Of course, a game that's even more Tron-like would be, um, Tron 2.0. It's a darned respectable FPS, it's very much Tron, and as it's several years old you can find it on the bargain table.
I take this a step farther, and have done so for nearly a decade. The very first thing I do when I get a game is to rip a disk image and save it to my file server. I use Alcohol to rip and mount the images because it preserves or emulates all the copy-protection garbage. Then I put the CD back in the box and put it on the shelf, never to be touched again.
I started this when my kids were little and I was getting tired of them ruining their game disks. It was so convenient I started doing it for all my disks. These days hard drive space is cheap so there's very little reason not to keep the whole disk image around.
In the very rare cases when Alcohol can't manage a working image, I go to Game Copy World and download the no-CD crack. I don't like doing that, though, simply because it makes it hard to apply official game patches. When the game is patched, you have to get the newest version of the crack and re-apply it. (And to the grandparent... I've personally never had a virus/malware problem with anything I've found on Game Copy World.)
Disk copy protection doesn't work. It's never worked; there have always been cracks for games all the way back to the days of the Apple ][. People who want to play games without paying for them will find a way to do so within days of the game's release. After that, all copy protection does is piss off your legitimate customers. But after more than 20 years of dealing with this crap, I've given up all hope that publishers will ever get a clue.
There are already quite a few popular sites that use "unusual" TLDs like last.fm, del.icio.us and blip.tv and it never struck me as a problem.
You do realize that those are all country codes, don't you?
.fm = Federated States of Micronesia
.us = United States of America
.tv = Tuvalu
Me, I think we should do away with all TLDs except country codes, and let each country administer its TLD as it sees fit. But that'd take away ICANN's big revenue stream, wouldn't it?
The OS should be telling them it is malware or if it is unknown, should be telling them what it is trying to do, before it does it. You'd think this incredibly common use case would be a priority by now, but for the most part only Windows has a big trojan problem and they also have a monopoly so why should they care?
Unfortunately, what you propose wouldn't be useful. Okay, let's say you download a program. The OS by default marks it "untrusted" and raises flags whenever it tries to do something potentially harmful. "{PROGRAM} is trying to write to C:\WINDOWS\foobar.dll. Allow or deny?" "{PROGRAM} is trying to use the Internet. Allow or deny?" "{PROGRAM} is trying to read your contacts file. Allow or deny?" How long before the user is trained to just click the freaking "Allow" button without reading the dialog? Hell, they already don't read the dialogs. The net result would just be more Vista "Allow or deny?" jokes, and no security improvement.
But what if the OS could scan the program ahead of time and generate a list of potentially harmful actions that the program might take? Get all those individual "Allow or deny?" questions out of the way at once. How many people would just click "Allow" without reading it? I'm betting it'd be the huge majority of the people it's meant to help. How many read the EULAs right now? This sort of technical description of what the program might do would be just as long and just as dense as the average EULA. Yeah, yeah, okay already! Just let me use the damned thing!
I maintain that users will want to download and use programs. You can warn them all you want, but when most of the stuff they download is legit, you're just annoying them. And training them to click "Allow" on any dialog, no matter what. When a piece of actual malware comes along, they'll allow it without thinking twice. Heck, probably without even thinking once.
Seriously, add a red ring around all executables, or something more subtle, just something that isn't duplicated by the icons for data.
Sure... But only if you can first give me unambiguous definitions of "executable" and "data". Into which category does a Word document fall? How about an HTML file? An arbitrary file without a filename extension?
Simplistic "solutions" like this have gotten us where we are now. A warning is popped up whenever the user tries to do anything useful with the computer. "Oooh, that file might be dangerous, do you really want to open it?" Give the user a half dozen of those a day and you've trained him to just blindly click "Yes, dammit!" to the security dialogs.
And that doesn't even begin to address the bigger issue, which is that users are easily tricked into running programs that they shouldn't. "Wow! Some random person just emailed me a picture of Natalie Portman naked in hot grits! Let me just double-click that self-extracting ZIP..." Or, more subtle, "Wow, that Comet Cursor looks really cool. Let me just click 'yes' to all these security warnings, because I really do want to install and run it."
That means 1 p.m. East Coast time, and, in Justin Mason's view, some pretty annoying times of day for many parts of the world.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any starting time going to be a pretty annoying time of day for many parts of the world? Or is there some time of day which is convenient for everyone?
HL2 textures had low poly count and were generally easy to render. The game looked good because the texture artwork looked good. It's the ultimate efficiency hack.
Wow, the game looked good because it actually used high-quality artwork instead of fancy video card tricks? I didn't think that was still allowed in games!
