Nice link. The DVD-RW I bought back to life had been out of a case for two years, was scratched to hell and my kids had gotten hold of it as well.
In essence this was a messiah level of resurrection as the disk could only hold about an hour of video and then it would pixelate and die. Now the whole thing works.
I always like telling people about this trick as they're always stunned if they don't know it, and it spares them spending god knows how many dollars on one of the less effective professional solutions. Buy a small tube of toothpaste, get any cloth, and voila! Instant optical disk repair kit.
As an owner of said DVD set, the way they store them in that tin is bloody stupid! You need several postal districts to unfold the thing, or try and balance it and hope you don't drop the disk.
Glad to meet another fan! And I'm glad toothpaste saved Easy Company!
Get toothpaste. NOT GEL, but regular white paste. Get a small cloth, put a dab on it, then rub it from the center to the outside in straight lines going outwards around the whole disk. When you're done, clean it off and pat it dry. Disk will look like hell, but it'll work.
I have rescued lord knows how many CDs with this technique, including console ones that were completely screwed, and even resurrected a dead DVD-RW just this past weekend using this technique.
That is despicable! A lot of people bitch about Steam, but the thing is it WORKS. I've been using it for three years and have never had a problem with any facet of it. And it's saved me a ton of time which would have been spent trying to find disks.
If that's what EA did with their creature creator, I can only imagine the problems when the game itself is released. I usually go with a digital download of a game if it's available. But Spore's will apparently be with EA's Download Manager which, if what I read was correct, will A) give you no actual installable files so you can't burn anything to disk, and B) it's ONLY valid for six months. So if after six months you need to reinstall, you'll have to buy it again. Now I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere, but if the cap fits... And that certainly seems to go in with EA's strategy. I mean the CEO has said about monetizing the contents of the game. Clearly the game itself will be so if you need to reinstall and you downloaded it, EA gouge you again. Certainly fits the current EA business model.
May as well just strike Spore off the list of games to buy this year. Will sit back and sit how this plays out. Given that Spore creatures seem to be downloadable as simple PNG files, I wonder if one could pirate the game and just use creatures that way?
Whatever the case, I hope the pirates get this out before it's in stores, showing once again how pointless copy protection is. I used to pirate a lot in the late 80's and early 90's. I'm seriously at the point where EA is making me consider going back to that for titles like Spore. I'd still support indie developers, and companies like Stardock... (Even in the days when I was an avid pirate, I still bought games if they were any good. Sensible Software had so much money off of me...) The good guys and the small developers etc... They deserve the support.
I saw this TV thing years ago. This guy is digging a hole in his basement to bury some pipes or something. His friends laugh and joke that it's to kill his wife and bury her. He defends himself and says it's for plumbing, but his friends get on him so much about it that eventually he snaps, kills his wife and buries her in said hole. That's pretty much how I feel about the likes of EA now. They've spent so long tacitly accusing me and many other of being thieves via their protection schemes that it may as well fulfill their prophecy. While it may not be morally or legally right, I challenge ANYONE to defend EA's practices.
(Man, reading up on all this and writing after a mere 3 hours sleep is rough... Apologies for the rambling.)
I read that when it first appeared. (I read the forums regularly being a Gal Civ player). It's a great article. Stardock and friends are about the only sane minds in gaming right now.
I laughed when Crytek whined about piracy killing sales of Crysis. Everyone I know didn't even bother with it because they knew their systems would fail miserably. I know a fair few people who pirate and NOT ONE pirated Crysis. Sure, it may be awesome. But only about 1 in 20 people have a PC that can run it.
Gal Civ scales fantastically. Strategy games need less horsepower, but Gal Civ looks GORGEOUS, even on a lower end system. Blizzard are another who write good scalable games.
Same here. There were three games I was waiting for this year. The Gal Civ II expansion (Twilight of the Arnor), Spore and GTR Evolution.
