I'm sorry, but to all those who say that they're using their mod-chips for legitimate purposes: who are you trying to fool? I can see the point that you might not want your kids or your dogs chewing on your games. Here's your legal solution: DON'T FEED THEM TO YOUR DOGS. If you're too stupid or lazy to keep them out of harm's reach, then you don't deserve to have them. God help your kids if you ever decide to own firearms.
If you were actually serious about being worried that your game would break, you simply would have gone to GameStop or Toys'R'Us or the local equivalent and gotten one of their game warranties. I think its $3 for a $50 game and it gets cheaper for cheaper games. I used to work at a GameStop and have seen disks that were scratched, cracked in half, chewed on, mangled, we even replaced the one with a bullet hole in it. Now that TRU is getting into the same racket, I bet other stores follow too.
Having lived in a college dorm, I can tell you the real use of mod-chips is for downloading games that you don't own and playing them. I remember a big event back them was that the French version of Halo 2 was leaked right before the American release. In my dorm you could walk up and down the hall and hear a lot of zapping, followed by French profanity. If you listen to only slashdotters, you would swear that the only people that buy and use modchips are little old ladies that have piles of legally purchased pristine discs locked away, and bring out copies for their rowdy grandchildren to play with on weekends. In my experience, I've never seen them used for that.
The best part about the article is the end, when the police fine her $345 (likely less than the cost of the equipment she smashed) and gave her the hammer back. Is there a lighter slap-on-the-wrist punishment? The police must be Comcast subscribers too.
How much something "costs" to produce isn't as simple as the cost of parts. It may cost $5 for just the parts, it may also cost and extra $1-5 for the direct labor to put the board together, and it may cost and extra $1 to ship it. Then there's the cost of maintaining a chip fab, indirect labor and mangement costs and bribes to the chinese government to keep their cheap wage factory certified, divided over the 2-300 PS3's produced per month to keep up with worldwide demand, not to mention the cost of worldwide marketing, the cost of years of system & Blu-Ray R&D spread over each unit... keep in mind that the cost of making your PS3, Wii or software title is more than just more than the sum of the cost of the individual parts.
Sorry, that was my Cost Accounding class talking, I'll stop now.
You may or may not have meant it as a joke, but it's a valid concern. Anyone remember the hullabaloo that was the rerating of Elder Scrolls Oblivion? The ratings board submitted that upon further review, it was more violent and gory than they had originally been shown (ignoring for the moment the 3rd party nudity patch); however Bethesda maintains that it had given them all the same information earlier and had indicated the maximum levels of violence and gore that it could on its submissions. The question is truly, who watches the watchers?
One big problem I see with this is that it would require the Xerox machine to not only know *all* information that is classified, but to store it somewhere to cross-reference it every time someone copies something. This is only really ok if you trust Xerox to encrypt all this information and restrict access to only whomever can tell it what is classified and what isn't... and that that person's password to the system isn't "password."
I can see the headlines in 2012: "XEROX REDACTOR HACKED! CULPRITS KNOW EVERTH-REDACT-REDACT-REDACT-REDACT-REDACT"
Let me paraphrase the article slashdot is citing its source from... "According to a Japanese article, Wii sales are falling, and no one is playing their Wii at home anymore. No one wants to make Wii games anymore, and developers will shy away from it like they did the GameCube. Will the PS3 rise like Jesus at Easter?! According to this other article (which we happened to write), this new model of PS3 will outsell Wii and XB360 this Christmas! That's enough evidence for us that Nintendo is going down again!" The article and the one it links to both read like Sony fanboy ravings, just like a lot of the posts in this thread sound like Nintendo fanboy defenses. So maybe Wii sales are down because Nintendo is doing what Nintendo does best: delaying major game releases to until right before Christmas (or, in this case, February, but let's not get off topic).
And by the way, my Wii has been gathering a little dust lately, but only because I picked up Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and imported the bilingual Phoenix Wright 3... I can't wait until their download service includes full games I can download to my poor worn out DS...
