> I remember a game like missle command, with > evil guys floating down towards our hero - a > large Llama sprite running back and forth > shooting diagonally and ricocheting off the > side of the screen.
Worse yet, what if copy protection was being used independantly?
What if (say) Sony copy protected the gene for musical talent, so that if you wanted your kid to be a musician, you HAD to pre-sign an agreement that they'd work for Sony?
> If you think you have a technique for > discovering the functions of genes without > spending billions of dollars, then you've just > won yourself a Nobel prize, my friend. They'll > be erecting statues and naming hospitals after > you.
Oo! Oo! I know!
1 - Abolish money 2 - Discover the functions of genes without spending the billions of dollars, because they no longer exist . . . 8 - PROFIT! 9 - Remember 10 - Reintroduce money 11 - Actually PROFIT!
Oddly enough, they ARE actually trialing this in the UK (the "car won't accelerate past the speed limit" bit, anyway). And this is a country where manuals are pretty much the standard.
Also, as far as I believe, it's illegal ("constructive litigation") to use the threat of a lawsuit to make people do stuff who aren't a) the subject of the lawsuit, b) aren't related to them in a way that's something to do with the lawsuit, and c) aren't doing something similar to what the lawsuit subject is doing.
In other words, "stop sharing files or I'll sue you" is ok (a). "Stop sharing files or I'll sue Kazaa" is ok (b). "We'll sue this student you don't know for $300m for file sharing, so you'd better stop sharing files yourself" is ok (c). But "stop sharing files or we'll sue the firm you work for so they run out of money and lay you off", is not ok unless the firm is something to do with file-sharing too.
"BigCorp, license our stuff or we'll sue Linus" clearly doesn't fit into any of a), b) or c); BigCorp isn't breaking SCO's patent, isn't involved with a group breaking SCO's patent, and isn't also intending to break SCO's patent.
Actually, there is something in the claim that they're undercutting a free product: MS are losing money when they give software away (because they could have sold it to someone else for money), whereas OSS aren't (because they wouldn't have charged anyone else any money). So the balance is negative for MS, but zero for OSS - ie, undercut.
What's the big deal with signing anyway?
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
I really don't understand how signing works anyhow. Ok, so U = S^E mod N, where (E,N) is the public key, S is the encrypted signature and U is the unencrypted digest. So all we need to do to appropriately encrypt some U value (and thus create our own signatures) is to find some Z such that U + Z*N is an integer power of E. (Then, S = Eroot(U+Z*N). )
Is there really no mathematical way of doing that? I certainly can't see it requiring factoring E.
I know that the "encryption" applied to the digest is actually the RSA *decryption* algorithm (applying the secret key). But this problem isn't equivalent to decrypting a message, because when we're decrypting a message there's only one correct result. In this case, we don't care what result we get as long as it'll give back our U when passed back through the signature decryption (RSA encryption) formula.
Well - no, not really. The reason voters are apathetic in the UK has been pretty much known for a long while: it's because of the way the electoral system works.
There are three main parties here: Conservative, Labour, and Lib. Dem. The problem is, the way it's set up, if the Conservatives get 40% of the vote and Labour and Lib.Dem get 30% each, then the Conservatives still get all the power even though 60% of people didn't support them.
Likewise, you see bizarre things. Like particular constituencies being designated "safe seats" which the holding party doesn't even bother to campaign in. Or "tactical voting" - opposition parties teaming up to tell people in a particular constituency which opposition they should vote for in order to oppose the current holding party (to avoid a situation like the above one, where the holding party gets the most votes because the opposing vote is split between parties)
Re:What this is about
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
> I'm pretty certain Palladium adds machine > instructions that a program can use to check if > Palladium is still on and that the OS is > trusted. It can refuse to run if Palladium is > turned off and there is nothing any patched > kernel or debugger can do about it.
Well, yes they can: they can run the whole thing on a virtual machine with a Palladium emulator.
Re:What this is about
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
I think what he was saying is: "It's ok if an app wants to check whether or not the kernel is signed, and not run if it isn't."
I don't think he was saying anything about hardware-level protection.
The Dvorak article has itself been discredited somewhat. Amongst other things, it addresses only speed rather than comfort.