Now the expansion I have. Stardock are awesome and treat customers like CUSTOMERS, not thieves. (As you know from Sins.) The reason I bought Gal Civ II in the first place was pretty much because I read their stance on copy protection and wanted to support a company that, to be blunt, doesn't act like a bastard.
GTR Evolution is out August 15th. Holding off to find out what the protection is. (If it drops on Steam, I'll buy it there most likely.)
Then there's Spore... A game I have lusted after since I first heard about it several years ago. What would have been an instant trawl the city to find it release day purchase is now a wait and see at best. I want to know EXACTLY what the protection is, what it does etc...
It's such a shame that what could very well be a hugely groundbreaking game is going to be essentially wrecked by EA's greed and attitude toward their thieves (or customers as everyone else calls them). I mean EA can't be stupid. Everyone can see copy protection does absolutely nothing, a glance at any torrent site shows that, so WHY do they persist in using it, crippling the game for a good percentage of people... Makes me wonder if they're coming up with my oppressive protection so they can kill off PC gaming entirely. I mean they've recently killed most of their sports titles on the PC...
Regardless, it's a crying shame to see this huge game from one of the true geniuses of videogames (only person I respect more is Sid Meier) being bogged down with this consumer abusing crap:(
Quite why they can't just have a serial number and, since it relies on the net, leave it at that is beyond me. No, they'd rather install vicious copy protection.
This should be the greatest game of the year, but with the microtransaction thing, and the offensive copy protection, EA are fucking it all up. I know my "I MUST GET THIS!" mindset has, in the wake of this, sunk too "Well I'll probably get this depending on the copy protection." I mean really, the only worse thing EA could do at this point is use Starforce.
Ah, the lesser spotted nerd. Linuxzealotus Fucktardicus Maggotus.
I'd bet those drivers wouldn't do shit on my laptop even if I had bothered to make it dual boot. I'd bet money on that. Their persnickety enough on the desktop. (My desktop has Ubuntu on it.)
First thing I did on the three systems I bought this last year was kill Vista and install XP. Yes it was from a pirate copy, but Microsoft has gotten their tax off me for THREE different systems so FUCK THEM. I am using a Microsoft OS. I am using one that is, in the words of Daft Punk, Harder Better Faster Stronger. (Okay, so the middle two are the most accurate.)
The big problem is the fact that despite providing XP drivers less than a year ago for these systems, now the various manufacturers basically say "Fuck you" if you ask them for help (some say it more politely than others) and leave you to sort it out yourselves. I got an HP laptop recently. Brand new. Had Vista on it. I tried it. After 20 minutes I was tearing my hair out with, among other things, the pathetic hand holding masquerading as security, so I dug out my XP disk.
It took me SIX HOURS to find drivers that had everything working. (And another few to refine driver versions to make stuff work WELL.) That's just the core stuff as well. Wireless, graphics, sound etc... Little things, like the fingerprint lock thing, I've never found drivers for. It is an absolute nightmare to get drivers for new systems these days, especially laptops. Basically you're relying on other peoples experiences, experimentation and message board postings to find stuff that works. You just have to hope that someone before you has gotten your model sorted.
Worst by FAR was the nVidia drivers for the graphics. Almost NONE work. Even hacked ones I found to support a wider variety of chipsets. (I must have had to reboot with the "use previous known good configuration" god knows how many times.) I must have tried 20 different sets of drivers before finding the one set that would actually work! (When I have issues with games now and folk immediately say "upgrade your graphics drivers" I just sit and weep in the corner muttering "the horror... the horror" quietly to myself.)
Hardly a surprise most people are content to leave it at that given "upgrading" to XP has been made so treacherous and complicated.
Is there any way to tell if you one of these little "presents" on your motherboard without cracking the box open?
Sticking with XP here. Need it for games. When it reaches the point where XP will no longer run games... Well I guess I'm done with games as NOTHING will get me to use Vista. (Already nuked it on three systems it came on.)
