"When I think about it, every game I've played and enjoyed recently was made by a (north) American team. [...] I'm talking about Burnout 3, LoK: Defiance, The Suffering, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Mortal Kombat Deception, GTA:SA, Doom 3, coming soon Half Life 2."
GTA:SA was made by Rockstar North. They're in Scotland.
"Had I been present at home watching it, I'd have got up to make a coffee or had a p break during the commercials anyway."
Would you have missed every single commercial break? (Sidenote: Frequent urination is a warning sign for diabetes. You might want to talk to a doctor if you're peeing that much.) Would you have been far enough away from the TV that you wouldn't even overhear any of the commercials? If you finish making coffee and/or peeing before the commercial break is over, would you carefully avoid the room with the TV?
Anyway, it's an accepted fact that people will miss some commercials during shows. The problem advertisers have with PVRs is that the audience is missing all of the commercials.
Re:Do we ever really hear about good viruses?
on
So, Who Wrote Sobig?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"What do you think of the notion that there are at least several really successful viruses that we never hear about, because they are more useful to the writer if they are not obviously annoying?"
I think it's not very likely. It isn't the payload that necessarily gets viruses noticed. If a virus (well, technically a worm in this case) tries to exploit buffer overruns in remote services (as was done by worms like Code Red and Blaster), it's going to get caught by the log entries from failed intrusions. If a virus (again, technically a worm in this case) tries to mail itself out to people, it's going to be easy for savvy users to see it for what it is. Even if a virus just modifies executables, it's going to raise alarms on a system that keeps checksums of such files. Even the increasingly archaic boot sector viruses will get caught by a simple BIOS setting.
All the popular infection vectors that viruses and worms use leave too much evidence. I don't think any virus that has infected a large number of computers will stay hidden for long.
"I don't see why people dislike Steam so much, it's so much better than the original interface."
I'm willing to concede the Steam server browser is better than the old server browser. However, I had a minimalist third-party server browser that served all my needs perfectly (HLSW). So that big advantage of Steam was meaningless to me. Also, because the group of people I played with primarily stuck to a single server, I really had no interest in the Friends list feature.
Furthermore, when they went to Steam, they felt the need to redo things like the console window (great for checking missed teamsays) and the font for death messages (great for approximating where the enemy is). Where things were previously perfect for checking at a glance, they're now harder to see -- which makes them near useless in the middle of a frantic match.
Finally, the hassles of using Steam were severe enough that I went from playing Day of Defeat for a few hours every night to almost not playing at all. It was especially bad when I first tried it (after the beta test supposedly ironed out the major issues), where every day seemed to be a crapshoot as to whether or not you could get it to work. Even now that it's stable, the net result is that I'm only marginally worse off than I was under WON.
Still, to be fair, I ordered HL2 over Steam. I'd be stuck with it even if I had bought a boxed version, so I decided to go with the most appealing package. I guess my current relationship with Steam can best be described as an uneasy truce that comes from necessity.
"I'm not saying that the bugs do not exist, but if I had access to all that code (and presumably to IE too, since he's been at MS that long) - then it's quite conceivable that he came up with stuff that will crash on these browsers."
Except that he 1) provided a copy of the random malformed HTML generating tool that he used and 2) managed to crash the closed-source Opera, as well.
It's a little ridiculous to suspect that he spent countless hours searching the mozilla, links, and lynx source code to find HTML-interpreting crash-causing bugs and then created a random malformed HTML generator as a cover story as to how he found the bugs.
"My guess is this was recompiled with the new SP2 compilers?"
My understanding of the SP2 compilation changes is that existing buffer-overflows still exist and will still cause the program to crash. The difference is that overflows which previously allowed the attacker to execute arbitrary machine code will instead crash before the code is executed.
"Basically, every modern MMORPG owes its existence, in my opinion, to LoRD."
LoRD came out in 1988. By that time, there were already several MajorBBS games out which more closely paralleled the multiplayer experience seen in MMORPGS -- unlike LoRD, where players only saw each other during direct attacks or while both in the inn, MBBS games allowed players to see each other whenever they both were in the same room in the game world.