This is not surprising given that it is written by two economists who are desperately on the defensive against the frequently-cited point that QWERTY adoption demonstrates that the market can lock in on an inferior product. What's ironic is that the article ends by saying that Dvorak failed because it failed to offer enough extra value, which of course is exactly what CAUSES the lock-in phenomenon: the first guy only has to be good, but then everyone else has to be better.
He does have some point, actually. After all, if dieting is so effective and so easy, why are there fat people? The only answer is - it's not easy. And that means, there are people for whom it's so hard that they can't do it. Having a brain that won't perform a particular behaviour is no different to having a damaged muscle - they're both broken body chemistry.
If the body is seriously hungry, it is capable of generating "hey, eat stuff!" impulses at a level lower than you can block with your conscious mind - just like if you haven't slept properly for days, you can't stop yourself nodding off, no matter how important it is that you don't. Using willpower against your own body's urges tends to be a losing battle, and you just wind up beating yourself up for eating.
This doesn't mean that you can't lose weight by dieting, though: it just means that fat people don't deserve to be insulted or attacked because they don't immediately go down to a diet of one lettuce leaf per day. This is one of the advantages of the Atkins diet: although it might be true that "low carbs don't make a difference, it only works because you're eating less", high-fat foods make you feel fuller, and are less of a jolt to the system for people who are used to eating a lot of fat.
A free market is *not* self-organizing at all, and people do not act in a way that supports the existance of a free market.
The most obvious example of this is: advertising works, and so does brand loyalty. The fact that these work means that people are basing their behaviour on them, and they could choose not to. And both of these significantly weaken the free market; the first by meaning that the system by which the best products are selected is distorted, and the second by freezing new competition out of the market because it has no loyalty. A truly free market requires that every new competitor has a chance to become a winner, and both these things impede that, and they are the result of people's behaviour which they could change if they chose.
Shame most of them aren't very good. I have several of them.
Dyhard Infinity (full title "Dyhard With Infinite Stairs") seems to be about jumping a little guy up some platforms and not falling off the bottom of the screen. Think Icy Tower.
Her Knights Forcing Break Out was marketed with the name "All For Princess Deadline" and is a Final Fight game that's way too hard because many enemies kill you in one hit.
Little Wizard is a fighting game that would actually be pretty cool if it ran at more than 6 frames a second.
Personally, I tend to use mine for playing C64 games. A bit of Iridis Alpha on the train doesn't hurt a bit. And before you say it, the game company doesn't object - they've been giving their ROMs away for years.
Only problem is, the only "circumvention tool" they're using is 007AUF itself. (Everything else involved - like USB memory cards - doesn't have any circumvention effect.)
So EA can be sued under the DMCA. Whoops! No they can't - MS authorised their code to run, bugs and all.
> OK. So it needs a memory card that can connect > to USB. This isn't a standard item. So instead > of the modchip being the circumvention device, > the USB memory card becomes one. Distributing > the USB memory cards is now in violation of > the DMCA.
No, you AREN'T circumventing copy protection by running Linux this way. AFAICS there is nothing illegal about it.
Running Linux on your XBox is not, in itself, illegal - provided you can actually get it to work without breaking any other laws. The old mod chips were illegal because a) they broke game copy protection too (DMCA), and b) they included a derivative work of MS's original Xbox BIOS (regular copyright law).
In this case this doesn't apply. No copy protection is normally applied to save game files. You could argue, I suppose, that "007 Agent Under Fire" violates the DMCA by running arbitary unsigned code. But that's shaky: the DMCA only protects against the technical protection that is actually there being broken, not against the protection not achieving the goal the developer intended it to. Just because MS says "Xboxen should never run unsigned code" doesn't make that the law, and if their technology fails to enforce that for reasons other than having been deliberately broken, the DMCA seems to have no business there. Here there has been no need to break copy protection: it's just never applied. And anyway, MS authorised the game to run, so it had their permission to "do whatever it does" anyway.
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups" It's not dying: it has been dead for quite a long time.
Ikaruga.
9. Puzzle What??? Lot of people still plays solitaire... even minesweeper! What might be happening is that there are not new types of puzzles...
Or nobody can be bothered marketing them.
8. Light Gun They're not really dead as they weren't really alive... aside of some people playing on nintendos, there were not a really market for they. I always thaught that the problem was that there is only one way to play with this things... aim and shoot.
