Finland uses game ratings that are exactly the same as the ratings for movies, and are handled by the same review board. However, if you want a rating for a movie, you have to either let them review it, or you automatically get 18+ rating (which is, by the way, why the Star Wreck movie got 18+ - it costs nothing to report it, while a review needs a fee). However, games ratings only need a declaration from the importer and no review, so there's a little bit less bureaucracy and general idiocy involved. And if the game already has a PEGI rating, it must be used instead (except that, in order to conform to our age ratings, 12+ rating becomes 11+ and 16+ becomes 15+).
Before PEGI, the system worked surprisingly well and everyone used a lot of common sense to come up with the ratings. Nowadays, it works, too. Though there was at least a few cases where the importers might have needed to pay some more attention to the content (Myth III, a part of the legendary series of flowing rivers of blood and gigantic explosions, got 11+ rating and the importer also lied that the game was of "average difficulty" when most Myth II veterans got sweaty =)
Welcome to the bold new era of CSS! Slashdot is moving away from the ancient "Kind of like HTML3.2 + shitload of <FONT> tags" design, and going for CSS-based layout.
This has really been one of the things many web designers whine about Slashdot. The other is invalid markup (Slashdot's supposed HTML3.2 is so bad it makes people gouge their eyes out, and it's so broken that they have specifically had to block validator.w3.org!) - supposedly that needs a lot more tuning in Slashcode to get it done. At this pace, we can expect Slashdot to do XHTML 1.0 + CSS 2 some time in 2010! Or maybe earlier.
Here would be some of the moments that tended to keep me awake. There have been a lot more - I tend to take everything out of games that have some real substance.
Creepiest: A lot of different kinds of creepiness, I think, but I think I could call Elegia Eternum and Excrucio Eternum for Neverwinter Nights some of the creepies adventures I've played. Psychological horror is pretty tricky to get right.
Most evil: I was genuinely chillily touched by Horance the Lich in Ultima VII. I really don't know why, but that was one of the cases when an evil character's, um, evilness really shows well. I was definitely zapped. "This guy is evil."
Nerve-wracking disgust due to messing with the player's head: Ultima IX. I start a-playing. Ol' LB says Despise needs cleaning. I go deep in the dungeon. In the end, this badly dressed guy waits. He wants me dead, of course. Soon, he starts spinning some ridiculous theory that he's my good buddy Iolo, didn't I notice his bow and lute? "yeah right," thought I, and killed the guy. "Real Iolo uses crossbow. Do you think I'm some kind of amateur?" Well, turns out that whoever wrote that crud didn't know that kind of facts, and made the whole thing sound like the Oldest Trick in the Book. I cried for the day when I realized I had just killed Iolo, yes, it was that horrible. No, actually it was Electronic Arts that made me kill Iolo. That's right. Boycott them!
Weirdest source of guilt: Opening of Metroid Prime. The scan visor records everything there is to know about the Parasite Queen. I kill the thing. I escape the spacewreck and touch down on the planet. And then it hits me: I had just destroyed something unique - yes, an ugly space parasite monster thing, but still - and the only thing that survives is the scan in the computer. After that realization, a lot of monsters in the game seemed to make me scream "I can't kill that, it's too cute". =(
Automatic tears: Death of Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid. Even sadder in Twin Snakes.
Also, IIRC, Sealand, which is a floating fortress that was abandoned in international waters, apparently has a hosting company. They make it a point to host things that might be illegal in other countries (the exception being child pornogrpahy and spam).
Except that after people started flicking "terrorist" cards to the table, they changed the policy to exclude anything that's against "commonly accepted international good practices" or some other vague crud like that. We've got a loooooong way to go to Kinakuta, folks.
eDonkey/eMule take hours to download small files, and days/weeks to download big files
It's the slow-but-sure network. If I want to download something there, I stick it in, let it run, and walk away. (Helps a lot if you use some server that can run completely on background without the need for the window system at all. I run mldonkey in screen(1).) Unlike with many other networks, it usually will finish eventually even if it's slow. =)
bittorrent is virtually useless, apparently everyone only has parts of any data that i want not equalling a whole
Keep your eyes open. Prefer recently started and/or popular torrents. (Though lately I managed to download something that was started in May, at decent download rate.) The only catch is that you have to act right away when you see the stuff.
These days, it seems that patience is a virtue in every case.
"Let's develop stuff that looks absolutely ridiculous, so that the weakest will die laughing at it, but people who actually try it will love it!"