Furthermore, LoRD was just an iterative improvement over several similar door games that were around at the time. They all had the same notion of engaging in instant combat against NPCs where your options were to attack, flee, or use a special ability. Similarly, they all centered around using gold to heal yourself and buy better equipment from a very linear weapons/armor list. LoRD was merely the most polished of the simple version of these games, and it pales in comparison to games that reach the next level of complexity, like Operation Overkill.
Overall, LoRD was a nifty game, a nicely polished game, and even a memorably historic game, but it wasn't the ground-breaking masterpiece you're trying to make it out to be.
"As recent surveys have shown, 80% of internet traffic nowadays is copyrighted stuff. If ISPs stop that, they will lose like 80% of their customers and go bankrupt."
80% of the traffic does not necessarily correspond to 80% of the customers. In fact, most copyright infringing activities are seen as bandwidth hogs, with each infringer tying up a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth. It takes a legitimate user a lot of time browsing the web, sending email, and playing games to equal the multiple gigs of bandwidth that a single pirated movie download uses.
Also, you're assuming that every user who uses the Internet for copyright infringement will have no need for Internet access if there's no piracy. That's just silly. There'll be some loss of interest, sure, but I'm sure plenty of them will still be interested in visiting Slashdot or playing Counter-Strike or emailing friends in Bora-Bora.
I think people who buy CD-Rs for non-copyright infringement-related purposes would disagree. It's not fair to make someone who just wants to backup his business files have to subsidize other people's music listening.
"Your computer is still vulnerable until you reboot the machine. What's the point of applying the patch if the updated files don't get loaded?"
In my case, the point is that rebooting would be inconvenient at the current time and I'm willing to take the calculated risk of being exposed until I turn my machine off for the night. If I'm playing UT2k4 instead of browsing the web, it doesn't matter how many unpatched IE vulnerabilities I have.
So does anyone have a way to keep Windows from pestering me with "[Reboot now] [Reboot later]" every 10 minutes? I tried killing the corresponding process, but something starts it back up almost immediately. I suppose I could just put off installing windows updates until bedtime, but that'd run the risk that I'd forget. So in a fit of wrong-headed irony, this new feature might actually cause my system to stay vulnerable longer.
"For comparison, don't about 80% of all businesses fail within five years of startup??"
Your comparison would only hold some sway if all the music stores in South Korea had opened within the last five years.
To put it in slightly different terms, if the country of Fictionalistan had an 80% infant mortality rate, then it's still really big news if 95% of the people named Pete died in a five year period. Same thing as with the South Korean music stores.
"Come on, Lucas is no worse than any other moviemaker, he's just smart enough to sell the same product again and again like Microsoft."
Wait a minute. I thought the problem was that Lucas wasn't selling the same product again and again. The complaints from the geek sector have been about all the changes Lucas made to Episode 4-6 -- just mentioning Greedo shooting first is enough to get most geeks' blood boiling.
"Springfield itself is moving around, sometimes it's at the ocean, sometimes near the desert or high mountains,"
Well, as we saw in "Trash of the Titans" (episode 9.22), Springfield's Plan B for dealing with emergencies is to move the whole town 5 miles down the road. Given how many crises seem to pop up there, it's not unreasonable to assume that they've invoked Plan B on a number of occasions.
Some of what you invision with your idea of a hacker/hobbyist friendly console seems to be covered by the XGameStation. Unfortunately, its price, at $199, is steep enough that it doesn't work so well as a casual impulse buy. Still, it's worth checking out.
"Ok, but nevertheless the US has jurisdiction over others, and can demand extradition of an Australian?"
Case 1: A US company, using US-based servers, is comparing itself to another US-based competitor, in violation of German advertising laws.
Case 2: An Australian in Australia ran a warez group whose active membership contained a number of Americans and which used a number of US servers for what it was doing.
It'd be naive not to recognize that there are several significant factors in the second case that support America at least having a claim to extradition while such factors are completely missing from the first case.
"Sims is moving away from being a virtual doll's house to something verging on the sinister and creepy."