I was an atheist boy scout, and I used to get into discussions with the troop leaders about religion on a regular basis. They never made me feel uncomfortable or like I didn't belong.
My experience matches yours. I went all the way from Cub Scouts to earning Eagle while being an atheist. I was never made to feel out of place. It all depends on the local organization. I was lucky enough to be in a troop led by some pretty open-minded people.
My younger son is in Cub Scouts right now; in fact, I'm his den leader. His pack is a little more uptight than mine was as a kid, but that's mostly because of one leader who wants things run absolutely by the book. None of the rest of the leaders particularly care. I don't even think the uptight leader really cares, personally, except that's what the book says.
The way I got through Scouts, and the way that I'm working with my son to get through it, is to stretch the definition of "faith in god" to something a bit more naturalistic. Appreciation of the world around us, belief in a moral center of "good" versus "bad", respect for others. I'm comfortable that we're following the spirit of the faith requirements, even if it's not exactly what the BSA had in mind.
So yeah, I wish the Boy Scouts weren't so anti-atheist and homophobic. Despite that, I still think it's a good program for kids, provided you can find a pack or troop that doesn't obsess over such matters.
Of course, it's also possible to spoof caller ID. But it's still more secure than email. Too bad businesses hardly ever use PGP signed email and would rather spend a small fortune on courier fees for dead tree delivery.
I agree that encrypted email is generally a better solution than a courier. But it's not going to be trusted as much by those who use it, because it's much harder to understand how it works.
A courier is simple technology. Everyone understands perfectly how it works. You give the guy a satchel, he hops on his bike and carries it to the recipient. Easy. How does encryption work? You type a message here, it comes out over there, and in the middle "a miracle occurs" and no one can read it. Yeah, right, pull the other one!
Courier failure modes are easy to detect. The courier can get hit by a bus, can be robbed, or can be bribed. The first two are easy to detect and simply (well, unless you are the courier!) require a retransmission. The third is less easy to detect, but if you're concerned about it you can at least put your stuff in a tamper-evident envelope. It won't stop the courier opening it, but at least you'll know he did. How do you tell when encryption fails? Well, it's easy enough to detect and retransmit a message that simply failed to get through. But how do you make a tamper-evident encryption envelope? There really isn't any way to detect whether or not a man in the middle has read your document. Plus, encryption has failure modes that might not be immediately evident. How long was that ssh bug in Debian before someone noticed it? How much of a pain was it to go back and change all your keys after it was fixed?
Couriers deal with a single copy of something. The document goes into the satchel, it comes out on the other end, and if you use a tamper-evident envelope you can be reasonably sure no one has made a copy. Once it's received there's no chance of someone coming along later and copying it. Email is copied by every server it passes through, and a man in the middle can undetectably make a perfect copy for decryption at his leisure.
Snake oil. There are a lot of encryption vendors whose products aren't all they're claimed to be. It's very hard to tell the good products from the bad. It's easy to tell whether the courier is good; give him a package and see how long it takes to get to the destination. If he fails the test, get a new courier. If you discover that your encryption is bad, not only must you get a new vendor but your recipient probably needs to get a new vendor as well.
I'm all for encryption, but I don't think it's really going to be mainstream until people can understand it at least as well as the alternatives. Whether or not it's technically superior just doesn't matter if the users don't understand (or at least think they understand) how it works.
Back {mumble} years ago, I asked my high-school physics teacher this same question. "Do matter and antimatter attract or repel each other by gravitation?" After he firmly put down the ranks of kids who thought antimatter was something made-up for Star Trek, he said he didn't know... And then he spent the rest of the period researching it in the texts that he had. And concluded that he still didn't know.
Then he assigned the question to me as a research problem. D'oh! In that pre-Internet era I went through the subject in the school and local libraries and found that... I didn't know. I'm glad we were right!
Steam is the first online content distribution system that's genuinely made it easier to buy a game rather than pirate it.
You're kidding me, right? My first (and, god willing, only!) experience with Steam was when I bought the Orange Box last Christmas. "Game not available now, Steam client is updating." "Game updating, wait." "Oops, can't contact the server, so sorry." Fer cryin' out loud, I just want to play a freakin' single-player game, on a single computer! There's no reason that the game should ever have to touch the Internet. And I certainly don't need another stupid background process running in the system tray.
I already anticipate being pissed five years from now when I want to go back and play a game of Portal, and it can't phone home because Steam has either collapsed or entirely changed the way they do things. Sorry, can't activate the game, screw you. (And yes, I often get nostalgic and load up an older game. I still have Homeworld and Total Annihilation loaded, and play them now and again.)
