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FUNCTION RANDOM - All Things Technological On Your Mind

Started by Camazotz Automat, August 17, 2012, 04:04:35 AM

steelbot

Quote from: West of the Rockies on December 21, 2013, 04:18:24 PM
This is only the vaguest of tech questions, but can we still buy the old Riven or Myst games?  My daughter might like them, but they may be obsolete.
There are ways to play them but you are correct, they may be more difficult than you imagine.  Today's processor/memory speeds even the video cards are so advanced, that the games programming itself was never intended to be played on it.  So you run into this the older the games get.

Thanks, Steelbot... I was afraid that would be the answer.

Quote from: West of the Rockies on December 21, 2013, 04:18:24 PM
This is only the vaguest of tech questions, but can we still buy the old Riven or Myst games?  My daughter might like them, but they may be obsolete.

You can get them on steam for a few dollars. Those are popular enough that they are still sold.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/63660/

area51drone

You can play them on a virtual PC running on your desktop too.    Check out "Microsoft Virtual PC"..  I have a Windows 2000 box, a Windows 98 box and an Unbuntu box all running on my regular xp machine now and then for various reasons - the 98 box is typically on just to play old games.

wr250

Quote from: area51drone on December 21, 2013, 08:15:43 PM
You can play them on a virtual PC running on your desktop too.    Check out "Microsoft Virtual PC"..  I have a Windows 2000 box, a Windows 98 box and an Unbuntu box all running on my regular xp machine now and then for various reasons - the 98 box is typically on just to play old games.
i personally use virtualbox, but then im just a poor boy.

area51drone

Quote from: wr250 on December 21, 2013, 09:46:43 PM

i personally use virtualbox, but then im just a poor boy.

Virtual PC from Microsoft is free, I guess at long as you own a Microsoft OS.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3702




Help me choose my next oddball project:

1) The Scrambler: Fills your URL history with a large amount of sites you did not visit. The variety is enough to fool pattern recognition sites that try to estimate your buying patterns.

2) Bot Pit: Bot Pit attempts to trick webcrawler bots into infinite recursive loops, for example, consistent calls to a random number generator. The idea being to take advantage of programmer's use of the while loop.

3) I8U: Logs advertisers that shows you images and places them on a blacklist. It allows you to automatically generate posts about how disappointed you are with the advertiser, and includes quickly generated memes showing the product being used by distatseful people (think Obamaphone).

area51drone

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on December 23, 2013, 03:31:35 AM
Help me choose my next oddball project:

1) The Scrambler: Fills your URL history with a large amount of sites you did not visit. The variety is enough to fool pattern recognition sites that try to estimate your buying patterns.

2) Bot Pit: Bot Pit attempts to trick webcrawler bots into infinite recursive loops, for example, consistent calls to a random number generator. The idea being to take advantage of programmer's use of the while loop.

3) I8U: Logs advertisers that shows you images and places them on a blacklist. It allows you to automatically generate posts about how disappointed you are with the advertiser, and includes quickly generated memes showing the product being used by distatseful people (think Obamaphone).

Hmm..  #2 sounds cool, but I think they probably end the recursion after a few iterations of the loop, so I don't see how that will kill the bots.
#3  So you are going to enable the ability to mark ads that aren't already blocked by programs such as ABP?  Or is this supposed to be a ABP replacement?   Because ABP is pretty damned good.  I can't remember the last time I saw an ad unless I turn it off.
#1 is probably my favorite of the bunch. 

Another idea would be to obfuscate URLs in the history, so you can browse without anyone being able to look at your history and quickly see what you were looking at, or maybe even password protect the history so it couldn't be read without knowing the key.

I like your thinking though MFM.


Quote from: area51drone on December 23, 2013, 11:38:27 AM
Hmm..  #2 sounds cool, but I think they probably end the recursion after a few iterations of the loop, so I don't see how that will kill the bots.
I would probably disguise them as pages, and most bots will try to open every page and record every link. I'm looking into finding ways that break regular expression processing too (mixing binary streams with normal strings?). Still thinking of ideas. The goal is very little data given and it takes a considerable amount of time to process.

Quote
#3  So you are going to enable the ability to mark ads that aren't already blocked by programs such as ABP?  Or is this supposed to be a ABP replacement?   Because ABP is pretty damned good.  I can't remember the last time I saw an ad unless I turn it off.
#1 is probably my favorite of the bunch.

I was thinking of embedded ads masquerading as content in things like facebook feeds. A banner ad on a site doesn't bother me too much.


area51drone

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on December 23, 2013, 05:53:03 PM
I would probably disguise them as pages, and most bots will try to open every page and record every link. I'm looking into finding ways that break regular expression processing too (mixing binary streams with normal strings?). Still thinking of ideas. The goal is very little data given and it takes a considerable amount of time to process.

My guess is that most bots assume there aren't hundreds of levels (let alone thousands) of links deep on any website, and that any content that would be placed that deeply wouldn't be very relevant to a user since it would be difficult for a human to navigate, hence they'd just stop the bot.   But it is an interesting idea.  I am willing to bet it has been tried before, and most bot creators have probably gone through this experiment just in testing.    They're not dumb either - if you have some rinky dink domain that hardly anyone one is linking to -  that out of no where has more pages in it than say Yahoo, it probably triggers a flag and the domain is marked as spam.   

