The culture within the npm/js community has mainly been one of using the package manager rather than "re-inventing the wheel", as such the blast radius of a compromised package is much greater

It's more to do with the standard library being so barren of common application needs, and looking for a solution that the community has gotten behind. Axios has been a common dependency in many codebases, because it is a solid solution that many have already used. Every developer could try building all the libraries that they would reach for themselves, but then each company has now taken on the task of ensuring their own (much larger) codebase is free from security issues, on top of taking care of their own issues and bugs.

It’s not just NPM, though. Every Rails project and every Rust project I’ve seen ended up with massive numbers of dependencies vs what an equivalent project in Go or C# would have needed.

CPAN too, just try Hailo under Perl to test an old-fashioned chatbot based on Markov chains where very small LLM's and Hailo converge if used with the advanced training options for it. Yes, it will pull tons of dependencies, (less with cpanminus if run with 'cpanm -n Hailo'), but contrary to NPM, Pip and the like CPAN's repos are highly curated and before PHP and ubiquitoous Python Perl was used everywhere, from a sysadmin language (better than Bash/Sh for sure) to CGI, IRC bots and whatnot. How many issues did we have? Zero or near zero.

Since this requires some files from the original Civilization how do people obtain legal copies of the game? It's not available on Steam or GOG

(Or am I being hopelessly naïve by asking such a question?)

You go on eBay or similar site and you pay for a used copy on floppy or CD-ROM. Then using the appropriate tool you back those files up and use them for OpenCiv 1. Cheap, no. Convenient, no. But legal.

If you're lucky you stumble across it in a thrift store that wasn't paying particular attention and assumed it was a puzzle or a board game.

I still have the floppies and manual in a box in the attic. Bit of a hoarder in that way I’m afraid.

Question then is do I need to find a floppy drive to obtain the files or can I get them elsewhere.

Of course who knows if the floppy’s still work. I remember having problems with my Star Trek 25th anniversary floppies around 1996ish, and today it’s 30 years later.

I mean from a legal perspective, original media is the only recourse. But if we expand the options we're willing to avail ourselves of, there's a lot of high quality backups online.

So far as I know, Take-Two Interactive is extremely lenient, especially since they don't offer any way to purchase Civ1 or 2

Not exactly, but under US copyright law there is a limitation of exclusive rights that grants the owner of a copy the right to make an adaptation provided "that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". Unfortunately, the law doesn't specify what "adaptation" means, and I'm not sure the concept of an "essential step" stretches to cover modifying your program to run on a new OS decades after its original host platform has gone extinct.

Regardless, making such a modification for personal use only would be hard for a copyright owner to win a lawsuit over even if they could find out about it. But publicly distributing your derivative work like this is definitely violating the original's copyrights.

Well, I claim that there is no violating of Original copyright whatsoever. The repository doesn't contain any of the contents of the original game disks or any of the files. You could argue that I used a small parts of the work, but that can only fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use doctrine.

It is complicated.

Many games license art works from third parties, in which the game house agreed only to use that art work in one game title.

E.g. a sound track on a game may feel like a small part of the whole game, but it can the complete work from a music producer.

This together with Valve's work on Fex may mean that Android users will be able to install Steam on their devices

Fex is not coming to Android https://wiki.fex-emu.com/index.php/FAQ

> This page was last edited on 22 October 2023, at 09:05.

Since then:

> In Android 16, Google expanded the "Linux Terminal" feature, which was initially introduced in Android 15 QPR2 beta, allowing users to run Linux applications within a virtual machine on their devices. This feature utilizes the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) to create a Debian-based environment where users can execute Linux commands and graphical applications. The guest operating system is fully isolated by the hypervisor (KVM or gunyah) and manages its own resources with its own Linux kernel. Notably, it supports running classic software such as Doom, demonstrating its ability to run full desktop applications.

Fex is already running on android, within things like https://github.com/utkarshdalal/GameNative

Kind of funny to imagine installing the mobile Epic store on a Steam device to get access to the mobile apps that you would otherwise need Google Play Services to access.

I think Amazon finally killed its app store. I wonder if there are any others that have the clout and inclination to register as an alternative app store and actually get developers to bother uploading there.

A less cynical interpretation of his actions would be that he's never shown to be motivated by money and is working on technology that interests him and that he can make an important contribution to

I thought this article would be about preventing your glasses getting steamed up when cooking

Additionally SDL3 is also C and the most recent version of the Box2d physics library was rewritten in C

C++ has many things, and that is why many programmers want to stick with C

if you don't like those things, then don't use them

Some people would rather have a pen knife than a Swiss army knife.

or perhaps a pointed stick?

There are also some things in C that do not work or work differently in C++, such as (void*), empty structures (which in C++ are not really empty), etc; and there is also such C++ stuff such as name mangling, the C++ standard library, etc, even if those things are not a part of your program, which is another reason why you might prefer C.

They became so bad so quickly and now all that's happening is more and more people swearing never to vote Labour again. This is leaving the door open for Reform at the next election.

They won't be any better. Farage is ultimately untrustworthy.

Apathy won the last UK election and we defaulted to a Labour government.

They now seem determined to introduce this digital ID system regardless of how unpopular it is.