Steam is high on my gaming shit list. Higher than SecuROM, Starforce, or any other on-disk copy protection scheme. At least I can download no-CD cracks to get around them if I have to.
Sounds pretty cool. I have a MAME cabinet set up, with a dance pad attached for Step Mania. It'd just be a quick config change to have it use the pad for Frogger. It'd work for Pac-Man and Q*Bert, too. I don't think I'd want to try Defender that way, though...
And the Chinese are probably not actively rude to you during the entry process either, something we in the US *really* need to fix. If we're going to collect all this info from visitors, at least we should do it politely!
Amen, brother! I'm a US citizen (middle-aged White Anglo-Saxon Programmer) who occasionally travels abroad. Without exception, the US customs officials have been the rudest I've ever encountered.
<rant class="us_border_policies">I was in England at the height of the whole Mad Cow thing. When I returned to the US they distributed fliers on the plane warning us about Mad Cow, that it was a very serious thing and be sure to disclose if you've been to any place rural. The same fliers were posted all over the international terminal at O'Hare. So I fessed up to the customs guy (or is it the immigration guy? Whoever stamps your passport) that yes, I'd been hiking in rural England, I had crossed a few cow pastures, and probably trod in a cowpie or two. He just grunted(*) and waved me through. WTF?! What's the point of all the warnings if they're not going to do anything about it?</rant>
(*)And I mean that literally. He grunted. Not a single syllable of any intelligible language came out of this guy's mouth. And that brings us back to having the rudest officials in the world.
PDF only? Pity. I might have read it otherwise. My PDA has a PDF reader, but it's hardly good for reading more than a couple pages. You'd think that 500 pages of text could be provided in, you know... A text-based format?
(Yeah, I know about extracting text from a PDF. Call me insufficiently motivated.)
(John Cleese plays Klaatu's giant 8-foot robotic pal called "Gort.")
Where the fsck did you get that? Both the article and IMDB speculate that Cleese will play the scientist, Dr. Barnhardt. I've seen no mention anywhere of Cleese playing Gort. Cleese could make a good Barnhardt, if it weren't for the fact that everyone will see him as "that guy from Monty Python".
Of course, the whole thing looks like a train wreck in the making. Nothing good can come of Klaatu being played by Ted "Theodore" Logan.
1. People are stupid. I would not be surprised at all to find that someone's distributing a file called "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg".
2. It's probably a Rick Astley video anyway.
Which I suppose brings up another question -- Is it (or would it be, under this bill) illegal to distribute files purporting to be kiddie porn, but which are really innocent? How about porn starring actors who are of age, but who look like they're 12 years old?
Tor.com [tor.com] is pretty good -- I think you can still sign up there to get a new ebook every week for free, plus they have a bunch of non-free books, podcasts, etc. I've been getting them for 6-8 weeks now and they're pretty good!
Well, you can kind of still sign up...
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I agree. I hate big, open floorplans. I'm not a huge fan of cubicles either, but at least they give some degree of privacy and isolation. A big open space just has too many distractions for me. People walking by, conversations I'm not interested in, etc.
I've worked at Initech (except we called it "Motorola"). I've worked in a private office with real walls and a real door. I've worked in a big bullpen. For me, the best environment is working in a real office (with a door and walls all the way to the ceiling) with about four other people who are working on the same project. We can have relevant work conversations without having to all pack up and move to a conference room, and without having to hear the guys next door who are working on something else.
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Wow. Seriously dude, I've never, ever heard those words used together like that.
I know! The Clone Wars is supposed to be so awful it'll make someone five years from now post "Jar-jar was cool."
You young whippersnappers! Back in my day, all we had to hate were the Ewoks! And we liked it that way!
Not to mention that if there's any custom programming to be done, Windows programmers are a dime a dozen.
I just want to know, what with China's history of copyright protection, whether or not it was a "Genuine" Windows install? :-)
I back up everything to /dev/null. Restoration is somebody else's job.
Of course, a game that's even more Tron-like would be, um, Tron 2.0. It's a darned respectable FPS, it's very much Tron, and as it's several years old you can find it on the bargain table.
I take this a step farther, and have done so for nearly a decade. The very first thing I do when I get a game is to rip a disk image and save it to my file server. I use Alcohol to rip and mount the images because it preserves or emulates all the copy-protection garbage. Then I put the CD back in the box and put it on the shelf, never to be touched again.
I started this when my kids were little and I was getting tired of them ruining their game disks. It was so convenient I started doing it for all my disks. These days hard drive space is cheap so there's very little reason not to keep the whole disk image around.