From the looks of it this looks like a typical Nintendo thing: Silly-looking widget that makes most of the people automatically say it's an awful, stupid idea. But people who actually care to read the specs will probably think it's not that stupid. (Compare to the DS, or Zelda: Wind Waker, perhaps.)
"Thus the Great Red revealed their secrets, and those with Weak Mind were again culled from the ranks. And all was good."
Yeah, I was zapped at first, but I don't really care, I have complete confidence in Nintendo's ability to make this thing work in a heavenly fashion =)
As if there was any Netscape left to end. The thing is these days nothing but a rotting husk or an aimlessly wandering ghost. Go google for "brand necrophilia" and see what comes up.
I wouldn't be least bit surprised if I saw "Microsoft Netscape" or whatever. At least that would put end to all of those jokes about confused people calling tech support.
Blender is free as in speech, but the language is ancient suomi.
Oh yeah, I had wondered what this passage from Kalevala exactly meant.
Joukahainen Blendatessa
koreen kopsahti fileeksi.
Vaka vanha Väinämöinen
editoimahan lipesi:
Kohta siitä kelpo hahmo
meshi miehen muotoon vääntyi.
Aika lailla ekstrudella
Huitoi vanha Väinämöinen.
(A bit of a literal translation: "As Joukahainen did Blend / a file of core he stumbled into. / The ancient Väinämöinen / did start editing: / Soon did the fair figure / turn the mesh into form of man. / With quite a bit with Extruder / did the ancient Väinämöinen swing around.")
I never really thought about the fact how well the FF and Ultima parts correspond to each other... apart of some silly crossover fanfictioning, or course. Both series have these days largely ignored parts 1-3, the 7th part getting popularly regarded as the high point and getting most sequels, and everyone seems to agree that part 8 was only kind of okay and the series went to hell after that. =)
That's silly. Years ago Slashdot was really an archetypical blog. (CmdrTaco posting stuff like "Linux possibly seen somewhere" every few moments.) These days, it's still a blog, just with atypically high volume of new articles/links, many many editors, and especially atypically high volume of comments! Who cares if comments are threaded or not, that means nothing!
If you're using Firefox, you can type slashdot into the URL box... and by some magic, you will get to the correct site.
While we're in the topic: How to make Firefox not do that? If I type a wrong domain name, I don't want the browser to take wild guesses... especially when 99% of the time the guesses end up completely wrong!
I know, I know, I know. It's just a bit fun to see ridiculously high (but reasonable if you're doing pro work) minimum requirements.
I know people have used Cinelerra for "home movie" things with far less high-end gear. I agree it's difficult to draw the line on what is reasonable hardware requirements because that, of course, varies with what you need.
Beyond getting it to DVD I would also like to edit trailers out of the vhs and make menus ( & mrls ) on the dvd.
Editing out trailers/commercials is... hoo boy... probably the big bottleneck here. I have absolutely no idea how this works out in Cinelerra, because the thing either was impossible to figure out, or crashed when I opened the video (situation as of an year ago, no idea if this new release is better). Plus, it's a full-blown NLE which probably doesn't have non-transcoding stream copy mode (I'd guess). There was this proggy called Kino, which could apparently cut video without massive re-encoding operations, but that (last I checked) specifically wanted DV format video files.
In other words, Linux just doesn't have anything comparable to VirtualDub, the single most best tool to do the job. =(
And as for making DVD menus... no idea either. I've heard a lot of rumors but never bothered to check out. As said, I make VideoCDs; There's a wonderful package for VideoCD mastering called vcdimager, which does have *some* sort of menu system support, but that's in the "good idea but needs serious hacking to pull off and there's no GUI or anything" territory and I just make VideoCDs with a couple of titles at most, so there's no real need for menus (overkill for 72 minute discs). Mastering menuless vcd's is very simple with it.
Have they actually improved the GUI? I could never ever figure out how to use Cinelerra. (This coming from a long-time Blender user. I'm no stranger to weird interfaces, it's just that sometimes it's easy to hit the limit =)
And toolkit? Do they still use the weird, inconsistent, completely unaesthetic toolkit? (A lot of cool pro X11 software seems to use fltk these days, why not that?) I don't really mind it that much, but it'd be nice to see a GUI that doesn't make eyes bleed.
