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It is not about DRM at all

Not at all you say? Not at all about DRM...then what happened here:

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2012/jan/12/microsoft-confirms-UEFI-fears-locks-down-ARM/

A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.

It also ensures that users cannot do this sort of thing:

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7650

Or even something as simple as this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decss

See, the distinction here is subtle. If the user can modify their kernel, but only when their computer is a special "modify the bootloader" mode (or if the user can sign their own bootloader etc.), then the security argument makes sense. If the user cannot, then there is no security argument, because forbidding the user to modify their own system has nothing to do with security -- unless by "security" you mean "DRM."

If this could be used for gnu/Linux the situation would be great for security.

...and that is a case in point. If this could be used for GNU/Linux it would be great for security; it cannot be, because this is not about the security of the user, but rather the security of privileged "media partners" and other companies. The security that "Secure Boot" is meant to provide is security against secret keys being copied out of RAM by some teenager using a debugger, or cheating in MMOs by people who modified their kernels to defeat anti-cheating technologies, or people who might try to use their computers in ways they were supposed to pay extra to do, and so forth. The adversary in the "Secure Boot" security model is the user of the computer , and that is the problem.

2010 called and wants their ATi card to run stable and stop crashing in any number of PC games: Borderlands, Saboteur etc. There have been public known issues with the 5xxx line of their cards causing system locks because of poor drivers and incompatibilities. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/03/borderlands-glitch-watch-2009-radeon-powered-pc-crashes/ http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101665 etc. etc.

Here are the system specs for BioShock, my system meets their min. sys. req. and here are the req. for R6 Vegas, my video card meets their min. sys. req. and my cpu is barely under, I didn't check the other games. There may be a couple games I can't play but there are 1000's I can.

Hmmmm, if this data is correct, I would have to say that the PS3 will be a flaming failure of death: .

It's clear they just got this technology from our newly-arrived alien overlords. Remember, like how we got the pyramids.

You may be right:

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 16610

"There's no doubting that NVIDIA's new 7800GTX is the ultimate in PC graphics technology. The card's G70 GPU, which is more than twice as powerful as two of NVIDIA's previous top-of-the-line 6800 boards, shares a lot of similar workings with the PS3's RSX chip - only it isn't as fast. Oh, and it retails for $599. "

Rumor has it that the demo was actually played on a 360 in the PS3 booth. The game was shown off back at X05.

link: http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 12682

In the dawn of the PS3, the system specs were all powerful. The almighty Cell processor has 8 SPEs and would take advantage of other Cell processors on the network, such as those in your TV. It was kind of like Devastator, the processors combining to become even more powerful.

Then we find out that Sony is having trouble making Cell chips with 8 working SPEs. So the PS3 is promised to only have 7 working SPEs for each system.

Today we find out that the OS will always consume an SPE and has the right to abduct another when necessary. This reduces the potential number of SPEs that a developer can reliably count on for a game to use at all times is reduced to 5.

The true power of the PS3 keeps being reduced the closer to launch it becomes. Additional features have already been dropped. How many more will evaporate before the PS3 becomes a real device you can go to the store and buy?

"Cell will create a new extensible computing platform. A set-top box containing a Cell chip could, for example, combine to share processing power with a Cell-powered high-definition television to render the graphics of an animated movie."

"A game console might use a chip with 16 cores, while a less complicated device like a set-top box would have a processor with fewer"

"It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948493.html

Don't you think someone should be asking these questions?

Pete Hines from Bethesda Software was kind enough to answer a few question and shed some light on the whole Horse Armor Spectacle. Click here.

Andy Parsons, senior vice president of Pioneer Electronics told Digital Bits, "The PS3 is going to represent an almost overnight population explosion of Blu-ray capable players. That's not something that's really happened before. The PlayStation 2 helped [DVD], because that came well down the road after DVD launched, but it did help to get a lot of players out there. But this is something new."

He added, "The PS3 is launching right at the forefront of Blu-ray. If Sony ships the kind of numbers we expect them to this year, that will provide a very rapid growth of players out there hungry for titles. We've been hearing between four and seven million units could ship."

