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| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-16, 20:27 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
 Post: #401 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Remember WinBrick96? That's one of the games I used to play from random shareware CDROMs, and one of the games I tried to As you may remember, currently there is no way to buy any of the full versions of the games by its developer, since their shareware payment processor closed shop due to the GDPR), nor there is any way to contact the developer (there are no email addresses publicly available, and the contact form on their website has been broken for years). All points to yet another piece of dead and forgotten software, right? Well... not so fast! The guy doesn't seem to be dead yet, as he DID updated its registration page with the following message: As our old business partner has concluded his business, we are looking for a new distributor. Unfortunately, the contact forms remains broken as of the date and time of this post (This also means that if you managed to buy any of his games in the past and somehow neglected to backup your installers, you're now fucked, as you can't request a download link anymore since the specific contact form for that is also broken too. BACKUP YO' SHIT, PEOPLE!!!). Seriously dude, Y U NO GOG!???!?! (Or even Steam, assuming you're willing to deal with complaints from people that have trouble running your ancient games on Windows 10) The classic shareware model has been dead for years - it's all freemium pay2win shitware OR Steam/GOG/$FAVORITE_APPSTORE nowadays! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-17, 14:11 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #402 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Welp, apparently there are a couple email addresses on the README file that ships with the demo version. ...the very same README file noone actually reads, and which was last updated in 2003. Will try emailing those. FYI: the download links for the registered versions (and its updates) were never public. I guess they were hosted on the very same servers as the other stuff, but obviously they weren't shared with anyone but customers (one-time/per-user links? Or simply a honor system: "here is the download link, plz do not leak!"). Archive only has the download links for both the Win16 and Win32 demo versions, as expected. The author is named Stefan Kuhne, but looking for him is quite tough, as he seems to share name with an Euro-fútbol player (which seems to be a well known celebrity, and hence not our guy). If I limit my search for "Stefan Kuhne Winbrick", I only get listings from shareware sites, and someone who archived one of the many demo versions at the Internet Archive, but no Twatters or Fecesbooks or whatever is popular in Deutschland - maybe this guy simply hates social media like me. UPDATE: StKuhne@gmx.net does not exist anymore: "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable". Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-17, 16:57 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #403 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Linkedin requires a free account (even for viewing only), which I'm not going to create. Did this guy jumped from random shareware to being a speaker on cellphone apps & web development? Sounds sketchy, but not unfeasible. How many Stefan Kunhes, born (?) in Germany and living in California could be out there? That Radaris site looks very intimidating (for the people who's being looked on!). Also, "WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT! THE TRUTH!!!!" disclaimers. What's not cool: "$34,78/mo" just for invading Someone's Else Privacy. NO THANKS. UPDATE: There is another example of some good ol' game I played out of shareware CDROMs: http://www.edcollins.com/cyberbox/ (in this case, another Sokoban clone) The guy kept selling and updating the game for over a decade, but then gave up because DOS is dead (just like the Dreamcast and Yuyuko), and ended releasing the full game for free. If you are/were a shareware gamedev in the '90s/early '00s, why not do the same? You aren't going to get rich, and people need to resort to things like emulators and VMs just to relive their childhood memories. But that still is worth something, just not money. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-17, 20:48 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #404 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by creaothceann To be more precise: the guy moved to USA with his family sometime around 9/11 (what an unfortunate timing!): Posted by winbrick.de Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-17, 22:38 in Web Browser Discussion
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Dinosaur
Post: #405 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
The piracy problem is solved for me: I simply don't consume your content, legit or pirate. I'm out of the system for all that matters. Hollywood can go choke on a flaming dick of fire, for all that matters. But then, that's just me, an extremist asshole that tries its hardest to get isolated from the world at large. Also, I was of the belief that the modern solution for "custom UI for 500 of the most popular websites" was "install our cellphone app!!!!" instead of browser hijacks... Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-17, 23:33 in 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back!