House Of The Dead series.
7. Text Adventure They didn't die: they evolved! quite long ago they became graphic adventures.
See www.ifarchive.org.
6. Maze rrright, they died. But that is not a game genre, just a kind of puzzle.
Not at all. Quake is just Monster Maze.
5. Virtual Reality Again, that's not a genre.
Never existed in the first place.
4. Educational They would be right only if Educational games had ever been alive.
And if there weren't entire shelves full of new ones coming out.
3. Full Motion Video And then again... this is not a genre,
Agreed, and it should have been shot in the head at birth. Anyone feel any real loss for Space Ace, Psycho Killer or MadDog McCree?
2. Beat 'Em Up They are right (at least!). RIP. We'll miss you (i loved double dragon).
Capcom VS Snk 2 EO.
1. Graphic Adventure They are right again.
Everquest. It has graphics and it's an adventure. Yea, it's "roleplaying", but you were roleplaying the skeleton dude in Grim Fandango too.
> Text Adventures were "Text" Adventures because > they didn't have the graphics horsepower > around back then that they have now. If the > creators of Zork started out today, they'd > make a game with a simliar design with 3d > graphics.
That's not true. The text format allows for a lot of extra flexibility, and allows different things to be expressed. For example, it's a lot easier to do a convincing "player's detective searching the room" scene in a text adventure than in a 3D adventure game, especially one with the kind of user interface you get in modern times.
I dare anyone to try and do "Rameses", "So Far", or "Spider And Web" as a 3D adventure and have them have the same impact.
> People who do not understand what is required > to write programs cannot comprehend that a > program should cost money. These same people > would never steal a cd from a store, yet they > don't understand that the music they download > is the same. I would recommend the RIAA to > work hard at making music, not the physical > cd, but the actual song, what is being > purchased.
It's a good point, but I don't think that the RIAA could really help. I think that more of the problem is that the average person believes themselves to be so disconnected from music stars that they just don't apply that kind of moral.
Society, and the industry itself, have some responsibility for that disconnection. The industry creates a glamour around musicians in general that makes them seem weird and different (seen Perfect Blue?) Likewise, society's embrance of the "talent" hypothesis - which is scientifically unsound, but useful to ensure productivity - has backfired, because the majority of people think "Well, it would be a lot of work for me to write that music, but it isn't for that famous musician, because they're talented. Talent makes the work easier, so it wasn't hard work for them."
Of course, the industry clampdown has only made things worse, because now when people DO know a musician themselves, chances are they are a small musician who WANTS their stuff copied just to get it heard.
If we could get back to the stage where musicians were respected as basically regular people who happened to stick their necks out and write some good songs, then piracy would go down. As long as we have the image that they're impossible perfect glamour beasts who have a magic 'talent' that makes anything they lay a finger on become perfect, people will not consider them morally in the same way either.
> One of the big problems is that people (mostly > really just hard core gamers) want better and > better "quality", which really means graphics > and sound and everything BUT gameplay.
Many people do want this, but hardcore gamers don't. (Many hardcore gamers I know are happily playing Gridrunner++.)
But yes, the Hollywood situation is a problem - it has been ever since computer graphics/music got so good that game studios have to compete for the same artists/musicians as everyone else, rather than having it as a niche.
The most obvious problem with this is that the vast majority of nerds a) don't smell, b) are indeed social with other nerds, and c) do indeed have similar interests as other nerds.
I mean, think about it. If nerds were as incredibly unsocial as people claim they are, why would other nerds like them? I assure you that not all nerd friendships are the result of "not being able to befriend anyone better".
The truth is that 'nerds' and 'jocks' are not really so different - they are both insular social groups with different sets of internal interests. The problem is purely that one set is treated better than the other, and this isn't the fault of the nerds OR the jocks exclusively.
Amongst other things they claim that Codemasters is Russian. It isn't, it's UK based, founded by Richard and David Darling. Also, the vast majority of games use SafeDisk or similar programs.
Slashdot Mirror
> I remember a game like missle command, with
> evil guys floating down towards our hero - a
> large Llama sprite running back and forth
> shooting diagonally and ricocheting off the
> side of the screen.