It could seem a lot closer to 20% if you take into account having to manually roll out Windows Updates network-wide after testing each update to make sure it doesn't do anything funky to your critical systems. Of course, the article mentions the top 3 as "Anti-virus, firewalls, and proxy servers," which seem relatively OS-neutral... not counting the fact that >95% of viruses are written for Windows.
The issue here isn't that the RIAA has unethical lawyers, its that the defense has crappy, undiligent lawyers. Slashdot seems to be saying "shame on the RIAA lawyers for not doing the job for both side's lawyers!" Gimme a break.
This is the kind of announcement that has been copied and pasted every month since the DS took off. The only thing different about the text of this press release is that it mentioned the PSP Slim launch. They even took the time to mention the Wii killing the PS3. I am a die-hard Nintendo fan, but even I'm getting sick of the broken record...
How is this a/. worthy news post if everyone already knows?
I agree fully that unranked random online play will reduce lamers dropping out to raise their score, its one of the things that made me stop playing Mario Kart DS online after awhile. But more than that, I think customer service and satisfaction issues might be weighing in to the decision to not rank and rank match...
Because of the possibility of lag, its very likely that occasionally people will lose or die due to a lag glitch. They see the screen pause, the other charater "teleports" across the screen, and suddenly you're dead before you can react. Smash can be rediculously fast-paced, but if the online play introduces enough lag (depending on how they program the game to handle it), heavier slower characters like Bowser or... I guess Wario might have advantages over the traditional cheap fast reaction characters like Fox (I hope they get rid wave-dashing) and Sheik. If it doesn't affect their "score," people are going to be much, much less likely to call up the 800-number and bitch about it, they'll just play it out and request a friendly rematch....I hope they keep Peach's down-smash and turnip-tossing...
...Why has no one has asked the vital question "what was in these updates?" I want to get beyond the bickering over the EULA and find out what they did before I decide whether or not to strongly or just mildly object to it.
The real problem with interviews at larger companies is that typically, interviewers are not sysadmins themselves, but HR people with a list of questions and, if you're lucky, some sort of technical manager that can tell a "his answer is close to what the MCSE book said" from "his answer is not close to what the MCSE book says."
Smaller companies will tend to have more pointed interviews, and the interviewers will be the actual people hiring who know what kind of people they need.
The deal with Fair Use is that, while there is a set of accepted best practices, its still fuzzy law at best. Copyright holders and users still have a bit of leeway in what they can consider acceptable and non-acceptable use, and in the case of YouTube, more often than not they'd just rather see it not there at all (especially if its mocking the original content or "potentially hurting sales").
Another thing to consider is that there generally aren't music clips sampled (best practices are around 30 seconds for fair use), its whole songs that are being karaoke'd, remixed, Lego'ed etc, and what this article is bringing up is that there are no standards and best practices for online use. They're trying to rally for a new, less vague set of standards to apply to online use so people aren't hindered by potentially breaking copyrights & lefts.
What this is saying without blatantly saying is that much of the new creative content up on YouTube flies in the face of current Fair Use, and since they can't control that effectively, might as well expand fair use!;)
They [Sony] say they're not that worried about the delay and would prefer that Rockstar take the time it needs to perfect the game. In PR-Speak, this translates to "we want it pushed back as long as possible so that it runs as well on Sony hardware as Microsoft hardware." I don't think Sony would have said it quite this way if it was a multi-platform development issue.
In addition, note that they didn't ask Microsoft if they minded the delay, because their response would be "of course we mind, its not developing for *our* platform that's holding the release date back."
it seems that the world will naturally be filled with these guys soon. Shame on you for trying to start a global warming flame-war. Don't you have better things to do, like kick dogs or skin cats?
...who would take someone saying "we'll fix it in ten ****ing days!!!!!!1111one" to be equivalent to a corporate pledge? Its just talking smack and giving a sense of scale, basically saying "we won't make you wait for the first service pack in '09 for it to be stable, we'll put guys on it right away." Chill, corporate retraction dudes.
It's just saying what businesses want, which is more money for less effort. It's an extension of the bad taste "fair use" leaves in their mouths and the continued actions being taken against it. The first CD that comes out that won't allow iTunes to fling it to an iPod will sell as many copies as Paris Hilton's album.