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Dinosaur
Post: #406 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Something like a GDEMU, perharps? However, the idea is sound, as the supply of SCD consoles is quite small and finite. The problem as usual is accuracy, considering that to this date the SCD is not fully emulated. I'm unaware of compatibility lists for emulators released in this decade, and all recent emulation attempts only try to get the Genesis base right (as this is a much more attainable goal). Doing it in hardware... well, good luck to those guys. Also, regarding the GDEMU: I don't know how feasible it would be a similar device for the SCD. On the DC, it was quite easy as the GDROM drive was a self-contained unit... except for VA2 motherboards where Sega integrated the GDROM drive brains on the main motherboard. But then the same guy did a similar device for Saturn consoles, and on those the CDROM controller IS integrated on all but the earliest motherboards. So maybe it is doable after all (from what I can remember, the SCD CDROM block is made mostly of off-the-shelf parts) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-20, 01:12 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #407 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
So Mom's Allshitter tablet is back to its antics. The usual dance of "it boots then hangs just to enter a bootloop when force-shutdown" is here again. adb logcat tells nothing interesting (no stacktraces this time! Just "Android system server is starting" over and over). Tablet boots, it's BARELY useable for a minute or so, then everything comes to a standstill. Even logcat dies after a couple minutes. Trying to forcefully shut it down results in the thing powering it up back on its own, to do the same shit. However, this time I was able to regain control... by uninstalling SuperSU (the app, not unrooting!). You remember that 2.82 is a very bad release for all of the devices I've tested on, and you're supposed to not use SuperSU anymore. Last time I was able to unfuck this Allshitter by turning the app back to a user app. This time, there was no recourse but to completely uninstall it. Tablet now boots again, sluggish as ever (my Dell Inspiron 6400 had more or less the same specs 13 years ago, and still runs circles around this plastic turd), but at least this time you can actually use it for more than ONE FULL MINUTE! Now this thing is the equivalent of a stock WinXP install, that is, admin privilegies for everybody yay GO WILD~~~~~ $MON started complaining about the Google app suddenly vanishing! See, normally noone SANE would use any of the Google crapps. But then, we're not normies, unlike $MOM (she willingly let Google track hard on her so she can read the news - that's the sole use she gives to the Google crapp - not even the quick searchbar; its only use here is a glorified news aggregator so she can get up to date with the latest Soviet Venezuelan political gossip that helps noone to get back our fucking shithole, but I digress). Normally I would say "stop touching random buttons" or "you uninstalled the app!"... except for the fact that on this thing, Google crapp is a SYSTEM app. It IS NOT supposed to uninstall on its own, for KitKat devices that's simply impossible! But here we are, with a Allfucker turdbucket and a missing Google icon and search bar. The app is completely missing from the app manager list. tl;dr: What brought it back: - Use Apps2SD to clean broken/damaged apps. This will find some remnants of the Google app (some .dex files) - let it delete those and reboot. - If it still doesn't come back, boot to recovery and wipe cache there. Unfortunately I've had to do this shit TWICE today, because smartdevices hate me, my family, and everything I'm around to. Welcome to my life of constant blackouts on everything, and eternally broken/crippled devices. ...fuck, I should stop reading JWZ's blogposts, I'm starting to sound like that asshole :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-21, 17:31 in Printer & Scanner Discussion
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Dinosaur
Post: #408 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
I haven't scanned anything from under Windows since... what, a long time ago? Thankfully my good ol' Acer S2W 3300U is still supported by SANE (you do need to provide your own firmware - hope you have your Windows driver pack on a safe place!). Yes, it's a lousy scanner, sometimes there is a halo strip on my scans (which goes more or less away if I take it apart for a cleanup), the power jack has cold solder joints, and it freaks the hell out if you try to scan in grayscale... but for the rare times I use it, it does the work. OEM-included scanning apps are a pile of suck and fail. ALL of them. I've used the ones from Acer/BenQ, Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, and Epson... and ALL OF THEM have annoyed me to no end. SANE is another bag of suck, but at least that one doesn't get (that much) in the way for me. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-21, 21:26 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #409 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Electronic Assholes insists that government don't call loot boxes "loot boxes" but "surprise mechanics", and they're "ethical and fun and people love them": https://www.pcgamesn.com/ea-loot-boxes In other news, crack dealers insists that drug enforcement agencies don't call crack "deadly drug" but "surprise chemicals" and that it is "ethical and harmless and consumers love it". EA, please, PLEASE, go bankrupt now! And all of your lameass IPs (starting with FIFA) buried in a deep concrete tomb in Saturn. The gaming world will thank you forever. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-22, 18:21 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
