And if you don't mind me asking... What was the name of your first childhood pet?
Ah-ha, I didn't actually use the name of my first childhood pet!
Because her name was "Meg" and that was too short, since apparently you must answer with at least five characters. So instead I use the name of my second childhood pet.
Except his name was "Max" and that's also too short.
And I'll never tell you about my third childhood pet, a black cat name Licorice!...oops. I wonder if I can change the answers to my security questions? I guess I'll need to go get a fourth childhood pet now, and make sure to name them something that's at least five letters long.
I was wondering that myself. From a high-level point of view, the thing practically looks like a PS Vita on its own - dual thumbsticks, same number of buttons otherwise, display, stereo sound, microphone, camera...
I'm now regretting submitting the link to the Reuters blog, but at the time I submitted the story, it was probably one of the "most trustworthy" (well, "least fanboyish") sources.
Still... looks neat. I guess. I'm interested in just how mobile that controller is - you can apparently browse the web and video chat with it. It might be an interesting tablet on its own.
Or not. It's something I'll be interested in looking at when it comes out, but I don't think I'll be getting one at launch.
Yes, and they activated the text resizing feature.
What they did not do is zoom/expand the page contents.
I just tried it again. That's exactly what it does. It enlarges the entire page. Images become bigger. Everything on the page is made larger. It zooms in. The gestures literally map to the "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" menu items.
Again, they may have refined the feature in some way, but it's not a new feature. It's a feature that just about every browser already has - including Safari.
Because before posting, I opened Safari on my MacBook, and did the zoom in and zoom out "pinch" gestures.
Guess what? The web page zoomed in and out. It doesn't work in Firefox, but that's because it doesn't work in Firefox. (And, somehow, I doubt Lion will change that.)
I can't say for sure where this feature has appeared first
The "Restore previous versions" feature was first introduced in Vista - for users of Enterprise, Business, and Ultimate editions, at least. It was unavailable for users of "lesser" editions, because, well, Microsoft, I guess. It was made available for all editions in Windows 7.
The feature it uses, "Shadow Copy," was in fact introduced with Windows XP. But as I understand it, the feature as it works in XP doesn't work for versioning. It only offers a way to access an otherwise locked file and was intended mainly for backup software.
Incidentally, this feature can be life saving. I'm lucky I was able to get a ridiculously cheap copy of Vista Ultimate when CompUSA was going out of business - I've needed that "restore previous versions" feature!
Also, while something similar exists for earlier Mac OS X in Time Machine, it's not anywhere near the same thing. Time Machine stores hourly backups. Need to restore a version that's 30 minutes old? Gotta pray Time Machine ran in between that time. (Yes, I've used both. Time Machine is still very useful, but it's not the same as versioning.)
He's not wrong, though. Several of the "new features" are re-treads of things that exist in Snow Leopard. (Also, I note that the link I gave is likely to change over time, and be meaningless once whatever if after Lion releases. Oh well.)
For example, "pinch to zoom." In Lion, you can pinch on the track pad to zoom in and out of webpages! Incidentally, you can also do this in Snow Leopard. And I'm fairly sure it worked in Leopard, too. Maybe even before that.
Another "new feature" is the Mac App Store. Which you can download Mac OS X Lion from. Hmmm...
Now, to be fair, there are apparently refinements to existing features hidden amongst the bullet points that flat-out name existing features.
Some of them, however, are pushing the definition of "new feature" like the ability to drag apps onto the Dock for quick launching. What's new with that? Well, you can do it from the new Launchpad. Which is already kind of like what happens in Snow Leopard if you make a stack out of the Applications folder and set it to "grid" view. Just fullscreen.
So... yeah. Some of the new features are really repeats of things that Mac OS X already does, just via a reworked interface.
I knew someone would bring that up. However, you most likely have a dominant hand. And, if you've ever used a Nook, you'll notice that: 1. You almost always hold it in one hand, and 2. it's nearly impossible to do the swipe gesture while holding the Nook in one hand.
Oh, and it's overly easy to accidentally hit the "n" and turn the touchscreen back on, which turns the "next page" gesture into a "do something random" gesture. (As hitting the "n" as part of the swipe gesture doesn't count as "next page.")
However, none of that really matters, because the next page button should never have broken in the first place!
