So fix malware probably ultimately caused by downloading and trusting a random executable by downloading and trusting a random executable? Would be a lot easier to feel safe about something open source.
Access to the demo was really very limited - you either had to own Borderlands or to have pre-ordered DNF. This is hardly encouraging people to try before they buy.
I'd say the review embargo in Europe wasn't exactly much in the spirit of openness either...
It's fairly obvious that despite recent interviews and other press, and despite the length of time it's been in their possession, Gearbox had very little to do with this game. If you watch the unreleased 2009 trailer for the game, which is part of the extras for the game but is available on YouTube, you can see that it's barely changed at all since then.
Arguably they could and should have improved upon all these various awful aspects, if they were taking over development and putting their name on it, but it seems they did nothing much except help get it in a box in some vaguely functional form. Somehow I doubt Take Two were too welcoming to the idea of an extra 6 months or a year spent on polishing it up.
For some carriers / manufacturer combinations, sure, though it could also be argued that Android users are at least generally free to update their ROMs themselves with newer versions, as most of the handsets seem to have a fairly thriving, reasonably low barrier to entry ROM ecosystem. Besides, even the casual user can easily replace one of the major vectors for attack: the browser.
Meanwhile, it's pretty grating that Apple have relatively little reason or excuse for their behaviour. There's very little divergence in their models and there are only a very few of them so it's only saving them the inconvenience of disabling new features and testing on the earlier iPhones. Safari / WebKit frequently has new security issues yet you can't replace the core browser engine there, IIRC, because of Apple's policies.
Having owned a 3G, which my girlfriend since inherited, but having now migrated to a Samsung Galaxy S, I know which situation I'm happier with personally.
Except that Apple arbitrarily stop supporting older every few releases, even for bug fixes as far as I'm aware; eg. they dropped iPhone 3G support in the most recent iOS update. That model is less than 3 years old and I suspect plenty of people are still using them. Hell, a quick Google suggests you can still buy one if you like.
One of the things I like about Slashdot is that amongst the typically informed discussion about a story there's often at least one comment providing critical updates or corrections to the original information.
Sadly this often doesn't turn up until after a couple of hundred posts based on the lack of that information and almost without fail the story itself remains unchanged, proudly maintaining its glaring omission.
It doesn't help that development tools basically have to run as admin, (Because of OS restrictions that are entirely reasonable and kept developers from using really idiotic things like inventing their own 'shared memory' system.), but results in developers never actually testing under non-admin situations, or at least not until the end of development, where it's called a 'bug' and the 'fix' is to run it as admin.
This isn't really true at all of Visual Studio apart from using a few specific features. I have never needed to run it as administrator for C++ development apart from for initial setup of a couple of add-ins.
In fact, I don't recall using any application on either Vista or Windows 7 that didn't correctly function unless it was run as administrator. I think Incredibuild briefly required it for legacy reasons when Vista was first around but that was soon fixed when we complained. I wonder how widespread this really is.
I'm so tired of this absurd argument that piracy is somehow ok because the original copy is intact. No-one will produce digital content if there is no way of making money from it, just as no-one would make tangible goods if there was no profit in it one way or another. Theft is a crime because you're taking something wrongfully. Legally and morally it's just as wrongful whether the item is tangible or not. Someone has worked hard to create it and wants to be paid for you to use it. This is no different from any other form of trade through human history. Whether the corporations deserve the cut they're getting or if they're screwing the real creators is a different argument, and the RIAA and MPAA can absolutely go fuck themselves with their current tactics, but swapping money for someone else's produce is simply how our society works.
It doesn't really have much to do with an individual insult though. (Well, maybe it does in this specific case - naturally I haven't bothered RTFA - but it doesn't in general.) Enough people trolling or generally behaving disruptively can quickly reduce a forum's signal to noise ratio below anything useful. I guess you haven't spent much time looking at, or more likely despairing at, the WoW forums, for example.
Where are those figures from? I haven't seen them before and they're pretty damning. Seeing where and how it dropped between those extremes would be interesting too.
Try BBC 6Music. It's consistently brilliant and probably has the greatest variety of music you'll hear anywhere, with little to no repetition within a day. No idea about streaming availability outside the UK though.
On the one hand I preferred it down there. On the other I just spent a few weeks with the recent couple of betas getting used to looking up instead of down when I moused over anything and now it's probably going to take at least another couple to retrain myself!