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Dinosaur
Post: #410 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Ubuntu (motto: "Linux for human beings") has decided to give the boot to 32-bit x86 packages, including multiarch starting with the upcoming 19.10 release: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Drops-32-bit-x86 This decision goes on top of discontinuing the i386 flavor of Ubuntu setup images, rendering all kinds of 32-bit support on this popular Linux distro completely useless. Technically the kernel will still support 32-bit executables on 64-bit hosts, but you need to bring your own new 32-bit userspace (some non-options are suggested: statically linked executables, 18.04 LTS chroot, "snaps", or VMs). This leaves two large groups of users in the frozen Siberian cold: Wine and Steam users. In the case of Wine, this sets them in a very rough position: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-Unsure-Ubuntu-32-Bit A 64-bit Wine exists, but naturally it can't run 32-bit executables (you need separate userspace and Wine prefixes for that), so they're in the same "will we need to bring our own libc and friends?" situation. Relying on some Valve bits (Steam Runtime) is an option, but not a good one for now. The shortest end of the stick now is at the (small but growing) Linux gaming arena, and the honeymoon between Valve and Ubuntu us now officially over: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Dropping-Official-Ubuntu Remember: the Steam client is still a 32-bit mess, and it's unlikely Valve is going to drop it for a pure 64-bit client due to the large amount of users still running 32-bit games and OS (not everybody on Steam runs high-end overclocked i9/Threadripper rigs for the latest AAAAAA+++ bugfest; a whole bunch of old/simple games still on sale will still run on XP on a P4 with some RAM and a GPU with non-braindead drivers) For now, the solution for those users is "move to Debian, you numbnuts!", or "SteamOS is still a thing, y'know?" Shit like this is why nobody is willing to take Linux seriously, why the Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen, and why those of us still with the "Linux will give a new life to your old junk" are now preaching to the wind :/ (In the meanwhile, Microsoft is still not going to dump Win32, no matter how hard they try with UWP) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-23, 15:00 in 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back!
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Dinosaur
Post: #412 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Oh, it also doubles as a Gen/MD flashcart? Now that's some great value for the price. Wonder how they took care of the "thou shall not expose 3.3V Flash ROM to 5V bus without safe measures" bit, as even Krikzz himself sometimes misses that part. Aside of that, I would love to see some hardware tests on that thing. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-23, 15:20 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO! (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #411 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by Braintrash Sorry, still not switching to your beloved *BSDs. Posted by sureanem 1) Statically linked exeuctables are the very definition of software bloat (for this specific use case). I don't want to discuss this again with you. 2) Maybe nobody runs Steam from 32-bit only OS. But how do you fix the games? Anything that is not a $60 AAAAAA++++ blockbuster, that hasn't been updated in years, and that you can still buy and there are plently of people still playing those. Visual novels and most Japanese games fit the description nicely. I'm glad I don't use Ubuntu, but such boneheaded decisions because "32 bit is OOOOOOOOOOOOLD because I live at Silly Valley and just bought a overclocked Threadripper with my VC money" are an easy way to get your users to have an axe to grind with you. Almost Mozilla-tier garbage. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-23, 17:48 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)
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Dinosaur
Post: #413 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Debian 10 "Buster" is leaving Testing to become the new ol' stable in two weeks from now on: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/06/msg00003.html Guess it's time to move yer ass and update over here, assuming my extremely flaky DSL is willing to cooperate (spoilers: it will not). Expect more broken shit because upstream hates you, as that's how software is developed nowadays. But on the positive side, it means I'll now be able to build Dolphin from source using only stock Debian packages and compilers. In other related news, the clock is running out for Jessie - LTS phase ends in one year and one week from now on (that is, June 30th, 2020). If Saki still survives to that date, maybe it's time to consider something else, maybe learn Arch, or simply ignore it as noone has hacked my shit and will not bother since you can't mine buttcoins on an (slightly overclocked) Pentium-MMX/200, and if you ever breach into its filesystems, feel free to steal all of my porn doujinshis (which are backed up anyway). Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-24, 03:44 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
