complain that getting new Python libraries is difficult - may be, I haven't checked that out, but it most definitely isn't painful on Perl (CPAN) or Ruby (RubyGems).
As for "getting things done", that's a bit wrong argument. You "get things done" in PHP. I "get things done" in Perl or (more frequently now) in Ruby. For "getting things done", there's only one real choice of language, and that's the language you're most comfortable with to do this stuff with.
And without making this a flamefest, I'll just link to my PHP rant here so you can just flame me email about that and leave rational discussion here. =)
Paul has turned off the saved form information feature on his XP install, forgot he's done it, and can't figure out how to turn it back on.
After all, you don't get a manual with pirated software.....
I think my parents got ripped off when they bought their new computer, they only got a small startup guide booklet and none of those gigantic door-stop manuals that you used to get in Windows 3.1 era.
You mean there's an actual big printed manual of MSIE that's supposed to ship with XP? Very interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember the Blitzkrieg server, which seems like the solution to all of the world's security needs? The expression Bruce Schneier used was "just too bizarre for words". I don't know if this was an elaborate trolling attempt or an actual real honest scam to deceive the terminally dumb, but it's fun to read, still, just for the amazing technobabble and ludicruous claims.
Wouldn't be the first time they've claimed there's some "spiritual" meaning to the startup sound...
"The thing from the agency said, 'We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3¼ seconds long.'" - Brian Eno on the construction of Windows 95 MSSOUND.WAV
I believe the original poster was referring to PowerShell (nee Monad/MSH). You know, Microsoft promised a real, actual shell that no Unix guru would sneer at, and that actually had improvements over Unix shells and very nice integration with .NET... ...and then Microsoft said that it's a separate component afterall.
True, cmd.exe is better than command.com (tab completion, woohoo), but not quite as interesting as, say, Bash. Good enough for casual use if you don't do any of this "scripting" stuff much.
I think it was the difficulty of having a small market to begin with, and not getting enough of different releases out to keep people buying the stuff. They were probably understaffed and not getting enough porting contracts.
I mean, I bought Quake III Arena, SMAC and Myth II (the latest after their bankruptcy though)... that from the whole lineup of Loki, not exactly a whole lot. (Plus Q3A was an iD game - they would have got a Linux version out with or without Loki's help, anyway.) I mean, when I bought SMAC I thought "Okay, now they got a real game out, hope they get more of these real games out soon, oh look, Deus Ex - I'll be getting that when it comes out..." ...and then they went belly up.
Had they been getting a different kind of game out every month, and maintaining all of that with the same respect and care, and doing this now when the market is slightly bigger too, they might have survived a little bit better.
Ah, but being able to play Legend of the Green Dragon with keyboard shortcuts makes the experience so much smoother and closer to the original game. =)
You're right though, overriding application's own keybindings is almost always bad, and even so, the browser should have options like "Disallow JavaScript keybindings altogether" and "Allow only the listed sites to bind keys in JavaScript"... there's potential for abuse.
I'm a member of the "general public". Wikipedia folks, bless their kindness, made me an administrator. I guess we have a slightly different definitions of "general public" here.
My point was that Wikipedia is still permitting edits from anonymous users but restricting the anonymous users in places where they're making nuisance of themselves under the guise of anonymity. That happens on a tiny fraction of the pages.
In my view, Wikipedia wouldn't get anywhere without rules. If there weren't any rules, we wouldn't have anything but vandalism and copyright violations. Even the name of the project limits the stuff: We're Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. That alone limits the scope of the project. We have a policy that says vandalism is most annoying, we have a policy that says copyright infringements must be removed and people should write their own stuff. From early on, Wikipedia has had its rules that limit its "wiki nature".
And specifically, Wikipedia has had, and will have, rules that are supposed to deal with personal bias, with stable versions or not. I don't think it will be the Wrong Version mk. 2.
For reference, this is supposed to be about the semi-protection. Which just happens to involve registering an user account and showing, just for a few passing moments, that you are capable of appropriate conduct.
That is, if you want to edit the couple of popular articles that happen to be semi-protected at the time.
There's 196 semi-portected articles at the moment in English Wikipedia. There's 1,355,706 articles. There's 70 articles at the moment that are full-protected, as well as handful of articles that show up in article count but are actually protected against recreation.
It still leaves you (...calculations, calculations, I'm a bit bad at math...) over 1.3 million articles for you to completely vandalise if you don't bother to spend a whole two minutes registering an user account.
You don't even need to confirm your email address.
And the separation of approved / unreviewed edits has not yet, as far as I know, even been implemented in MediaWiki.
Sorry if I sound a bit tired. I just find it a little bit vexing that people get stuck on small things like "hey, it says 'anyone can edit', and I get this error message that says that I can't". This is what happens when someone realises that you need some control. Regrettably, utopias where everyone can do anything don't work - human nature being what it is, you need some control. It's almost like saying "Oh, sure, everyone can come in our country!... except for people who don't have a passport and visa... and people who try to cross the border at a funny place... and armed, hostile soldiers of another country... obviously... But apart of that, everyone can come!"