This is like trying to excuse a keyboard where the left control routinely breaks by saying that "well, you always have the right control key, and you can just use sticky keys to emulate the control key." It's still a shoddy piece of crap.
Given that the next page button in my original Nook broke just after the warranty period ended (which makes it a bit hard to use to read books, unless you like reading them backwards)...
Funny, because according to the article and a projectionist that actually offered his real name instead of posting anonymously, it's because of DRM.
So why aren't theater personnel simply removing the 3-D lenses? The answer is that it takes time, it costs money, and it requires technical know-how above the level of the average multiplex employee. James Bond, a Chicago-based projection guru who serves as technical expert for Roger Ebert's Ebertfest, said issues with the Sonys are more than mechanical. Opening the projector alone involves security clearances and Internet passwords, "and if you don't do it right, the machine will shut down on you." The result, in his view, is that often the lens change isn't made and "audiences are getting shortchanged."
That's right, according to James Bond, it's due to DRM.
...OK, so maybe saying "I'm taking the word of James Bond over someone who's anonymous" isn't quite the best way to phrase things, but well, that's really his name.
Plus it's entirely possible you're talking about a different model of Sony projector, since this apparently affects only Sony projectors that were originally 2D-only but later retrofitted to be 3D.
I remember when the Dark Knight came out. I had just watched Batman Begins on Blu-ray, and it came with a preview of the Dark Knight which was basically just the opening bank sequence from the final movie.
After seeing that on my somewhat crappy and small HDTV, you'd think that seeing it on the big screen would be a big improvement. Nope.
The color was worse, the image was worse, and some idiot had decided that PG-13 movie was the perfect place to bring his young children.
Now, I'm sure that part of that has to do with this specific theater using the "old" film tech (remember, the Dark Knight was released in 2008, so this predates the Sony projectors in the article), but, honestly? Why would I bother with that.
So I don't. Instead I have a NetFlix subscription. The picture may be smaller, the sound may not be quite as surround, but damn it, I don't care.
No, that is just the polarising lens/filter combo needed for passive 3D glasses. Like sunglasses polarisation makes the image darker.
Yes, that would be the technical reason why the image is darker, but that's not the DRM part. The DRM is the reason that the projectionist doesn't simply replace the lens: if they do, they risk tripping Sony's DRM and locking the projector out.
Rather than risk that, they just leave the lens on. Thereby making the movie look absolutely horrible.
So it may not be DRM making the movie dark directly, but DRM is the root cause: Sony doesn't trust the people who own the projector to change the lens, and it's DRM that enforces that policy.
The reason? It turns out to be Sony DRM, although the article doesn't ever come out and say it directly. Basically, there's a special 3D lens required to display 3D movies, but this lens reduces the brightness of 2D movies.
So why aren't theater personnel simply removing the 3-D lenses? The answer is that it takes time, it costs money, and it requires technical know-how above the level of the average multiplex employee. James Bond, a Chicago-based projection guru who serves as technical expert for Roger Ebert's Ebertfest, said issues with the Sonys are more than mechanical. Opening the projector alone involves security clearances and Internet passwords, "and if you don't do it right, the machine will shut down on you."
In other words, you have to deal with Sony DRM. Rather than jump through the Sony-imposed hoops, theaters just leave the 3D lens on all the time.
Why bother with Sony projectors at all if they have this problem and others don't?
The reason appears to be a basic business quid pro quo. Sony provides projectors to the chains for free in exchange for the theaters dedicating part of their preshow ads to Sony products.
So, yeah. Another wonderful example of Sony in general and Sony DRM in specific giving customers an inferior product.
Obviously the theaters deserve some blame for this too.
I have described FFXIII as having this wonderfully complex and beautiful world that you are absolutely forbidden from seeing.
Throughout the game you get this sense of this vibrant world with an interesting history. But you're never allowed to see it, the most you get are long text-dumps.
Mario Galaxy gets away with using lives the same way Super Mario World did: by making them overly abundant and ridiculously easy to get, along with making the consequence of reaching game over be practically non-existent.
Overall, "lives" is a pointless mechanic and has been for basically the past two decades. The games that still have them do so by making the mechanic entirely meaningless.
