Why couldn't they just use compact flash cards like everyone else? It's not like Nintendo's based in China or anything.
Look at the console market. Nintendo is the only company with a non-standard disc format - and as it happens, the only one whose games can't be easily copied. In Any country.
So would you have to pay to download the comics, media, whatever? Or is this a free service after buying the cartridges?
In order to make enough money to be of interest to a Japanese company, they'd need to sell the content.
This is nothing new - just another proprietary media. Except for the focus on comics - which makes sense really, considering actual video would fill a flash cart quickly and all the text you could want is available through cell phones, which all Japanese people with GBAs would own anyway.
Don't worry, the chance of this format making it to the west, where comics are for the young and the social outcasts, are slim.
A while back, a bunch of us, for whatever reason, were arguing what the Hamburgler used to say. Whether is was "robble robble", or "rabble rabble". We debated this for 5 minutes, no fooling. Just kept going on and on, until someone suggested, "Why don't you just find out at a Hamburgler fan site?"
And lo and behold, Google didn't just find one, it found about a dozen.
when you detect an error (the redundant bit doesn't match the proper sequence), you back-trace through your data and find the most likely non-errored sequence and adjust your data bits accordingly.
From my admittedly limited exposure to turbo codes, it seems there are no redundant bits and the algorithm never detects an error per se. Instead it always backtracks to find the most likely sequence. Hence the huge performance demands - this analysis needs to happen for every possible state of the encoder for every bit, times multiple iterations (the more you do, the closer to the limit you get).
The article lists www.macombsheriff.com as the offending web site.
Which begs the question: Why does it have a.com TLD? Was it a commercial web site? I'm sick of.gov and.mil sites using.com because it's k00l3r. These sites should use the proper TLD, and of course it should be impossible for a _person_ to own these domains.
Of course, when I rule the world there will be different TLDs for individuals, companies, military, government, and nonprofits - and a commercial site would never be able to even claim an individual's web site is infringing (or whatever) since they will live in different namespaces.
Ironically, the alleged extortionist's domain is justice4pat.com, seeming to suggest that this is a business venture for him.
Or maybe he just decided not to use.org because he felt like supporting Verisign, what with all of their sitefinder-related legal fees.
I'm sure many non-console-owning cable customers would just love being able to play solitaire and bejeweled on their television - and remember these kinds of software take a very short time to develop. How many people would actually pay $5 a month for 20 games or so? I'm not talking specifically about you or the people you know, but the normal cable customer base.
So the simple puzzle games may not be such a bad idea, and if you can port a Sega Genesis (say) emulator or even add actual on-board hardware to run Genesis software you have a library of hundreds of real titles. Pay $5, play Sonic for up to 30 days. Not a bad deal for some people. Again, not for you, but for some people.
Now, as far as modern games are concerned, there are two ways to go about it. Convergence (combo cable box + xbox + DVR) which may or may not make sense to some people (but not to us) and developing a new competing next-gen platform which is probably not such a good plan.
Most spyware actually informs users somewhere in the very long license agreement, and would not be affected by this.
Completely criminal spyware - installed completely without the user's knowledge (such as that found on some discs claiming to be music CDs) is already illegal.
This is just a 'feel-good' measure which will not actually change anything; at least the intent, unlike CAN-SPAM, wasn't evil here.
and with all the amount of stuff, and all the people, you can find anecdotal evidence to support most any theory. It's a good thing these people are, you know, experts, or I'd be inclined to distrust their opinions.
The article itself states that the documentary "was followed by a panel debate, which concluded that scientific findings of the effects, if any, of violent video games were scant."
So it's just some "experts" seeding panic for personal fame and fortune.
While we're all here, I would like to use this opportunity to link to a little snippet from ebay on my own site, which proves beyond any doubt that games are, indeed, corrupting today's youth.
Why not just illegally trade the "old format" mp3s then? Or am I missing the totally obvious?
Officer, arrest this man. He is obviously a user, and probably a dealer, of a terrorist-grade operating system weapon, capable of running audio playback software software (and undoubtedly encryption software too) not expressly authorized by the ministry of rights (MiniRight).
Yes, I know it sounds like a joke, but so did the DMCA before 1998.
There is no reason the two systems can't exist together, implementing each other. There is much need for commercial software a hacker with a little time on his hands would never want to tackle; conversely, there are many possible projects which could make the world a slightly better place but can't really become profitable.
* Users spot the need for software that doesn't yet exist * People 'vote' (or something) on the importance of these projects, and/or share any relevant information (like an existing project which can do the same thing) * Groups of coders, documenters, testers etc. form to make these project a reality.
Let's face it - a lot of ideas get lost because the people who happen to think of them don't happen to have the time or the skills to code them.
They included the statement, "at our customers request." You can bet they'll be passing the cost of the license on to their customers.