So bsically waste food. Sorry, but if you're going to only eat half the fries, DON'T FUCKING BUY THEM! Honestly wasting food, especially with the costs these days, is just fucking sick.
I don't do it as much as I should, but yes, I do. Though I actually use "In The Groove" on the PS2. I find it better than DDR, and I don't feel like it's trying to kill me:) The workout mode has a timer and I do 20 minutes. The calorie burn counter is horse shit because if you step and miss (which if you're horribly uncoordinated it's really easy to do) it doesn't count the calorie despite you doing the move. And if you're very tall like me, you can't change the settings to match your height, so it's largely nonsense.
The songs are pretty shitty too, but they have a fast beat which is what you need, and they're not the worst songs in the world.
Overall I'd recommend it. It's the perfect in house exercise that isn't boring.
Then you're lucky as I always seem to be coming across people who had to restore their device multiple times to all manner of fuckups caused by various apps. I never had to restore (probably because I'm patient and would often wait for my locked up device to eventually reset itself) but things were real ugly. Not to mention Installer was an extremely poorly coded piece of software that went wrong for me on multiple occasions leaving me no choice but to SSH into the thing to fix it.
And while Apple have the device locked down, it makes a mockery of the whole thing when that "bug" (feature I say) was found in the free game "Aurora Feint" that sent your entire contact list to the devs server. Somehow that got past Apple's eagle eyes.
I wish they'd make it more accessible. There's some apps I really want (like a SID player for C64 music) but due to Apple's SDK agreement, it might not be allowed.
You have a point. When I used the jailbreak on my iPod, while I had more freedom, stability and quality went out the window. Many things went wrong after that. (Album cover art disappearing, iPod thinking it had no music on it etc...) Before I wiped it clean and upgraded, it had got so bad that keyframes from videos were being inserted as album cover art. It was a total mess.
I own an iPod Touch and it is HANDS DOWN the greatest tech device I've ever bought. There is nothing else like it on the market right now.
Of course it's worth is increased exponentially when hacked and jailbroken. Apple charged iPod owners $10 for the 2.0 software update. There is some claim that business law requires them to do this, which is nonsense as Sony routinely give the PSP new features for free. MS released their 2.0 Zune update for free for older Zune's etc... So I'm not sure why Apple is defended in this practice when Sony and MS are possibly two of the most evil companies out there.
As it was, I scored the 2.0 update for free thanks to an Apple fuckup. HAHA!:)
The main reason I haven't ordered "Spore" yet is because I'm waiting to see what copy protection methods EA use. If there is ANY chance of the game not working for me, I'm not buying it.
What cracks me up (pun intended) is the fact that Ubisoft have been UTTER BASTARDS in the past. If you posted complaining about Starforce on their forums, their employees would accuse you of being a hacker, a pirate etc... People get banned for posting links to cracks. HAVE been banned for posting links to THIS VERY CRACK.
This priceless, and utterly UTTERLY hilarious. A major software company relying on a cracking group to fix their stupid issues that their choice of DRM caused.
The only way this could be ANY funnier is if it was Electronic Arts instead, and even that would be pushing it as Ubi's attitude toward their consumers in regards to DRM is a hundred times more offensive than I've ever seen EA be.
I've tried multiple firewalls over the years, including that one, and had a variety of issues ranging from general system stability problems to constant BSOD's. So much so I don't even bother anymore. I'm behind a router. I know it's not perfect, but having one less buggy, unstable program in the background makes life a lot nicer.
Off the top of my head I tried ZoneAlarm, both old and new versions, Tiny Personal Firewall, the prior TPF that had a different name, and several others.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice link. The DVD-RW I bought back to life had been out of a case for two years, was scratched to hell and my kids had gotten hold of it as well.
In essence this was a messiah level of resurrection as the disk could only hold about an hour of video and then it would pixelate and die. Now the whole thing works.
