Back in the late 80's / early 90's, john calhoun did release the source for his various games. So there is a possibility that he may release the sources for these updated versions, who knows. Somewhere around here on an 800k disk, I have the LightSpeed Pascal source for Glider v2.02.
<cheap plug>And there is an open source clone, written in Java at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jglider/. It's currently playable, although it is lacking some features (enemies -- toasters, fish bowls, helocopters, etc). It certainly needs new graphics as it's using the old black&white images. And the ability to read in existing House files would be great. Someday, I'll get around to fixing/implementing all of that:)</cheap plug>
While it's not v1.0, you can download Slackware v1.1.2 at http://linux.ka.nu/, as well as some other historic Linux distributions (Debian 0.91, SLS 1.05, and MCC Interim 1.0+)
Quickly looking at/usr/libexec/httpd/mod_rendezvous_apple.so, looks like it has the three following options:
RegisterDefaultSite Optionally, specify a port or keyword main; defaults to 80 RegisterUserSite Specify a user name or the keyword all-users, optionally followed by a port or keyword main; default is 80 RegisterResource Specify a path and a name under which to register, optionally followed by a port or keyword main; default is 80
To read the story of the missing LSL4 game straight from the developer's (Al Lowe) mouth, check out Lesiure Suit Larry 4 and Why Larry 5?.
Fairly interesting story -- What was supposed to be LSL4, ended up morphing into The Sierra Network, and then getting sold to AT&T for $100 million (and then getting resold to AOL for $10 million).
Re:Corrections:
on
The Be Lives!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
b) Where was it reported on OSNews? Can't find the article anywhere
The Australian TiVo Page should be able to help anybody in a country (where TiVo service isn't available) get up and running. This includes modifications for PAL. You'll have to get your own guide data into the unit, which the Aussies may be able to help you with.
Actually, I had ran it multiple times, and had pasted the best times for each language (I know, not a true benchmark -- hence the quotes around the word benchmark). But pasted here for giggles:
I feel dirty. I started by downloading a tarball from Microsoft, and after extracting the tarball, I ran a shell script that built a Microsoft product from source. I then invoked a Microsoft compiler from a UNIX shell, am greeted with a Microsoft copyright message, and get an.exe file as output. And then I ran the.exe file on a UNIX based Mac.
Something about that experience felt really... dirty.
And for the unofficial 'benchmarks' on my G4/800 (because printing out "Hello World!" is a valid benchmark:) ):
Not intending flamebait, but isn't this exactly what we're usually complaining about companies doing? This is one of the highest examples of insecure design. It's not that difficult to remove the backdoor code from the public release, if you code it right to begin with.
No it's not that difficult to remove them. But if you keep the backdoors in, and then wait until the last load before you go GM to remove them, you've just increased the amount of work your QA department has to do. They have to be insanely thorough to make sure that removing of the backdoor code hasn't affected any other code. They're not going to be very happy if you do this at the last minute. And albeit in perfectly designed system, the removal wouldn't affect anything else. But, QA has to do what they have to do. They refuse to make assumptions like that. So now QA has more work to do, which means there's a possibility of the release date being pushed further back (maybe by a week -- but that could push it into the next fiscal quarter, thus screwing up revenues), and now you have shareholders that are unhappy.
Net result? Unhappy engineers (QA for doing more work, devs for having to be "on call"), unhappy customers (people always get upset when they have to wait longer), and unhappy shareholders (they want to see $$$, not QA test results).
If TiVo really wanted to lock people out, they'd disable the backdoors to begin with, and if they really needed to see the logs on a defective unit, they could load it up on a custom system that can pull the logs from the drives after putting them in a read-only configuration.
Yes, they can do that. But, speaking for the QA engineers again, since they're fairly important during the dev cycle... Now, instead of hitting four keys on their remote (clear-enter-clear-thumbs up) to view the log files on their standard system (i.e. you have to test on the exact configuration a customer would have) they now either have to pull the drives out and read the log files on another system (very time consuming just to see one log entry).
