Messages

1066

Trouble Shooting / Re: R1Q2 troubles

« on: August 03, 2008, 08:29:53 AM »

No.

Try this:

Put -nopathcheck on the command line you use to launch r1q2. This will require changing it in the program you use to launch it or in the desktop shortcut.

1067

Trouble Shooting / Re: R1Q2 troubles

« on: August 02, 2008, 10:38:42 PM »

Install Quake2 in \quake2 on any drive. Don't install it in a deep path like c:\program files\idsoftware\quake2

The message is caused by a safety check of the path to your Quake2 installation to prevent buffer overflows.



There are two problems:
1
Quake2 defines MAX_OSPATH as 128 characters.
R1ch subtracts MAX_QPATH (64 bytes) from it to obtain 64 characters that he will allow for a path to the current directory of the game. This is needed to establish the buffer size for Quake 2 to access the file system and I suppose the 50/50 split was deemed reasonable.

2
All old mods and many current ones use this same 128 character limit from "q_shared.h" so the buffer must be fixed at that size or it could potentially break (crash) most mods.

The fundamental error is that under Windows NT systems: NT, XP, Vista, the true MAX_PATH constant defined for the OS is 260 characters and that is the constant that Quake 2 code should have used in the first place.

I believe the MAX_PATH for Windows 95/98 was 256 as that was the standard in C90/99 at that time.

To top it all off, Linux can use values from 256 to 4096 depending on flavor and vintage and it's called PATH_MAX in <linux/limits.h> with the additional limit that NAME_MAX is 255 or thereabouts.



Anyway, move your Quake 2 installation and you will be fine.

1068

/dev/random / Re: My life flashed before my eyes...

« on: July 27, 2008, 08:02:06 PM »

If they paid for an FBI report and to have you bonded they paid for a credit check. The fees charged by the CRA's are very small to banks, IIRC, on the order of $10 or $25, small change compared to running NCIC or FBI on you. Most places have an account with Experian or TRW and they can do it in about 5 minutes or less. A bank can run your credit report cheaper than you can... up until the federally mandated free annual one became law.

Ever test driven a car at the dealership? Did they make a copy of your drivers license before you went on the road with the salesman? Guess what the back office at the dealer was doing while you were checking out that spiffy new car... they were running your credit to see if you had spiffy credit to buy the car. It is also the basis for the interest rate and/or down payment on the loan they will offer you should you decide to buy it.

One customer I attend does BI's on anyone coming to the facility for longer than a couple of weeks. We're talking full DoD clearances, etc. They have you sign a FCRA disclosure form where you must agree to allow them to run a credit check. They are more concerned with that aspect of the forms than any other. The DoD stuff can be run no matter what and they do, but you better sign this here FCRA form or else.

1069

poetry / essays / short stories? / Re: Quotes

« on: July 26, 2008, 09:23:41 PM »

I had nothing left to double up with. I limit myself to a certain amount of cash in hand when we hit town. Once the cash is gone, that's it. Time to hit the shows or dinner and chase the wife upstairs or head home. Best I ever did was two $100 jackpots one night on a $1 progressive slot machine cluster. Total winnings paid for the trip plus $47. Second best was $90 jackpot on a quarter machine the first night in Vegas while attending CES. Dropped another $400 the rest of the weekend. Where'd that guy go with the "Quit while your ahead" advice?

1070

poetry / essays / short stories? / Re: Quotes

« on: July 26, 2008, 02:54:32 PM »

who is the fool who said, "Quit while you're ahead"?

The stick man at the craps table in Vegas... just before I put it all on the field. 7 in 12 chance paying out 1 to 1, better than 50% odds, and leave it to me to lose it.

LOL! and to that he says "Double up, catch up." ... as I watch my last $5 chip on the come and my wife rolls a natural against the point.

1071

/dev/random / Re: My life flashed before my eyes...