Pretty much all software projects fix a massive number of bugs within the final portion of their development; that's pretty much all that's happening at that point and a huge proportion of it is the backlog of stuff that got left while features were still being added or finished. And your anecdote is more or less correct as well in that often a bug is hiding or distracting from others or fixing one actually introduces another so there's a lot of churn during this period. Few projects actually finish this process but instead just fix bugs largely in order of priority and then stop when there's not enough serious stuff left to hold up release any longer. If anything, Mozilla are more conscientious about this than most, I suppose partly because of the fact that they're so open about their process. (You don't even want to know about some of the bugs that will get skipped in commercial stuff. 'Known shippable' quickly becomes the most common phrase you hear towards the end. How do you think any of Bethesda's in-house product ever gets out the door?)
True, and I think that's why this news is so disappointing - Assassin's Creed II was an enormous improvement upon the first one and there was plenty of potential to do the same here with a Mirror's Edge sequel. Oh well.
By the way legitimate question: Did you have any problems with your usb mass storage? Because even before I installed Keis 1.5 or 2 I had USB mass storage working out of the box for Win 7 x64 and x32. What didn't work understandably is if I select Keis when I plug the phone in. This is actually the first I've heard of the USB issue, and I'm beginning to wonder if there's two different phones on the market or if it only affects phones in a certain geographical area.
Personally I've found, having done it on numerous different machines now, that Windows will manage to cope with the phone just fine but usually it takes two attempts at plugging it in for it to work. The first time installs the drivers but usually produces an error message about failing to install the device properly but then if I remove and reattach it then it works fine, and it works every time from then on as well.
Where have Samsung promised 2.3 for the Galaxy S I? I've only seen that tweet from Samsung India from a while ago, which isn't exactly the most official of channels and was swiftly removed. I mean, I'm pretty much assuming they'll be providing it, if they're doing the work for the S II anyway, but I haven't seen an actual statement to that effect.
The worst thing about Kies is how ridiculously fiddly it can be to get it to connect. I have to quit LauncherPro, otherwise the crappy Kies software phone-side thinks the phone isn't idle, and often I need to plug it into my PC more than once for Kies to successfully pick it up. Meanwhile, USB mass storage just works without any problem and connecting with Odin to root it has always been painless.
If everyone thought like you then your supposed inalienable rights would be irrelevant as there'd really be no more games being made for you to download anymore anyway.
Well, ok, there'd still be floods of free Flash games and indie stuff but let's not pretend that anyone downloading this leak is disinterested in the kind of AAA games that depend upon the current publishing models. Making them is simply unsustainable in the face of sufficiently high piracy rates and this is primarily why most publishers barely care about PC anymore. (I work in the industry. This isn't just PC gamers bitching about inferior ports; the publishers really aren't very interested unless it's a low cost by-product of the console versions.)
I find it bizarre that so many people are incapable of appreciating that the economy and the nature of products being made have simply changed over the last decade or so. I see no reason why digital content should be inherently less valuable or worth protecting than physical product. The fact that no-one happens to have invented a way of magically cloning the latter without damaging the original isn't really relevant; the point is that without continuing the long-standing arrangement of someone investing money to make a product and then people paying for it if they want it, thereby providing a return on that investment, no-one will make the product anymore. Who exactly wins in this situation?
The music industry is a different case as there seems to be a very plausible and arguably superior model of artists providing their work more directly via the various alternative distribution channels that have sprung up in recent times. But for anyone that enjoys movies with non-trivial budgets or any form of cutting edge video games then the amount of money they require upfront to create is only viable in something like the traditional arrangement.
I will buy the new one regardless of whether I download the pirate version or not.
Sadly for Crytek, and despite the frequency with which this claim is made, I think you'd be in the extreme minority there. Especially as, looking at a couple of videos on YouTube, this seems close enough to final that most people aren't going to see much value in that.
I'm seeing a fairly generic fantasy world and a bunch of nice rendering techniques that by now have pretty much all appeared in released games, on consoles even. Am I missing something?
So you don't really worry about cheating in Xbox360 games, other than social cheating that the Xbox can't really defend itself again ("standbying", "rage quitting", etc). Or against proxy-bots (where a proxy aimbot intercepts Xbox Live network packets).
Oh, that's good. In that case everyone playing, for example, MW2 on 360 didn't need to worry about the huge numbers of players running around with modified content that enables a variety of cheats and Infinity Ward didn't need to rush out all those patches to fix things up.
And actually your latter suggestion is not a threat, as far as I'm aware, since all XBL traffic is encrypted and, thus far, unbroken.
No offence particularly intended but if it really took you being on the receiving end of 13 identity thefts to start taking a couple of obvious precautions, maybe you aren't the guy to write this book.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a whole lot of *woosh* in this subthread.