I always like telling people about this trick as they're always stunned if they don't know it, and it spares them spending god knows how many dollars on one of the less effective professional solutions. Buy a small tube of toothpaste, get any cloth, and voila! Instant optical disk repair kit.
As an owner of said DVD set, the way they store them in that tin is bloody stupid! You need several postal districts to unfold the thing, or try and balance it and hope you don't drop the disk.
Glad to meet another fan! And I'm glad toothpaste saved Easy Company!
You left out some vital information. Did he complete the mission?!
I thought it was "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt"?
Get toothpaste. NOT GEL, but regular white paste. Get a small cloth, put a dab on it, then rub it from the center to the outside in straight lines going outwards around the whole disk. When you're done, clean it off and pat it dry. Disk will look like hell, but it'll work.
I have rescued lord knows how many CDs with this technique, including console ones that were completely screwed, and even resurrected a dead DVD-RW just this past weekend using this technique.
Given the content they're ripped out of the game to make their release, to match up with that, this should only be half a website.
That is despicable! A lot of people bitch about Steam, but the thing is it WORKS. I've been using it for three years and have never had a problem with any facet of it. And it's saved me a ton of time which would have been spent trying to find disks.
If that's what EA did with their creature creator, I can only imagine the problems when the game itself is released. I usually go with a digital download of a game if it's available. But Spore's will apparently be with EA's Download Manager which, if what I read was correct, will A) give you no actual installable files so you can't burn anything to disk, and B) it's ONLY valid for six months. So if after six months you need to reinstall, you'll have to buy it again. Now I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere, but if the cap fits... And that certainly seems to go in with EA's strategy. I mean the CEO has said about monetizing the contents of the game. Clearly the game itself will be so if you need to reinstall and you downloaded it, EA gouge you again. Certainly fits the current EA business model.
May as well just strike Spore off the list of games to buy this year. Will sit back and sit how this plays out. Given that Spore creatures seem to be downloadable as simple PNG files, I wonder if one could pirate the game and just use creatures that way?
Whatever the case, I hope the pirates get this out before it's in stores, showing once again how pointless copy protection is. I used to pirate a lot in the late 80's and early 90's. I'm seriously at the point where EA is making me consider going back to that for titles like Spore. I'd still support indie developers, and companies like Stardock... (Even in the days when I was an avid pirate, I still bought games if they were any good. Sensible Software had so much money off of me...) The good guys and the small developers etc... They deserve the support.
I saw this TV thing years ago. This guy is digging a hole in his basement to bury some pipes or something. His friends laugh and joke that it's to kill his wife and bury her. He defends himself and says it's for plumbing, but his friends get on him so much about it that eventually he snaps, kills his wife and buries her in said hole. That's pretty much how I feel about the likes of EA now. They've spent so long tacitly accusing me and many other of being thieves via their protection schemes that it may as well fulfill their prophecy. While it may not be morally or legally right, I challenge ANYONE to defend EA's practices.
(Man, reading up on all this and writing after a mere 3 hours sleep is rough... Apologies for the rambling.)
I read that when it first appeared. (I read the forums regularly being a Gal Civ player). It's a great article. Stardock and friends are about the only sane minds in gaming right now.
I laughed when Crytek whined about piracy killing sales of Crysis. Everyone I know didn't even bother with it because they knew their systems would fail miserably. I know a fair few people who pirate and NOT ONE pirated Crysis. Sure, it may be awesome. But only about 1 in 20 people have a PC that can run it.
Gal Civ scales fantastically. Strategy games need less horsepower, but Gal Civ looks GORGEOUS, even on a lower end system. Blizzard are another who write good scalable games.
Same here. There were three games I was waiting for this year. The Gal Civ II expansion (Twilight of the Arnor), Spore and GTR Evolution.
Now the expansion I have. Stardock are awesome and treat customers like CUSTOMERS, not thieves. (As you know from Sins.) The reason I bought Gal Civ II in the first place was pretty much because I read their stance on copy protection and wanted to support a company that, to be blunt, doesn't act like a bastard.