So read "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" just like you would read "a city where everyone can perform on the streets." (don't be surprised if, in such city, the police asks you to get the hell away from the way of the traffic and move to the sidewalk like everyone else.)
Secondly, what the heck is wrong with the concept of reviewed versions? It doesn't prevent anyone from editing the stuff or even seeing the unreviewed edits, it just prevents people from seeing stuff we don't know to be good. It's a quality control measure, not a barrier to contributing.
Actually, it's more likely fall below the threshold of what's considered copyrightable at all. Fair use, by comparison, is borrowing chunks that are recognisable parts of a larger copyrighted work (and copyrightable in their own right), with proper attribution.
I know, nitpicking...
I need GameFAQs because I'm an idiot.
The games wave Big Freaking Hints in front of my nose, and while I'm personally able to duly note each and every one of them, I sometimes fail to make sense of them. Or, when I repeatedly fail at following the clues, I start to wonder if what I deduced was right. "Okay, I did a, b, and c; why isn't this boss dying?"
In a sense, its good that there's something with which to confirm that yes, in fact, I'm on a right track with this one. That's one thing that increases motivation to play in case the thing is seemingly impossible to beat even when I know exactly what to do...
It's torture to any h. sapiens watching the shows to see members of their race to sink so low, but the monkeys will probably be just happy to see the so-called higher simians to fall from grace... Or has someone proved conclusively that schadenfreude is exclusive to humans? I doubt that, given that the monkeys punch each others to genitals and all that. =)
There's already a few common libraries like you mention - wxWidgets for C++, SWT for Java, just as examples. Oh, and Mozilla's XUL, too. The good news: Cross-platform stuff is easier. The bad news: The apps have very very small hitches that make them feel non-native no matter what widget set you use, so you need to tune and tweak the stuff very carefully - though I bet Mozilla folks have much less headaches with XUL than rewriting Firefox GUI in three different GUI libraries and trying to keep those in sync...
You wanted graphics then? We had this standard called VGA - or VESA, if you want to go really fancy. (3D graphics? Hardware accelerated? You've got to be kidding. Oh, you probably mean that "3DFX Voodoo" thing that's coming in a couple of years.) You wanted sound then? We had this standard called "Sound Blaster compatible". You wanted file access? We had this standard called FAT16, for which every monkey can write driver for. You wanted keyboard? Well, this BIOS thing apparently let you use this "PS/2" stuff pretty easily. You wanted mouse? Well, the only standard is "Microsoft compatible", and there's tons of drivers, but who games with a mouse, anyway?
The point is, these days we have shitloads of more complexity on the driver side. Every 3D card has different drivers (though the game API is the same). Sound? No standards anymore, apart of some things that may still in this day and age claim some compatibility with ye olde ancientye SB. HD? NTFS, which is everywhere, is proprietary, and there's a bunch of really funny ways to attach the hard drive on the machine (ATA? SATA? USB 2.0? Firewire? SCSI, for crying out loud?)
Back in the DOS era, writing a miniature OS to handle all "standard" hardware was simple when we didn't have to worry about all graphics jargon that Carmack spouts.
Arrrrrrrgh!
Someone please reprimand FBI for invalid HTML, not using a doctype at all, images without alt attributes, goddamnfrigging <p> </p>, and misusing <h1> and <h3> to change font size rather than using them for headings.
I thought all public US government sites were supposed to follow some accessibility guidelines or something? (Text versions, support for screen readers, all that good junk...) And since that is a public US government site now...
That should be "between copyright owners of a show, and a website that makes fun of the show."
People should be allowed to make fun of anything they please. The target should have every right to be enraged, of course, but they should have no right to lawsuit the said fun-makers out of existence, or even threaten with that. Both sides have their rights, you know.
It just happens that in this case, there's purple dinosaurs involved.
And 10: The supernatural. (As evidenced by this recent debate...)
ELinks? Supports limited Javascript, limited CSS, and does tabs. Can't quite run most Ajax stuff, but it's still a surprisingly capable text-based browser. The world isn't stuck in Lynx, you know =)
As everyone knows, Commodore VIC-1541 Toaster is a very, very odd thing.
I once got a C64 game collection. The store was half across the country. Got home. Tried playing the games. A few didn't work. We mailed the games back to the store for replacement.
The games came back with a note "If the games do not work, turn the floppy drive to its side." With a helpful diagram.
Flipped the drive to its side, tried running the game, and wham - time to enjoy some games.
I later ran into some games that had such a weird copy protection that, in turn, didn't work while the drive was on its side...
Now, honest truth to tell, I've looked at modern attempts at DRM/copy protections with rather bleary eyes, but I think Starforce and the Sony XCP rootkits seem to have finally beaten this stuff - time to get worried about nasty copy protection schemes again...
And here I thought that if X server gets terminally messed up in Linux, the real key combo to do is MagicSysRq-E,I,E,I,S,S,S,U,B, and the real pro knows how to time the key presses properly =)
Selected bits from Thompson's tech support call, lead developer's comments:
"No, I'm sorry, this version doesn't have an installer, we basically dumped binaries and assets on a DVD-R. You need to copy the files by hand."