I linked to the thread more to demonstrate that I'm not the only one having issues rather than because the OP in that thread makes any sense. If you read through the thread (hell, just the first few pages, really) you'll come across plenty of valid complaints.
The game requires a ridiculous amount of CPU and GPU power and if we're at all honest looks no better than a game that came out years ago.
Hell, I've recently been playing through Crysis and Crysis at max settings requires less CPU and GPU time than FFXIV, and there's no way FFXIV looks as nice as Crysis. That's seriously messed up.
Ignoring the fact that it's unnecessarily slow, you still have crazy things like shadows not working. It (was) 2010. How the hell do you manage to screw up shadows?! (I should explain: there is a single parallel light source, and all "mobile objects" - that is, things that aren't part of the map - cast a shadow based on that. And not on, say, the light sources in the map. Which leads to crazy things like you being able to cast a shadow onto a lit fire.)
Oh, and then there's the bit where the graphics engine crashes if you Alt-Tab out of the game. Still. In 2011. Everyone else fixed that a decade ago. (And, yes, there's a windowed mode. You can still crash it by doing something similar to an Alt-Tab, like locking the desktop or having a UAC prompt appear.)
Who knows exactly how much FFXIV is costing them in development costs and server costs, but that ship has sailed. There's no point sinking money into something that will never turn a profit.
It's been seven months now. The improvements the game has made are minor at best. (The two biggest are that leveling combat classes is now possible, and that the market place works. Not well, mind you, but it works.) If you ask anyone playing whether or not you should, they'll tell you flat-out it isn't worth it.
This is not the sign of a game on the road to profitability. With every week that goes by, the ability to earn new players goes down.
Once they've stopped throwing money at a failed game, then they can start worrying about creating new games that people actually want to play.
Not that this needs to be said, but it should be said anyway:
For now.
It's Sony. I'm not sure how they'll take away the ability to boot Linux on phones that are running it, but they'll find a way. At the very least, one of the firmware updates to the existing software will remove the ability to install Linux, you can guarantee that.
If you read the letter (which is made needlessly annoying by the fact that it's scanned in and the raw text isn't made available, fuck you very much Sony), you'll see that on page 2 they explain:
When Sony Online Entertainment discovered this past Sunday afternoon that data from its servers had been stolen, it also discovered that the intruders had placed a file on one of those servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion."
So that's how they come to that conclusion. Which I guess means we can blame Anonymous, in so much as anyone calling themselves Anonymous is Anonymous.
Not that I really believe that the attacker really is "Anonymous," but they do make a good scape goat. And who knows, maybe the attacker did decide that this attack might as well be carried out under the "anonymous" banner.
That's nice. Too bad their privacy policy says that they can store that information indefinitely, link that information together, and share it with third parties.
If they don't actually do that, maybe Apple should, I dunno, rewrite their privacy policy to explain what they actually do. Seems like a better plan than saying "oh, we don't do the things we say we're allowed to do, wink wink."
Otherwise, I'm going to continue assuming that they do exactly what their privacy policy says that they do. Because, after all, it's their policy. My policy is assuming they do exactly what their policy says they do.
Because if they don't, why does their policy say that they may?
Slashdot Mirror
And if you don't mind me asking... What was the name of your first childhood pet?
Ah-ha, I didn't actually use the name of my first childhood pet!
Because her name was "Meg" and that was too short, since apparently you must answer with at least five characters. So instead I use the name of my second childhood pet.
Except his name was "Max" and that's also too short.
And I'll never tell you about my third childhood pet, a black cat name Licorice! ...oops. I wonder if I can change the answers to my security questions? I guess I'll need to go get a fourth childhood pet now, and make sure to name them something that's at least five letters long.
Other banks started using a separate calculator to create the one-off numbers. This was a physically separate device, not on the computer itself.
You can buy those little random number generator tokens for several MMOs, such as World of Warcraft.
I've got one for Final Fantasy XIV since it came with the collector's edition. (Yes, I regret that purchase.)
My bank (well, credit union) doesn't offer it as an option, instead requiring you to answer three "security" questions instead.
I really wonder when the US will catch up.
So, there's your answer. We care more about our online security for video games than we do about the security of our banks.
We have the technology to do better. (Well, maybe not. See RSA's SecurID.) But we don't.