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Dinosaur
Post: #414 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Why Joe Vidya has to jump flaming hoops (virtual machines, containers, buying new overpowered hardware) just to play a videogame?! Not everything has to involve devops-y/Troo UNIX® graybeard sysadmin trickery just because they despise the Easy Modo life. Look, I get that Linux distros are often short on manpower so they're always looking for ways to reduce their maintenance workloads, and ejecting seldom used features is a easy way to achieve that, but who gets to take such decisions without consulting YOUR USERS FIRST? Stop distributing a 32-bit x86 installer? Fine. Kill multiarch userspace support? Not fine! This is not yet another "I want to play $ANCIENT_GAME on modern computers, so I need an emulation solution", this is breaking perfectly working setups for no good reason at all! We all get that x86 is long due for a replacement, but going 64-bit only that suddenly (while offering Rube-Goldberg-esque "solutions" to your -now possibly former- users) is a fine way to tell them "fuck you, and thanks for all the fish!". If you drive away all of your users, you will have plenty of available manpower... since there will be no distro to maintain after that! Yes, I'm aware that Wine is another hack that I would not like to have to use, but that's not the only use case to NOT kill 32-bit yet (curiously enough most of those use cases involve proprietary software, but I can think about a couple of FOSS apps that won't work at all under an all-64bit setup: that's the risk you run if you code your stuff in good ol' assembler unless you work twice and have separate sources for x86 and amd64). Also, for those that suggest that VMs are the solution, are you going to buy me the extra hardware and perform the required setup (which sometimes is far from trivial) so I can enjoy my old games that right now can just be executed in place with no performance loss and another layer of bugs on top? Sure, software developers often are at fault (you could have simply migrated your shit to 64-bit YEARS ago!), but as a software developer myself I understand that this is not always possible for a myriad of technical and non-technical reasons. Microsoft STILL supports Win16 (but only on 32-bit Windows builds) despite noone having made 16-bit apps in almost two decades (the excuse at this date is down the lines of "InstallShield and friends, you never know when you will need to install that old copy of Photoshop 6"). The reasons to kill 32-bit are not remotely clear, aside of the kool kidz' "IT'S OOOOOOOOLD and I hate dinosaurs!!!!" because the only processor arch they know is ARM. Maybe in 2025 virtualization/containers would have reached a seamless integration level with user desktop interfaces, and by them Steam and friends could just offer an one-click solution for that (even under Windows, as eventually MS will want to kill Win32 for good, no matter if they're in the right or wrong). But right now, we're not living in the future yet. Not even remotely. Don't be a rotten Apple (with a capital ASSHOLE), please. I hope this backfires spectacularly on Ubuntu's face, bleeding users just like Mozilla. But in the shorter term, this is no good for the Linux ecosystem at large because the kool kidz will end infecting other distros. At least I'm glad that "sanity" is the name of the game here at Debianland (for "good enough™" values of "sanity"). Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-24, 04:34 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
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Dinosaur
Post: #415 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
From what I understand, Ubuntu will no longer build x86/32 packages of any kind, which also impacts the most typical scenario for multiarch users. If you absolutely must run your x86/32 software, you're now on your own. I don't know if you can build a x86/64 kernel that explicitly removes 32-bit support. For most users (including me), that's what "multiarch" usually means, and that's the bit that Ubuntu is trying to get rid of with this move. I might be pulling numbers out of thin air, but I can tell that there are far more people running x86/32 apps on x86/64 distros rather than people crosscompiling for ARM from x86. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-25, 11:48 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
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Dinosaur