They can't very well have a network connection for a couple of reasons. 1- You can't have any daemons running on the TiVo while you're testing it, because the customers won't have them running on their units (i.e. telnet/ftp/etc). Ignoring that, the 2nd issue is that they can't leave the TiVo connected to the network during their tests, because what if that's "altering" the behavior of code -- i.e. a bug only exists when there is no network connection, but a QA tester never notices this because they always have their test station connected so they can view log files through the network. So a bug goes unnoticed, they GM the release, and all of a sudden TiVo's support line is swamped with buggy software reports, and they now have to spend more money rolling out an emergency patch.
Net result? TiVo's not happy (more work/more money spent/public black eye), the customers aren't happy ("This TiVo is a POS! Lets go check out UltimateTV!"), and the shareholders certainly aren't happy.
And quite frankly, I think they also leave the backdoors in for the 'hacker' community. But, they need to protect themself from the 'Joe Blow' community. By doing what is discussed here (changing it to an impossible code for 'Joe Blow' to enter, but allowing a 'hacker' to change it with ease), maybe they've found a nice balance. Aren't we always talking about companies doing something for "us"? Isn't this a case where they're doing something for us? -- leaving in useful utils (log viewer on tv), prototype code (Teach TiVo was very useful, and only available through backdoors), etc.
Then again, I could've been completely off in my original speculation. But the above scenarios of QA are accurate of every software shop I've worked in. You change two bytes in a boot record, and they'll rerun 28 hours of tests that have nothing to do with the boot record, just to make sure there wasn't any code that was dependant on the previous boot record value. And rightfully so, in all honesty.
In TiVo's case, would just removing the backdoor altogether work instead of just putting a new, totally hackable and insecure password on there?
I don't work for TiVo, so I don't know their intentions. But I can speculate. You can do some nasty damage to your TiVo through use of some of the back doors (Node Navigator being the most famous method). So, you get Joe Blow who accidently does this to his TiVo, screws it up, and calls support -- Their costs have now increased.
It's too difficult to remove the backdoors. They're quite useful inhouse during dev/test cycles (a QA tester notices a bug, they can easily view the log files, etc). Two branches of the software, one inhouse with the backdoors, and one w/o them for the public is a lot to deal with. What if you applied a patch to one branch, forgot about the other. Now QA has to test both branches, to make sure they're the same. QA people whine, a lot (rightfully so sometimes). They won't like that.
So, whats the best option? While doing inhouse testing, use a nice simple code (1234). Right before you're ready to GM it, change it the something "impossible" (i.e. uses characters that can't be entered through the TiVo). The code-base is the same, so QA can get away with just running a quick set of happy-path tests. And, this now reduces Joe Blow's chance of killing his TiVo (since he can't enable backdoors), it lowers support costs, and everybody (inside TiVo) is happy. A "win" situation for TiVo.
Of course, a "hacker" can go in and change the code to something that isn't "impossible", but if they screw up their TiVo and call support, support doesn't have to help them this time. They voided their warranty when they opened the case, to pull the drive, to change the backdoor code. Another "win" siutation for TiVo.
Whether or not this is the case, I don't know... But, it sounds very likely to me.
Yeah, I think they removed that screen from their releases due to fears (or maybe it actually happened?) of people calling 911. In the current versions of the software, it now gives a blue screen (of death), telling you the unit is too hot, tips on ventilation, etc.
If the internal temperature on your TiVo reaches a certain point, you're greated with an image of the TiVo dude in flames, with a message "Your TiVo is on fire! Call 911 now!". http://tivo.samba.org/download/belboz/firegood.jpg.
Maybe you guys are too young to remember, but back about 12 years ago, the only way you could get Unix on a PC was shell out thousands of dollars for Interactive Unix or AT&T or $99 for Mark Williams Unix which used the intel small memory model (ram was limited to 64K, yes 64K).
Doesn't Minix count as a way to get UNIX on a PC? It was released in 1987, was/is free, and ran on PC's.
Junkyard Wars isn't an original TLC creation. It was originally a British show called 'Scrapheap Challenge'.