In the very rare cases when Alcohol can't manage a working image, I go to Game Copy World and download the no-CD crack. I don't like doing that, though, simply because it makes it hard to apply official game patches. When the game is patched, you have to get the newest version of the crack and re-apply it. (And to the grandparent... I've personally never had a virus/malware problem with anything I've found on Game Copy World.)
Disk copy protection doesn't work. It's never worked; there have always been cracks for games all the way back to the days of the Apple ][. People who want to play games without paying for them will find a way to do so within days of the game's release. After that, all copy protection does is piss off your legitimate customers. But after more than 20 years of dealing with this crap, I've given up all hope that publishers will ever get a clue.
You do realize that those are all country codes, don't you?
Me, I think we should do away with all TLDs except country codes, and let each country administer its TLD as it sees fit. But that'd take away ICANN's big revenue stream, wouldn't it?
Unfortunately, what you propose wouldn't be useful. Okay, let's say you download a program. The OS by default marks it "untrusted" and raises flags whenever it tries to do something potentially harmful. "{PROGRAM} is trying to write to C:\WINDOWS\foobar.dll. Allow or deny?" "{PROGRAM} is trying to use the Internet. Allow or deny?" "{PROGRAM} is trying to read your contacts file. Allow or deny?" How long before the user is trained to just click the freaking "Allow" button without reading the dialog? Hell, they already don't read the dialogs. The net result would just be more Vista "Allow or deny?" jokes, and no security improvement.
But what if the OS could scan the program ahead of time and generate a list of potentially harmful actions that the program might take? Get all those individual "Allow or deny?" questions out of the way at once. How many people would just click "Allow" without reading it? I'm betting it'd be the huge majority of the people it's meant to help. How many read the EULAs right now? This sort of technical description of what the program might do would be just as long and just as dense as the average EULA. Yeah, yeah, okay already! Just let me use the damned thing!
I maintain that users will want to download and use programs. You can warn them all you want, but when most of the stuff they download is legit, you're just annoying them. And training them to click "Allow" on any dialog, no matter what. When a piece of actual malware comes along, they'll allow it without thinking twice. Heck, probably without even thinking once.
Sure... But only if you can first give me unambiguous definitions of "executable" and "data". Into which category does a Word document fall? How about an HTML file? An arbitrary file without a filename extension?
Simplistic "solutions" like this have gotten us where we are now. A warning is popped up whenever the user tries to do anything useful with the computer. "Oooh, that file might be dangerous, do you really want to open it?" Give the user a half dozen of those a day and you've trained him to just blindly click "Yes, dammit!" to the security dialogs.
And that doesn't even begin to address the bigger issue, which is that users are easily tricked into running programs that they shouldn't. "Wow! Some random person just emailed me a picture of Natalie Portman naked in hot grits! Let me just double-click that self-extracting ZIP..." Or, more subtle, "Wow, that Comet Cursor looks really cool. Let me just click 'yes' to all these security warnings, because I really do want to install and run it."
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any starting time going to be a pretty annoying time of day for many parts of the world? Or is there some time of day which is convenient for everyone?
It's Beer O'Clock, time to download Firefox!
Wow, the game looked good because it actually used high-quality artwork instead of fancy video card tricks? I didn't think that was still allowed in games!
My experience matches yours. I went all the way from Cub Scouts to earning Eagle while being an atheist. I was never made to feel out of place. It all depends on the local organization. I was lucky enough to be in a troop led by some pretty open-minded people.
My younger son is in Cub Scouts right now; in fact, I'm his den leader. His pack is a little more uptight than mine was as a kid, but that's mostly because of one leader who wants things run absolutely by the book. None of the rest of the leaders particularly care. I don't even think the uptight leader really cares, personally, except that's what the book says.
The way I got through Scouts, and the way that I'm working with my son to get through it, is to stretch the definition of "faith in god" to something a bit more naturalistic. Appreciation of the world around us, belief in a moral center of "good" versus "bad", respect for others. I'm comfortable that we're following the spirit of the faith requirements, even if it's not exactly what the BSA had in mind.
So yeah, I wish the Boy Scouts weren't so anti-atheist and homophobic. Despite that, I still think it's a good program for kids, provided you can find a pack or troop that doesn't obsess over such matters.
Bah! Kids today have everything too easy! Why, back in my day...!
What? It's time for my Metamucil? No, I'll come quietly this time...
I agree that encrypted email is generally a better solution than a courier. But it's not going to be trusted as much by those who use it, because it's much harder to understand how it works.