But if someone threatens to take away our virtual loot... we're not going to stand for that!
I was wondering that myself. From a high-level point of view, the thing practically looks like a PS Vita on its own - dual thumbsticks, same number of buttons otherwise, display, stereo sound, microphone, camera...
I'm now regretting submitting the link to the Reuters blog, but at the time I submitted the story, it was probably one of the "most trustworthy" (well, "least fanboyish") sources.
But now Joystiq has scant details on the console itself along with more on the controller itself.
Still... looks neat. I guess. I'm interested in just how mobile that controller is - you can apparently browse the web and video chat with it. It might be an interesting tablet on its own.
Or not. It's something I'll be interested in looking at when it comes out, but I don't think I'll be getting one at launch.
Yes, and they activated the text resizing feature.
What they did not do is zoom/expand the page contents.
I just tried it again. That's exactly what it does. It enlarges the entire page. Images become bigger. Everything on the page is made larger. It zooms in. The gestures literally map to the "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" menu items.
Again, they may have refined the feature in some way, but it's not a new feature. It's a feature that just about every browser already has - including Safari.
Using what browser?
Because before posting, I opened Safari on my MacBook, and did the zoom in and zoom out "pinch" gestures.
Guess what? The web page zoomed in and out. It doesn't work in Firefox, but that's because it doesn't work in Firefox. (And, somehow, I doubt Lion will change that.)
I can't say for sure where this feature has appeared first
The "Restore previous versions" feature was first introduced in Vista - for users of Enterprise, Business, and Ultimate editions, at least. It was unavailable for users of "lesser" editions, because, well, Microsoft, I guess. It was made available for all editions in Windows 7.
The feature it uses, "Shadow Copy," was in fact introduced with Windows XP. But as I understand it, the feature as it works in XP doesn't work for versioning. It only offers a way to access an otherwise locked file and was intended mainly for backup software.
Incidentally, this feature can be life saving. I'm lucky I was able to get a ridiculously cheap copy of Vista Ultimate when CompUSA was going out of business - I've needed that "restore previous versions" feature!
Also, while something similar exists for earlier Mac OS X in Time Machine, it's not anywhere near the same thing. Time Machine stores hourly backups. Need to restore a version that's 30 minutes old? Gotta pray Time Machine ran in between that time. (Yes, I've used both. Time Machine is still very useful, but it's not the same as versioning.)
He's not wrong, though. Several of the "new features" are re-treads of things that exist in Snow Leopard. (Also, I note that the link I gave is likely to change over time, and be meaningless once whatever if after Lion releases. Oh well.)
For example, "pinch to zoom." In Lion, you can pinch on the track pad to zoom in and out of webpages! Incidentally, you can also do this in Snow Leopard. And I'm fairly sure it worked in Leopard, too. Maybe even before that.
Another "new feature" is the Mac App Store. Which you can download Mac OS X Lion from. Hmmm...
Now, to be fair, there are apparently refinements to existing features hidden amongst the bullet points that flat-out name existing features.
Some of them, however, are pushing the definition of "new feature" like the ability to drag apps onto the Dock for quick launching. What's new with that? Well, you can do it from the new Launchpad. Which is already kind of like what happens in Snow Leopard if you make a stack out of the Applications folder and set it to "grid" view. Just fullscreen.
So... yeah. Some of the new features are really repeats of things that Mac OS X already does, just via a reworked interface.
I knew someone would bring that up. However, you most likely have a dominant hand. And, if you've ever used a Nook, you'll notice that: 1. You almost always hold it in one hand, and 2. it's nearly impossible to do the swipe gesture while holding the Nook in one hand.
Oh, and it's overly easy to accidentally hit the "n" and turn the touchscreen back on, which turns the "next page" gesture into a "do something random" gesture. (As hitting the "n" as part of the swipe gesture doesn't count as "next page.")
However, none of that really matters, because the next page button should never have broken in the first place!
This is like trying to excuse a keyboard where the left control routinely breaks by saying that "well, you always have the right control key, and you can just use sticky keys to emulate the control key." It's still a shoddy piece of crap.
Given that the next page button in my original Nook broke just after the warranty period ended (which makes it a bit hard to use to read books, unless you like reading them backwards)...