Oh, I'm not saying that it won't be appropriate and hilarious. I fully expect my example to be really, really close. I'm just saying that no matter how clever/cheesy the dialogue, they'll likely play the level once and done.
If you've every played DoA or Soul Caliber, you know what to expect from the plot. "My feet ache... with destiny!" "You stepping on my pet goldfish... prepare for death!" (Grrr, can't find the link to that Sluggy cartoon...)
Granted its Nintendo, but I'm not expecting anything on the order of a different awesome side scrolling game for each character, more of a slight upgrade to the pale 1P mode in the GCN Smash with more character interaction & cutscenes in between a la DoA/Soul Caliber. It might be worth playing to get used to the new controls & moves, but people will get through them and never look back like all the previous Smash iterations.
Here's what I envision the "Solid Snake meets Mario" level being: "I need to get into this top secret government facility, and there's no good fox-urine covered cardboard boxes around. Hmm..."
"It's-a-me, Mario!"
"What? You say you can lead me through the pipes of the sewers? Lead on!"
$1600 salary is well above the poverty line, you should be ashamed of yourself. Yes, games are relatively expensive, but "access to games" isn't a constitutional right or a basic need to survive, its a manufactured product!
I don't know if this is such a good thing... the entrepreneurial-minded business criminal would simply say "now I can cut costs because the federal government is providing my spamming business internet access free of charge, and I get free room and board!"
I think the lack of information here is letting our imaginations run wild. I seriously doubt that we're talking RIAA-Nazi style "let's pick a few kazaa users at random and drag them to court" raid, my impression is that they're arresting internet & ebay resellers and professional installers of modchips, and the people that sell the modded XBox hard drives with hundreds of games downloaded to them. We're likely talking people that deal in several thousands of chips per year, not a peon kid who thought buying a random modchip to import / download / Linux-ize his system would be cool (so relax).
And the question posed of owning a legitimate backup is a classic catch-22... if you own a legit backup, its legit. But if you made it and have to use it by breaking copy protections, that is a violation of the DMCA. How you can make a legit backup without cracking copy protection is the catch-22...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but to all those who say that they're using their mod-chips for legitimate purposes: who are you trying to fool? I can see the point that you might not want your kids or your dogs chewing on your games. Here's your legal solution: DON'T FEED THEM TO YOUR DOGS. If you're too stupid or lazy to keep them out of harm's reach, then you don't deserve to have them. God help your kids if you ever decide to own firearms.
If you were actually serious about being worried that your game would break, you simply would have gone to GameStop or Toys'R'Us or the local equivalent and gotten one of their game warranties. I think its $3 for a $50 game and it gets cheaper for cheaper games. I used to work at a GameStop and have seen disks that were scratched, cracked in half, chewed on, mangled, we even replaced the one with a bullet hole in it. Now that TRU is getting into the same racket, I bet other stores follow too.
Having lived in a college dorm, I can tell you the real use of mod-chips is for downloading games that you don't own and playing them. I remember a big event back them was that the French version of Halo 2 was leaked right before the American release. In my dorm you could walk up and down the hall and hear a lot of zapping, followed by French profanity. If you listen to only slashdotters, you would swear that the only people that buy and use modchips are little old ladies that have piles of legally purchased pristine discs locked away, and bring out copies for their rowdy grandchildren to play with on weekends. In my experience, I've never seen them used for that.
The best part about the article is the end, when the police fine her $345 (likely less than the cost of the equipment she smashed) and gave her the hammer back. Is there a lighter slap-on-the-wrist punishment? The police must be Comcast subscribers too.
How much something "costs" to produce isn't as simple as the cost of parts. It may cost $5 for just the parts, it may also cost and extra $1-5 for the direct labor to put the board together, and it may cost and extra $1 to ship it. Then there's the cost of maintaining a chip fab, indirect labor and mangement costs and bribes to the chinese government to keep their cheap wage factory certified, divided over the 2-300 PS3's produced per month to keep up with worldwide demand, not to mention the cost of worldwide marketing, the cost of years of system & Blu-Ray R&D spread over each unit... keep in mind that the cost of making your PS3, Wii or software title is more than just more than the sum of the cost of the individual parts.
