mapfortu's Journal: 140925 (background)

140925. video games.

Today homeless mentioned an idea for a video game or a movie. Let him work on the movie with the entertainment department. A few of the other court members and I were wondering how the video game would be any different than a typical game of the Sims, or similar, with a script pack for all of the workers and their households and the associated social community structure around them. We began working out a game scenario.

The character is Petros Corencelli. You live in a world where software is not as freely written as it seems. Software has been around for too many thousands of years, and cruft is to software as filibuster is to politics. Worse than boilerplate. A cheap facade of semi-configurable boilerplate for the purpose of wasting time, you suppose. You are Petros Corencelli, and you can tell them the quick story about software, because they're offering to pay you to crack this old piece of junk, and you are an honest cracker, and you don't want to fool them into thinking that this one is difficult. Ten, fifteen minutes, at most, and you will be able to turn the core like a rubics cube, make it sing, dance, do tricks, bring pop-ups to the screen or kill them, pop the DVD drive open and eject any sticks plugged in any of the ports, whatever they want. Okay, great, so what's the quick story on software?

Just like you said. It's worse than a fisher-price game. All the buttons are there, but they long since ceased to work for anything practical. All decoration. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years ago the Six Point Uberlink Software Corporation did indeed standardize all software. It happened, it was sad, but they had the money and the political support and bought controlling share of all the operable fiber on the planet and they did it. You could not produce a running program, anywhere, without using the six hundred point profiling process. What was the six hundred point profiling process? A one-time check on the user, a timer, with some sort of window frame around it to give the user a score between one and six hundred. The score was reported and there really is no point in discussing what the result was used for or how it was compiled or how carefully it was tracked. This was the Six Point Uberlink Software Corporation and they did indeed buy the planet software business. It was impossible to produce a running executable on any operation machine without applying the profiling process. In the earliest days, such as the piece of junk the client was asking about, the profiling was at the first available user text input and the scoring mechanism was related to the amount of time between the appearance of the prompt and the user achieving the enter key. Quite easy, quite simple. The program was text based, the first available user input was near immediately, and the user was eventually going to achieve the enter key. Some sort of timer was applied with a window which provided a score between one and six hundred for the user and the score was reported. Very simple.

Some users, in the hardcore, began deliberately fouling the scoring process by holding the enter key down from the moment they invoked the program. Then came the security wars, when Six Point began buffering the keyboard queue against such false reporting and a queue full of enter when the program began was flushed until the user appeared sane. Then the particular enter prompt used for the sampling was available to be manipulated to any user keyboard-to-enter sequence anywhere at any time in the program. Such manipulations were very technical, and the authors of such programs usually had to simplify the six hundred point profiling down into configurable switches for end user programs using their boilerplate programs to apply the six hundred point profile to their particular program. The switches and configuration options usually provided four or five standard forms, deeper switches allowed for a few groups of a few dozen more which were easily configurable.

I'm talking about bootloaders... obviously.