Post: #416 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Cool, we've won this battle... but not the war.Software continues to grow in size at the high end, making it very difficult to even build new applications in 32-bit environments. Maybe it's time to... y'know, bring a notch or two down to the bloat? Nah, who am I kidding? BRING ON TEH JAVASCRIPTS!!! You’ve heard about Spectre and Meltdown – many of the mitigations for those attacks are unavailable to 32-bit systems. I'll keep those mitigations disabled across every single piece of hardware I'm directly responsible for (no matter the bitness), thanks. I'm an adult and can assume responsibility if some West Elbonian skript kiddo breaches into my junk for mining buttcoins or stealing my presidential assasination plans. Oh wait, noone cares! Neither do I. Intel (and everybody else) should still fix their broken junk. None of those discussions raised the passions we’ve seen here, so we felt we had sufficient consensus for the move in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It isn't "passion", it's "being able to actually use my computer with the software I've paid for/been using since forever". Anyway, you're still not guilty-free, Ubuntu. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-26, 01:09 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #417 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
From the guy that brought to you chemistry classics like Things I Won't Work With and other boring Big Pharma blogposts, here are some interesting posts about Silly Valley take on biotech: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/24/rewiring-plankton-and-reality https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/07/17/the-case-of-verge-genomics Basically: "there is an app for that®" is their motto for fixing everything, from cancer to Ebola to genetic disorders! He even has a name for this unique breed of "biotech hackers armed with VC money": Silicon Valley Sunglasses https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/silicon_valley_sunglasses ...so great, now the cure to every illness known to mankind is a healthy dose of Javascript. And a new iPhone, just in case. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-06-27, 12:10 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO! (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #418 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by Nicholas Steel Didn't you got the memo? You're supposed to stick to Windows forever, until MS says that it's time to throw your money in the trash because 32-bit is OOOOOOOOLD, unsafe as AIDS! Guys, please don't be like this guy: Posted by Some random at Moronix Or like this one: Posted by another pissed nerd at Moronix So basically us gamers have no rights, are holding "progress" hostage, and are actually HARMFUL for Linux. Got it. And people wonder why only nerds stick to Personal Computers these days :/ Also, fuck containers - not every Linux box is a cherished production server (where some hardcore nerds believe that it's the only place for Linux nowadays, according to such responses). Come up with a VirtualBox/QEMU fork specifically aimed at GAMING, and easy to use (none of this "container" hipster garbage), and then we'll talk. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-07-03, 00:00 in Blackouts
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Dinosaur
Post: #419 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
So here I am, one week without DSL access AT ALL because my phone line is now dead as a dissident. All I have at hand right now is a bunch of useless Movistar 3G phones ("CHOOSE OUTAGES" is their new motto, replacing their former "CHOOSE IT ALL"), and a loaned Movilnet 3G stick that is barely useable, and since its owner don't even want to tell me what data plan they hired for this, I'm effectively confined to like 10 minutes or 10MB of data PER DAY (that is: fetch email, logon on bank to check balances, maybe pay something if for whatever chance there is money, disconnect. And that's with adblockers!) No job ("eventual jobs" that are paid "someday" don't count in hyperinflation), no money in the bank (and the banknotes on my wallet are literally evaporating in value, while retailers are even "devastating" the allmighty dollar!), hard to sell all of my remaining computer junk (as electronics are not edible, and people only buy food with whatever they can get in their hands), every appliance on this house is leaking/seizing/freezing/refusing to work at all, and of course, the usual "what we're going to eat this week?!". With people leaving the country in hordes like rats leaving a sinking ship, and commies gonna commie while LOLoppositors still wait for their useless "peaceful" exits, nothing is improving. Looks like my mental health is actually getting eroded at a increasingly fast pace, in the middle of this madness, as I can't find solutions. Fuck, I can't even order the ideas on my mind to compose this post. But hey, keep listening to the shit spoken by the League of Stern Words People, aka the UN, OAS, EU (why would they even care about a non-European country in first place?!). They don't really care, and/or they're absolutely powerless to do anything. The only ones that could do are too busy giving cheap discourses on "please stop being commies, pretty please" (USA and friends), or running away without figthing the war for freedom (every single Venezuelan that has left the country, usually to end moping floors, washing cars, or pick-pocketing, which are the most usual "jobs" for most of those that have left). In fact, I'm fucking glad that some countries have started closing its doors to the massive influx of Venezuelan defectors (YES, I AM CALLING THEM THAT WAY, if you don't want to defend your fucking country, the one where you came to life, the one that gave you EVERYTHING you are, you don't deserve to live anywhere else then), as that's the only way to convince people to go back and think. But I guess we're so fucking retarded (and cowards), so we're letting Maduro and pals destroy whatever is left from this shithole. Keep spouting that "the only possible exit must be a peaceful one" shit, you MORONS. Because that has worked so well for Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Syria... ...and in the meanwhile I'm enjoying the joys of an all-digital gaming life, with a Steam client whose offline mode is simply not working, and with whatever few games I have on GOG/Humble Bundle inaccessible despite being "mine" simply because I can't download them without a working connection. Anyway, not that gaming matters anymore at this stage of my life, where I'm literally struggling for staying sane. Nobody cares anyway. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-07-04, 11:09 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #420 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Having only a few minutes of Internet access per day gives you more than enough free time to do other stuff you've been neglecting for YEARS. Like another purge of the remnants of my shareware CD-ROM collection, and archiving the stuff from those gold CD-Rs that were bought with my very first PC, 21 years ago (!!!). Stuff like plenty of ancient edutainment stuff, most of it old Win16 apps like: - Dorling-Kindersley titles - I really loved their How Stuff Works 2 CDROM, too bad its ancient QuickTime didn't played nice with more modern versions of itself, trying to hijack your BMP/MOV file associations at every time they could! - Encarta '98. Remember back when there was no Wikipedia? No Google? No dialup modems with most PCs? If you owned a PC and wanted to get fancy over your schoolmates still relying on good ol' textbooks, you had to - Miscellaneous encyclopedia CD-ROMs from newspapers ("get the first free and buy the other 18 for $LOW_PRICE!!!") And then, some of the surviving magazine cover CD-ROMs back when I was starting with this "Linux" thing, almost two decades ago. I found this weird jewelcase (seriously, it's the only one I have like this: it opens backwards, there is no room for holding a front cover or a booklet, and it's slimmer than a standard jewelcase but actually not as slim as those dreaded slim packs which broke if you looked at them funny) from a Spainard Linux magazine containing a somewhat popular (in Spain) Linux distro from the era, Esware Linux 365. Noone ever heard about Esware outside Spain (and some Latin American countries, if you were lucky), and that's because this was a distro aimed at the Spanish market. This was from a era where it was much more feasible to call and buy a bunch of CD-ROMs (that would get obsolete in no time) instead of spending the next 3 months downloading gigabytes of stuff over 33.6K dial-up. But then I could typically find them for free with select computer magazines (this particular specimen is a demo build for the now-defunct Todo Linux magazine issue #15, according to the printing on the cover). I can't recall having any particular luck installing it on my ol' Deceleron shitbox back in 2002, but then that box really hated anything that wasn't Windows 9x/Me (even 2000/XP would BSOD at startup with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE, and most Linux distros would either fail to install, boot only to console, or if you were very lucky, with a heavily distorted X11 GUI). Esware 365 (AKA 2.0) was actually a bold move for them, not only they switched their base from Red Hat to Debian, they also tried to embrace the Year of the Linux Desktop™ by making a user-friendly distro, easy to install and to maintain. (I never got to use their original RH flavor) What makes this particular distro CD-ROM remarkable? We bitch and moan about the disease of Electron/Chrome-in-a-can desktop webapps, where a glorified Silly Valley IRC client can easily bring a octacore Xeon with 64GB RAM down to its knees when some Javascript decides to take a dump on it. But those Esware guys were waaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of its time, as this distro features which is probably the WORST Linux installer I've ever interacted with in my entire career as a Linux user. It's the WORST OS installer (of any kind) I've used, PERIOD. And as you have already guessed it, it was a webapp. Yes, these Spainards were being disruptive in 2001. Too bad their webby shit was unable to achieve its ultimate goal most of the times, which was actually installing a Linux distro to your PC. First things first: when you boot this thing, you setup your mouse, and get asked which kind of setup would you want to do: - Normal: it starts its webby setup wizard - actually a barebones X server running Mozilla in kiosk mode, connecting to their setup webapp running in a local Apache instance. If you knew Mozilla back then, it was a miracle that the thing didn't crashed at startup! - Help: "This distro is brought to you by $LIST_OF_SPAINARD_DUDES" - Network: Same as normal, sans the X server and kiosk Mozilla. Instead you get to setup your network (no DHCP allowed, assume compatible Ethernet NIC installed), then get prompted to go to another PC in your LAN and connect to the same setup webapp. Then you make your way through the usual Windows-ish NEXT->NEXT dance (or I must say: Siguiente->Siguiente - there are also English and Galician options, but the English one is Anyway, onto the scariest part of every Linux installer: disk partitioning! Oh boy, how do you even---?!?!?!?! These Spainards managed to screw up this thing so badly I'm still amazed that they managed to ship this thing as is! The