Well then, it's entirely possible that ONE of their customers specifically requested a SCO license. They tried to explain it didn't mean anything, but the customer insisted, customer's always right, customer's attorney explained to him he must get a license to be on the safe side, EV1 sighed in disbelief and called SCO to buy one (or however many) licenses.
Seriously it would be awesome to have an earthquake in a game, I don't think any other GTA-style game has done something like that (i.e. disaster scenarios).
One of the objectives in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3's LA level is "start the earthquake". Later on the same level you have to deal with a car teetering over the top of the broken freeway.
The PS2 title Disaster Report places you in an earthquake ravaged city.
Quake, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be earthquake related.
the government may require that up to 70% of software on Chinese computers is produced domestically.
So how do they plan to calculate the percentage? Number of software packages? Size in megabytes? Lines of source code? Weight of documentation?
Chinese programmers: Please make lots of free, useless little utilities so for every foreign software package your people need, they can install two of yours to balance them.
Posing as clients, we ascertained that in 49 out of the 70 PCs installed, prohibited video games were being played such as 'rally', 'football' and 'war games'
The only game I know of titled simply 'Football' was for the Atari VCS2600.
"war games" is, of course, a Colecovision title.
And "Rally" really takes us back - it seems to be an arcade pong clone, circa 1983.
I don't think the poll was meant to hold any thing meaningful. Its just a chance for game fans to Vote on what their favorite game of all-time is...instead of argueing mindlessly over the subject.
Who's making money off this kind of device? What are their ties to the NM house of representatives?
On the plus side, this would make car chase scenes in movies set in NM that much more fun. Imagine, the bad guys try to escape the scene in their motorcycles. The hero leaps into his ferrari, and...
Some games are mismarked, like Tony Hawk 3. It says "E" for everyone, but fails to mention the blood and swearing. I personally would still let anyone play it, since the context of the blood and swearing is appropriate.
Tony Hawk 3 (at least the PS2/GC/xbox versions) is rated T for Teen. If I were a parent, the blood wouldn't bother me, but some of the song lyrics might.
Parents might object more to "defy authority" goals in the THPS games like "grind 5 police cars", "destroy 5 no skating signs", "grind down officer Tom's banners" or "dunk 30 tourists".
Yet other parents may be horrified by Tony's ability to skitch. This features is just screaming for a lawsuit somewhere down the road. "But mommy, Tony's always doing it!".
a spokesperson against animal cruelty "claimed that the game made light of animal suffering, which was offensive." That's how comedy (+parody) works. M.A.S.H. made light of human suffering, but got people to think about war and such.
Plus, the game is very light-hearted in a Sam & Max way. It will not be confused with reality any more than a typical Itchy & Scratchy cartoon.
Is there some U.K. law that states works of fiction may not be offensive?
Labor MP Ian Gibson said he "feared that children would gain a distorted view of animal experimentation" Children? In the states, the game was rated 'T' for teen. U.K. has its own ratings; I believe the equivalent rating is '13' or something like that.
You know, some nights I can't sleep because I keep thinking about all those cop shows which may give children a distorted view of law enforcement. This kind of thing should be illegal.
Art should faithfully represent reality. People have no business making up stuff.
Does anyone else think that our society is overdue on becoming fed up with all these sort of things?
Our society is fed up with poverty, disease and famine, but there's nothing to be done about those either.
Microsoft is a huge, rich company. If they can't write secure software it can't be done, and anyway it's always the fault of the bad guys for doing bad stuff, never the fault of the company making it possible in the first place.
(note - it's not my opinion, but I did talk to Joe Sixpack a few days ago and he said everybody except us geeks agreed that was the case).
Windows is designed primarily with 'security by obscurity' in mind. The security holes indeed show up every often and we have worms making it to the gazillion windows boxes before the patch does. Get ready for a deluge of worms/virri. Another bad week/month for sysadmins.
No, just on sysadmins relying on 'security by obscurity'.
Didn't microsoft claim somewhere that publishing the source code would undermine national security?
(And didn't they also give the source to foreign governments about to switch to Linux?)
I know there are a heck of a lot of knock-off, unofficial ones, though - I even saw one recently with a Famicom cartridge port in it, so you could play Japanese NES games on it
For a list of way too many knock-offs, check out Famiclones. Some of the stranger ones are meant to be mistaken for a SNES, Genesis, or even a Playstation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why couldn't they just use compact flash cards like everyone else? It's not like Nintendo's based in China or anything.
Look at the console market. Nintendo is the only company with a non-standard disc format - and as it happens, the only one whose games can't be easily copied. In Any country.
So would you have to pay to download the comics, media, whatever? Or is this a free service after buying the cartridges?
In order to make enough money to be of interest to a Japanese company, they'd need to sell the content.