Given that one of the favorite past times of a number of people with the first Sims game has been killing off their Sims in a variety of ways, I think the "sinister and creepy" line was reached quite awhile ago. One of the favorite methods seems to be drowning, as Sims can't get out of a pool if there's no ladder.
On a related note, one of the people working on Sims 2 posts on another message board that I'm on. He created a serial killer character who lures women back to his house and then paints their deaths, as Sims will now paint pictures of what they actually see. He did have to use a cheat though to make the painter keep painting instead of reacting to the death itself.
"I'm just hoping they left in the bit where the Stormtrooper entering the control room where C3PO & R2D2 are at whacks his head coming in."
I doubt they'd take it out, as they reference that in Episode 2 -- Jango Fett (whom the stormtroopers are cloned from) whacks his head on the door to his ship the same way that the stormtrooper does in ANH.
I don't think he was actually charged under the PATRIOT Act. From the article, it looks like the PATRIOT Act was just used to acquire financial records from his ISP. Even without the PATRIOT Act, I suspect they could have gotten the records with a more traditional subpoena and charged him anyway, though I'm obviously speculating a bit here.
"I'm no legal dictionary but I believe that any reasonable human equates "trafficking" with profit. Was Adam charging for these 8 kbps streaming counterfeit goods."
Charging for the streams isn't the only way to profit from them. Television channels, for example, use those same TV shows as a way to entice you into watching commercials.
In this guys case, it could be argued that the episodes are being used to entice people into visiting his main site, which has a number of commercial interests on it. He's got fastclick banner ads, cafepress-produced SG-1 Archive merchandise, and affiliate links to Amazon.com.
"The guy was asked KINDLY by the MPAA to take down the episodes (which were of very crappy quality to begin with) and he DID so."
From what I've heard, he just made the episodes a little less public. Apparently, the archive of episodes was still being hosted and still being updated with newly aired episodes. The only catch is that the files weren't linked off of his site. Instead, the files used a predictable naming scheme, and details on how to find the files was given out via word-of-mouth.
"Obviously in a clueful, uncorrupt legal system Sendmail would have to be secure against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, simply because of its primordial venerability."
This is absurd. Just because Sendmail itself is over 20 years old doesn't mean that all the code in it is over 20 years old. If process XYZ was patented 5 years ago, and the Sendmail code to do XYZ was added 3 years ago, then Sendmail doesn't have any special protection against infringment and it can't serve as its own prior art.
"I sure hope the RIAA doesn't look in Bittorrent's direction. There are a LOT of good legal uses for it."
A nice thing about Bit Torrent is that the legal and illegal uses don't impact each other. There's nothing to stop someone from putting up a tracker that only hosts legally redistributable materials. Since the RIAA is looking for specific cases of infringement, there's no reason for them to go after a tracker that's only hosting legal files.
"They actually do this under concern for the buyer. They don't get commission."
While it's true that they don't get commission, their managers get bonuses based on service plans sold. As a result, the employees are under a lot of pressure to sell as many service plans as possible. While they may have some concern for the buyer, that's secondary and more than overshadowed by the pressure to sell sell sell. In some stores, it's so bad that employees are more than willing to lose a non-service plan sale on a big ticket item since it would bring their percentages down.
Slashdot Mirror
GTA:SA was made by Rockstar North. They're in Scotland.
Would you have missed every single commercial break? (Sidenote: Frequent urination is a warning sign for diabetes. You might want to talk to a doctor if you're peeing that much.) Would you have been far enough away from the TV that you wouldn't even overhear any of the commercials? If you finish making coffee and/or peeing before the commercial break is over, would you carefully avoid the room with the TV?
Anyway, it's an accepted fact that people will miss some commercials during shows. The problem advertisers have with PVRs is that the audience is missing all of the commercials.
I think it's not very likely. It isn't the payload that necessarily gets viruses noticed. If a virus (well, technically a worm in this case) tries to exploit buffer overruns in remote services (as was done by worms like Code Red and Blaster), it's going to get caught by the log entries from failed intrusions. If a virus (again, technically a worm in this case) tries to mail itself out to people, it's going to be easy for savvy users to see it for what it is. Even if a virus just modifies executables, it's going to raise alarms on a system that keeps checksums of such files. Even the increasingly archaic boot sector viruses will get caught by a simple BIOS setting.
