Quasar

GreyGhost said:

It appears to have had the desired effect, Wikia deleted both pages.

Wow that's overkill. All they actually needed to do was roll back to before User:Dank's edits. Oh well, their staff were never known for subtlety or a slow hand ;)

What was on those pages? I'm a bit late to the party...

bzzrak said:

What was on those pages? I'm a bit late to the party...

User:Dank copied the newest revisions of the pages that are on DoomWiki.org to wikia.com, which includes all revisions since 2011. He did this without attributing us, which is required by our license. Wikia will not allow proper attribution to be added and, even if they did, in this case my edits to the articles were mostly contributed under CC BY-SA 4.0 which creates a license incompatibility anyway.

TL;DR: Dank should not be copying our stuff to wikia. It's a chump move.

Quasar said:

I must build this game in a way that the resulting binary is redistributable. How do I do that?

There is no way to guarantee a single binary will run on all flavors of Linux.

What usually happens is you target the most popular ones, e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mint. See the downloads page for Blender, there is about 10 or 12 packages for Linux (probably half if you ignore the 32-bit and 64-bit distinction).

I hope you enjoyed that rant, can't say I did though, information about compiling stuff *is* out there (e.g. StackOverflow) and I'm sure if a long-time Unix/Linux developer suddenly dived into developing on Windows they would feel equally overwhelmed and frustrated at first.

There is the Linux Standard Base (LSB) which is supposed to address the problem. Unfortunately, it's not followed by most distributions. But, still, it's at least a start. Until it or something similar is more widely followed, the best advice is what andrewj said: target the most popular distros, like Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, and Fedora. Hell, SteamOS is based on Debian, so there ya go.

Ubuntu shipping with old libpng headers doesn't surprise me, because Ubuntu is a piece of shit. Unfortunately, it and its derivatives are the most popular for desktop users.

Installing libpng from source should be pretty easy as long as its dependencies are installed. It uses the GNU Build System (aka, "autotools"), which is pretty common. The basic steps for any software that uses it are:

./configure --help (to see what configuration options are available)
./configure --prefix=/usr (or whever you want to install it)
make
make install (or make install DESTDIR=/some/folder if you want to make package)

That's sorta the equivalent of loading up a solution in Visual Studio, changing the project's configuration, and building it.

You get what you pay for

Maes said:

If someone(apart from legitimate government security agencies who are able to do it subtly and with our best interests in mind, of course) ever figured a way to hack into the update system of any major OS (including Ubuntu Linux and OSX), rest assured that it would either result in mass panic, if done clumsily and obviously, and ever result in a worldwide economic or geopolitical crisis.

Ubuntu is easy, just get a new PGP key into the repository maintainers key-chain and then use software which intercepts FTP/HTTP access for repositories in your country to download the modified packages.

OS X is even easier, just put levies on Apple. If they do not like it then purge their software and make it illegal.

Avoozl said:

How is it known if this is Microsoft's doing and not just same sort of fake malware update?

The stuff's documented (after a fashion) in Microsoft's knowledge base, so unless that's also been hacked it's not unreasonable to assume these are official malware updates.

GreyGhost said:

official malware enhanced user experience updates as a result of our NEW and IMPROVED corporate policy.

FTFY <3

You evil bastard.

All hail Quasar the Beast.

I used to like the nr. 666 for the amount of views on a realy odd and weird crappy digital song i made which ended up on youtube.

Csonicgo said:

Another good one: "Computer/WWW/Internet is just a fad"

I remember being told back in the late 70s that personal computers would be a short-lived fad and I should stick to repairing TVs. :D

GreyGhost said:

I remember being told back in the late 70s that personal computers would be a short-lived fad and I should stick to repairing TVs. :D

I remember being told not to go into computers because everybody was doing it and the market was overflooded - oh wait, that turned out to be true >_> :( :( :(

Quasar said:

I remember being told not to go into computers because everybody was doing it and the market was overflooded - oh wait, that turned out to be true >_> :( :( :(

This has actually backfired in some unsuspectable sectors e.g. law enforcement: most modern police forces in industrialized countries are unable to carry out an investigation without resorting to computers, so a criminal who doesn't use social media etc. can actually get at least one step ahead of the police, as there are less and less agents skilled in "getting their hands dirty" in the field and doing real hardboiled detective work on the streets -perhaps with the exception of some hardcore units like NARCs. Those still skilled are mostly old farts.