Metagalactic Llamas Battle At The Edge Of Time.
I'm scared I know that.
Pity us poor UK folks who can't get these because the ******d sellers won't ship internationally.. :( :(
Worse yet, what if copy protection was being used independantly?
What if (say) Sony copy protected the gene for musical talent, so that if you wanted your kid to be a musician, you HAD to pre-sign an agreement that they'd work for Sony?
> If you think you have a technique for
> discovering the functions of genes without
> spending billions of dollars, then you've just
> won yourself a Nobel prize, my friend. They'll
> be erecting statues and naming hospitals after
> you.
Oo! Oo! I know!
1 - Abolish money
2 - Discover the functions of genes without spending the billions of dollars, because they no longer exist
.
.
.
8 - PROFIT!
9 - Remember
10 - Reintroduce money
11 - Actually PROFIT!
Oddly enough, they ARE actually trialing this in the UK (the "car won't accelerate past the speed limit" bit, anyway). And this is a country where manuals are pretty much the standard.
Also, as far as I believe, it's illegal ("constructive litigation") to use the threat of a lawsuit to make people do stuff who aren't a) the subject of the lawsuit, b) aren't related to them in a way that's something to do with the lawsuit, and c) aren't doing something similar to what the lawsuit subject is doing.
In other words, "stop sharing files or I'll sue you" is ok (a). "Stop sharing files or I'll sue Kazaa" is ok (b). "We'll sue this student you don't know for $300m for file sharing, so you'd better stop sharing files yourself" is ok (c). But "stop sharing files or we'll sue the firm you work for so they run out of money and lay you off", is not ok unless the firm is something to do with file-sharing too.
"BigCorp, license our stuff or we'll sue Linus" clearly doesn't fit into any of a), b) or c); BigCorp isn't breaking SCO's patent, isn't involved with a group breaking SCO's patent, and isn't also intending to break SCO's patent.
Actually, there is something in the claim that they're undercutting a free product: MS are losing money when they give software away (because they could have sold it to someone else for money), whereas OSS aren't (because they wouldn't have charged anyone else any money). So the balance is negative for MS, but zero for OSS - ie, undercut.
I really don't understand how signing works anyhow. Ok, so U = S^E mod N, where (E,N) is the public key, S is the encrypted signature and U is the unencrypted digest. So all we need to do to appropriately encrypt some U value (and thus create our own signatures) is to find some Z such that U + Z*N is an integer power of E. (Then, S = Eroot(U+Z*N). )
Is there really no mathematical way of doing that? I certainly can't see it requiring factoring E.
I know that the "encryption" applied to the digest is actually the RSA *decryption* algorithm (applying the secret key). But this problem isn't equivalent to decrypting a message, because when we're decrypting a message there's only one correct result. In this case, we don't care what result we get as long as it'll give back our U when passed back through the signature decryption (RSA encryption) formula.
Well - no, not really. The reason voters are apathetic in the UK has been pretty much known for a long while: it's because of the way the electoral system works.
There are three main parties here: Conservative, Labour, and Lib. Dem. The problem is, the way it's set up, if the Conservatives get 40% of the vote and Labour and Lib.Dem get 30% each, then the Conservatives still get all the power even though 60% of people didn't support them.
Likewise, you see bizarre things. Like particular constituencies being designated "safe seats" which the holding party doesn't even bother to campaign in. Or "tactical voting" - opposition parties teaming up to tell people in a particular constituency which opposition they should vote for in order to oppose the current holding party (to avoid a situation like the above one, where the holding party gets the most votes because the opposing vote is split between parties)
> I'm pretty certain Palladium adds machine
> instructions that a program can use to check if
> Palladium is still on and that the OS is
> trusted. It can refuse to run if Palladium is
> turned off and there is nothing any patched
> kernel or debugger can do about it.
Well, yes they can: they can run the whole thing on a virtual machine with a Palladium emulator.
I think what he was saying is: "It's ok if an app wants to check whether or not the kernel is signed, and not run if it isn't."
I don't think he was saying anything about hardware-level protection.
The Dvorak article has itself been discredited somewhat. Amongst other things, it addresses only speed rather than comfort.