Not necessarily. It's happened before that a group maliciously reports a page to get Facebook to take it down. From the article:
But we weren't anti-porn, and conservatives on the page "Porn Harms" rallied their page members to report us to get the page taken down. It worked. On the "Porn Harms" page, they openly celebrated and discussed their successful bogus takedown of our page.
(Note: I have no idea if that link from the article is work safe, and I'm not about to try it and find out. But I figured I'd leave it in anyway.)
...Wait a minute. "Porn Harms." Why does that sound familiar?
I expect that in this case, their page was in fact maliciously removed - as a response to their getting an actual porn page pulled.
Funny, because according to the article and a projectionist that actually offered his real name instead of posting anonymously, it's because of DRM.
So why aren't theater personnel simply removing the 3-D lenses? The answer is that it takes time, it costs money, and it requires technical know-how above the level of the average multiplex employee. James Bond, a Chicago-based projection guru who serves as technical expert for Roger Ebert's Ebertfest, said issues with the Sonys are more than mechanical. Opening the projector alone involves security clearances and Internet passwords, "and if you don't do it right, the machine will shut down on you." The result, in his view, is that often the lens change isn't made and "audiences are getting shortchanged."
That's right, according to James Bond, it's due to DRM.
...OK, so maybe saying "I'm taking the word of James Bond over someone who's anonymous" isn't quite the best way to phrase things, but well, that's really his name.
Plus it's entirely possible you're talking about a different model of Sony projector, since this apparently affects only Sony projectors that were originally 2D-only but later retrofitted to be 3D.
This is why I don't go to theaters.
I remember when the Dark Knight came out. I had just watched Batman Begins on Blu-ray, and it came with a preview of the Dark Knight which was basically just the opening bank sequence from the final movie.
After seeing that on my somewhat crappy and small HDTV, you'd think that seeing it on the big screen would be a big improvement. Nope.
The color was worse, the image was worse, and some idiot had decided that PG-13 movie was the perfect place to bring his young children.
Now, I'm sure that part of that has to do with this specific theater using the "old" film tech (remember, the Dark Knight was released in 2008, so this predates the Sony projectors in the article), but, honestly? Why would I bother with that.
So I don't. Instead I have a NetFlix subscription. The picture may be smaller, the sound may not be quite as surround, but damn it, I don't care.
No, that is just the polarising lens/filter combo needed for passive 3D glasses. Like sunglasses polarisation makes the image darker.
Yes, that would be the technical reason why the image is darker, but that's not the DRM part. The DRM is the reason that the projectionist doesn't simply replace the lens: if they do, they risk tripping Sony's DRM and locking the projector out.
Rather than risk that, they just leave the lens on. Thereby making the movie look absolutely horrible.
So it may not be DRM making the movie dark directly, but DRM is the root cause: Sony doesn't trust the people who own the projector to change the lens, and it's DRM that enforces that policy.
professional theatrical projection equipment
There was an interesting story in the Boston Globe this weekend about how Sony projectors are projecting 2D digital movies up to 85% darker than they should.
The reason? It turns out to be Sony DRM, although the article doesn't ever come out and say it directly. Basically, there's a special 3D lens required to display 3D movies, but this lens reduces the brightness of 2D movies.
So why aren't theater personnel simply removing the 3-D lenses? The answer is that it takes time, it costs money, and it requires technical know-how above the level of the average multiplex employee. James Bond, a Chicago-based projection guru who serves as technical expert for Roger Ebert's Ebertfest, said issues with the Sonys are more than mechanical. Opening the projector alone involves security clearances and Internet passwords, "and if you don't do it right, the machine will shut down on you."
In other words, you have to deal with Sony DRM. Rather than jump through the Sony-imposed hoops, theaters just leave the 3D lens on all the time.
Why bother with Sony projectors at all if they have this problem and others don't?
The reason appears to be a basic business quid pro quo. Sony provides projectors to the chains for free in exchange for the theaters dedicating part of their preshow ads to Sony products.
So, yeah. Another wonderful example of Sony in general and Sony DRM in specific giving customers an inferior product.
Obviously the theaters deserve some blame for this too.
I have described FFXIII as having this wonderfully complex and beautiful world that you are absolutely forbidden from seeing.