They are just catching up with the technology we're used to. It's not a breathtaking achievement anymore to put multiple cores on a chip since, what, 2005? Nor to put said cores in a mobile device. Nor to cobble some DRAM chips together and add them up to an arbitrary amount.

The real tricky part is getting reasonable life out of them and prevent their thermal death, which is why N cores doesn't mean that you get a full-time supercomputer in your pocket: if forced to run constantly at their max speed, most very-high performance mobile cores would eventually burn down, because they lack the sophisticated cooling systems that evolved on desktops and even laptops. Good thing the battery would run out before you manage to do it...or auto speed throttling would set the speed back, preventing this "forcing" scenario.

Mobile CPUs are very good at consuming very little power per MHz at relatively low rates. Crank the speed up, and this advantage is lost. It's definitively possible to cram more processing (and electric) power in a mobile than the current thermal designs and batteries can handle for any reasonable amount of time. The question is: "is it worth it?"

Sorry if I think more like an engineer than a marketer ;-)

I have to admit, I'm really rather quite confused here. So the Microsoft Store offers apps for particular websites or particular functions? So what? It's not like you're barred from other means of accessing that information. Heck, Microsoft might suggest an app to download when I want to open a particular kind of file, but there's nothing preventing me from downloading another program to do the same thing. For instance, just recently I downloaded VLC to my Windows 8 computer, despite Windows offering me apps to download to view movies.

More to the point, just because, say, Microsoft has a CNN app, it doesn't mean they'll block you from CNN's website if you use your preferred browser. That's the whole issue of net neutrality. It's not that certain websites will get promoted over others (that has always been the case). The issue with net neutrality is that companies are looking to restrict access to websites altogether based on how much you're willing to pay for access.

geekmarine said:

More to the point, just because, say, Microsoft has a CNN app, it doesn't mean they'll block you from CNN's website if you use your preferred browser. That's the whole issue of net neutrality. It's not that certain websites will get promoted over others (that has always been the case). The issue with net neutrality is that companies are looking to restrict access to websites altogether based on how much you're willing to pay for access.

They could do that in several ways, just listing a few possibilities:

• Convert web servers to use a modified, non-standard compliant HTTP-like protocol (or, equivalently, use some sort of scrambling or encryption at all times for all communication to/from a server), which only the "correct" app can decode.
  
• Use completely different web page authoring tools and custom standards that don't rely on HTML, and thus only an ad-hoc app can make sense of them and display them, while general-purpose browsers would just display garbage.
  
• Most of the webpage's content actually being part of the client-side executable, tied to the particular platform, and updates being only possible through its own secret, ad-hoc protocols (essentially, making every website behave like a 90s "multimedia" interactive encyclopedia on CD-ROM)
  

Yes, with hacking or enough reverse engineering someone could probably circumvent these "safeguards", rip resources, access premium content etc., but then the DMCA and related legal fuss would kick in.

It's weird how at first "educational" or readable content for computers came in simple text files, then custom programs, then, with the internet, in standard website form, and now with mobile apps there's a trend back to the custom executable.

Similarly, in an age where many traditionally desktop applications are implemented (not always efficient or practical to use) as "rich internet applications", the mobile market marks a return to the ad-hoc , platform-specific executable. Now, there might be some overlap e.g. Metro apps using HTML5, but those are still platform specific, so you get a sort of HTML5 that, well, is not everybody's HTML5.

aww... I'm sorry. :(

Nikki's Haven is now online:

http://eternity.mancubus.net/nikki/index.html

I'm sorry for your loss, James. I know from the times she was mentioned on chat, how important she was to you.

I had another friend lose her cat of 20 years in December, and the same message applies I'm sure - she gave her cat the best life possible, and I'm sure you did too. They can't have had it any better :)

Quasar said:

Hey :P I've been to both California and Florida, as well as Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri (this is disregarding the states I have only driven through/flown over/stopped at an airport in).

To be quite honest, I haven't left Washington since about 2004. Back in my childhood I was well-travelled, though. I've spent time in nearly all the states in the north and along the coasts. I wish I had the time and money to go traveling around the country again. Especially if I can visit the places I've never been like upper New England, the Southwest, the Deep South, New York, and Chicago.

here from virginia i'm makin a smash
they call me landfill cause i'm nothin but trash

I'll be heading back today and should be back in OK around 8:00 central. Wish me luck with those United Economy flights >___>

I took one database administration class dealing with SQL once. My head got tangled up in so many ways simply imagining the grand-scale management of a huge SQLdatabase that I swore I would never take a job relating to being a DB admin or assistant.