This is nothing new - just another proprietary media. Except for the focus on comics - which makes sense really, considering actual video would fill a flash cart quickly and all the text you could want is available through cell phones, which all Japanese people with GBAs would own anyway.
Don't worry, the chance of this format making it to the west, where comics are for the young and the social outcasts, are slim.
A while back, a bunch of us, for whatever reason, were arguing what the Hamburgler used to say. Whether is was "robble robble", or "rabble rabble". We debated this for 5 minutes, no fooling. Just kept going on and on, until someone suggested, "Why don't you just find out at a Hamburgler fan site?"
And lo and behold, Google didn't just find one, it found about a dozen.
So don't keep us waiting... which one was it?
when you detect an error (the redundant bit doesn't match the proper sequence), you back-trace through your data and find the most likely non-errored sequence and adjust your data bits accordingly.
From my admittedly limited exposure to turbo codes, it seems there are no redundant bits and the algorithm never detects an error per se. Instead it always backtracks to find the most likely sequence. Hence the huge performance demands - this analysis needs to happen for every possible state of the encoder for every bit, times multiple iterations (the more you do, the closer to the limit you get).
Like the article says, these codes were introduced in 1993. This would have made a good story - back then.
The problem is that turbo codes are so computationally intensive that using them in consumer electronics is only new becoming feasible.
The article lists www.macombsheriff.com as the offending web site.
.com TLD? Was it a commercial web site? I'm sick of .gov and .mil sites using .com because it's k00l3r. These sites should use the proper TLD, and of course it should be impossible for a _person_ to own these domains.
.org because he felt like supporting Verisign, what with all of their sitefinder-related legal fees.
Which begs the question: Why does it have a
Of course, when I rule the world there will be different TLDs for individuals, companies, military, government, and nonprofits - and a commercial site would never be able to even claim an individual's web site is infringing (or whatever) since they will live in different namespaces.
Ironically, the alleged extortionist's domain is justice4pat.com, seeming to suggest that this is a business venture for him.
Or maybe he just decided not to use
I'm sure many non-console-owning cable customers would just love being able to play solitaire and bejeweled on their television - and remember these kinds of software take a very short time to develop. How many people would actually pay $5 a month for 20 games or so? I'm not talking specifically about you or the people you know, but the normal cable customer base.
So the simple puzzle games may not be such a bad idea, and if you can port a Sega Genesis (say) emulator or even add actual on-board hardware to run Genesis software you have a library of hundreds of real titles. Pay $5, play Sonic for up to 30 days. Not a bad deal for some people. Again, not for you, but for some people.
Now, as far as modern games are concerned, there are two ways to go about it. Convergence (combo cable box + xbox + DVR) which may or may not make sense to some people (but not to us) and developing a new competing next-gen platform which is probably not such a good plan.
Most spyware actually informs users somewhere in the very long license agreement, and would not be affected by this.
Completely criminal spyware - installed completely without the user's knowledge (such as that found on some discs claiming to be music CDs) is already illegal.
This is just a 'feel-good' measure which will not actually change anything; at least the intent, unlike CAN-SPAM, wasn't evil here.
and with all the amount of stuff, and all the people, you can find anecdotal evidence to support most any theory. It's a good thing these people are, you know, experts, or I'd be inclined to distrust their opinions.
The article itself states that the documentary "was followed by a panel debate, which concluded that scientific findings of the effects, if any, of violent video games were scant."
So it's just some "experts" seeding panic for personal fame and fortune.
While we're all here, I would like to use this opportunity to link to a little snippet from ebay on my own site, which proves beyond any doubt that games are, indeed, corrupting today's youth.
Why not just illegally trade the "old format" mp3s then? Or am I missing the totally obvious?
Officer, arrest this man. He is obviously a user, and probably a dealer, of a terrorist-grade operating system weapon, capable of running audio playback software software (and undoubtedly encryption software too) not expressly authorized by the ministry of rights (MiniRight).
Yes, I know it sounds like a joke, but so did the DMCA before 1998.
There is no reason the two systems can't exist together, implementing each other. There is much need for commercial software a hacker with a little time on his hands would never want to tackle; conversely, there are many possible projects which could make the world a slightly better place but can't really become profitable.
We need a resource that streamlines this process:
* Users spot the need for software that doesn't yet exist
* People 'vote' (or something) on the importance of these projects, and/or share any relevant information (like an existing project which can do the same thing)
* Groups of coders, documenters, testers etc. form to make these project a reality.
Let's face it - a lot of ideas get lost because the people who happen to think of them don't happen to have the time or the skills to code them.
They included the statement, "at our customers request." You can bet they'll be passing the cost of the license on to their customers.