All the popular infection vectors that viruses and worms use leave too much evidence. I don't think any virus that has infected a large number of computers will stay hidden for long.
I'm willing to concede the Steam server browser is better than the old server browser. However, I had a minimalist third-party server browser that served all my needs perfectly (HLSW). So that big advantage of Steam was meaningless to me. Also, because the group of people I played with primarily stuck to a single server, I really had no interest in the Friends list feature.
Furthermore, when they went to Steam, they felt the need to redo things like the console window (great for checking missed teamsays) and the font for death messages (great for approximating where the enemy is). Where things were previously perfect for checking at a glance, they're now harder to see -- which makes them near useless in the middle of a frantic match.
Finally, the hassles of using Steam were severe enough that I went from playing Day of Defeat for a few hours every night to almost not playing at all. It was especially bad when I first tried it (after the beta test supposedly ironed out the major issues), where every day seemed to be a crapshoot as to whether or not you could get it to work. Even now that it's stable, the net result is that I'm only marginally worse off than I was under WON.
Still, to be fair, I ordered HL2 over Steam. I'd be stuck with it even if I had bought a boxed version, so I decided to go with the most appealing package. I guess my current relationship with Steam can best be described as an uneasy truce that comes from necessity.
Except that he 1) provided a copy of the random malformed HTML generating tool that he used and 2) managed to crash the closed-source Opera, as well.
It's a little ridiculous to suspect that he spent countless hours searching the mozilla, links, and lynx source code to find HTML-interpreting crash-causing bugs and then created a random malformed HTML generator as a cover story as to how he found the bugs.
My understanding of the SP2 compilation changes is that existing buffer-overflows still exist and will still cause the program to crash. The difference is that overflows which previously allowed the attacker to execute arbitrary machine code will instead crash before the code is executed.
LoRD came out in 1988. By that time, there were already several MajorBBS games out which more closely paralleled the multiplayer experience seen in MMORPGS -- unlike LoRD, where players only saw each other during direct attacks or while both in the inn, MBBS games allowed players to see each other whenever they both were in the same room in the game world.
Furthermore, LoRD was just an iterative improvement over several similar door games that were around at the time. They all had the same notion of engaging in instant combat against NPCs where your options were to attack, flee, or use a special ability. Similarly, they all centered around using gold to heal yourself and buy better equipment from a very linear weapons/armor list. LoRD was merely the most polished of the simple version of these games, and it pales in comparison to games that reach the next level of complexity, like Operation Overkill.
Overall, LoRD was a nifty game, a nicely polished game, and even a memorably historic game, but it wasn't the ground-breaking masterpiece you're trying to make it out to be.
80% of the traffic does not necessarily correspond to 80% of the customers. In fact, most copyright infringing activities are seen as bandwidth hogs, with each infringer tying up a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth. It takes a legitimate user a lot of time browsing the web, sending email, and playing games to equal the multiple gigs of bandwidth that a single pirated movie download uses.
Also, you're assuming that every user who uses the Internet for copyright infringement will have no need for Internet access if there's no piracy. That's just silly. There'll be some loss of interest, sure, but I'm sure plenty of them will still be interested in visiting Slashdot or playing Counter-Strike or emailing friends in Bora-Bora.
I think people who buy CD-Rs for non-copyright infringement-related purposes would disagree. It's not fair to make someone who just wants to backup his business files have to subsidize other people's music listening.
Cool, I'll try that. Thanks.
In my case, the point is that rebooting would be inconvenient at the current time and I'm willing to take the calculated risk of being exposed until I turn my machine off for the night. If I'm playing UT2k4 instead of browsing the web, it doesn't matter how many unpatched IE vulnerabilities I have.
So does anyone have a way to keep Windows from pestering me with "[Reboot now] [Reboot later]" every 10 minutes? I tried killing the corresponding process, but something starts it back up almost immediately. I suppose I could just put off installing windows updates until bedtime, but that'd run the risk that I'd forget. So in a fit of wrong-headed irony, this new feature might actually cause my system to stay vulnerable longer.