And that is quite a query so far, and you say it is only partial? How long did it take you to get this much working?

Will this be on the test?

Happy birthday Eternity man! :-)

Happy birthday Quasar

Technician said:

You have to share your day with fathers day?

My father had the same problem.

Craigs said:

so how does a birthday/fathers day combo work? Do you get a shitty father's day present and an awesome birthday present? A shitty birthday present and an awesome father's day present? Equally shitty presents? Equally awesome presents?
HOW THE FUCK DOES IT WORK

I have a friend who was born on Christmas. She never got any birthday presents.

You'll need CPAP and a walker after looking at code like that.

Who needs data integrity when you can show off long SQL queries?

SELECT lol
FROM quasar
WHERE not exists (select * from quasars_database_skills); -- not needed
INSERT INTO quasars_database_skills
(real_programmers_use_binary_lol);

Ralphis said:

Voluptuous Curvy Lesbians

It may have been written by the aforementioned, having had very little training in programming ;)

But no actually it's Visual Component Library, by Borland. It is a RAD system created for Delphi, which can also be linked from their sorry-ass C++ compiler/IDE, C++Builder. It was meant to hang out with the likes of MFC. I've never had a fraction of the problems with undefined behavior in MFC though.

He's talking about the Velan Central Library.

Creepy.

Creaphis said:

He's talking about the Velan Central Library.

Creepy.

Brofist!

thedailywtf seems like a more appropriate place for such questions.

That being said...it does seem like a WTF, or just a fancy way to hide the functioning innards of a database.

Well I'm not really a SQL guru but can't you use an inner join in your update to avoid the correlated subqueries? E.g.

code:
Array

That syntax works in SQL Server, dunno about Firebird though.

Jonathan said:

Well I'm not really a SQL guru but can't you use an inner join in your update to avoid the correlated subqueries? E.g.

code:
Array

That syntax works in SQL Server, dunno about Firebird though.

I think on Firebird that would update all procedures >_> But I don't know. I'm an SQL n00b myself. However I ended up just eliminating the temp table altogether and using a single update statement that ran in 3 minutes, a significant improvement. It's just a one-time update to fix some procedures that the Behavioral Health dept. never entered in their fee schedule due to laziness ;)

Damn, I though you said VLC. That shit clashes on me like a plane full Arabs.

Technician said:

Damn, I though you said VLC. That shit clashes on me like a plane full Arabs.

Heh. Yeah, VCL == Visual Component Library. It's Borland's attempt at a competitor for Microsoft's MFC, supposedly oriented toward RAD, though I don't see how it helps rapidly develop anything frankly.

I guess they mean rapidly develop a bunch of forms and have them crash on you til you code elaborate workarounds that track deleted pointers and disable event handlers until the constructor sequence has finished. And not to mention the fact that listviews commit access violations if their contents are changed while the control isn't visible. This makes tab and page controls really nice to deal with - in the program's main toolbar there is a timer control with which all filtered list views have to register themselves when they want to refresh. That timer will check every 250 ticks for filters that want a refresh, test if they're visible, and refresh them if they are. If not, it's back into the queue!

It would take several years of development time to get all that right, I think. Probably why this system, developed in 2001, only just got fixes for some of them after I arrived 3 months ago ;)

From what I recall it's an outdated and badly engineered toolkit.

I use them at work, and even plugged a LCD TV in my laptop at home. The funny thing is that in both cases they're asymmetrical in size, resolution and aspect ratios :-p

fraggle said:

Like this, this or this?

Considering I currently have three monitors sitting on my desk (and a couple of others in the house), I should really try this out. I hope that for the Chocolate-Doom part, I don't actually need separate computers, do I? (though the very fact that I'd connect multiple monitors to one computer means that just a VGA port won't be enough...)

EDIT: oh yeah, I do have a DVI out as well :)

If you can hook them all up to one machine then no, you don't need multiple computers. However, getting them all to run fullscreen may be a bit trickier ...

I like VirtualBox for this stuff. Doesn't run windows 9x well, though.

I use VirtualPC 2007 with extensions, runs win95C very well. It's also fast as hell.