GTR Evolution is out August 15th. Holding off to find out what the protection is. (If it drops on Steam, I'll buy it there most likely.)
Then there's Spore... A game I have lusted after since I first heard about it several years ago. What would have been an instant trawl the city to find it release day purchase is now a wait and see at best. I want to know EXACTLY what the protection is, what it does etc...
It's such a shame that what could very well be a hugely groundbreaking game is going to be essentially wrecked by EA's greed and attitude toward their thieves (or customers as everyone else calls them). I mean EA can't be stupid. Everyone can see copy protection does absolutely nothing, a glance at any torrent site shows that, so WHY do they persist in using it, crippling the game for a good percentage of people... Makes me wonder if they're coming up with my oppressive protection so they can kill off PC gaming entirely. I mean they've recently killed most of their sports titles on the PC...
Regardless, it's a crying shame to see this huge game from one of the true geniuses of videogames (only person I respect more is Sid Meier) being bogged down with this consumer abusing crap:(
Quite why they can't just have a serial number and, since it relies on the net, leave it at that is beyond me. No, they'd rather install vicious copy protection.
This should be the greatest game of the year, but with the microtransaction thing, and the offensive copy protection, EA are fucking it all up. I know my "I MUST GET THIS!" mindset has, in the wake of this, sunk too "Well I'll probably get this depending on the copy protection." I mean really, the only worse thing EA could do at this point is use Starforce.
Ah, the lesser spotted nerd. Linuxzealotus Fucktardicus Maggotus.
I'd bet those drivers wouldn't do shit on my laptop even if I had bothered to make it dual boot. I'd bet money on that. Their persnickety enough on the desktop. (My desktop has Ubuntu on it.)
most people are content to leave it at that
First thing I did on the three systems I bought this last year was kill Vista and install XP. Yes it was from a pirate copy, but Microsoft has gotten their tax off me for THREE different systems so FUCK THEM. I am using a Microsoft OS. I am using one that is, in the words of Daft Punk, Harder Better Faster Stronger. (Okay, so the middle two are the most accurate.)
The big problem is the fact that despite providing XP drivers less than a year ago for these systems, now the various manufacturers basically say "Fuck you" if you ask them for help (some say it more politely than others) and leave you to sort it out yourselves. I got an HP laptop recently. Brand new. Had Vista on it. I tried it. After 20 minutes I was tearing my hair out with, among other things, the pathetic hand holding masquerading as security, so I dug out my XP disk.
It took me SIX HOURS to find drivers that had everything working. (And another few to refine driver versions to make stuff work WELL.) That's just the core stuff as well. Wireless, graphics, sound etc... Little things, like the fingerprint lock thing, I've never found drivers for. It is an absolute nightmare to get drivers for new systems these days, especially laptops. Basically you're relying on other peoples experiences, experimentation and message board postings to find stuff that works. You just have to hope that someone before you has gotten your model sorted.
Worst by FAR was the nVidia drivers for the graphics. Almost NONE work. Even hacked ones I found to support a wider variety of chipsets. (I must have had to reboot with the "use previous known good configuration" god knows how many times.) I must have tried 20 different sets of drivers before finding the one set that would actually work! (When I have issues with games now and folk immediately say "upgrade your graphics drivers" I just sit and weep in the corner muttering "the horror... the horror" quietly to myself.)
Hardly a surprise most people are content to leave it at that given "upgrading" to XP has been made so treacherous and complicated.
That's TBD. A meeting is TBA.
TTFN.
Is there any way to tell if you one of these little "presents" on your motherboard without cracking the box open?
Sticking with XP here. Need it for games. When it reaches the point where XP will no longer run games... Well I guess I'm done with games as NOTHING will get me to use Vista. (Already nuked it on three systems it came on.)
What has my goat ever done to you?