He sounds like he escaped from QVC or a low budget infomercial or something. "Order now at the low price of $16.95 and receive this free ..."
So fix malware probably ultimately caused by downloading and trusting a random executable by downloading and trusting a random executable? Would be a lot easier to feel safe about something open source.
Access to the demo was really very limited - you either had to own Borderlands or to have pre-ordered DNF. This is hardly encouraging people to try before they buy.
I'd say the review embargo in Europe wasn't exactly much in the spirit of openness either...
It's fairly obvious that despite recent interviews and other press, and despite the length of time it's been in their possession, Gearbox had very little to do with this game. If you watch the unreleased 2009 trailer for the game, which is part of the extras for the game but is available on YouTube, you can see that it's barely changed at all since then.
Arguably they could and should have improved upon all these various awful aspects, if they were taking over development and putting their name on it, but it seems they did nothing much except help get it in a box in some vaguely functional form. Somehow I doubt Take Two were too welcoming to the idea of an extra 6 months or a year spent on polishing it up.
For some carriers / manufacturer combinations, sure, though it could also be argued that Android users are at least generally free to update their ROMs themselves with newer versions, as most of the handsets seem to have a fairly thriving, reasonably low barrier to entry ROM ecosystem. Besides, even the casual user can easily replace one of the major vectors for attack: the browser.
Meanwhile, it's pretty grating that Apple have relatively little reason or excuse for their behaviour. There's very little divergence in their models and there are only a very few of them so it's only saving them the inconvenience of disabling new features and testing on the earlier iPhones. Safari / WebKit frequently has new security issues yet you can't replace the core browser engine there, IIRC, because of Apple's policies.
Having owned a 3G, which my girlfriend since inherited, but having now migrated to a Samsung Galaxy S, I know which situation I'm happier with personally.
Except that Apple arbitrarily stop supporting older every few releases, even for bug fixes as far as I'm aware; eg. they dropped iPhone 3G support in the most recent iOS update. That model is less than 3 years old and I suspect plenty of people are still using them. Hell, a quick Google suggests you can still buy one if you like.
Sadly this often doesn't turn up until after a couple of hundred posts based on the lack of that information and almost without fail the story itself remains unchanged, proudly maintaining its glaring omission.
Hey, he only said 'measured in hours'. That's 192 hours and 264,552 hours respectively :)
It doesn't help that development tools basically have to run as admin, (Because of OS restrictions that are entirely reasonable and kept developers from using really idiotic things like inventing their own 'shared memory' system.), but results in developers never actually testing under non-admin situations, or at least not until the end of development, where it's called a 'bug' and the 'fix' is to run it as admin.
This isn't really true at all of Visual Studio apart from using a few specific features. I have never needed to run it as administrator for C++ development apart from for initial setup of a couple of add-ins.
In fact, I don't recall using any application on either Vista or Windows 7 that didn't correctly function unless it was run as administrator. I think Incredibuild briefly required it for legacy reasons when Vista was first around but that was soon fixed when we complained. I wonder how widespread this really is.
I'm so tired of this absurd argument that piracy is somehow ok because the original copy is intact. No-one will produce digital content if there is no way of making money from it, just as no-one would make tangible goods if there was no profit in it one way or another. Theft is a crime because you're taking something wrongfully. Legally and morally it's just as wrongful whether the item is tangible or not. Someone has worked hard to create it and wants to be paid for you to use it. This is no different from any other form of trade through human history. Whether the corporations deserve the cut they're getting or if they're screwing the real creators is a different argument, and the RIAA and MPAA can absolutely go fuck themselves with their current tactics, but swapping money for someone else's produce is simply how our society works.
It doesn't really have much to do with an individual insult though. (Well, maybe it does in this specific case - naturally I haven't bothered RTFA - but it doesn't in general.) Enough people trolling or generally behaving disruptively can quickly reduce a forum's signal to noise ratio below anything useful. I guess you haven't spent much time looking at, or more likely despairing at, the WoW forums, for example.
Where are those figures from? I haven't seen them before and they're pretty damning. Seeing where and how it dropped between those extremes would be interesting too.
Try BBC 6Music. It's consistently brilliant and probably has the greatest variety of music you'll hear anywhere, with little to no repetition within a day. No idea about streaming availability outside the UK though.
On the one hand I preferred it down there. On the other I just spent a few weeks with the recent couple of betas getting used to looking up instead of down when I moused over anything and now it's probably going to take at least another couple to retrain myself!