I've got a copy of Win95 on an older laptop - I don't really use it for anything. I suppose I could load a bunch of old programs on it but DOSbox would achieve the same result. I would've liked to see NT4 but I hear the hardware compatibility was crap, so I may as well run Win2k (which I have running on a slightly-less-old laptop). I've got half a mind to dig out an old IDE SSD I bought and see how it handles Xubuntu on one of these...

Ah Jamie, Jamie, I think years of Linuxing have turned you into a bitter Windows hater with a secret agenda vs Windows users, else you wouldn't be advocating going the hard and painful way whenever possible ;-)

Super Jamie said:

I think the longest a full Windows reload plus all settings and little incidental programs ever took me personally was 4 days. My point is, that timeframe is still shorter than pissing around trying to fix a broken install. Certainly less personally frustrating.

We're kinda missing the ball here. What is frustrating? A repair-install that lasts under an hour vs 4 days of scavenging installers from disks, or you're referring to something like trying to manually remove every hidden piece of malware? The latter I can understand, but the former...no way.

Super Jamie said:

Windows comes with MSBackup, which is decent enough that it actually works. There is no reason not to perform backups on a modern Windows box.

Again, this ain't DOS or Linux. You can only back up and reliably restore non-executable data with it. Backing up "Program Files" and restoring it won't work, and you know that.

Super Jamie said:

The hard drive will still be as fragmented as when you started (maybe even moreso) and all the little hidden Windows settings and files that are either documented obscurely on Technet or not at all still remain.

Not to mention it doesn't clean out user profiles so all the tempfiles, caches, and settings clutter from briefly-installed programs still remain.

That's the whole point of a repair-install: preserving settings and returning to the user a PC that was just like before. Given that most failures were hardware-related (burned out mobos, blown caps) what we needed most was to "transplant" the HD and OS on a new "body".

If the usage context calls just for that, there's no better general-purpose, guaranteed to work fix. Unless of course you can suggest me a method that allows me to back up all data, programs and settings of an unknown PC for which I don't have Norton Ghost/image based backup tools, and where the data is not kept on a separate drive/partition than the OS, and is faster than a repair installation. [/sarcasm]

Super Jamie said:

A repair-reinstall or reload-over-the-top is a band-aid fix at best.

It has its limitations in that e.g. it's not the right thing to do if you know there's still spyware around, or if you know fragmentation is an issue. Then again in the latter case, you can always defrag afterwards, or assist the process by deleting temps/temporarily moving old data out of the way etc.

Super Jamie said:

If you deleted C:\Windows and C:\ProgramFiles and essentially anything that's not user data (ie: moving user data to C:\Backup and deleting C:\DocsAndSettings too) then you'd have a similar solution albeit still with existing hard drive fragmentation.

Come on Super Jamie, you know better than that. There isn't always such a clear programs-data dichotomy in Windows (especially prior to Vista/7). Some save shit in their program directories, other in Docs & Settings (and no, complaining that such software doesn't follow conventions or good practice doesn't cut it, soldier!). So you must be pretty intimate with every particular system/program to know what to save and what not, which I can only do for my personal PCs and maaaaybe for the one(s) I'm working with everyday, but not for some random-ass sergeant's 10 yo PC running a custom Access-based app.

Super Jamie said:

To do a motherboard swap on Windows you can usually boot into safemode, remove ALL devices, and reboot to repair. Even so, the Microsoft recommended solution is a reload in this instance. Windows after NT5 were not designed to have their motherboard swapped.

I had mixed results from swapping mobos: in a few rare instances windows was able to boot normally (if the old system used only the windows IDE drivers, and the chipset of the new mobo was similar to the old one or had built-in support from windows). More often, I got a BSOD at some point during loading (even in safe mode), so a repair-install was still the best method to complete the "transplant". I've done Pentium I -> Pentium IV and the other way around :-D

Super Jamie said:

I also find it hard to believe an army or "Top Secret even from NATO" organisation does not have copies of the software it uses to do its' function. So if that PC suffers complete hard drive failure then the organisation is permanently impaired because they can't get "Enemy Finder 2003" or whatever working again? Rubbish.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of unique PCs whose backups are kept only remotely/occasionaly from specially authorized personell, and requesting their intervention is like going through flaming hoops. It's not my job to discuss security policy, but the main problem is that most of those apps are custom access-based DB hacks that can't be separated clearnly from their data (and restoring the apps from their original installations would require asking for higher security clearances and lead to unacceptable delays).