Your comparison would only hold some sway if all the music stores in South Korea had opened within the last five years.
To put it in slightly different terms, if the country of Fictionalistan had an 80% infant mortality rate, then it's still really big news if 95% of the people named Pete died in a five year period. Same thing as with the South Korean music stores.
Wait a minute. I thought the problem was that Lucas wasn't selling the same product again and again. The complaints from the geek sector have been about all the changes Lucas made to Episode 4-6 -- just mentioning Greedo shooting first is enough to get most geeks' blood boiling.
Well, as we saw in "Trash of the Titans" (episode 9.22), Springfield's Plan B for dealing with emergencies is to move the whole town 5 miles down the road. Given how many crises seem to pop up there, it's not unreasonable to assume that they've invoked Plan B on a number of occasions.
Some of what you invision with your idea of a hacker/hobbyist friendly console seems to be covered by the XGameStation. Unfortunately, its price, at $199, is steep enough that it doesn't work so well as a casual impulse buy. Still, it's worth checking out.
Case 1: A US company, using US-based servers, is comparing itself to another US-based competitor, in violation of German advertising laws.
Case 2: An Australian in Australia ran a warez group whose active membership contained a number of Americans and which used a number of US servers for what it was doing.
It'd be naive not to recognize that there are several significant factors in the second case that support America at least having a claim to extradition while such factors are completely missing from the first case.
Given that one of the favorite past times of a number of people with the first Sims game has been killing off their Sims in a variety of ways, I think the "sinister and creepy" line was reached quite awhile ago. One of the favorite methods seems to be drowning, as Sims can't get out of a pool if there's no ladder.
On a related note, one of the people working on Sims 2 posts on another message board that I'm on. He created a serial killer character who lures women back to his house and then paints their deaths, as Sims will now paint pictures of what they actually see. He did have to use a cheat though to make the painter keep painting instead of reacting to the death itself.
I doubt they'd take it out, as they reference that in Episode 2 -- Jango Fett (whom the stormtroopers are cloned from) whacks his head on the door to his ship the same way that the stormtrooper does in ANH.
I don't think he was actually charged under the PATRIOT Act. From the article, it looks like the PATRIOT Act was just used to acquire financial records from his ISP. Even without the PATRIOT Act, I suspect they could have gotten the records with a more traditional subpoena and charged him anyway, though I'm obviously speculating a bit here.
Charging for the streams isn't the only way to profit from them. Television channels, for example, use those same TV shows as a way to entice you into watching commercials.
In this guys case, it could be argued that the episodes are being used to entice people into visiting his main site, which has a number of commercial interests on it. He's got fastclick banner ads, cafepress-produced SG-1 Archive merchandise, and affiliate links to Amazon.com.
From what I've heard, he just made the episodes a little less public. Apparently, the archive of episodes was still being hosted and still being updated with newly aired episodes. The only catch is that the files weren't linked off of his site. Instead, the files used a predictable naming scheme, and details on how to find the files was given out via word-of-mouth.
This is absurd. Just because Sendmail itself is over 20 years old doesn't mean that all the code in it is over 20 years old. If process XYZ was patented 5 years ago, and the Sendmail code to do XYZ was added 3 years ago, then Sendmail doesn't have any special protection against infringment and it can't serve as its own prior art.
A nice thing about Bit Torrent is that the legal and illegal uses don't impact each other. There's nothing to stop someone from putting up a tracker that only hosts legally redistributable materials. Since the RIAA is looking for specific cases of infringement, there's no reason for them to go after a tracker that's only hosting legal files.
It's actually abuse@[127.0.0.1] according to RFC822.
While it's true that they don't get commission, their managers get bonuses based on service plans sold. As a result, the employees are under a lot of pressure to sell as many service plans as possible. While they may have some concern for the buyer, that's secondary and more than overshadowed by the pressure to sell sell sell. In some stores, it's so bad that employees are more than willing to lose a non-service plan sale on a big ticket item since it would bring their percentages down.