Quote
I was thinking of embedded ads masquerading as content in things like facebook feeds. A banner ad on a site doesn't bother me too much.

Huh?  Is this in reference to the bot pit or I8U?  I don't follow in either way.   Why don't you do something useful with your time though, seriously.  You apparently have some coding skills, if you want some real projects to work on, contact me and I'll pay you to do them.

Quote from: area51drone on December 23, 2013, 10:50:52 PM
Huh?  Is this in reference to the bot pit or I8U?  I don't follow in either way.   Why don't you do something useful with your time though, seriously.  You apparently have some coding skills, if you want some real projects to work on, contact me and I'll pay you to do them.
It was in reference to I8U. Thanks for the offer-I'm guessing you do some kind of mining/price arbitrage programming? This is just a side project. I was mainly looking for something unusual to do in my spare time-mainly as mental gymnastics, no real goal for developing anything or career with this.

area51drone

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on December 24, 2013, 10:55:35 AM
It was in reference to I8U. Thanks for the offer-I'm guessing you do some kind of mining/price arbitrage programming? This is just a side project. I was mainly looking for something unusual to do in my spare time-mainly as mental gymnastics, no real goal for developing anything or career with this.

No, actually looking to get some android/iphone game programming done.  Pricing software is already done ;)

Also looking for anyone who can animate and has skills with Anime Studio Pro.


steelbot

Quote from: area51drone on December 24, 2013, 02:12:06 PM
No, actually looking to get some android/iphone game programming done.  Pricing software is already done ;)

Also looking for anyone who can animate and has skills with Anime Studio Pro.
May talk to Coaster.....he's quite good with cinema4D i believe....
I am going to look at that Anime Studio though....I like to tinker - (the Aquarius in me lol)

area51drone

Quote from: steelbot on December 24, 2013, 09:13:41 PM
May talk to Coaster.....he's quite good with cinema4D i believe....
I am going to look at that Anime Studio though....I like to tinker - (the Aquarius in me lol)

Yeah definitely check it out.  Kind of amazing how far technology has come.



MV/Liberace!

Quote from: area51drone on December 31, 2013, 11:53:05 AM
So 2009.  You aren't using nzbclub?

demonoid was one of the greatest repositories of rare, useful gems (from obscure software to any form of media) on the internet.  if all of that remains when they reopen, i'll be very pleased.

slippingaway

Quote from: MV on November 28, 2012, 10:31:07 PM
if you have windows 8 and miss your start menu, try this.  works great.
A good FREE alternative is IObit's Start Menu 8 available HERE

area51drone

Quote from: MV on December 31, 2013, 02:08:16 PM
demonoid was one of the greatest repositories of rare, useful gems (from obscure software to any form of media) on the internet.  if all of that remains when they reopen, i'll be very pleased.

There are so many things that I haven't not been able to find on usenet, and it's a hell of a lot safer.   Very rarely do I ever have to torrent anything.   You don't think the seeders are long gone at this point?

b_dubb

where can a brother download the last episodes of breaking bad.  not that i'd actually do that.  i'm just curious

MV/Liberace!

Quote from: b_dubb on January 02, 2014, 01:43:36 PM
where can a brother download the last episodes of breaking bad.  not that i'd actually do that.  i'm just curious

hit the pirate bay.

MV/Liberace!

Quote from: slippingaway on December 31, 2013, 03:03:41 PM
A good FREE alternative is IObit's Start Menu 8 available HERE

thanks, i'll try that.  in the past i had tried using classic shell (also free) on a few of the win8 machines to come through the office here, but i had mixed results with that.  start8 has always been consistently reliable, and since my customers pay the freight when i install it, i just decided to stop looking for an alternative.  i always buy the start8/modern mix bundle.  modern mix makes all "metro" screens conventionally windowed so they can be resized or run on the desktop like common applications.  modern mix is a must have. 

wr250

Quote from: MV on December 31, 2013, 02:08:16 PM
demonoid was one of the greatest repositories of rare, useful gems (from obscure software to any form of media) on the internet.  if all of that remains when they reopen, i'll be very pleased.

take a look at www.d2.vu
as far as windows8 , i use linux exclusively




analog kid

Quote from: area51drone on January 02, 2014, 12:46:58 AM
There are so many things that I haven't not been able to find on usenet, and it's a hell of a lot safer.   Very rarely do I ever have to torrent anything.   You don't think the seeders are long gone at this point?

Do you pay for the server? Does everything still have to be packed and split into 20 parts? Haven't used Usenet since the 90s and no real desire to return there. That or those Jdownloader / Hotfiles days.


ziznak

Quote from: wr250 on January 02, 2014, 02:21:03 PM
take a look at www.d2.vu

I noticed a comment on that other "pirate" type site that I accidentally landed on earlier... it mentioned demonoid having a fake resurrection.  Has anybody with an old demonoid user account tried to get in at D2 or use the password retrieval?  I can't help but be hopeful  BUT... seems too good to be true.

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