A lot of people have posted here making incredibly lame jokes about the possible 10-15 lines of code. However, one point they make is true; we can't tell whether or not the alleged copied code is actually copied or just so obvious that it coincidentally happens to be similar. For certain applications, certain code is going to be identical.
For instance, if you want to use a single string for, say, holding user input, you'll probably use malloc() to declare a char* called 'str' or 'p'. This will probably be about 5 lines of code if you include error detection.
Then there are system calls one uses. If you're outputting a line of text, you'll probably use puts(), or printf(), or fprintf(). If you're getting a list of groups a user is a member of, you'll use getgroups() and/or getgid(). If you want to spawn a subprocess you'll use fork(). If you want to get the name of the current terminal you'll use ttyname(). All this creates code which is likely to look very similar.
Try Ulysses by James Joyce. Though I'll admit it may well take a good deal longer to read. It's tough, but I think it is actually easier to read than Tolkien in it's own way. (Though the same can't be said of Finnegans Wake - that takes a lifetime to read.)
If you found the parent comment unfunny, picture the hacker as Dogbert and the player as Dilber meticulously and irritatingly describing his character.
If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that itlooksbeautiful.
I'll try posting something original as opposed to the MS-bashing and the MS-bashing-bashing whilst remaining at least a little ontopic.
I think Microsoft would do well to test more and make less. Each incarnation of Windows seems to have brought disproportionately large improvements (or hindrances if you like) in the user interface, features, and resource consumption. Whilst a gradual accumulation of features and a slow increase in resource use is inevitable for any operating system I think Microsoft has been making their systems grow too much too quickly.
Microsoft seems to be running out of some new features to add to each new version of Windows to entice consumers are resorting to making their own features (notably,.NET and the like) in order to keep sales high. Unfortunately I think that in terms of features and UI they can't push the boundary too much further for the next few years (though obvious beyond that there will no doubt be new ideas).
As such I feel that MS would benefit from focusing on testing instead of adding new things. Consolidation is often just as helpful as (if not better than) augmentation, particularly for larger systems. I feel that sales would remain high if Windows had no new features or UI but could genuinely be considered as stable as alternatives.
You see, C is also like a hammer in that it is totally unforgiving. Everyone makes mistakes, even "carpenters" and "OS experts". But both C and the hammer will smash your thumb (or stack) open regardless. I think what people are trying to point out is that sloppy coding is not necessarily the cause of programming errors. An unforgiving language is.
I am aware that the above list of suggested commands does have differing effects on different versions of UNIX and is incomplete. This suggests a different strategy. Log in as root, do what you have to do without interfering with anything else, then get the hell out.:-)
One of the other available screenshots actually shows a command prompt, which appears to be just "RF-CONTROL>", which is rather odd. (No bash in the Matrix?) And there's a command in $PATH called "disable", which is executed as "disable grid nodes 21 - 40". Hmmm. I don't recall any tool written with getopt which would handle that sort of thing by default. And best of all, it actually gives a confirmation message. Huh? That can't be right. No UNIX tool gives a confirmation message without your prompting it to. It even has "ARE YOU SURE (y/n)" plastered across the centre of the screen!
...I'm going to risk taking a karma hit for being Offtopic with a bit of speculation.
If cracking someone's system, then why shouldn't you login as root? You might get caught? You're probably going to get caught anyway, so it doesn't matter too much. There's not too much point trying to get into an ordinary user's account since there's no guarantee that a particular username exists. The only one you can be reasonably sure of is "root".
And once you have logged in as root, can't you just do:
This is only a problem because the plant is patented. Virtually every other plant on earth is "public domain" so there's no problem about those when they grow on someone else's land. Why not just say that it's stupid and irresponsible to try to patent species of plants, not let anyone do it, and then leave the issue be? Companies will have the freedom to create these GM crops (thus placating the GM advocates) but have little incentive to do so since they will be available for free (thus placating the anti-GM campaigners).
If the game's designed properly all the important and sensitive stuff is done server-side so that patching your client won't have any effect. This would put more load on the server since it would probably have to do quite a bit more processing, but it would eliminate cheating if all the client did was send keystrokes to the server, which processed everything else. Then only the server admin could enable cheating.
...well, assuming I were a cheater. Which I'm not. Really. But anyway...
I'm a big fan of the cheat which allows you to tweak its effect. There's an example given of a BF:1942 cheat which will double your fire rate and driving speed. This suggests something interesting; the incremental cheat. Just use the cheat to up your fire rate and driving speed by 5% to start with. If no one responds; up it a bit more, and more, until someone starts calling you a cheater. Then you can turn it back down and then tell them that they're making false accusations, whilst still having perhaps a 20% advantage over other players.
If I were placed on a multiplayer game server where half of the players are cheating, I think I'd just sit and watch the other half frantically screamed "OMG HAX!!!1" messages scrolling down the screen.