So bsically waste food. Sorry, but if you're going to only eat half the fries, DON'T FUCKING BUY THEM! Honestly wasting food, especially with the costs these days, is just fucking sick.
I don't do it as much as I should, but yes, I do. Though I actually use "In The Groove" on the PS2. I find it better than DDR, and I don't feel like it's trying to kill me:) The workout mode has a timer and I do 20 minutes. The calorie burn counter is horse shit because if you step and miss (which if you're horribly uncoordinated it's really easy to do) it doesn't count the calorie despite you doing the move. And if you're very tall like me, you can't change the settings to match your height, so it's largely nonsense.
The songs are pretty shitty too, but they have a fast beat which is what you need, and they're not the worst songs in the world.
Overall I'd recommend it. It's the perfect in house exercise that isn't boring.
How can that be done, as the article states, in the privacy of the home? If you work from home you could cycle from the bedroom to your desk I guess.
Do people even READ the posts anymore?
Funny, my thought on reading your comment was "If that isn't a link to ED-209 or similar, then they've failed."
Well played.
Then you're lucky as I always seem to be coming across people who had to restore their device multiple times to all manner of fuckups caused by various apps. I never had to restore (probably because I'm patient and would often wait for my locked up device to eventually reset itself) but things were real ugly. Not to mention Installer was an extremely poorly coded piece of software that went wrong for me on multiple occasions leaving me no choice but to SSH into the thing to fix it.
And while Apple have the device locked down, it makes a mockery of the whole thing when that "bug" (feature I say) was found in the free game "Aurora Feint" that sent your entire contact list to the devs server. Somehow that got past Apple's eagle eyes.
I wish they'd make it more accessible. There's some apps I really want (like a SID player for C64 music) but due to Apple's SDK agreement, it might not be allowed.
You have a point. When I used the jailbreak on my iPod, while I had more freedom, stability and quality went out the window. Many things went wrong after that. (Album cover art disappearing, iPod thinking it had no music on it etc...) Before I wiped it clean and upgraded, it had got so bad that keyframes from videos were being inserted as album cover art. It was a total mess.
I own an iPod Touch and it is HANDS DOWN the greatest tech device I've ever bought. There is nothing else like it on the market right now.
Of course it's worth is increased exponentially when hacked and jailbroken. Apple charged iPod owners $10 for the 2.0 software update. There is some claim that business law requires them to do this, which is nonsense as Sony routinely give the PSP new features for free. MS released their 2.0 Zune update for free for older Zune's etc... So I'm not sure why Apple is defended in this practice when Sony and MS are possibly two of the most evil companies out there.
As it was, I scored the 2.0 update for free thanks to an Apple fuckup. HAHA!:)
The main reason I haven't ordered "Spore" yet is because I'm waiting to see what copy protection methods EA use. If there is ANY chance of the game not working for me, I'm not buying it.
Two wrongs don't make a right, dude.
What cracks me up (pun intended) is the fact that Ubisoft have been UTTER BASTARDS in the past. If you posted complaining about Starforce on their forums, their employees would accuse you of being a hacker, a pirate etc... People get banned for posting links to cracks. HAVE been banned for posting links to THIS VERY CRACK.
This priceless, and utterly UTTERLY hilarious. A major software company relying on a cracking group to fix their stupid issues that their choice of DRM caused.
The only way this could be ANY funnier is if it was Electronic Arts instead, and even that would be pushing it as Ubi's attitude toward their consumers in regards to DRM is a hundred times more offensive than I've ever seen EA be.
I've tried multiple firewalls over the years, including that one, and had a variety of issues ranging from general system stability problems to constant BSOD's. So much so I don't even bother anymore. I'm behind a router. I know it's not perfect, but having one less buggy, unstable program in the background makes life a lot nicer.
Off the top of my head I tried ZoneAlarm, both old and new versions, Tiny Personal Firewall, the prior TPF that had a different name, and several others.
Just not worth the aggravation.