And video compatibility? Specifically, I'm curious how it handles all the stuff captured with mencoder. Can I toss a MJPEG AVI in and it thinks it is what it is? How about XviD support? Make me drool and say it does Theora and Vorbis?
You guys look at the system requirements for this? They recommend dual Opterons.
They've always done stuff like this. Even back in the days when all they had was Broadcast2000, system requirements said stuff like "terabyte striped RAID". I don't think those were too common with most people looking for cheap video editing software at the time - and likewise, I don't think half-terabyte SATA drives are very common nowadays either. =)
Actually, the best thing is probably using mencoder (part of mplayer) to capture the video through TV card, then using... something... to encode the video. (I've usually used virtualdub to capture and tmpegenc to encode in Windows. Nowadays I use mencoder and capture directly to xvid video; I suppose there's mpeg encoders like.. um... transcode? to do the thing.)
I'm not sure if it pays to encode the video at DVD quality though, it's not really worth all of the effort. I've personally used VideoCDs, which most DVD players can play. Besides, CD-Rs are cheaper than DVD-Rs.
Passwords expire every 3 months. New passwords can not resemble old passwords. Result: Users keep their passwords on post-it notes stuck to their monitors.
Or change their password to "D4mnTh1sP4ssW0rdSh17", which is accepted, then change it immediately back to whatever they were using yesterday.
Right on. Firefox extensions are NOT equivalent of ActiveX per se. They're equivalent of BHOs (Browser Helper Objects).
Of course, there's a distinct difference there as well. MSIE users first learn of these "BHO" things when run their favorite anti-spyware program and discover they have quite a few more BHOs than they thought.
MSIE makes it easy to install BHOs. Perhaps too easy, leading to drive-by downloads.
Firefox.xpi install mechanism has been used to spread spyware too (a long long time ago), but they kind of crampedh the spyware folks' style when they added install host permission list and made it always abundantly clear to the user that stuff was being installed and they should pause and confront themselves. No drive-bys, the user really needs to want to get that thing in, and often it's very easy to get rid of the extension too (I've heard Windows nowadays has a clear way of getting the BHOs nuked, but previously, I had to sit hours in front of MSIE to get rid of some particularly troublesome spyware bits).
I've tried to do animation using SVG and Inkscape, but that has turned out to be a truly horrendous task.
Yeah, Inkscape has no animation support tools whatsoever, and... hey... did anybody mention anything about playing the animations? I haven't been able to find any OSS SVG animation player that would support any of the possible animation methods I can think of (Javascript/DOM, SVG declarative, SMIL).
And, for example, I'm definitely happy that Firefox will support SVG soon, just that my joy was more than slightly dented by the fact that Mozilla SVG doesn't support declarative animations! (I think it does DOM though, which is Painful to Work With compared to other methods.)
The anti-virus/anti-spam stuff tries to stop spam. They can't catch everything. Furthermore, the whole point of phishing e-mail is that it looks legit enough that careless people believe them. Automated spam traps can't catch stuff that looks really legitimate. "Oops, looks like this important security warning was miscategorised by my two-penny spam filter. Better tell it not to do that again."
Here's a hint: Never trust any instructions you get from email unless you are absolutely certain who you're dealing with - be they requests to reset passwords or check information (log on to the REAL site, don't follow the links in email!) or other kinds of instructions (send money, check out this attached security patch that surely seems to be scanned by some anti-virus proggie you don't even have, etc...)
Conmen ruined email as a communication medium, now they're slowly ruining Internet banking.
And the data formats haven't changed that much since the days when Netscape was the dominant browser.
Actually, it has, at least the URL history is in a completely different format in Mozilla derivants.
The format is called Mork, and is described as the single most brain-damaged database format ever devised. JWZ cried tears and blood when trying to write a separate parser for it. I can definitely understand the frustration of digital forensics people with this one: A file format that is not really encrypted, just obfuscated beyond all sanity.
Last I heard everyone wanted it to be replaced by sqlite. =)
Failed predictions, from Wikipedia: 1899, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." - falsely attributed to Charles H. Duell, director of the US Patent Office. This is curiously redolent of the epigram by Sir Max Beerbohm 'Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently; things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth'
how many languages have real support for creating gui's?