And, TNN's Robot Wars did not come out before Battlebots. This was also originally a British show called 'Robot Wars'. All TNN did was take the British show and hire professional wrestlers to redub the announcing bits.
From what I hear, the last piece of code Bill Gates wrote was gorilla.bas.. I don't know about you, but I think that's MUCH slicker code than any of John Carmack's inventions...
I'm not quite sure where you get your information from... Yes, TiVo does collect information (which is very easy to opt-out of, btw) but it is aggregate data. Meaning, the information they sell would say "an 12-16 year old in zip code 80200 watches Babylon", not "John Doe at 123 First St watches porn that he got off PPV, via his credit card number XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX".
You ask how Excite@Home can't make money? "Great" business deals like buying BlueMountainArts.com for $800 million dollars, and selling it off two years later for $30 million dollars. Buying WebShots.com for $500 million dollars, buying MatchLogic (a profitable company) and deciding to shut it down instead of selling it to other interested parties. And the list of companies they've owned goes on, and on. There should be a full list of companies listed in the Bankruptcy notice, as "Debtors".
Buying thousands of Aeron chairs. Buying Large plots of land for their "campuses". Employing thousands of idiots. And, horrible management that didn't see the few goldmines (@home, MatchLogic, etc) they were sitting on.
Then they try and make up this reckless spending, by using advertising revenue. We all know what happened to that.
The worst move @home ever made was merging with Excite. Alone, they were a profitable business (as you showed), but instead they got rolled into a huge money spending juggernaut with piss poor management, aka Excite.
This is already possible with TiVo. It's not supported by TiVo, but the Ethernet card that is available for the TiVo supports guide-data fetches over ethernet. Find out more information at www.9thtee.com/tivonet.htm
Along those same lines... the other picture on that page, with the phone being "unfolded" the buttons are white on black, instead of black on white. Perhaps two different prototypes, but still struck me as odd.
I had similar problems with pppd in both MacOS Developer Preview 4, and the Public Beta. pppd would connect to my ISP, but, never communicate with anybody. It required going into a shell, and manually setting the routing information. Works like a charm.
Slashdot Mirror
iPod Shuffle: http://webpages.charter.net.nyud.net:8090/mattman7 /shuf.jpg
7 /mini.jpg
Mac Mini: http://webpages.charter.net.nyud.net:8090/mattman
Back in the late 80's / early 90's, john calhoun did release the source for his various games. So there is a possibility that he may release the sources for these updated versions, who knows. Somewhere around here on an 800k disk, I have the LightSpeed Pascal source for Glider v2.02.
:)</cheap plug>
<cheap plug>And there is an open source clone, written in Java at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jglider/. It's currently playable, although it is lacking some features (enemies -- toasters, fish bowls, helocopters, etc). It certainly needs new graphics as it's using the old black&white images. And the ability to read in existing House files would be great. Someday, I'll get around to fixing/implementing all of that
While it's not v1.0, you can download Slackware v1.1.2 at http://linux.ka.nu/, as well as some other historic Linux distributions (Debian 0.91, SLS 1.05, and MCC Interim 1.0+)
Quickly looking at
To read the story of the missing LSL4 game straight from the developer's (Al Lowe) mouth, check out Lesiure Suit Larry 4 and Why Larry 5?.
Fairly interesting story -- What was supposed to be LSL4, ended up morphing into The Sierra Network, and then getting sold to AT&T for $100 million (and then getting resold to AOL for $10 million).
b) Where was it reported on OSNews? Can't find the article anywhere
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2212
The Australian TiVo Page should be able to help anybody in a country (where TiVo service isn't available) get up and running. This includes modifications for PAL. You'll have to get your own guide data into the unit, which the Aussies may be able to help you with.
Something about that experience felt really... dirty.
And for the unofficial 'benchmarks' on my G4/800 (because printing out "Hello World!" is a valid benchmark
Not intending flamebait, but isn't this exactly what we're usually complaining about companies doing? This is one of the highest examples of insecure design. It's not that difficult to remove the backdoor code from the public release, if you code it right to begin with.