"Well, yeah, it might not run because you to move a few folders and files around. all files in data/txt32b1024/m00 to data/mission/00, depending on what texture depth and size you use, copy everything gfx/shaders/nv44 to gfx/shader - well, that kind of depends on what chipset you use, but that's the gist of it. They should be easy to figure out, because the bullyXXXXXXXX.log in your profile directory tells what's wrong. Just keep moving the folders and copying stuff around until it runs, okay?"
"Well, it's either in your profile directory or qc directory in wherever you put the binary. ... that would be the same folder as the bully_dev.exe file."
"bully12039203.log? What the heck? Oh, you have that buggy build of Windows 2000 that had that weird weird WEIRD quirk in C library. Microsoft is just as clueless as we are. We think it's our fault though, somewhere deep in code, no one just bothered to fix it. It's supposed to be year-month-day, and not a random number. Yeah, it makes it kind of hard to find it. The release build of the game will just use bully.log. What? You have patched up XP? Well I'll be damned..."
"Oh darn, I forgot, some of the stuff needs to be rebuilt from assets to make it actually run - sorry, we sent you data straight off the freezer, and not all of the build data. Well, I can email you a script to make it run. You have ActivePerl, right? No? Well, just call back when you get it installed..."
"Oh right, you need to edit the script a bit. On the line 262, change the right hand side of regexp from "$2/$1" to "$2\\$1". ... Right! Okay, now you're done. Start it up and you can leave it running overnight."
"Two backslashes. Not two forward slashes."
"No, please don't edit this on Word. Sorry, it won't work that way."
"You edited the bully_dev.ini file day before yesterday in Word too? Well, heck, no wonder it didn't work... Looks we need to start all over. But good that we got the script fixed. Might have ended up in great big problems soon anyway if we didn't do this now."
"You don't have Notepad icon there? Sorry, I was thinking of Windows 98, right now I'm sitting in front of my NetBSD toaster, which is an actual toaster by the way, can you believe that, ha ha..."
"Like I said days ago: two backslashes. Not two forward slashes."
"Well, that binary probably has debug catches turned on. And the warning logging. Just add -nolog -noprof -nodebug to the command line... How, you ask? Well, let me tell you..."
And so on...
C language doesn't do string bounds checking. If you have char foo[123] and you say "foo[542] = 'b';", you're writing to part of memory that's somewhere after the space allocated for foo.
strcpy() basically does this: It copies, byte by byte, things from source string to destination string. If source has more bytes than destination string has, boom - you just overwrote the memory that follows the destination string.
The correct solution is to use strncpy(), with which you can specify the maximum size of the destination string.
You can also see the same concept art in Metroid Prime and Prime2 image galleries. They're unlocked when you scan tons of stuff in the game. Thanks for the links though, that's a whole lot more than there's in the in-game galleries =)
index.php this, index.php that... well, you know, it doesn't have to mean darn, we have this thing called "mod_rewrite" these days... =) And RoR website does use Rails apps, at least Typo and Instiki (I think).
But seriously, I wish there was a real Rails-based CMS there's Typo, which is more of a blogware than a general-purpose CMS, and I don't have any idea if we have anything quite comparable to, say, Drupal...
I have a belt bag for my Nintendo DS. I keep six GBA games on the side pocket. GBA games are small enough, yet not too small, easy enough to handle. But currently, I'm keeping one Nintendo DS game in the console itself and keeping the others in my bag in the retail packages. DS games are much smaller than GBA games. I keep worried that I might lose them. I'm trying to come up with a decent, safe enough solution. (Let's see if I can find my old wallet that had all those pockets, that ought to do the trick...) I always get the same sort of worries with memory cards, SIM cards, etc...
The point is, the smaller the storage media comes, the easier it is to lose.
I'm all for 1 cm disks, as long as they come with a caddy that is half the size of a 3.5" floppy.
Eh... PHP isn't exactly installed as widely as Perl, Python or even Ruby on non-web-server machines. And I usually see PHP just installed as Apache mod_php rather than the CGI interpreter.
Also, I'm kind of divided on whether the "everything in one place" is actually true. PHP can be compiled with different modules. So can other scripting languages, actually. Installing the stuff that's missing from your site's particular bit is either surprisingly simple if you're root (apt-get install php5-whatever) or surprisingly painful if you aren't (recompile the entire shebang), which is actually exact same thing as the other languages have.
And you complain that getting new Python libraries is difficult - may be, I haven't checked that out, but it most definitely isn't painful on Perl (CPAN) or Ruby (RubyGems).
As for "getting things done", that's a bit wrong argument. You "get things done" in PHP. I "get things done" in Perl or (more frequently now) in Ruby. For "getting things done", there's only one real choice of language, and that's the language you're most comfortable with to do this stuff with.
And without making this a flamefest, I'll just link to my PHP rant here so you can just flame me email about that and leave rational discussion here. =)
I think my parents got ripped off when they bought their new computer, they only got a small startup guide booklet and none of those gigantic door-stop manuals that you used to get in Windows 3.1 era.
You mean there's an actual big printed manual of MSIE that's supposed to ship with XP? Very interesting.