Surprisingly many. GTK+ website lists, unless I coffeedly counted wrong, 29 supported languages. Can't seem to find the list of languages supported by Tk, but I presume mindboggling number of languages have Tk bindings (not as slick as GTK+, but more cross-platform, for sure). And, a lot of languages have way to mess with C/C++ functions, so you probably could write a wrapper you need yourself...
is there a way to do a gui in lisp? seems so improbable to me
Sure there is! Pick any of the dozens of ways! Most are for X11 but some cross-platform ones are there too, like Tk and GTK+ and Qt =)
Slashdot Mirror
The article barely mentions the Finnish ratings.
Finland uses game ratings that are exactly the same as the ratings for movies, and are handled by the same review board. However, if you want a rating for a movie, you have to either let them review it, or you automatically get 18+ rating (which is, by the way, why the Star Wreck movie got 18+ - it costs nothing to report it, while a review needs a fee). However, games ratings only need a declaration from the importer and no review, so there's a little bit less bureaucracy and general idiocy involved. And if the game already has a PEGI rating, it must be used instead (except that, in order to conform to our age ratings, 12+ rating becomes 11+ and 16+ becomes 15+).
Before PEGI, the system worked surprisingly well and everyone used a lot of common sense to come up with the ratings. Nowadays, it works, too. Though there was at least a few cases where the importers might have needed to pay some more attention to the content (Myth III, a part of the legendary series of flowing rivers of blood and gigantic explosions, got 11+ rating and the importer also lied that the game was of "average difficulty" when most Myth II veterans got sweaty =)
As for how well it's observed I can't say...
Welcome to the bold new era of CSS! Slashdot is moving away from the ancient "Kind of like HTML3.2 + shitload of <FONT> tags" design, and going for CSS-based layout.
This has really been one of the things many web designers whine about Slashdot. The other is invalid markup (Slashdot's supposed HTML3.2 is so bad it makes people gouge their eyes out, and it's so broken that they have specifically had to block validator.w3.org!) - supposedly that needs a lot more tuning in Slashcode to get it done. At this pace, we can expect Slashdot to do XHTML 1.0 + CSS 2 some time in 2010! Or maybe earlier.
Here would be some of the moments that tended to keep me awake. There have been a lot more - I tend to take everything out of games that have some real substance.
Creepiest: A lot of different kinds of creepiness, I think, but I think I could call Elegia Eternum and Excrucio Eternum for Neverwinter Nights some of the creepies adventures I've played. Psychological horror is pretty tricky to get right.
Most evil: I was genuinely chillily touched by Horance the Lich in Ultima VII. I really don't know why, but that was one of the cases when an evil character's, um, evilness really shows well. I was definitely zapped. "This guy is evil."
Nerve-wracking disgust due to messing with the player's head: Ultima IX. I start a-playing. Ol' LB says Despise needs cleaning. I go deep in the dungeon. In the end, this badly dressed guy waits. He wants me dead, of course. Soon, he starts spinning some ridiculous theory that he's my good buddy Iolo, didn't I notice his bow and lute? "yeah right," thought I, and killed the guy. "Real Iolo uses crossbow. Do you think I'm some kind of amateur?" Well, turns out that whoever wrote that crud didn't know that kind of facts, and made the whole thing sound like the Oldest Trick in the Book. I cried for the day when I realized I had just killed Iolo, yes, it was that horrible. No, actually it was Electronic Arts that made me kill Iolo. That's right. Boycott them!
Weirdest source of guilt: Opening of Metroid Prime. The scan visor records everything there is to know about the Parasite Queen. I kill the thing. I escape the spacewreck and touch down on the planet. And then it hits me: I had just destroyed something unique - yes, an ugly space parasite monster thing, but still - and the only thing that survives is the scan in the computer. After that realization, a lot of monsters in the game seemed to make me scream "I can't kill that, it's too cute". =(
Automatic tears: Death of Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid. Even sadder in Twin Snakes.
Except that after people started flicking "terrorist" cards to the table, they changed the policy to exclude anything that's against "commonly accepted international good practices" or some other vague crud like that. We've got a loooooong way to go to Kinakuta, folks.
It's the slow-but-sure network. If I want to download something there, I stick it in, let it run, and walk away. (Helps a lot if you use some server that can run completely on background without the need for the window system at all. I run mldonkey in screen(1).) Unlike with many other networks, it usually will finish eventually even if it's slow. =)
Keep your eyes open. Prefer recently started and/or popular torrents. (Though lately I managed to download something that was started in May, at decent download rate.) The only catch is that you have to act right away when you see the stuff.
These days, it seems that patience is a virtue in every case.
"Let's develop stuff that looks absolutely ridiculous, so that the weakest will die laughing at it, but people who actually try it will love it!"