If this continues then the only players of CS and the like will be hardcore cheaters. This will be even funnier because often cheaters consider themselves to be above reproach and will threaten and verbally abuse anyone else who cheats as they do. So all game servers will be infested with retards squawking at each other.
Looking further into the future...
An arms race of cheats is almost inevitable. As with a real life arms race it will continue indefinitely until someone comes up with The Ultimate Cheat. By analogy with real life, we can see that this Ultimate Cheat will probably consist of submitting a link to the game server to Slashdot, causing it to be turned into a molten pile of slag and driving everyone playing bonkers. Then no one will play the games any more because of the risk of their computers exploding and I will be happy, for then I will have other freeciv players to play with.
Then someone develops a wallhack for freeciv, and the cycle starts over again...
I really don't see anything amusing about it all except that you guys like to open your mouth and talk about how 1337 you are when in fact you're nothing but a bunch of little pathetic script kiddies.
While that's the usual and stereotypical reason given, I think there's a more obvious reason; to these people, it's really really funny to watch everyone jumping up and down and getting angry screaming "OMG CHEATER" because of their cheating. That's the fun for them - not the winning, but pissing everyone else off.
Couldn't you just blow the whistle to the police anonymously a few weeks later? As long as you don't tell anyone else about it and leave a long time delay no one will realise that it was you (hopefully).
Another Mozilla based browser, Galeon has this feature too. It's currently my favourite browser, though I'm quite impressed by my (so far brief) trial of Firebird.
I don't think this has been posted, but if you downloaded the Linux binary given in the FTP folder linked from the story and can't figure out what to run in the untarred folder, do './run-mozilla.sh./MozillaFirebird'. Just one or the other on their own won't work. This confused me a bit at first trying to figure it out, but hopefully this will help someone.
So what? Whenever something like this happens, we bitch about it on Slashdot, nobody bothers to do anything about it, a couple of companies get sued, and then we hear nothing more about it because these patents are retarded and unenforceable. No need to worry.
It's all well and good hoping that other companies will follow their lead, but unfortunately some companies can afford to hold out on DRM until their customers are forced to accept it; though Intuit may have gone out of business from the customer backlash if they had kept this up, the same may not be true for other companies.
They should name these browsers after progressive rock songs. That'd give them a lot of geek cred (in my mind anyway). Come on, what could be cooler than using a browser called "Echoes"?
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people have posted here making incredibly lame jokes about the possible 10-15 lines of code. However, one point they make is true; we can't tell whether or not the alleged copied code is actually copied or just so obvious that it coincidentally happens to be similar. For certain applications, certain code is going to be identical.
For instance, if you want to use a single string for, say, holding user input, you'll probably use malloc() to declare a char* called 'str' or 'p'. This will probably be about 5 lines of code if you include error detection.
Then there are system calls one uses. If you're outputting a line of text, you'll probably use puts(), or printf(), or fprintf(). If you're getting a list of groups a user is a member of, you'll use getgroups() and/or getgid(). If you want to spawn a subprocess you'll use fork(). If you want to get the name of the current terminal you'll use ttyname(). All this creates code which is likely to look very similar.
Try Ulysses by James Joyce. Though I'll admit it may well take a good deal longer to read. It's tough, but I think it is actually easier to read than Tolkien in it's own way. (Though the same can't be said of Finnegans Wake - that takes a lifetime to read.)
If you found the parent comment unfunny, picture the hacker as Dogbert and the player as Dilber meticulously and irritatingly describing his character.
You can if you freeze it!
If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that it looks beautiful.
I'll try posting something original as opposed to the MS-bashing and the MS-bashing-bashing whilst remaining at least a little ontopic.
.NET and the like) in order to keep sales high. Unfortunately I think that in terms of features and UI they can't push the boundary too much further for the next few years (though obvious beyond that there will no doubt be new ideas).
I think Microsoft would do well to test more and make less. Each incarnation of Windows seems to have brought disproportionately large improvements (or hindrances if you like) in the user interface, features, and resource consumption. Whilst a gradual accumulation of features and a slow increase in resource use is inevitable for any operating system I think Microsoft has been making their systems grow too much too quickly.
Microsoft seems to be running out of some new features to add to each new version of Windows to entice consumers are resorting to making their own features (notably,
As such I feel that MS would benefit from focusing on testing instead of adding new things. Consolidation is often just as helpful as (if not better than) augmentation, particularly for larger systems. I feel that sales would remain high if Windows had no new features or UI but could genuinely be considered as stable as alternatives.
Duct tape your victim to a chair, pick one of the songs at random and play it over...and over...and over...
You see, C is also like a hammer in that it is totally unforgiving. Everyone makes mistakes, even "carpenters" and "OS experts". But both C and the hammer will smash your thumb (or stack) open regardless. I think what people are trying to point out is that sloppy coding is not necessarily the cause of programming errors. An unforgiving language is.
