Eve Online Followup



  • The developers of Eve Online have posted an explanation of how the now infamous boot.ini-overwrite bug came about: Here it is



  • Nice! I can only agree with the comments of that article. If more MMOs would treat their users like that, the world would be a better place.



  • While reading it, I hated it when they said that they called in the developers in the middle of the night. That's always my #1 fear when I'm a developer...



  • @rbowes said:

    While reading it, I hated it when they said that they called in the developers in the middle of the night. That's always my #1 fear when I'm a developer...

    The best is when they call you in the middle of the night about something that's going to sit around for another month waiting until the next release cycle anyhow....
     



  • @vt_mruhlin said:

    @rbowes said:

    While reading it, I hated it when they said that they called in the developers in the middle of the night. That's always my #1 fear when I'm a developer...

    The best is when they call you in the middle of the night about something that's going to sit around for another month waiting until the next release cycle anyhow....

    I've seen this kind of behaviour before. It doesn't matter whether you're doing anything productive, they just want the appearance of activity. I get this every time one of our DSL lines fails on a Friday afternoon - nobody is willing to accept that it just is not going to get fixed until Monday (because all our contracts are next-working-day and there's nothing I can do to make the telecom send an engineer out that evening). There's always a great rush of useless activity, and the line is fixed on Monday anyway.



  • @rbowes said:

    While reading it, I hated it when they said that they called in the developers in the middle of the night. That's always my #1 fear when I'm a developer...

    Heh; if my company called me up in the middle of the night without the promise of a quite staggeringly large bonus I'd hang up on them. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly willing to work long hours where necessary, and I've pulled a literal 24 hour stint before now (6pm Sunday to 6pm Monday), but waking me up late at night and trying to drag me in? No. 



  • If you're getting called in at night, or weekends, or holidays, there better be compensation, especially if it's unplanned, whether that's flex time, bonuses, overtime, etc. etc. etc.

    A well-run operation well never call you in at these times unexpectedly, and if they do, you need to find a new employer, or (re)negotiate compensation.



  • I still think TRWTF is that Windows does not protect files essential to its operation. Of course, such neglect by the Eve Online developers is inexcusable, but if this had been on any other up-to-date operating system, nothing would have happened. If it can happen accidentally, it can happen on purpose. There should be protection.

    Eve Online have fixed it, and they even admit that it was their fault, but that does not change anything about the fact that this was yet another demonstration of Windows's lousy security.
     



  • Unix/Linux do the exact same thing with root.



    Windows does protect against random programs writing to certain files, if you run as a normal user, but alas the default is...



  • Well, Windows isn't completely dumb, if boot.ini on the first partition is hosed, it restores it. And that asks the question: is it a Windows bug that it only restores boot.ini if it's on the first partition? It sounds like it to me!



  • I'm reminded of the beginning of the end for me and my last employer.

    We were getting to the end of the day on Friday, and we had a client that couldn't get my app to run on their system.  So my boss asked me to come in on Saturday to fix it up.  He did not offer any extra time off or compensation, or even a Pop-Tart.  I had very personal reasons for not wanting to work on Saturday.  But that wasn't enough for my boss.  He yelled at me, questioned my loyalty, then cussed at me.  Very endearing.  I walked out.  Luckily, I was able to keep that job until I found another one. 

    The experience ruined me on ever working for a startup company again.  Both of the companies I worked for were run by people who just couldn't make it in the corporate world, so they became their own boss.  Very bad ones.  The web (and open-source software) give more people a chance to start a company and make a few bucks on the internet, but that doesn't make everyone qualified to make a few bucks on the internet. 



  • @PSWorx said:

    Nice! I can only agree with the comments of that article. If more MMOs would treat their users like that, the world would be a better place.

     

    I played it a week... My god, if other MMOs were this BORING then yea they would treat their users like gold. This game you basically spend 2/3 the time "Traveling" in autopilot. And 2/3 of the time i mean i set a course, go watch a show for  30 min/ or hr then play for 15 minutes then set another course. The game has a :"learning" system where you learn by setting a skill on "train" and it trains in say... 1 day. I needed to log in from work ot start skill gain, then log off... The game rewards people who had an account for 2yrs and that in itself makes that account powerful.

     

    I assure you if say... any EA game was that slow-paced, EA would treat every customer as the last man on earth who has money! (though they already should)



  • @marinus said:

    I still think TRWTF is that Windows does not protect files essential to its operation. Of course, such neglect by the Eve Online developers is inexcusable, but if this had been on any other up-to-date operating system, nothing would have happened. If it can happen accidentally, it can happen on purpose. There should be protection.

    Eve Online have fixed it, and they even admit that it was their fault, but that does not change anything about the fact that this was yet another demonstration of Windows's lousy security.
     

     

    TRWTF is that any joe-schmoe can delete that file. Whats boot.ini anyways? My wife deleted it once caz she was "cleaning up" and didn't know what it was. It wasent in /windows/ so she had no idea what to make of it. Yea I want to see someone modify /boot in non-root mode in linux. 