Pretty much all software projects fix a massive number of bugs within the final portion of their development; that's pretty much all that's happening at that point and a huge proportion of it is the backlog of stuff that got left while features were still being added or finished. And your anecdote is more or less correct as well in that often a bug is hiding or distracting from others or fixing one actually introduces another so there's a lot of churn during this period. Few projects actually finish this process but instead just fix bugs largely in order of priority and then stop when there's not enough serious stuff left to hold up release any longer. If anything, Mozilla are more conscientious about this than most, I suppose partly because of the fact that they're so open about their process. (You don't even want to know about some of the bugs that will get skipped in commercial stuff. 'Known shippable' quickly becomes the most common phrase you hear towards the end. How do you think any of Bethesda's in-house product ever gets out the door?)
True, and I think that's why this news is so disappointing - Assassin's Creed II was an enormous improvement upon the first one and there was plenty of potential to do the same here with a Mirror's Edge sequel. Oh well.
By the way legitimate question: Did you have any problems with your usb mass storage? Because even before I installed Keis 1.5 or 2 I had USB mass storage working out of the box for Win 7 x64 and x32. What didn't work understandably is if I select Keis when I plug the phone in. This is actually the first I've heard of the USB issue, and I'm beginning to wonder if there's two different phones on the market or if it only affects phones in a certain geographical area.
Personally I've found, having done it on numerous different machines now, that Windows will manage to cope with the phone just fine but usually it takes two attempts at plugging it in for it to work. The first time installs the drivers but usually produces an error message about failing to install the device properly but then if I remove and reattach it then it works fine, and it works every time from then on as well.
Where have Samsung promised 2.3 for the Galaxy S I? I've only seen that tweet from Samsung India from a while ago, which isn't exactly the most official of channels and was swiftly removed. I mean, I'm pretty much assuming they'll be providing it, if they're doing the work for the S II anyway, but I haven't seen an actual statement to that effect.
The worst thing about Kies is how ridiculously fiddly it can be to get it to connect. I have to quit LauncherPro, otherwise the crappy Kies software phone-side thinks the phone isn't idle, and often I need to plug it into my PC more than once for Kies to successfully pick it up. Meanwhile, USB mass storage just works without any problem and connecting with Odin to root it has always been painless.
If everyone thought like you then your supposed inalienable rights would be irrelevant as there'd really be no more games being made for you to download anymore anyway.
Well, ok, there'd still be floods of free Flash games and indie stuff but let's not pretend that anyone downloading this leak is disinterested in the kind of AAA games that depend upon the current publishing models. Making them is simply unsustainable in the face of sufficiently high piracy rates and this is primarily why most publishers barely care about PC anymore. (I work in the industry. This isn't just PC gamers bitching about inferior ports; the publishers really aren't very interested unless it's a low cost by-product of the console versions.)
I find it bizarre that so many people are incapable of appreciating that the economy and the nature of products being made have simply changed over the last decade or so. I see no reason why digital content should be inherently less valuable or worth protecting than physical product. The fact that no-one happens to have invented a way of magically cloning the latter without damaging the original isn't really relevant; the point is that without continuing the long-standing arrangement of someone investing money to make a product and then people paying for it if they want it, thereby providing a return on that investment, no-one will make the product anymore. Who exactly wins in this situation?
The music industry is a different case as there seems to be a very plausible and arguably superior model of artists providing their work more directly via the various alternative distribution channels that have sprung up in recent times. But for anyone that enjoys movies with non-trivial budgets or any form of cutting edge video games then the amount of money they require upfront to create is only viable in something like the traditional arrangement.
I will buy the new one regardless of whether I download the pirate version or not.
Sadly for Crytek, and despite the frequency with which this claim is made, I think you'd be in the extreme minority there. Especially as, looking at a couple of videos on YouTube, this seems close enough to final that most people aren't going to see much value in that.
Someone mod this up. Troll?!
I'm seeing a fairly generic fantasy world and a bunch of nice rendering techniques that by now have pretty much all appeared in released games, on consoles even. Am I missing something?
So you don't really worry about cheating in Xbox360 games, other than social cheating that the Xbox can't really defend itself again ("standbying", "rage quitting", etc). Or against proxy-bots (where a proxy aimbot intercepts Xbox Live network packets).
Oh, that's good. In that case everyone playing, for example, MW2 on 360 didn't need to worry about the huge numbers of players running around with modified content that enables a variety of cheats and Infinity Ward didn't need to rush out all those patches to fix things up. And actually your latter suggestion is not a threat, as far as I'm aware, since all XBL traffic is encrypted and, thus far, unbroken.
No offence particularly intended but if it really took you being on the receiving end of 13 identity thefts to start taking a couple of obvious precautions, maybe you aren't the guy to write this book.