The title is named Star Trek: Legacy. It's been first revealed by Game Informer Online. The day after, Evil Avatar posted some more some more informations. The game is planned for Xbox 360 and PC, scheduled for a september 2006 release, and is developped by Mac Doc Software (known for Empire Earth, Dungeon Siege and ... Star Trek Armada). The publisher is Bethesda Softworks, known for The Elders Scrolls series, among other titles. An interesting thing to note is that the game will cover the whole Star Trek timeline, from the Enterprise era up to the Voyager's.

We've been having a rather lengthy discussion over at Evil Avatar about this for a few days now.

Of interest is the game's use of Source, using Steam for distribution, and the use of "cartoon-like" graphics. The latter has a few people worried, though who knows what it means.

This has been discussed on Evil Avatar for awhile now. It seems that for Oblivion at least, that statement isn't entirely true

Gavin Carter: The game's code takes advantage of the multithreaded nature of the Xbox 360 and multithreaded PCs to improve just about every aspect of the game. The primary function is to improve framerates by off-loading some work from the main thread to the other processors. We do a variety of tasks on other threads depending on the situation - be it sound and music, renderer tasks, physics calculations, or anything else that could benefit. Loading also gets spread across hardware threads to aid in load times and provide a more seamless experience for the player.

That's not to say that writing software for multiple cores is easy. It's actually extremely hard to synchronize the various tasks that run on the different cores. I suspect that most early games will run slowly on a single core or somewhat inefficiently on multiple cores. It will be quite some time before developers can figure out how to use all of them efficiently enough.

The developer's dream is a single processor console that has a very fast CPU. Unfortunately that's hard to manufacture, so they're stuck with something less than ideal that can be made cheaply with today's technology.

Behold: a not-so-scientific experiment using the new Xbox360 controller. Guess which one wins?

The problem is the editors choosing articles submitted by the site. It definitely doesn't give a good message.

Would you prefer it if the stories were submitted by those same editors, but anonymously?

It sounds like there's going to be some interesting news revealed, anyway - subscribers to the offline, dead-tree CGW have learned a lot more already, it would appear. And for a change, I won't have to buy some crappy games magazine or look for dodgy scans for the information... ;-)

Yeah they did:

http://forums.dvdfile.com/showthread.php?t=54438
http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 3465
http://www.n-philes.com/forums/archive/index.php/t -16902.html

oops sorry, not 100% correct [maybe 80-85%], but interesting nonetheless... read on... http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 2663&

Well, no one here appears to have downloaded and installed Facade. Thanks to Evil Avatar, I picked this one up over night and just installed it.

First off, make sure you have a 1.6 Ghz machine. It's not just a recommendation - the install won't work if you don't meet that requirement. And the install is very long as you might expect.

This is a very audio game. If you're deaf, I'm not sure it's even possible to play. The first really odd thing is that the characters call me verbally by my real name. It's "Adam", which isn't too uncommon, but strange nonetheless. I suspect they have a hundred or so common names they've recorded.

The controls are weird - a combination of keyboard arrows, typing, and the mouse. There's also some limited manipulation of objects (e.g. picking up the phone and throwing it around). You can also hug and comfort the two people with a click of the mouse.

The main interface, however, is the keyboard. You'll do a lot of typing, trying to guess what the magic keys and phrases are.

I haven't finished it. Heck, I feel I've barely scratched the surface. Even though it's in a single room, the illusion of open interaction with two humans is pretty good. Well, enough Slashdotting. Time to play a bit more.

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 1984

Not that I am one to rain on anyone parade or anything

There will be THREE versions of the Xbox 360. The base unit, the base unit with a hard drive and an enhanced unit with a larger hard drive and a TiVo like video recording utility.

NONE of the three versions will offer backwards compatability.

I saw this posted on Evil Avatar and you know those guys are hooked in with Microsoft big time.

Now they tried NBA! http://www.evilavatar.com/modules.php?op=modload&n ame=News&file=article&sid=7277&mode=thread&order=0 &thold=0

"Is this even possible on the DS or am I way out there on this one?"

It's quite possible, and in fact, internet browsing software is already in development. ;)

As sebastard on Evil Avatar pointed out, cybercafes are a multi-billion dollar business overseas. Vivendi took a different approach to selling things like Counterstrike to these cybercafe owners (Valve uses Steam and a play-for-play approach).

I suspect that Vivendi will be paying Valve a fair bit of money in the near future.

Check it out! My Favorite bit: The rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars within the timeframe of Duke Nukem Forever's development.