partition tool (actually a bunch of Perl/PHP scripts under the hood, with whatever little bits of JS the Mozillas of the era could cope with sprinkled on top) is a special class of failsauce: - Sometimes it fails to detect some (or all) of your HDDs, leaving you with no room to install your fancy new Linux distro. - There is no option to resize or reformat existing partitions, only create new ones. - There is no undo option! - It gives you no control over where to place your new partitions, and it reeeeeeally wants you to use extended partitions even on an empty drive. - Speaking about empty, unpartitioned drives: presenting one of those to the partition tool may cause it to lose its mind, either telling that there is no space, or causing it to create a - Even if you managed to clear all those hurdles and make a sane partitioning scheme, the thing may simply ignore you and create nothing at all, leaving your HDD perfectly untouched, defeating the whole purpose of a partitioning tool (and leading your setup to a surprise halt, as there are no error messages EVER displayed to the user) If you survive this shitshow, you still have to setup LILO (this step is also prone to silent failure), optionally create a boot floppy (this step also silently fails), setup your network (AGAIN: you already did this on the Hardware setup step, but this time you get to tell them that you're actually not using a dial-up modem anymore), setup users and passwords, and THEN... actual install begins. First, your actual partitioning scheme is applied (if you're lucky, considering how poorly coded is their partitioning "tool"), then the base system is copied to the HDD. And here comes the second WTF of the day... If you take any Linux distro CD/DVD and start browsing it with your favorite file manager, you will eventually find a directory full of software packages in whatever format is used by your distro maintainers. The install scripts will simply take the contents of those packages and copy them to their intended destinations. There might be some special packages which are manually put in place before all of this (for bootstrapping the base system, or whatever), instead of going through the regular install procedures (things weren't as streamlined in 2001 as they're right now in 2019). That's... not how things were done in Spain back then, it seems. if you browse this Esware 365 CD, you will find a directory with a bunch of 2001-vintage Debian packages, but exactly ZERO of those are used during install phase. Instead, there is a ~184MB tarball (/Esware/base/esware-base-1.0.tgz) with the ENTIRE system image on it - the installer will simply vomit its contents all over your filesystem, including temporary/duplicate files, obsolete cache contents, possibly broken config files, and surprisingly, no kernel package anywhere to be seen. No, that one ships on separate tarballs according to your architecture (which back then could be i386/486/586 -all of those shared the same image-, or i686). Anyway, just like everything on this doomed demodisc, this step was also prone to silent failure: you could sit there, staring at the "Now installing..." display, with absolutely ZERO disk/CPU activity at all. The installer just gives up, walks home, and leaves you -the user- stranded in a big fat seat of nothingness. Just a stoopid "ESWARE 365: WE MAKE LINUX POSSIBLE" animation. "Making Linux Possible" indeed. If for whatever reason you were chosen to win the lottery, you MIGHT end with an actual working, bootable Linux install somewhere in your HDD! Once inside, you will find a standard KDE2 desktop (not as great as KDE 3.5, but still miles ahead of whatever they're doing right now with Plasma 5, or other LOLDESKTOPS by Silly Valley®), the ability to use standard .deb packages, and no kernel .debs installed anywhere. Or working sound. Or video drivers other than VESA. God, how spoiled we have become nowadays, with our fancy Linux distros with full-blown 3D graphics acceleration, bloated sound systems, wireless networking that (often) Just Works™, and cheap games from Steam. No way Jose, that's not how things were done at the dawn of the millenium: getting your system to boot Linux was just the beginning of the adventure! But with Esware 365 installer, it was more like the beginning of your nightmares. Bonus: If somehow you get yer' filthy hands on a Esware 365 ISO and try to get it working under a VM, get ready to extra fun. And by "fun", I mean "don't try this at home, kids. Seriously, DON'T!". These are my instructions for VirtualBox: - Configure your VM with the oldest hardware you can choose... not that Esware will take any advantage of it. PIIX3/4 IDE controller is fine, forget about USB, PS/2 mouse is your only logical choice here, don't bother enabling sound since it won't work at all (Esware will detect AC'97 audio but will output nothing; it will fail to detect VirtualBox's SB16 card), and while any of the AMD NICs will get detected by Esware, none of them will actually work for whatever reason. At least it plays nice with the VESA emulation of VirtualBox. - 128MB was overkill for a Linux distro back then, so go and use that. As for HDD, a 4GB should be more than enough. The installer silently failed with a 1GB disk (despite being more than enough to dump the base system image, with plenty of space to spare), but Your Mileage May (Greatly) Vary. Don't forget to add a floppy drive, as VirtualBox doesn't add one, and you WILL need it - keep