No it's not that difficult to remove them. But if you keep the backdoors in, and then wait until the last load before you go GM to remove them, you've just increased the amount of work your QA department has to do. They have to be insanely thorough to make sure that removing of the backdoor code hasn't affected any other code. They're not going to be very happy if you do this at the last minute. And albeit in perfectly designed system, the removal wouldn't affect anything else. But, QA has to do what they have to do. They refuse to make assumptions like that. So now QA has more work to do, which means there's a possibility of the release date being pushed further back (maybe by a week -- but that could push it into the next fiscal quarter, thus screwing up revenues), and now you have shareholders that are unhappy.
Net result? Unhappy engineers (QA for doing more work, devs for having to be "on call"), unhappy customers (people always get upset when they have to wait longer), and unhappy shareholders (they want to see $$$, not QA test results).
If TiVo really wanted to lock people out, they'd disable the backdoors to begin with, and if they really needed to see the logs on a defective unit, they could load it up on a custom system that can pull the logs from the drives after putting them in a read-only configuration.
Yes, they can do that. But, speaking for the QA engineers again, since they're fairly important during the dev cycle... Now, instead of hitting four keys on their remote (clear-enter-clear-thumbs up) to view the log files on their standard system (i.e. you have to test on the exact configuration a customer would have) they now either have to pull the drives out and read the log files on another system (very time consuming just to see one log entry).
They can't very well have a network connection for a couple of reasons. 1- You can't have any daemons running on the TiVo while you're testing it, because the customers won't have them running on their units (i.e. telnet/ftp/etc). Ignoring that, the 2nd issue is that they can't leave the TiVo connected to the network during their tests, because what if that's "altering" the behavior of code -- i.e. a bug only exists when there is no network connection, but a QA tester never notices this because they always have their test station connected so they can view log files through the network. So a bug goes unnoticed, they GM the release, and all of a sudden TiVo's support line is swamped with buggy software reports, and they now have to spend more money rolling out an emergency patch.
Net result? TiVo's not happy (more work/more money spent/public black eye), the customers aren't happy ("This TiVo is a POS! Lets go check out UltimateTV!"), and the shareholders certainly aren't happy.
And quite frankly, I think they also leave the backdoors in for the 'hacker' community. But, they need to protect themself from the 'Joe Blow' community. By doing what is discussed here (changing it to an impossible code for 'Joe Blow' to enter, but allowing a 'hacker' to change it with ease), maybe they've found a nice balance. Aren't we always talking about companies doing something for "us"? Isn't this a case where they're doing something for us? -- leaving in useful utils (log viewer on tv), prototype code (Teach TiVo was very useful, and only available through backdoors), etc.
Then again, I could've been completely off in my original speculation. But the above scenarios of QA are accurate of every software shop I've worked in. You change two bytes in a boot record, and they'll rerun 28 hours of tests that have nothing to do with the boot record, just to make sure there wasn't any code that was dependant on the previous boot record value. And rightfully so, in all honesty.
In TiVo's case, would just removing the backdoor altogether work instead of just putting a new, totally hackable and insecure password on there?
I don't work for TiVo, so I don't know their intentions. But I can speculate. You can do some nasty damage to your TiVo through use of some of the back doors (Node Navigator being the most famous method). So, you get Joe Blow who accidently does this to his TiVo, screws it up, and calls support -- Their costs have now increased.
It's too difficult to remove the backdoors. They're quite useful inhouse during dev/test cycles (a QA tester notices a bug, they can easily view the log files, etc). Two branches of the software, one inhouse with the backdoors, and one w/o them for the public is a lot to deal with. What if you applied a patch to one branch, forgot about the other. Now QA has to test both branches, to make sure they're the same. QA people whine, a lot (rightfully so sometimes). They won't like that.