Sorry, that was my Cost Accounding class talking, I'll stop now.
You may or may not have meant it as a joke, but it's a valid concern. Anyone remember the hullabaloo that was the rerating of Elder Scrolls Oblivion? The ratings board submitted that upon further review, it was more violent and gory than they had originally been shown (ignoring for the moment the 3rd party nudity patch); however Bethesda maintains that it had given them all the same information earlier and had indicated the maximum levels of violence and gore that it could on its submissions. The question is truly, who watches the watchers?
One big problem I see with this is that it would require the Xerox machine to not only know *all* information that is classified, but to store it somewhere to cross-reference it every time someone copies something. This is only really ok if you trust Xerox to encrypt all this information and restrict access to only whomever can tell it what is classified and what isn't... and that that person's password to the system isn't "password."
I can see the headlines in 2012: "XEROX REDACTOR HACKED! CULPRITS KNOW EVERTH-REDACT-REDACT-REDACT-REDACT-REDACT"
Let me paraphrase the article slashdot is citing its source from... "According to a Japanese article, Wii sales are falling, and no one is playing their Wii at home anymore. No one wants to make Wii games anymore, and developers will shy away from it like they did the GameCube. Will the PS3 rise like Jesus at Easter?! According to this other article (which we happened to write), this new model of PS3 will outsell Wii and XB360 this Christmas! That's enough evidence for us that Nintendo is going down again!" The article and the one it links to both read like Sony fanboy ravings, just like a lot of the posts in this thread sound like Nintendo fanboy defenses. So maybe Wii sales are down because Nintendo is doing what Nintendo does best: delaying major game releases to until right before Christmas (or, in this case, February, but let's not get off topic).
And by the way, my Wii has been gathering a little dust lately, but only because I picked up Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and imported the bilingual Phoenix Wright 3... I can't wait until their download service includes full games I can download to my poor worn out DS...
It could seem a lot closer to 20% if you take into account having to manually roll out Windows Updates network-wide after testing each update to make sure it doesn't do anything funky to your critical systems. Of course, the article mentions the top 3 as "Anti-virus, firewalls, and proxy servers," which seem relatively OS-neutral... not counting the fact that >95% of viruses are written for Windows.
The issue here isn't that the RIAA has unethical lawyers, its that the defense has crappy, undiligent lawyers. Slashdot seems to be saying "shame on the RIAA lawyers for not doing the job for both side's lawyers!" Gimme a break.
This is the kind of announcement that has been copied and pasted every month since the DS took off. The only thing different about the text of this press release is that it mentioned the PSP Slim launch. They even took the time to mention the Wii killing the PS3. I am a die-hard Nintendo fan, but even I'm getting sick of the broken record...
/. worthy news post if everyone already knows?
How is this a
I agree fully that unranked random online play will reduce lamers dropping out to raise their score, its one of the things that made me stop playing Mario Kart DS online after awhile. But more than that, I think customer service and satisfaction issues might be weighing in to the decision to not rank and rank match...
...I hope they keep Peach's down-smash and turnip-tossing...
Because of the possibility of lag, its very likely that occasionally people will lose or die due to a lag glitch. They see the screen pause, the other charater "teleports" across the screen, and suddenly you're dead before you can react. Smash can be rediculously fast-paced, but if the online play introduces enough lag (depending on how they program the game to handle it), heavier slower characters like Bowser or... I guess Wario might have advantages over the traditional cheap fast reaction characters like Fox (I hope they get rid wave-dashing) and Sheik. If it doesn't affect their "score," people are going to be much, much less likely to call up the 800-number and bitch about it, they'll just play it out and request a friendly rematch.
...Why has no one has asked the vital question "what was in these updates?" I want to get beyond the bickering over the EULA and find out what they did before I decide whether or not to strongly or just mildly object to it.
Which is, oddly enough, something else Purdue students are working on.
Hail Purdue!