This is not surprising given that it is written by two economists who are desperately on the defensive against the frequently-cited point that QWERTY adoption demonstrates that the market can lock in on an inferior product. What's ironic is that the article ends by saying that Dvorak failed because it failed to offer enough extra value, which of course is exactly what CAUSES the lock-in phenomenon: the first guy only has to be good, but then everyone else has to be better.
He does have some point, actually. After all, if dieting is so effective and so easy, why are there fat people? The only answer is - it's not easy. And that means, there are people for whom it's so hard that they can't do it. Having a brain that won't perform a particular behaviour is no different to having a damaged muscle - they're both broken body chemistry.
If the body is seriously hungry, it is capable of generating "hey, eat stuff!" impulses at a level lower than you can block with your conscious mind - just like if you haven't slept properly for days, you can't stop yourself nodding off, no matter how important it is that you don't. Using willpower against your own body's urges tends to be a losing battle, and you just wind up beating yourself up for eating.
This doesn't mean that you can't lose weight by dieting, though: it just means that fat people don't deserve to be insulted or attacked because they don't immediately go down to a diet of one lettuce leaf per day. This is one of the advantages of the Atkins diet: although it might be true that "low carbs don't make a difference, it only works because you're eating less", high-fat foods make you feel fuller, and are less of a jolt to the system for people who are used to eating a lot of fat.
A free market is *not* self-organizing at all, and people do not act in a way that supports the existance of a free market.
The most obvious example of this is: advertising works, and so does brand loyalty. The fact that these work means that people are basing their behaviour on them, and they could choose not to. And both of these significantly weaken the free market; the first by meaning that the system by which the best products are selected is distorted, and the second by freezing new competition out of the market because it has no loyalty. A truly free market requires that every new competitor has a chance to become a winner, and both these things impede that, and they are the result of people's behaviour which they could change if they chose.
Shame most of them aren't very good. I have several of them.
Dyhard Infinity (full title "Dyhard With Infinite Stairs") seems to be about jumping a little guy up some platforms and not falling off the bottom of the screen. Think Icy Tower.
Her Knights Forcing Break Out was marketed with the name "All For Princess Deadline" and is a Final Fight game that's way too hard because many enemies kill you in one hit.
Little Wizard is a fighting game that would actually be pretty cool if it ran at more than 6 frames a second.
Personally, I tend to use mine for playing C64 games. A bit of Iridis Alpha on the train doesn't hurt a bit. And before you say it, the game company doesn't object - they've been giving their ROMs away for years.
Only problem is, the only "circumvention tool" they're using is 007AUF itself. (Everything else involved - like USB memory cards - doesn't have any circumvention effect.)
So EA can be sued under the DMCA. Whoops! No they can't - MS authorised their code to run, bugs and all.
> OK. So it needs a memory card that can connect
> to USB. This isn't a standard item. So instead
> of the modchip being the circumvention device,
> the USB memory card becomes one. Distributing
> the USB memory cards is now in violation of
> the DMCA.
No, you AREN'T circumventing copy protection by running Linux this way. AFAICS there is nothing illegal about it.
Running Linux on your XBox is not, in itself, illegal - provided you can actually get it to work without breaking any other laws. The old mod chips were illegal because a) they broke game copy protection too (DMCA), and b) they included a derivative work of MS's original Xbox BIOS (regular copyright law).
In this case this doesn't apply. No copy protection is normally applied to save game files. You could argue, I suppose, that "007 Agent Under Fire" violates the DMCA by running arbitary unsigned code. But that's shaky: the DMCA only protects against the technical protection that is actually there being broken, not against the protection not achieving the goal the developer intended it to. Just because MS says "Xboxen should never run unsigned code" doesn't make that the law, and if their technology fails to enforce that for reasons other than having been deliberately broken, the DMCA seems to have no business there. Here there has been no need to break copy protection: it's just never applied. And anyway, MS authorised the game to run, so it had their permission to "do whatever it does" anyway.
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups"
It's not dying: it has been dead for quite a long time.
Ikaruga.
9. Puzzle
What??? Lot of people still plays solitaire... even minesweeper!
What might be happening is that there are not new types of puzzles...
Or nobody can be bothered marketing them.
8. Light Gun
They're not really dead as they weren't really alive... aside of some people playing on nintendos, there were not a really market for they. I always thaught that the problem was that there is only one way to play with this things... aim and shoot.