From the looks of it this looks like a typical Nintendo thing: Silly-looking widget that makes most of the people automatically say it's an awful, stupid idea. But people who actually care to read the specs will probably think it's not that stupid. (Compare to the DS, or Zelda: Wind Waker, perhaps.)
"Thus the Great Red revealed their secrets, and those with Weak Mind were again culled from the ranks. And all was good."
Yeah, I was zapped at first, but I don't really care, I have complete confidence in Nintendo's ability to make this thing work in a heavenly fashion =)
As if there was any Netscape left to end. The thing is these days nothing but a rotting husk or an aimlessly wandering ghost. Go google for "brand necrophilia" and see what comes up.
I wouldn't be least bit surprised if I saw "Microsoft Netscape" or whatever. At least that would put end to all of those jokes about confused people calling tech support.
Oh yeah, I had wondered what this passage from Kalevala exactly meant.
Joukahainen Blendatessa
koreen kopsahti fileeksi.
Vaka vanha Väinämöinen
editoimahan lipesi:
Kohta siitä kelpo hahmo
meshi miehen muotoon vääntyi.
Aika lailla ekstrudella
Huitoi vanha Väinämöinen.
(A bit of a literal translation: "As Joukahainen did Blend / a file of core he stumbled into. / The ancient Väinämöinen / did start editing: / Soon did the fair figure / turn the mesh into form of man. / With quite a bit with Extruder / did the ancient Väinämöinen swing around.")
From a cursory glance, license seems OSD-compliant. Though I haven't had my morning coffee and I'm not a lawyer.
Also, another cool thing would be Blender project MakeHuman; Can create all sorts of human figures, fully poseable within Blender. Pretty cool stuff.
::blinks::
I never really thought about the fact how well the FF and Ultima parts correspond to each other... apart of some silly crossover fanfictioning, or course. Both series have these days largely ignored parts 1-3, the 7th part getting popularly regarded as the high point and getting most sequels, and everyone seems to agree that part 8 was only kind of okay and the series went to hell after that. =)
That's silly. Years ago Slashdot was really an archetypical blog. (CmdrTaco posting stuff like "Linux possibly seen somewhere" every few moments.) These days, it's still a blog, just with atypically high volume of new articles/links, many many editors, and especially atypically high volume of comments! Who cares if comments are threaded or not, that means nothing!
While we're in the topic: How to make Firefox not do that? If I type a wrong domain name, I don't want the browser to take wild guesses... especially when 99% of the time the guesses end up completely wrong!
I know, I know, I know. It's just a bit fun to see ridiculously high (but reasonable if you're doing pro work) minimum requirements.
I know people have used Cinelerra for "home movie" things with far less high-end gear. I agree it's difficult to draw the line on what is reasonable hardware requirements because that, of course, varies with what you need.
Editing out trailers/commercials is... hoo boy... probably the big bottleneck here. I have absolutely no idea how this works out in Cinelerra, because the thing either was impossible to figure out, or crashed when I opened the video (situation as of an year ago, no idea if this new release is better). Plus, it's a full-blown NLE which probably doesn't have non-transcoding stream copy mode (I'd guess). There was this proggy called Kino, which could apparently cut video without massive re-encoding operations, but that (last I checked) specifically wanted DV format video files.
In other words, Linux just doesn't have anything comparable to VirtualDub, the single most best tool to do the job. =(
And as for making DVD menus... no idea either. I've heard a lot of rumors but never bothered to check out. As said, I make VideoCDs; There's a wonderful package for VideoCD mastering called vcdimager, which does have *some* sort of menu system support, but that's in the "good idea but needs serious hacking to pull off and there's no GUI or anything" territory and I just make VideoCDs with a couple of titles at most, so there's no real need for menus (overkill for 72 minute discs). Mastering menuless vcd's is very simple with it.
Have they actually improved the GUI? I could never ever figure out how to use Cinelerra. (This coming from a long-time Blender user. I'm no stranger to weird interfaces, it's just that sometimes it's easy to hit the limit =)
And toolkit? Do they still use the weird, inconsistent, completely unaesthetic toolkit? (A lot of cool pro X11 software seems to use fltk these days, why not that?) I don't really mind it that much, but it'd be nice to see a GUI that doesn't make eyes bleed.