Throughout the game you get this sense of this vibrant world with an interesting history. But you're never allowed to see it, the most you get are long text-dumps.
Mario Galaxy gets away with using lives the same way Super Mario World did: by making them overly abundant and ridiculously easy to get, along with making the consequence of reaching game over be practically non-existent.
Overall, "lives" is a pointless mechanic and has been for basically the past two decades. The games that still have them do so by making the mechanic entirely meaningless.
I linked to the thread more to demonstrate that I'm not the only one having issues rather than because the OP in that thread makes any sense. If you read through the thread (hell, just the first few pages, really) you'll come across plenty of valid complaints.
The game requires a ridiculous amount of CPU and GPU power and if we're at all honest looks no better than a game that came out years ago.
Hell, I've recently been playing through Crysis and Crysis at max settings requires less CPU and GPU time than FFXIV, and there's no way FFXIV looks as nice as Crysis. That's seriously messed up.
I'd love to see them keep the graphics engine
I wouldn't. The engine is a horrible piece of shit.
Ignoring the fact that it's unnecessarily slow, you still have crazy things like shadows not working. It (was) 2010. How the hell do you manage to screw up shadows?! (I should explain: there is a single parallel light source, and all "mobile objects" - that is, things that aren't part of the map - cast a shadow based on that. And not on, say, the light sources in the map. Which leads to crazy things like you being able to cast a shadow onto a lit fire.)
Oh, and then there's the bit where the graphics engine crashes if you Alt-Tab out of the game. Still. In 2011. Everyone else fixed that a decade ago. (And, yes, there's a windowed mode. You can still crash it by doing something similar to an Alt-Tab, like locking the desktop or having a UAC prompt appear.)
Given Deux Ex 2, and the last several Square Enix releases, I have every faith in their ability to fuck that up.
I suppose I should limit that to Eidos releases. Let's see, Eidos's last big release was... Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. And that was... ummm...
So, yeah, I think I'll wait for the reviews before running out to purchase.
Who knows exactly how much FFXIV is costing them in development costs and server costs, but that ship has sailed. There's no point sinking money into something that will never turn a profit.
It's been seven months now. The improvements the game has made are minor at best. (The two biggest are that leveling combat classes is now possible, and that the market place works. Not well, mind you, but it works.) If you ask anyone playing whether or not you should, they'll tell you flat-out it isn't worth it.
This is not the sign of a game on the road to profitability. With every week that goes by, the ability to earn new players goes down.
Once they've stopped throwing money at a failed game, then they can start worrying about creating new games that people actually want to play.
But first, they've got to stop the bleeding.
Not that this needs to be said, but it should be said anyway:
For now.
It's Sony. I'm not sure how they'll take away the ability to boot Linux on phones that are running it, but they'll find a way. At the very least, one of the firmware updates to the existing software will remove the ability to install Linux, you can guarantee that.
Somebody's tinkering trying to fix the broken fortune that hasn't changed for weeks.
On the production server?
...Oh, right. This is Slashdot. Never mind.
If you read the letter (which is made needlessly annoying by the fact that it's scanned in and the raw text isn't made available, fuck you very much Sony), you'll see that on page 2 they explain:
When Sony Online Entertainment discovered this past Sunday afternoon that data from its servers had been stolen, it also discovered that the intruders had placed a file on one of those servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion."
So that's how they come to that conclusion. Which I guess means we can blame Anonymous, in so much as anyone calling themselves Anonymous is Anonymous.
Not that I really believe that the attacker really is "Anonymous," but they do make a good scape goat. And who knows, maybe the attacker did decide that this attack might as well be carried out under the "anonymous" banner.
They probably deserve the blame, too - they were apparently hacked via a "known vulnerability" although I don't think they've ever stated which one.
That's nice. Too bad their privacy policy says that they can store that information indefinitely, link that information together, and share it with third parties.
If they don't actually do that, maybe Apple should, I dunno, rewrite their privacy policy to explain what they actually do. Seems like a better plan than saying "oh, we don't do the things we say we're allowed to do, wink wink."
Otherwise, I'm going to continue assuming that they do exactly what their privacy policy says that they do. Because, after all, it's their policy. My policy is assuming they do exactly what their policy says they do.
Because if they don't, why does their policy say that they may?