  • @dlikhten said:

     

    TRWTF is that any joe-schmoe can delete that file. Whats boot.ini anyways? My wife deleted it once caz she was "cleaning up" and didn't know what it was. It wasent in /windows/ so she had no idea what to make of it. Yea I want to see someone modify /boot in non-root mode in linux. 


    I want to see someone modify boot.ini in non-administrator mode in windows.



  • @dlikhten said:

    @marinus said:

    I still think TRWTF is that Windows does not protect files essential to its operation. Of course, such neglect by the Eve Online developers is inexcusable, but if this had been on any other up-to-date operating system, nothing would have happened. If it can happen accidentally, it can happen on purpose. There should be protection.

    Eve Online have fixed it, and they even admit that it was their fault, but that does not change anything about the fact that this was yet another demonstration of Windows's lousy security.
     

     

    TRWTF is that any joe-schmoe can delete that file. Whats boot.ini anyways? My wife deleted it once caz she was "cleaning up" and didn't know what it was. It wasent in /windows/ so she had no idea what to make of it. Yea I want to see someone modify /boot in non-root mode in linux. 

     

    Thats just it though, your wife was running as 'root' in Windows. Unfortunately, this is the default for Windows.  But knowing that she is using an account with this much power, she should not have been randomly 'cleaning' like this. Go create a lower privileged user for her, before she starts cleaning again.

    You can't blame windows here... PEBKAC.

     



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Thats just it though, your wife was running as 'root' in Windows. Unfortunately, this is the default for Windows.  But knowing that she is using an account with this much power, she should not have been randomly 'cleaning' like this. Go create a lower privileged user for her, before she starts cleaning again.

    You can't blame windows here... PEBKAC.

    That was the default in XP, but is no longer the case for Vista.



  • @marinus said:

    I still think TRWTF is that Windows does not protect files essential to its operation. Of course, such neglect by the Eve Online developers is inexcusable, but if this had been on any other up-to-date operating system, nothing would have happened. If it can happen accidentally, it can happen on purpose. There should be protection.

    Actually, Windows XP and onwards do. Had this been Win NT, then yeah, the entire filesystem there was defaulted to "Everyone: Full Control", because M$'s army of morons couldn't be bothered to figure out that a multitasking "multi-user" (hah!) OS should be able to isolate files from and between users.

    At least in XP critical files ARE restricted to administrative users:

    C:\>cacls c:\boot.ini
    c:\boot.ini BUILTIN\Power Users:R
                BUILTIN\Administrators:F
                NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:F

    'course, in XP you need to run as Administrator anyways to accomplish most anything, because again Microsoft's army of morons couldn't understand why people would to do stuff, like... say.... type on the keyboard or move the mouse. (ok, it's not that bad, but still...). Vista provides you with the option of elevating privileges when something requires those privileges, but the MS Army of Morons decided to take it to the level of "The system timer interrupt must update the system clock. Cancel/Allow?" every 10 bajillion microseconds.


  • @clively said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    Thats just it though, your wife was running as 'root' in Windows. Unfortunately, this is the default for Windows.  But knowing that she is using an account with this much power, she should not have been randomly 'cleaning' like this. Go create a lower privileged user for her, before she starts cleaning again.

    You can't blame windows here... PEBKAC.

    That was the default in XP, but is no longer the case for Vista.
    Except now Windows users are so used to being root all the time that they claim that UAC is "teh worst feature evar!!11" in Vista. Microsoft has dug itself a nice little bad-practice hole in this regard. Users want security, but because of how previous versions of Windows have behaved, they don't know what security is.



  • @MarcB said:

    @marinus said:

    I still think TRWTF is that Windows does not protect files essential to its operation. Of course, such neglect by the Eve Online developers is inexcusable, but if this had been on any other up-to-date operating system, nothing would have happened. If it can happen accidentally, it can happen on purpose. There should be protection.

    Actually, Windows XP and onwards do. Had this been Win NT, then yeah, the entire filesystem there was defaulted to "Everyone: Full Control", because M$'s army of morons couldn't be bothered to figure out that a multitasking "multi-user" (hah!) OS should be able to isolate files from and between users.

    At least in XP critical files ARE restricted to administrative users:

    C:\>cacls c:\boot.ini
    c:\boot.ini BUILTIN\Power Users:R
                BUILTIN\Administrators:F
                NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:F

    'course, in XP you need to run as Administrator anyways to accomplish most anything, because again Microsoft's army of morons couldn't understand why people would to do stuff, like... say.... type on the keyboard or move the mouse. (ok, it's not that bad, but still...). Vista provides you with the option of elevating privileges when something requires those privileges, but the MS Army of Morons decided to take it to the level of "The system timer interrupt must update the system clock. Cancel/Allow?" every 10 bajillion microseconds.