I'm all for encryption, but I don't think it's really going to be mainstream until people can understand it at least as well as the alternatives. Whether or not it's technically superior just doesn't matter if the users don't understand (or at least think they understand) how it works.
Back {mumble} years ago, I asked my high-school physics teacher this same question. "Do matter and antimatter attract or repel each other by gravitation?" After he firmly put down the ranks of kids who thought antimatter was something made-up for Star Trek, he said he didn't know... And then he spent the rest of the period researching it in the texts that he had. And concluded that he still didn't know.
Then he assigned the question to me as a research problem. D'oh! In that pre-Internet era I went through the subject in the school and local libraries and found that... I didn't know. I'm glad we were right!
You're kidding me, right? My first (and, god willing, only!) experience with Steam was when I bought the Orange Box last Christmas. "Game not available now, Steam client is updating." "Game updating, wait." "Oops, can't contact the server, so sorry." Fer cryin' out loud, I just want to play a freakin' single-player game, on a single computer! There's no reason that the game should ever have to touch the Internet. And I certainly don't need another stupid background process running in the system tray.
I already anticipate being pissed five years from now when I want to go back and play a game of Portal, and it can't phone home because Steam has either collapsed or entirely changed the way they do things. Sorry, can't activate the game, screw you. (And yes, I often get nostalgic and load up an older game. I still have Homeworld and Total Annihilation loaded, and play them now and again.)
Steam is high on my gaming shit list. Higher than SecuROM, Starforce, or any other on-disk copy protection scheme. At least I can download no-CD cracks to get around them if I have to.
Sounds pretty cool. I have a MAME cabinet set up, with a dance pad attached for Step Mania. It'd just be a quick config change to have it use the pad for Frogger. It'd work for Pac-Man and Q*Bert, too. I don't think I'd want to try Defender that way, though...
Amen, brother! I'm a US citizen (middle-aged White Anglo-Saxon Programmer) who occasionally travels abroad. Without exception, the US customs officials have been the rudest I've ever encountered.
<rant class="us_border_policies">I was in England at the height of the whole Mad Cow thing. When I returned to the US they distributed fliers on the plane warning us about Mad Cow, that it was a very serious thing and be sure to disclose if you've been to any place rural. The same fliers were posted all over the international terminal at O'Hare. So I fessed up to the customs guy (or is it the immigration guy? Whoever stamps your passport) that yes, I'd been hiking in rural England, I had crossed a few cow pastures, and probably trod in a cowpie or two. He just grunted(*) and waved me through. WTF?! What's the point of all the warnings if they're not going to do anything about it?</rant>
(*)And I mean that literally. He grunted. Not a single syllable of any intelligible language came out of this guy's mouth. And that brings us back to having the rudest officials in the world.
Let me guess... A two-liter Mountain Dew bottle which they'll later just throw out the window, right? Because I've soooo been there, man!
PDF only? Pity. I might have read it otherwise. My PDA has a PDF reader, but it's hardly good for reading more than a couple pages. You'd think that 500 pages of text could be provided in, you know... A text-based format?
(Yeah, I know about extracting text from a PDF. Call me insufficiently motivated.)
Where the fsck did you get that? Both the article and IMDB speculate that Cleese will play the scientist, Dr. Barnhardt. I've seen no mention anywhere of Cleese playing Gort. Cleese could make a good Barnhardt, if it weren't for the fact that everyone will see him as "that guy from Monty Python".
Of course, the whole thing looks like a train wreck in the making. Nothing good can come of Klaatu being played by Ted "Theodore" Logan.
1. People are stupid. I would not be surprised at all to find that someone's distributing a file called "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg".
2. It's probably a Rick Astley video anyway.
Which I suppose brings up another question -- Is it (or would it be, under this bill) illegal to distribute files purporting to be kiddie porn, but which are really innocent? How about porn starring actors who are of age, but who look like they're 12 years old?
Well, you can kind of still sign up...
D'oh!
Well, Granny has bad teeth, you know, and can't chew properly. I'm just making it in liquid form so the dear sainted lady doesn't starve to death.
I agree. I hate big, open floorplans. I'm not a huge fan of cubicles either, but at least they give some degree of privacy and isolation. A big open space just has too many distractions for me. People walking by, conversations I'm not interested in, etc.
I've worked at Initech (except we called it "Motorola"). I've worked in a private office with real walls and a real door. I've worked in a big bullpen. For me, the best environment is working in a real office (with a door and walls all the way to the ceiling) with about four other people who are working on the same project. We can have relevant work conversations without having to all pack up and move to a conference room, and without having to hear the guys next door who are working on something else.