Super Jamie said:

Most PCs probably don't need a format and reload, but I'm saying it's a quicker and easier solution with a better result than spending hours and hours (especially of billable time) trying to fix something which only may or may not work again, and if it does will be no better than before it broke.

It's only a better solution if there isn't much data to begin with, very few apps and the PC is part of a "farm" of identical image-generated, identical-hardware PCs. Also, if the hard disk if actually physically fucked up (in which case it would be uncautious to repair-install), excessively fragmented, or if spyware can't be removed quickly and swiftly (which was another thing I perfected in the army, but that's another story).

Reformatting is NOT better for unique PCs laden with perhaps years worth of customized and personalized apps, desktop organization, which is where most personal/home PCs fall into, BTW.

Super Jamie said:

Repair install is not available for OEM XP as far as I can tell. You are expected to use the OEM restore functionality instead. I already risked downloading an XP image just to find this out -- it offers to install fresh, or to run the recovery partition. No option to repair, and even if it did, the resulting XP retail install would invalidate my OEM key.

Those OEM "recovery" disks are not the real deal, fuck that shit and get a real installation disk. However, you're right, there are some XP installations that can't be upgraded/repaired in this way, as well as some installation disks that can't perform the upgrade: I already mentioned those of different languages and those offering multiple languages during installation (those can't even repair-install themselves).

Before you ehm..acquire any other XP image, try to discover exactly what version/language pack your older one uses, and try to get a matching image. Normally, if you have, say, a pure us-en version an a SP3 VLK us-en should cut it. Of course, there's always the chance that the OEM version you have is too customized, or even just too damaged to be reliably detected. In that case..well...do it the Super Jamie way :-p

I'm running a copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 that's currently locked up in one of those lame-ass OEM recovery disks. I wouldn't mind having an XP MCE install disk without all the shovelware crap, but: Is it even possible to get a disk for a stand-alone installation of XP MCE? And, if I got one, could I use my current product key to activate it?

Creaphis said:

Is it even possible to get a disk for a stand-alone installation of XP MCE? And, if I got one, could I use my current product key to activate it?

Yes, no.

Creaphis said:

And Doom 3 doesn't even have an "exploding barrel" equivalent

What do those orange barrels do then when you shoot them?

myk said:

Quake has some other flaws DOOM doesn't have. At least, while watching a demo in Quake, pressing almost any key will bring up the menu, as in DOOM when you're in the intro loop (or always, in older versions). In DOOM, under -playdemo you can do various things like re-size the screen or go to the automap. Maybe they never bothered in Quake because it has no automap, but you can't, for instance, use +showscores during demo playback.

QL suffer from this. You can't do shit while watching a demo or it will stop the demo playback. :/
While in ETQW for instance, you can use console commands to spec different players in the demo. Check the scoreboard etc.

leileilol said:

What do those orange barrels do then when you shoot them?

And yellow

leileilol said:

What do those orange barrels do then when you shoot them?

Hm... I couldn't remember seeing any. I guess I'm wrong.

Boy does that bring back some memories. :)

I have 2 nearly identical systems that still work but are not used in my garage.

I have some even older ones out there as well. I gotta throw that crap away some day. I really enjoyed playing on those old systems, even tho' they sucked bad, I didn't know it at the time.

Ah, the memories.

let's not forget the OH SO HARD iso burning and HOW DO BOOT A BOOT DISK??? adventures.

I didn't have any trouble with the ISO's, that was in your imagination. The CD's burned correctly; you were the one who didn't believe me when I told you it took 45 minutes to burn. There was nothing wrong with the disk and I ESPECIALLY didn't do anything to it like you wrongfully accused me.

And I don't know what you're smoking with the boot disk crap. I already knew I needed to boot off of a Win98 recovery disk. The only thing I needed to make sure of was how to FDISK and format the hard drive without screwing anything up. It never hurts to be sure of what you're doing when you mess with those tools.

So go away.

When I posted something stupid over there, my account got banned, not even a nice fuck you. It just stopped working, i hated that.

:P

I started a new one when their forums collapsed and it hasn't been banned, but still. I have no fucking clue why I was banned from there.

This topic seems incomplete, as if there were vital information in messages preceding the first one. In other words, I don't have the first freaking clue what this is all about.

Erp said:

When I posted something stupid over there, it got deleted, not even a nice fuck you. It just disappeared, i hated that.