PhysicsFS: 1.0.2 and 2.0.0 released! http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=4514 icculus.org: CVS, your days are numbered! We are pulling the plug on cvs.icculus.org on March 31st! http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=4508 I take back what I said about CloudFront...if you need to push 3 terrabytes a month, you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month so strangers can play Postal 2 and Prey for free. Sadly, no one else seems better. Sony charging publishers 16 cents/gigabyte for DLC makes a lot of sense now...it's one cent cheaper than Amazon's base rate. :( What does one do, when one gives out gigabytes of free shit? At least when someone buys a game based on a demo, those 16 pennies seem like a darn good investment. But if my attach rate for these big-ass servers, demos, and installers was 100%, it would still gain me zero bucks, not counting the 400 bucks a month spent on bandwidth. Man, I need a sugar daddy at Akamai so badly. Other stuff: My rant from yesterday stands, but I wanted to add some notes: - There is apparently a freedesktop thing, but looking aside the infuriating need to stick "XDG" on everything, I'm not sure I dig on the idea of using environment variables. I'd rather this have to call a piece of system-controlled code that can set policy, and handle things like creating directories, etc, so every app that needs to be changed needs extremely minimal changes, and reduce their ability to get things wrong. Granted, that system code could respect these XDG_* variables if that makes sense. Even looking beside that: dude, it's 2009, can we stop using environment variables and shell scripts for everything? Is it heresy to ask that? Honest to god, though: how'd that $BROWSER thing work out? - My code example wasn't meant to be a locked down API. I'd change things in it already. - Someone pointed out GoboLinux. That's sort of what I'd like to see, but I'm not really concerned with /bin and friends all that much, and the symlink soup they do is kind of nasty...but it still proves this is a feasible thing. I think Mac OS X might have that more or less done right: /bin, /usr, /etc (etc!) all still exist and have things you'd expect, and the Unix Goodness is there...but they also have an /Applications directory for all the bundled apps that the end user (not the Unix command line guru) cares about. For that, it's possible that klik is moving in the right direction. I'm not sure, though. I think there's a lot of hostility to the idea of Application Bundles, since the primary beneficiary might be closed-source software. This is probably why there's no pleasant equivalent of OS X .dmg files, either. But that's not the hill I want to die on right now, so we'll fight that fight another day. - Fundamentally, the hurdle is not designing a solution. That takes ten minutes. The hurdle is patching, and patching, and patching. --ryan.