I see your point, and I'm sure the publishers have their reason for pricing games at ~$50.

Maybe instead of dropping the price of games they need to improve the quality. I think it's absolutely rediculous when developers are working on a patch before it's even hit the stores. Most publishers put so much pressure on developers to release that they often release a buggy product. It seems to me to be part of the reason why people are more willing to warez.

I guess I just don't believe that people are inherently malicious in their actions and are more driven by market forces.

Check out this article believed to be written by one Brad Wardell of Stardock and Galactic Civilizations fame. I posted the article (and ranted a little) here if you are interested.

Plus the PS2 looks like ass in a bag

Over at Evil Avatar folks refer to the gamecube as a "purple purse".

There's an interview with one of the Moonbyte guys available. Also referring to Stunts.

Worst Acronym Ever = MMORTFPSRPG (Massive Multiplayer Real-time First Person Shooter Role Playing Game)

Gotta Love Google.

Ah, once more with the same tune: "everybody who was talking trash about Ion Storm just wishes they could have worked there!!!"

No.

I suggest that anybody who is actually interested in the reasons why Ion Storm became an industry synonym for mismanagement and failure dig up the original articles by BitchX and Flamethrower that started off the whole public meltdown. Ion Storm did not fail because people were jealous of how well John Romero treated his friends. Ion Storm failed because Romero, Porter and Hall were incompetant managers who treated their talented employees like dirt, and focussed on creating a cult of personality rather than actually completing a game.

Unfortunatly, as revisionist screeds like Divine's article prove, that cult of personality is Ion Storm Dallas' most lasting legacy, long out-living their forgettable games.

http://www.evilavatar.com/EA/News/M34018/6983.jpg

Enjoy!

I am not talking about the screenshot linked to in the Slashdot article. I am talking about the screenshot pointed to by the comment that is the parent of mine above (#2466971).

If that doesn't work try;

http://www.evilavatar.com/EA/News/M34018/6983.jpg

If that doesn't work try;

http://www.evilavatar.com/EA/News/M34018/6983.jpg

Anyone here remember the low-poly love doll competition? Challenge: using 1k triangles or less, build a ... um ... female love doll model: an unabashedly sexist objectification. All the entries were anonymous until voting was finished, and voting was on posed models alone - no skins.

Some of the entries (about 60, IIRC) were wretched, and many were from professionals, but Paul Steed's model won with 801 votes, compared with 344 for 2nd place. After reviewing the other entries, his looks all the more amazing. Have any of you ever tried to build a believable wire-frame from scratch? My god, it's hard.

The fact that id fired Steed for (ostensibly) political reasons (or any reason at all other than, say, keying John's F50) does not speak well of them. I know, I know, Kevin and Adrian own the company and they can do whatever the fsck they want; I also know that you need to work with people you like and "personality conflicts" are regularly cited as dismissal reasons.

None of that overshadows the fact that they fired one of the most amazing low-poly modeler/animators in the business. Their future games will suffer for it, and that makes me sad.

What's really holding back PC gaming...it's harder than it should be to make a game work with your 3D card, drivers, etc. That's not really Microsoft's fault; it's a natural result of having a huge ecosystem of independent PC makers, 3D card makers, and sound card makers working together.

Ok, I agree with that...lots of different people can lead to compatiblity problems. This doesn't mean that they can't be overcome, but problems can and do occur. But then...

In all, Microsoft has done a pretty good job of making PC's work. They have forced 3D hardware makers to adopt common standards with DirectX. That is good. They did the same for printer drivers, sound drivers, and PCMCIA. Their implementation isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn good.

Jigga-What?!? Ok, this is were he losses me. First, isn't MS in trouble for exactly that...forcing software makers to do things that MS wanted them to do? What about choosing standards based on technical merit...you know, robustness, interoperability, that sort of thing...instead of standards based on their ability to tie developers to a single platform?

What ever happened to Open Standards? You know, like the ones used to build the Internet and make email work? Again, I'm no expert, but they seem to work pretty well. Don't look now, but your soaking in them! I realize some of the Open Standards may not have developed as quickly or as well as some of the MS 'standards', but how much of that was due to MS marketing muscle?

I'm not trying to bash MS or Tim Sweeney, but I don't know that dominating a market can be compared to 'setting standards'. If there's something I'm overlooking, someone please fill me in.