The real problem with interviews at larger companies is that typically, interviewers are not sysadmins themselves, but HR people with a list of questions and, if you're lucky, some sort of technical manager that can tell a "his answer is close to what the MCSE book said" from "his answer is not close to what the MCSE book says."
Smaller companies will tend to have more pointed interviews, and the interviewers will be the actual people hiring who know what kind of people they need.
The deal with Fair Use is that, while there is a set of accepted best practices, its still fuzzy law at best. Copyright holders and users still have a bit of leeway in what they can consider acceptable and non-acceptable use, and in the case of YouTube, more often than not they'd just rather see it not there at all (especially if its mocking the original content or "potentially hurting sales").
;)
Another thing to consider is that there generally aren't music clips sampled (best practices are around 30 seconds for fair use), its whole songs that are being karaoke'd, remixed, Lego'ed etc, and what this article is bringing up is that there are no standards and best practices for online use. They're trying to rally for a new, less vague set of standards to apply to online use so people aren't hindered by potentially breaking copyrights & lefts.
What this is saying without blatantly saying is that much of the new creative content up on YouTube flies in the face of current Fair Use, and since they can't control that effectively, might as well expand fair use!
In addition, note that they didn't ask Microsoft if they minded the delay, because their response would be "of course we mind, its not developing for *our* platform that's holding the release date back."
Unix-Replacing Daemons of Interfaces Representing Depth
Interfaces Representing Depth of Unix-Replacing Daemons
I'm going to need a translator here...
...who would take someone saying "we'll fix it in ten ****ing days!!!!!!1111one" to be equivalent to a corporate pledge? Its just talking smack and giving a sense of scale, basically saying "we won't make you wait for the first service pack in '09 for it to be stable, we'll put guys on it right away." Chill, corporate retraction dudes.
Didn't Led Zeppelin do a song about this? ...Oh wait, that was Kashmir.
It's just saying what businesses want, which is more money for less effort. It's an extension of the bad taste "fair use" leaves in their mouths and the continued actions being taken against it. The first CD that comes out that won't allow iTunes to fling it to an iPod will sell as many copies as Paris Hilton's album.
Oh, I'm not saying that it won't be appropriate and hilarious. I fully expect my example to be really, really close. I'm just saying that no matter how clever/cheesy the dialogue, they'll likely play the level once and done.
If you've every played DoA or Soul Caliber, you know what to expect from the plot. "My feet ache... with destiny!" "You stepping on my pet goldfish... prepare for death!" (Grrr, can't find the link to that Sluggy cartoon...)
Granted its Nintendo, but I'm not expecting anything on the order of a different awesome side scrolling game for each character, more of a slight upgrade to the pale 1P mode in the GCN Smash with more character interaction & cutscenes in between a la DoA/Soul Caliber. It might be worth playing to get used to the new controls & moves, but people will get through them and never look back like all the previous Smash iterations.
Here's what I envision the "Solid Snake meets Mario" level being:
"I need to get into this top secret government facility, and there's no good fox-urine covered cardboard boxes around. Hmm..."
"It's-a-me, Mario!"
"What? You say you can lead me through the pipes of the sewers? Lead on!"
$1600 salary is well above the poverty line, you should be ashamed of yourself. Yes, games are relatively expensive, but "access to games" isn't a constitutional right or a basic need to survive, its a manufactured product!
I don't know if this is such a good thing... the entrepreneurial-minded business criminal would simply say "now I can cut costs because the federal government is providing my spamming business internet access free of charge, and I get free room and board!"
I think the lack of information here is letting our imaginations run wild. I seriously doubt that we're talking RIAA-Nazi style "let's pick a few kazaa users at random and drag them to court" raid, my impression is that they're arresting internet & ebay resellers and professional installers of modchips, and the people that sell the modded XBox hard drives with hundreds of games downloaded to them. We're likely talking people that deal in several thousands of chips per year, not a peon kid who thought buying a random modchip to import / download / Linux-ize his system would be cool (so relax).
And the question posed of owning a legitimate backup is a classic catch-22... if you own a legit backup, its legit. But if you made it and have to use it by breaking copy protections, that is a violation of the DMCA. How you can make a legit backup without cracking copy protection is the catch-22...