And video compatibility? Specifically, I'm curious how it handles all the stuff captured with mencoder. Can I toss a MJPEG AVI in and it thinks it is what it is? How about XviD support? Make me drool and say it does Theora and Vorbis?
They've always done stuff like this. Even back in the days when all they had was Broadcast2000, system requirements said stuff like "terabyte striped RAID". I don't think those were too common with most people looking for cheap video editing software at the time - and likewise, I don't think half-terabyte SATA drives are very common nowadays either. =)
Actually, the best thing is probably using mencoder (part of mplayer) to capture the video through TV card, then using... something... to encode the video. (I've usually used virtualdub to capture and tmpegenc to encode in Windows. Nowadays I use mencoder and capture directly to xvid video; I suppose there's mpeg encoders like.. um... transcode? to do the thing.)
I'm not sure if it pays to encode the video at DVD quality though, it's not really worth all of the effort. I've personally used VideoCDs, which most DVD players can play. Besides, CD-Rs are cheaper than DVD-Rs.
Passwords expire every 3 months. New passwords can not resemble old passwords. Result: Users keep their passwords on post-it notes stuck to their monitors.
Or change their password to "D4mnTh1sP4ssW0rdSh17", which is accepted, then change it immediately back to whatever they were using yesterday.
Right on. Firefox extensions are NOT equivalent of ActiveX per se. They're equivalent of BHOs (Browser Helper Objects).
Of course, there's a distinct difference there as well. MSIE users first learn of these "BHO" things when run their favorite anti-spyware program and discover they have quite a few more BHOs than they thought.
MSIE makes it easy to install BHOs. Perhaps too easy, leading to drive-by downloads.
Firefox .xpi install mechanism has been used to spread spyware too (a long long time ago), but they kind of crampedh the spyware folks' style when they added install host permission list and made it always abundantly clear to the user that stuff was being installed and they should pause and confront themselves. No drive-bys, the user really needs to want to get that thing in, and often it's very easy to get rid of the extension too (I've heard Windows nowadays has a clear way of getting the BHOs nuked, but previously, I had to sit hours in front of MSIE to get rid of some particularly troublesome spyware bits).
Yeah, Inkscape has no animation support tools whatsoever, and... hey... did anybody mention anything about playing the animations? I haven't been able to find any OSS SVG animation player that would support any of the possible animation methods I can think of (Javascript/DOM, SVG declarative, SMIL).
And, for example, I'm definitely happy that Firefox will support SVG soon, just that my joy was more than slightly dented by the fact that Mozilla SVG doesn't support declarative animations! (I think it does DOM though, which is Painful to Work With compared to other methods.)
The anti-virus/anti-spam stuff tries to stop spam. They can't catch everything. Furthermore, the whole point of phishing e-mail is that it looks legit enough that careless people believe them. Automated spam traps can't catch stuff that looks really legitimate. "Oops, looks like this important security warning was miscategorised by my two-penny spam filter. Better tell it not to do that again."
Here's a hint: Never trust any instructions you get from email unless you are absolutely certain who you're dealing with - be they requests to reset passwords or check information (log on to the REAL site, don't follow the links in email!) or other kinds of instructions (send money, check out this attached security patch that surely seems to be scanned by some anti-virus proggie you don't even have, etc...)
Conmen ruined email as a communication medium, now they're slowly ruining Internet banking.
If they really want to break the compatibility with Unix, they have to start adding e to creat()... =)
Actually, it has, at least the URL history is in a completely different format in Mozilla derivants.
The format is called Mork, and is described as the single most brain-damaged database format ever devised. JWZ cried tears and blood when trying to write a separate parser for it. I can definitely understand the frustration of digital forensics people with this one: A file format that is not really encrypted, just obfuscated beyond all sanity.
Last I heard everyone wanted it to be replaced by sqlite. =)
Failed predictions, from Wikipedia: 1899, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." - falsely attributed to Charles H. Duell, director of the US Patent Office. This is curiously redolent of the epigram by Sir Max Beerbohm 'Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently; things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth'
Surprisingly many. GTK+ website lists, unless I coffeedly counted wrong, 29 supported languages. Can't seem to find the list of languages supported by Tk, but I presume mindboggling number of languages have Tk bindings (not as slick as GTK+, but more cross-platform, for sure). And, a lot of languages have way to mess with C/C++ functions, so you probably could write a wrapper you need yourself...
Sure there is! Pick any of the dozens of ways! Most are for X11 but some cross-platform ones are there too, like Tk and GTK+ and Qt =)