     While it is obvious just about everything you said here is exaggerated past the point of ridiculous.... and questionably just trolling. I will bite.

    The fact you need administrator privileges constantly in Windows has more to do with the third party developers not following the best practices set forth way back in the Win2k days.

    Yes, MS probably should have enforced these recommendations as rules, but oh well, that is over and done. Now they are trying to enforce it more in Vista and everyone complains because it 'breaks' some poorly written software.

    And if you don't like UAC, you can turn it off. For the average user, I cannot think of too many better options.

     



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    The fact you need administrator privileges constantly in Windows has more to do with the third party developers not following the best practices set forth way back in the Win2k days.
    Actually, it's because of Windows 9x/ME. I read somewhere that Win95 was just supposed to be a bridge between Win3.1 and NT, and if MS stuck to this, there probably wouldn't be so many programs that assume that they can write everywhere. Running as Administrator by default on 2000 and XP just added to the mess.



  • @ender said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    The fact you need administrator privileges constantly in Windows has more to do with the third party developers not following the best practices set forth way back in the Win2k days.
    Actually, it's because of Windows 9x/ME. I read somewhere that Win95 was just supposed to be a bridge between Win3.1 and NT, and if MS stuck to this, there probably wouldn't be so many programs that assume that they can write everywhere. Running as Administrator by default on 2000 and XP just added to the mess.

    Right, the problem stemmed from backwards compatibility. But if they had been strict from the beginning starting with 98 or win 2k, and gradually increased this strictness, there would have been less of a shock factor during the Vista rollout.

    Different priorities over the years... MS used to have backwards compatibility as their top priority, now they are aiming for security...



  • I recognized the installer scripting language they were using as NSIS.  The documentation doesn't explicitly say that you should use the full path or not, but the examples always show $INSTDIR used unless you're using writing a file:

     

    4.9.1.1 Delete

    [/REBOOTOK] file

    Delete file (which can be a file or wildcard, but should be specified with a full path) from the target system. If /REBOOTOK is specified and the file cannot be deleted then the file is deleted when the system reboots -- if the file will be deleted on a reboot, the reboot flag will be set. The error flag is set if files are found and cannot be deleted. The error flag is not set from trying to delete a file that does not exist.

    Delete $INSTDIR\somefile.dat

    Personally, I think that it's poor design on NSIS's part for not having all commands act locally (SetOutPath sets the working directory, but only applies to Rename, File, CreateShortCut, etc).

    On the other hand, it's pretty poor programming to use non-absolute directories when deleting files. 



  • @dlikhten said:

    @PSWorx said:

    Nice! I can only agree with the comments of that article. If more MMOs would treat their users like that, the world would be a better place.

    I played it a week... My god, if other MMOs were this BORING then yea they would treat their users like gold. This game you basically spend 2/3 the time "Traveling" in autopilot. And 2/3 of the time i mean i set a course, go watch a show for  30 min/ or hr then play for 15 minutes then set another course. The game has a :"learning" system where you learn by setting a skill on "train" and it trains in say... 1 day. I needed to log in from work ot start skill gain, then log off... The game rewards people who had an account for 2yrs and that in itself makes that account powerful. 

    I assure you if say... any EA game was that slow-paced, EA would treat every customer as the last man on earth who has money! (though they already should)

    The real WTF is that people can be smart enough to install EVE Online on their computer and still retarded enough to completely misunderstand the game, fail to realize the entire basic reason why the game was created (player interaction), and then whine about how its really boring when they play it as if there are no other players in the game.

    There is a reason why EVE Online is the most popular independently-published MMOG in history, and it appears it went right over your head, out the window, and looked back and stuck its tongue out at you.



  • @Dark Shikari said:

    @dlikhten said:

    @PSWorx said:

    Nice! I can only agree with the comments of that article. If more MMOs would treat their users like that, the world would be a better place.

    I played it a week... My god, if other MMOs were this BORING then yea they would treat their users like gold. This game you basically spend 2/3 the time "Traveling" in autopilot. And 2/3 of the time i mean i set a course, go watch a show for  30 min/ or hr then play for 15 minutes then set another course. The game has a :"learning" system where you learn by setting a skill on "train" and it trains in say... 1 day. I needed to log in from work ot start skill gain, then log off... The game rewards people who had an account for 2yrs and that in itself makes that account powerful. 

    I assure you if say... any EA game was that slow-paced, EA would treat every customer as the last man on earth who has money! (though they already should)

    The real WTF is that people can be smart enough to install EVE Online on their computer and still retarded enough to completely misunderstand the game, fail to realize the entire basic reason why the game was created (player interaction), and then whine about how its really boring when they play it as if there are no other players in the game.

    There is a reason why EVE Online is the most popular independently-published MMOG in history, and it appears it went right over your head, out the window, and looked back and stuck its tongue out at you.

    Much like simple computer 101 ideas went over his head when he bad mouthed MS with vague, misguided arguments like M$ sucks! n00bs!

     


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