Well then, it's entirely possible that ONE of their customers specifically requested a SCO license. They tried to explain it didn't mean anything, but the customer insisted, customer's always right, customer's attorney explained to him he must get a license to be on the safe side, EV1 sighed in disbelief and called SCO to buy one (or however many) licenses.
Seriously it would be awesome to have an earthquake in a game, I don't think any other GTA-style game has done something like that (i.e. disaster scenarios).
One of the objectives in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3's LA level is "start the earthquake". Later on the same level you have to deal with a car teetering over the top of the broken freeway.
The PS2 title Disaster Report places you in an earthquake ravaged city.
Quake, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be earthquake related.
the government may require that up to 70% of software on Chinese computers is produced domestically.
So how do they plan to calculate the percentage? Number of software packages? Size in megabytes? Lines of source code? Weight of documentation?
Chinese programmers: Please make lots of free, useless little utilities so for every foreign software package your people need, they can install two of yours to balance them.
Posing as clients, we ascertained that in 49 out of the 70 PCs installed, prohibited video games were being played such as 'rally', 'football' and 'war games'
The only game I know of titled simply 'Football' was for the Atari VCS2600.
"war games" is, of course, a Colecovision title.
And "Rally" really takes us back - it seems to be an arcade pong clone, circa 1983.
I don't think the poll was meant to hold any thing meaningful. Its just a chance for game fans to Vote on what their favorite game of all-time is...instead of argueing mindlessly over the subject.
Why not do neither?
Let's generalize a step further:
"Best work of art ever"
Or even two:
"Best thing ever"
How can the result be meaningful to anybody or make the world a better place?
Who's making money off this kind of device? What are their ties to the NM house of representatives?
On the plus side, this would make car chase scenes in movies set in NM that much more fun. Imagine, the bad guys try to escape the scene in their motorcycles. The hero leaps into his ferrari, and...
Some games are mismarked, like Tony Hawk 3. It says "E" for everyone, but fails to mention the blood and swearing. I personally would still let anyone play it, since the context of the blood and swearing is appropriate.
Tony Hawk 3 (at least the PS2/GC/xbox versions) is rated T for Teen. If I were a parent, the blood wouldn't bother me, but some of the song lyrics might.
Parents might object more to "defy authority" goals in the THPS games like "grind 5 police cars", "destroy 5 no skating signs", "grind down officer Tom's banners" or "dunk 30 tourists".
Yet other parents may be horrified by Tony's ability to skitch. This features is just screaming for a lawsuit somewhere down the road.
"But mommy, Tony's always doing it!".
a spokesperson against animal cruelty "claimed that the game made light of animal suffering, which was offensive."
That's how comedy (+parody) works. M.A.S.H. made light of human suffering, but got people to think about war and such.
Plus, the game is very light-hearted in a Sam & Max way. It will not be confused with reality any more than a typical Itchy & Scratchy cartoon.
Is there some U.K. law that states works of fiction may not be offensive?
Labor MP Ian Gibson said he "feared that children would gain a distorted view of animal experimentation"
Children? In the states, the game was rated 'T' for teen. U.K. has its own ratings; I believe the equivalent rating is '13' or something like that.
You know, some nights I can't sleep because I keep thinking about all those cop shows which may give children a distorted view of law enforcement. This kind of thing should be illegal.
Art should faithfully represent reality. People have no business making up stuff.
Does anyone else think that our society is overdue on becoming fed up with all these sort of things?
Our society is fed up with poverty, disease and famine, but there's nothing to be done about those either.
Microsoft is a huge, rich company. If they can't write secure software it can't be done, and anyway it's always the fault of the bad guys for doing bad stuff, never the fault of the company making it possible in the first place.
(note - it's not my opinion, but I did talk to Joe Sixpack a few days ago and he said everybody except us geeks agreed that was the case).
1. Company releases online game
2. You buy game hoping to play online
3. Company pulls all server to save money
The problem is finding an attorney to understand these cases and be willing to represent us. Otherwise, this is pretty much an open-and-shut case.
Any slashdot reader who recently graduated from law school and would like to win a class action lawsuit as a career stepping stone? Talk to us.
Windows is designed primarily with 'security by obscurity' in mind. The security holes indeed show up every often and we have worms making it to the gazillion windows boxes before the patch does. Get ready for a deluge of worms/virri. Another bad week/month for sysadmins.
No, just on sysadmins relying on 'security by obscurity'.
Didn't microsoft claim somewhere that publishing the source code would undermine national security?
(And didn't they also give the source to foreign governments about to switch to Linux?)
I know there are a heck of a lot of knock-off, unofficial ones, though - I even saw one recently with a Famicom cartridge port in it, so you could play Japanese NES games on it
For a list of way too many knock-offs, check out Famiclones. Some of the stranger ones are meant to be mistaken for a SNES, Genesis, or even a Playstation.