« on: July 26, 2008, 02:32:08 PM »

I've worked in the corporate back end of 2 banks and and a school, and have had everything from FBI background checks to a thorough review of all my places of residency since 10 years before I was born. So far no credit checks.

I guess some places feel that if a person is irresponsible enough to default on loans, then they're probably not going to be a responsible employee either. Makes a little sense, but I still find it to be a loathsome practice. Sometimes these companies overstep their boundaries. Christ, at what point does someones personal life become THEIR OWN???

Short answer: Never. Your personal life and the evidence (credit report) of it indicates who you are.
A person deep in debt might be inclined to steal or embezzle. A person in debt might be bribable or encouraged to spy for money. A person with a bad habit involving expensive "services" or items might be blackmailed into doing something illegal or against his employer. Background checks for jobs involving security clearances always involve credit checks. The fact you didn't detect the credit check does not mean it didn't happen.

1072

/dev/random / Re: My life flashed before my eyes...

« on: July 26, 2008, 02:01:57 PM »

bank held my large "credit" against me.  Said I had to much credit.  WTF?  Never payed a bill late, never ran a balance in anything.

That's odd. Must mean that they can't get enough money from you in interest.

My dad has awesome credit. I wish he'd tell me his secrets.

I'd ask him. I didn't ask my dad and I wish I had, but then he watched me build my credit when I was young and I am sure he would have said something if I was being an idiot about it. My first CC was a dept. store card (now inactive) and 2nd was a Visa that I still keep active.

Simple answer: Use your credit wisely.
Don't run up big balances and then under-pay or pay monthly minimums. Don't spend on credit more than you could otherwise afford to pay in cash that month or in a month or two. Pay off your credit card balances first, then keep them low. Don't close unused credit accounts. Keep them locked up once they are zero-balance. Close the ones that charge annual fees but never close more than one per year, that will hurt your credit score even if you initiate the closure. If you have annual-fee cards, call the CC company and see if you can get them to make it fee-free, it never hurts to ask. If they don't have a free card, take a lower interest rate, they do want to keep you if you are paying as agreed. An inactive credit card shows "Pays as agreed" even though it is classed inactive by the CC company holding it.

If you have CC balances, pay the highest interest rate cards off first, pay twice the minimum or 1/2 the balance off until you get to zero, then lock them up and don't use them except in dire emergencies. Pay off car loans on schedule, double up if you can afford to, especially early on in the life of the loan as that will pay down the principle ahead of schedule and you will save the interest. Don't pay it off too early if their is a early payoff penalty. Pay it on schedule and bank any reserve cash after your monthly budget.

Always keep a savings, even if you can only afford to put away $50.00 a month. Don't buy that Wii or 72-inch TV if you have to give up spare cash each month. You simply can't afford not to save and luxury items are NOT a necessity of life even if the commercials tell you they are. Instant gratification won't make you truly happy if you have to remain in debt.

Keep your job, layoffs can be unavoidable but don't be a 2-year per job resumé builder. Continuous employment at one employer for 5 or 6 years is much better than 3 employers over the same period. When I see resumés of 30 year old VP's who spend two years at places and move on with all kinds of "lean" and "saved costs" and "Black-belt" and "implemented JIT" and other buzz words I see a guy who has no commitment to the company he works for who is solely interested in his own career and hasn't learned anything useful except how to polish a resumé or his bosses knob. Because at 30, he didn't "implement" anything, he participated, probably as a minor player in a commitee who steered the project and they probably fouled the whole thing up so bad they made up the numbers just so the President could claim it a success.

If in school, stay in school. Student loans may feel like an axe over your head but if you can stay in school during a job slump in your region you will be better off in the long run.

If graduating, look for a job with good long-term prospects, preferrably in a position that is a profit-making position rather than an overhead position. Being in Management may seem attractive but new hired "management" is a liability when profits are low and layoffs are coming.

