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What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

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Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#91

Post by self_awareness »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #72
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good old InstallShield. At one point it was everywhere, and then... it wasn't. I keep all the bundled installers I've ever had in a folder. Currently there are files there from 2009 onwards (older ones are archived somewhere). I didn't bother looking for the older ones, but running grep -a ether-rot-mutex quickly yielded a match containing the entire snippet! The culprit is the installer for Ulead (now Corel) PhotoIm…

Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a…

But it had to solve some original problem (while maybe introducing others). Otherwise it wouldn't be used?

From user's POV, I've always preferred IS installers than Wise, but I haven't created any packages even once. I was always just the "next-next-finish"-type of user ;)

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#92

Post by ivanche »

nunez wrote: post #61

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…

Somewhere I’ve heard that you could replace MZ with ZM and exe will continue to work. Never tried it though.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#93

Post by badsectoracula »

self_awareness wrote: post #91
xyzzy123 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a…

But it had to solve some original problem (while maybe introducing others). Otherwise it wouldn't be used? From user's POV, I've always preferred IS installers than Wise, but I haven't created any packages even once. I was always just the "next-next-finish"-type of user ;)

A cut down (but still very functional) version of Install Shield came bundled with Visual Studio, Delphi, C++ Builder and perhaps others (they were somewhat customized versions for each) so for many it was available out of the box.

And the included version had a wizard to quickly create an installation project so unless you wanted something advanced, making an installer was a matter of selecting your program's files, the name of any Start menu shortcuts (and perhaps a couple of other things i forget) and then building the installer. For a ton of people it was more than enough.

I think at the time its main "drawback" was that it made installer downloads from the internet a bit awkward since it generated tons of files, but many archiving tools (WinZip, WinRAR, etc) added options for making self-extracting archives that can launch applications, so the combo of a WinZip self-extracting archive that launches an InstallShield setup.exe was very common for a very long time.

But basically the reason it was used a lot was that it was easily available to the users of the most popular development tools at the time.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#94

Post by [deleted] »

self_awareness wrote: post #91
xyzzy123 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a…

But it had to solve some original problem (while maybe introducing others). Otherwise it wouldn't be used? From user's POV, I've always preferred IS installers than Wise, but I haven't created any packages even once. I was always just the "next-next-finish"-type of user ;)

[deleted]

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#95

Post by [deleted] »

schoen wrote: post #58
derefr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it ended up in the binary it probably wasn't a comment, in the true sense. In some languages, rather than comments being a special syntactic thing, you just write a string-literal expression as its own statement. Before dead code elimination was a thing, I imagine these string-literals would end up in the binary.

I just checked, and this method is still syntactically valid (though not recommended style) in... C Javascript (Node) Python Perl Ruby Rust The strings did end up in my Python 2.7 .pyc bytecode, though not in my C or Rust binaries. My intuition was that this would work in most of these languages, but not all. For example, I thought Rust would probably complain about a value being unused. There's no such thing in gene…

[deleted]

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#96

Post by pjc50 »

self_awareness wrote: post #91
xyzzy123 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a…

But it had to solve some original problem (while maybe introducing others). Otherwise it wouldn't be used? From user's POV, I've always preferred IS installers than Wise, but I haven't created any packages even once. I was always just the "next-next-finish"-type of user ;)

It made you a standard executable Windows installer. Inexplicably there wasn't a decent first-party Microsoft solution to this until the Microsoft Store era.

There wasn't really effective competition, probably because it's hard to get people to pay for developer tools and it's a hard problem to do well.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#97

Post by secondcoming »

nunez wrote: post #61

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…

This isn't steganography though, it's a string compiled into an executable. It's not hidden.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#98

Post by gpvos »

nunez wrote: post #61

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…

Or "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a software factory!" in an invisible part of a dialog template.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#99

Post by secondcoming »

greenhorn123 wrote: post #73
nunez wrote: post #61

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…

Hackintoshes did not necessarily steal MacOS, you could buy legit copies of MacOS.

I have a Snow Leopard CD somewhere

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#100

Post by [deleted] »

medstrom wrote: post #80
nunez wrote: post #61

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…

To clarify why that's supposed to be cool, "MZ" are the initials of Mark Zbikowski, one of the leading developers of MS-DOS.

[deleted]
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