So, whats the best option? While doing inhouse testing, use a nice simple code (1234). Right before you're ready to GM it, change it the something "impossible" (i.e. uses characters that can't be entered through the TiVo). The code-base is the same, so QA can get away with just running a quick set of happy-path tests. And, this now reduces Joe Blow's chance of killing his TiVo (since he can't enable backdoors), it lowers support costs, and everybody (inside TiVo) is happy. A "win" situation for TiVo.
Of course, a "hacker" can go in and change the code to something that isn't "impossible", but if they screw up their TiVo and call support, support doesn't have to help them this time. They voided their warranty when they opened the case, to pull the drive, to change the backdoor code. Another "win" siutation for TiVo.
Whether or not this is the case, I don't know... But, it sounds very likely to me.
Yeah, I think they removed that screen from their releases due to fears (or maybe it actually happened?) of people calling 911. In the current versions of the software, it now gives a blue screen (of death), telling you the unit is too hot, tips on ventilation, etc.
If the internal temperature on your TiVo reaches a certain point, you're greated with an image of the TiVo dude in flames, with a message "Your TiVo is on fire! Call 911 now!". http://tivo.samba.org/download/belboz/firegood.jpg .
The closest I can find to an announcement is at http://www.morphos-news.de. v1.0 will be released on Oct 14 to "betatesters".
Google Cache
Maybe you guys are too young to remember, but back about 12 years ago, the only way you could get Unix on a PC was shell out thousands of dollars for Interactive Unix or AT&T or $99 for Mark Williams Unix which used the intel small memory model (ram was limited to 64K, yes 64K).
Doesn't Minix count as a way to get UNIX on a PC? It was released in 1987, was/is free, and ran on PC's.
Junkyard Wars isn't an original TLC creation. It was originally a British show called 'Scrapheap Challenge'.
And, TNN's Robot Wars did not come out before Battlebots. This was also originally a British show called 'Robot Wars'. All TNN did was take the British show and hire professional wrestlers to redub the announcing bits.
From what I hear, the last piece of code Bill Gates wrote was gorilla.bas .. I don't know about you, but I think that's MUCH slicker code than any of John Carmack's inventions...
I'm not quite sure where you get your information from... Yes, TiVo does collect information (which is very easy to opt-out of, btw) but it is aggregate data. Meaning, the information they sell would say "an 12-16 year old in zip code 80200 watches Babylon", not "John Doe at 123 First St watches porn that he got off PPV, via his credit card number XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX".
Sometime, try reading http://www.tivo.com/privacy_faq.html
You ask how Excite@Home can't make money? "Great" business deals like buying BlueMountainArts.com for $800 million dollars, and selling it off two years later for $30 million dollars. Buying WebShots.com for $500 million dollars, buying MatchLogic (a profitable company) and deciding to shut it down instead of selling it to other interested parties. And the list of companies they've owned goes on, and on. There should be a full list of companies listed in the Bankruptcy notice, as "Debtors".
Buying thousands of Aeron chairs. Buying Large plots of land for their "campuses". Employing thousands of idiots. And, horrible management that didn't see the few goldmines (@home, MatchLogic, etc) they were sitting on.
Then they try and make up this reckless spending, by using advertising revenue. We all know what happened to that.
The worst move @home ever made was merging with Excite. Alone, they were a profitable business (as you showed), but instead they got rolled into a huge money spending juggernaut with piss poor management, aka Excite.
After talking to Alice, I'm not sure how anyone could mistake this thing anything except for Eliza with a larger 'dictionary'.
Me> But you're related to Eliza
Alice> Huh. I am like ELIZA plus 41376 questions and answers.
This is already possible with TiVo. It's not supported by TiVo, but the Ethernet card that is available for the TiVo supports guide-data fetches over ethernet. Find out more information at www.9thtee.com/tivonet.htm
Along those same lines... the other picture on that page, with the phone being "unfolded" the buttons are white on black, instead of black on white. Perhaps two different prototypes, but still struck me as odd.
I had similar problems with pppd in both MacOS Developer Preview 4, and the Public Beta. pppd would connect to my ISP, but, never communicate with anybody. It required going into a shell, and manually setting the routing information. Works like a charm.