Never let a lender talk you into taking on more debt than you can afford. How much can you afford? If you have to eat dog food to make the monthly mortgage, it's probably more than you can afford. That big house comes AFTER you have that cushy management job at the local chip foundary.

Your credit score does NOT depend on whether you keep a balance on a CC or whether they are making money off you on interest. They make money on each transaction so the interest you pay is gravy to them. It's also really stupid to keep a balance on a card when you can afford to pay it off.

1073

/dev/random / Re: My life flashed before my eyes...

« on: July 26, 2008, 01:33:22 PM »

to top it off I had to ARGUE with the bank that I didn't want to spend as much money as they wanted to give us.   Why?  Because I knew how much we could afford monthly & what they said we should do was WAY more then we could afford.  They didn't seem to care we needed to eat & pay taxes on the house. 

Just maybe that is the reason why the banking industry is in bad shape today?

Yep. They over-extended to get their commissions, got tacit or even active approval from their underwriters and now we see the results.

1074

Jokes / Re: Nerd Humor.. har har

« on: July 20, 2008, 07:46:51 AM »

Man, that takes me back. I coveted a Cromemco when I was in college. Now I am glad I couldn't afford one at the time. Somewhere in my attic I have an Imsai front panel from the good old S-100 days. I have some nice Z80 microcomputers on STD Bus cards too. They were a lot better.

1075

Bot Drop / Re: Failed file check

« on: July 20, 2008, 07:38:25 AM »

A better course of action might be to send them in to the admins for evaluation and addition to the approved files list for the server in question.

1076

Bot Drop / Re: Failed file check

« on: July 19, 2008, 03:36:25 PM »

I think the intent of the file checks is to identify the files that are "not approved" for the particular server. They may be common files on other servers or mods. The approved list is not all-encompassing. It also means the player in question is using files of the same name and path of the "approved" files but they are not identical. This can be true for files in customized paks on the server or on the client. The server could have customized files and the player could be using "vanilla" files. Only by checking them can you actually know which case it is. The vanilla files should have been on the approved list for the server but sometimes things can be missed.

WAV files can be used to time respawns of powerups and give the player useful information about when a powerup is close to respawning. If he is consistently close to the powerup when it respawns this is a clue that he may be using them.

I believe the MD5 hash of the failed file on the client is logged in the server anticheat log. The system admin should be reviewing those logs, identifying the files and getting copies of those failed files and checking their MD5 hashes against the logged events. Once the file is identified this way it can be determined if it is a "cheat" in the context of that particular server or not. If the file is a cheat, it can be added to the "not-approved" list and the automation can kick the player in response, but that is an admin configuration choice for the particular server.

I should also mention that the best source for the questionable files is the player identified with them. If the player is reluctant to provide them for review, it may be wise to set the server to ban those questionable files and kick the player(s) in question.

1077

Religion, and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist / Re: Ye Religion Thread

« on: July 16, 2008, 08:13:00 PM »

To say the laws of nature arise out of chaos without a Creator is to say entropy can be reversed and matter arises from nothing, assembles itself into complex structures and then spends the rest of eternity in decay.

This seems to be stated somewhat in the manner of a False Dilemma.  We've already discovered and observed processes and laws by which matter does indeed assemble itself into complex structures.  So we're left pondering the cause of the Big Bang.  Even if entropy were violated, why make the leap to positing something as complex as a Creator?  (A creator who by definition should be complex enough to ponder the question of its own origins?)

As Bertrand Russell said so succinctly, "If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument."

Can the universe create itself? Is then the universe not God?

The semantics here seem murky.  Why not instead ask if the universe is just some kind of weird entropy-violating perpetual motion machine?  Why bring "God" into it by default?  Are there NO other possibilities?


[1] Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer, Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 97

I brought up Einstein to illustrate the folly of setting up Hawking as the smartest guy of his time as an authority on the existence or non-existence of God. No one can "prove" god, it's folly to attempt it. Decartes was another example and the best he could do was the "I think, therefor I am." postulate. Isn't it interesting that in the mythical story of Moses on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments when he asked God his name the reply was "I am that I am."

