I was thinking about installer programs on the way into school this morning. With multi-CD games still being distributed (as there are still people out there without DVD drives in their computers, those damned heathens), I'm wondering why the hell they don't have autoplay programs on CDs 2..n (where n is the last CD of the set starting at 1) that will tell the installer program that yes, I did insert the next fucking disc so it'll get on with it already. How bloody difficult is it to make your own dialog for the "swap disc" notice, with a hWnd that can be put into the registry or somewhere where the next autorun program can find it and pass along a WM_USER message informing it that the noob need not click on "OK"? FFS, this is simple Windows programming, not rocket science.
However, the next topic might be. I was thinking about key generation, and came to the idea of keys being programs for Turing (or von Neumann) machines, that when run, will cause themselves to be output. The generation of such keys/programs would not be trivial, but that could also make the situation untenable for getting keys to print on the CD cases in the first place.
Next, I turned to the idea of prime numbers stored in base 36 (0-9A-Z) form. Did you know that there are over 8.08e10 different numbers in decimal for 25 base-36 numbers? I highly doubt that we'll be able to calculate all the primes up to 808,281,277,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 before I die, and even then, determining on a home system if the number is prime or not will probably mean whatever checks the key on the home machine will take a good several years, 6k+-1 be damned.
What about 5 prime numbers in some special order (perhaps sequential, or something else) stored as five digit base 36 characters? The highest number, decimal, in that case would be 60,466,175 (assuming that you're counting from 0), and it might actually be reasonable in that case to generate keys at the factory and check them at home.
...
That was quite the brainfart on the bus this early February morn. While key management isn't my usual thing, with the issues of piracy and security and whatnot, I actually applied myself, in my usual half-ass manner, to figuring some of this crap out. I'd also like to note that all three of my journal entries as yet have been on Fridays. Coincidence? Yes, actually.