House Of The Dead series.
7. Text Adventure
They didn't die: they evolved! quite long ago they became graphic adventures.
See www.ifarchive.org.
6. Maze
rrright, they died. But that is not a game genre, just a kind of puzzle.
Not at all. Quake is just Monster Maze.
5. Virtual Reality
Again, that's not a genre.
Never existed in the first place.
4. Educational
They would be right only if Educational games had ever been alive.
And if there weren't entire shelves full of new ones coming out.
3. Full Motion Video
And then again... this is not a genre,
Agreed, and it should have been shot in the head at birth. Anyone feel any real loss for Space Ace, Psycho Killer or MadDog McCree?
2. Beat 'Em Up
They are right (at least!). RIP. We'll miss you (i loved double dragon).
Capcom VS Snk 2 EO.
1. Graphic Adventure
They are right again.
Everquest. It has graphics and it's an adventure. Yea, it's "roleplaying", but you were roleplaying the skeleton dude in Grim Fandango too.
> Text Adventures were "Text" Adventures because
> they didn't have the graphics horsepower
> around back then that they have now. If the
> creators of Zork started out today, they'd
> make a game with a simliar design with 3d
> graphics.
That's not true. The text format allows for a lot of extra flexibility, and allows different things to be expressed. For example, it's a lot easier to do a convincing "player's detective searching the room" scene in a text adventure than in a 3D adventure game, especially one with the kind of user interface you get in modern times.
I dare anyone to try and do "Rameses", "So Far", or "Spider And Web" as a 3D adventure and have them have the same impact.
> People who do not understand what is required
> to write programs cannot comprehend that a
> program should cost money. These same people
> would never steal a cd from a store, yet they
> don't understand that the music they download
> is the same. I would recommend the RIAA to
> work hard at making music, not the physical
> cd, but the actual song, what is being
> purchased.
It's a good point, but I don't think that the RIAA could really help. I think that more of the problem is that the average person believes themselves to be so disconnected from music stars that they just don't apply that kind of moral.
Society, and the industry itself, have some responsibility for that disconnection. The industry creates a glamour around musicians in general that makes them seem weird and different (seen Perfect Blue?) Likewise, society's embrance of the "talent" hypothesis - which is scientifically unsound, but useful to ensure productivity - has backfired, because the majority of people think "Well, it would be a lot of work for me to write that music, but it isn't for that famous musician, because they're talented. Talent makes the work easier, so it wasn't hard work for them."
Of course, the industry clampdown has only made things worse, because now when people DO know a musician themselves, chances are they are a small musician who WANTS their stuff copied just to get it heard.
If we could get back to the stage where musicians were respected as basically regular people who happened to stick their necks out and write some good songs, then piracy would go down. As long as we have the image that they're impossible perfect glamour beasts who have a magic 'talent' that makes anything they lay a finger on become perfect, people will not consider them morally in the same way either.
> and you denfitely won't get any shelf space as
> an independent.
Introversion Software got shelf space in the UK for Uplink, without a publisher.
> One of the big problems is that people (mostly
> really just hard core gamers) want better and
> better "quality", which really means graphics
> and sound and everything BUT gameplay.
Many people do want this, but hardcore gamers don't. (Many hardcore gamers I know are happily playing Gridrunner++.)
But yes, the Hollywood situation is a problem - it has been ever since computer graphics/music got so good that game studios have to compete for the same artists/musicians as everyone else, rather than having it as a niche.
The most obvious problem with this is that the vast majority of nerds a) don't smell, b) are indeed social with other nerds, and c) do indeed have similar interests as other nerds.
I mean, think about it. If nerds were as incredibly unsocial as people claim they are, why would other nerds like them? I assure you that not all nerd friendships are the result of "not being able to befriend anyone better".
The truth is that 'nerds' and 'jocks' are not really so different - they are both insular social groups with different sets of internal interests. The problem is purely that one set is treated better than the other, and this isn't the fault of the nerds OR the jocks exclusively.
The GBA did not have regional lockout.
And it's a seriously whacked-out list.
Amongst other things they claim that Codemasters is Russian. It isn't, it's UK based, founded by Richard and David Darling. Also, the vast majority of games use SafeDisk or similar programs.