False dilemma? I don't think so. The observable universe always runs toward increasing entropy but then again there is a lot of unobserved universe out there. As far as increasing complexity is concerned, these are processes where entropy is decreased in one locality at the expense of an increase of entropy in another. My main point was that the human brain inescapably ascribes a prime mover to every effect. The dilemma is how to escape the trap.

Bertrand Russell was a self-confessed atheist and an excellent writer.

Einstein may never have accepted a personal God but he was still confined by his childhood social programming enough to say "God doesn't play dice..." and to speak in public as a believer in some kind of God. This is what I was trying to illustrate about mankind's inability to escape from the concepts of alpha-omega and a prime mover.

Name something that doesn't have a cause? We can't escape it. We even have to say the "cause" of the universe was the big bang. The end of the universe is the big crunch. Einstein tried and failed to describe an eternal universe. But this all still leaves the question unanswered about the certainty of the fundamental nature of it.

You didn't honestly answer the two questions, but they were largely rhetorical. I wanted to see if anyone would fall into the trap of explaining a self-creating universe or a Pantheism.

A weird entropy-violating perpetual motion machine? Weirdness is "the unexplained", this doesn't satisfy the requirements of the TOE whose goal it is to explain everything. To accept "weirdness" as an explanation is to cop out of the whole discussion.

No other possibilities? I never said there were no other possibilities, I only posed questions.

1078

Religion, and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist / Re: Ye Religion Thread

« on: July 15, 2008, 08:18:33 PM »

Yawn.

Einstein was Jewish and was considered the smartest man alive in his time. He regarded mathematics as the key to understanding the fundamental design of the universe. His famous phrase, "God does not play dice with the world [universe]" was his counter-argument to Max Planck's quantum mechanics. He said this even though Einstein's own photoelectric effect and photon theory of light depended on it. The quest for the Grand Unification Theory (GUT) is a quest for that same kind of understanding. The theory about the Theory of Everything (TOE) is that it will be both elegant and beautiful in it's symmetry and simplicity. The idea that the universe could be explained and understood and that the laws of physics would exist without a Creator was completely foreign to their minds.

Today we know Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity are correct and Planck's Quantum Mechanics are also correct and they both apply to every place in the universe as far as we can observe. To say the laws of nature arise out of chaos without a Creator is to say entropy can be reversed and matter arises from nothing, assembles itself into complex structures and then spends the rest of eternity in decay. Can the universe create itself? Is then the universe not God? The mind of man is nowhere near ready to encompass the questions, much less determine the answers.

1079

Quake / Re: BEN - Random Deathmatch Map Generator for Quake2

« on: July 08, 2008, 08:32:12 PM »

The map would already exist as a file unless the server and client clean up at the end of the level after moving into the new map. There would be no need for a "vote savemap" command unless you were going to keep a collection of favs. Saving faves would be self-defeating of a "random map" server but a good map is a terrible thing to waste.

Depending on the map sizes and textures it looks like a typical Ben2 medium sized map is about 1MB, simple download from game server to the clients would be sufficient unless you want to que them to the client before play to be sure everybody has them and can enter the map simultaneously. This would guarantee that no one would have advantage of exploring the map before everyone downloaded and entered.

1080

Quake / Re: BEN - Random Deathmatch Map Generator for Quake2

« on: July 04, 2008, 05:08:49 PM »

Suggestions and comments:
1. A setting for pointing to custom quake2 executable. Default is quake2.exe, it would be nice to be able to launch user choice of binary like r1q2, q2ace, etc.
2. Maybe a mod setting while you're at it to allow launch into mods for testing the map under that mod.

I noticed on a big map, 100 moves, 12 branches, 4 x 4 on all rooms settings and 5% prob. that there were some vertical railing posts on some platforms. No horizonals railing attached.