Wow, for once you posted something that isn't a Slashdot cliche or Dilbert quote.
Wait a minute...
I am aware that the above list of suggested commands does have differing effects on different versions of UNIX and is incomplete. This suggests a different strategy. Log in as root, do what you have to do without interfering with anything else, then get the hell out. :-)
One of the other available screenshots actually shows a command prompt, which appears to be just "RF-CONTROL>", which is rather odd. (No bash in the Matrix?) And there's a command in $PATH called "disable", which is executed as "disable grid nodes 21 - 40". Hmmm. I don't recall any tool written with getopt which would handle that sort of thing by default. And best of all, it actually gives a confirmation message. Huh? That can't be right. No UNIX tool gives a confirmation message without your prompting it to. It even has "ARE YOU SURE (y/n)" plastered across the centre of the screen!
If cracking someone's system, then why shouldn't you login as root? You might get caught? You're probably going to get caught anyway, so it doesn't matter too much. There's not too much point trying to get into an ordinary user's account since there's no guarantee that a particular username exists. The only one you can be reasonably sure of is "root".
And once you have logged in as root, can't you just do:
/etc/nologin /etc/init.d/sshd stop
$ touch
$
$ killall -9 mingetty
$ killall -9 login
to stop someone else logging in and stopping you?
This is only a problem because the plant is patented. Virtually every other plant on earth is "public domain" so there's no problem about those when they grow on someone else's land. Why not just say that it's stupid and irresponsible to try to patent species of plants, not let anyone do it, and then leave the issue be? Companies will have the freedom to create these GM crops (thus placating the GM advocates) but have little incentive to do so since they will be available for free (thus placating the anti-GM campaigners).
If the game's designed properly all the important and sensitive stuff is done server-side so that patching your client won't have any effect. This would put more load on the server since it would probably have to do quite a bit more processing, but it would eliminate cheating if all the client did was send keystrokes to the server, which processed everything else. Then only the server admin could enable cheating.
...well, assuming I were a cheater. Which I'm not. Really. But anyway...
I'm a big fan of the cheat which allows you to tweak its effect. There's an example given of a BF:1942 cheat which will double your fire rate and driving speed. This suggests something interesting; the incremental cheat. Just use the cheat to up your fire rate and driving speed by 5% to start with. If no one responds; up it a bit more, and more, until someone starts calling you a cheater. Then you can turn it back down and then tell them that they're making false accusations, whilst still having perhaps a 20% advantage over other players.
If I were placed on a multiplayer game server where half of the players are cheating, I think I'd just sit and watch the other half frantically screamed "OMG HAX!!!1" messages scrolling down the screen.
If this continues then the only players of CS and the like will be hardcore cheaters. This will be even funnier because often cheaters consider themselves to be above reproach and will threaten and verbally abuse anyone else who cheats as they do. So all game servers will be infested with retards squawking at each other.
Looking further into the future...
An arms race of cheats is almost inevitable. As with a real life arms race it will continue indefinitely until someone comes up with The Ultimate Cheat. By analogy with real life, we can see that this Ultimate Cheat will probably consist of submitting a link to the game server to Slashdot, causing it to be turned into a molten pile of slag and driving everyone playing bonkers. Then no one will play the games any more because of the risk of their computers exploding and I will be happy, for then I will have other freeciv players to play with.
Then someone develops a wallhack for freeciv, and the cycle starts over again...
While that's the usual and stereotypical reason given, I think there's a more obvious reason; to these people, it's really really funny to watch everyone jumping up and down and getting angry screaming "OMG CHEATER" because of their cheating. That's the fun for them - not the winning, but pissing everyone else off.
Couldn't you just blow the whistle to the police anonymously a few weeks later? As long as you don't tell anyone else about it and leave a long time delay no one will realise that it was you (hopefully).
Another Mozilla based browser, Galeon has this feature too. It's currently my favourite browser, though I'm quite impressed by my (so far brief) trial of Firebird.
I don't think this has been posted, but if you downloaded the Linux binary given in the FTP folder linked from the story and can't figure out what to run in the untarred folder, do './run-mozilla.sh ./MozillaFirebird'. Just one or the other on their own won't work. This confused me a bit at first trying to figure it out, but hopefully this will help someone.
So what? Whenever something like this happens, we bitch about it on Slashdot, nobody bothers to do anything about it, a couple of companies get sued, and then we hear nothing more about it because these patents are retarded and unenforceable. No need to worry.
It's all well and good hoping that other companies will follow their lead, but unfortunately some companies can afford to hold out on DRM until their customers are forced to accept it; though Intuit may have gone out of business from the customer backlash if they had kept this up, the same may not be true for other companies.
You wouldn't happen to be a Farker, perchance?
They should name these browsers after progressive rock songs. That'd give them a lot of geek cred (in my mind anyway). Come on, what could be cooler than using a browser called "Echoes"?