reading! - Mount your Esware ISO on the virtual CDROM drive, and try to boot. The kernel boots... and dies with a "cannot mount root filesystem, tried /dev/sdd" or some similar BS. This is because somehow whatever ancient SYSLINUX version on this CD doesn't play nice with the (much newer) VirtualBox PC BIOS - for whatever reason the initrd image already loaded on RAM gets "lost" when the control is passed over to the kernel, which can't found it anymore and instead tries to look for it at a hardcoded (non-existing) device path. The workaround is kinda lame: extract the initrd.img inside the boot-esware.img boot image on the root of the CDROM, rename it to initrd.img.gz (as it's actually gzipped and we need it uncompressed, but gunzip will bail out since the file doesn't have the expected file extension because Troo UNIX® Philosophy except when they're not), gunzip that, and mount the resulting initrd.img on your virtual floppy drive. Yes, it's a wacko 3MB "superfloppy". No, VirtualBox doesn't care, and neither does the kernel. You're not done yet! To boot, write any nonsense on the boot splash, hit ENTER, you will get an error message. This is what we want, so we can actually drop to a textmode prompt. The magical enchant is "linux initrd=/dev/fd0". At some point during boot, the kernel will ask you to insert your root floppy and press ENTER - just make sure you've mounted your initrd.img into your virtual floppy drive, and hit ENTER. Or don't bother, and go watch a porn or synthesize nitro compounds at home instead, rather than waste your time preserving this piece of turd. - Mouse will stop working when you logout, just because. Bonus 2:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # LOCA.pl ############################################################################# # These are the perl scripts that partition the hard disk(s) for the # ESware GNU/Linux 365 installation tool. Feel free to submit any problem # to bugs@esware.com or to do a collaboration. # # Copyright 2001 Pablo Iñigo <pablo@esware.com> and # Jorge Gómez Arenas <syvic@esware.com> # # ESware Linux S.A. # # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it # under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the # Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your # option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but # WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU # General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, # Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. ############################################################################# sub localiza { #Dado un disco y un mega de inicio devuelve el minor (identificador) my ($D, $I) = @_; my ($partedp, @discos,$l,$Minor, $Inicio, $Final, $Sys); #print "\nLOCALIZA===========> D=$D, ID=$I"; $partedp= `parted -s $D p \| grep -v Partition \| grep -v Disk \| grep -v Flags \| grep -v exten`; @discos=split ("\n", $partedp); foreach $l (@discos) { ($Minor, $Inicio, $Final, $Sys)= split (" ", $l); $Inicio=~s/\..*//g; #print "\n\tBuscamos que INICIO_PASADO($I) esté entre $Inicio+10 y $Final-10"; if ($I <= $Inicio+10 and $I >= $Inicio-10) { #print "\nEl minor $Minor es el que SI BUSCAMOS"; return $Minor; } else { #print "\n"; #print "\nEl minor $Minor no es el que BUSCAMOS"; } # Para la primera particion if ($I < 10 and $I >= 0) { #print "\n----------------------ENtra en la mierda esta: INIICO DADO = $I"; return $Minor } } } sub comprueba_tipo { my ($salida,$Minor, $Inicio, $Final, @tip,$miid,$ejecuta); my ($DD, $II, $FF) = @_; $salida = `parted -s $DD p \| grep exten`; ($Minor, $Inicio, $Final, @tip)= split (" ", $salida); # Elegimos un mega del medio de la particion de la que deseamos conocer # el tipo: $MEDIO = ($FF + $II) / 2; #print "\nLOCA: Medio de la particion = $MEDIO"; print "\n SI -$MEDIO- < -$Final- y -$MEDIO- > -$Inicio- "; if ($MEDIO < $Final and $MEDIO > $Inicio) { #print "\nLOCA: Lógica"; # La partición a crear está dentro de una extendida. No problem return "logical"; } if (length ($Minor) < 1) { #print "\nLOCA: Primaria sin particion extendida"; # No existe partición extendida. No problemo return "primary"; } if ($MEDIO > $Final or $MEDIO < $Inicio) { #print "\nLOCA: Primaria con EXTENDIDA"; # La partición a crear está fuera de la extendida. No problemo return "primary"; } #print "\nMIerda, La partición está entre medias entre la extendida y espacio libre"; #Else # Redimensionamos la partición extendida y acoplamos la partición $miid = localiza($DD, $II); #print "\nLOCA Llega aquí. Esto puede ser un fallo..."; $ejecuta ="parted -s $DD resize $miid $II " . int ($FF+1); #print "\n$ejecuta"; #system ($ejecuta); return "LoGiCal"; #return "MIERDA"; } print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; Typos, useless files, toilet humor, and more bugs than at Joe's Apartment inside of this fine piece of Spainard software engineering, because Your Mom™. ...I'm totally calling my next Javascript library "YourMomTampaxApocalypsisNow.js" If you're wondering what happened to Esware: unsurprisingly, 365 was its doom, and while they managed to hang on for a while (switching to IT services and the like), they ended folding anyway. Their remnants were slurped by someone else (which most likely failed too), and they faded into obscurity. But I'll keep this CD-ROM safe, if only for lulz, and its really weird disc case. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
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