Or you could just use the system restore facility that you got free with Windows XP. Install your games, set a system restore point (start->programs->accessories->system tools->system restore) and give full admin access to the kids. Then when they mess anything up go back to your known good restore point. Thats a hell of a lot easier than dual booting and ghosting and you dont need any extra software to do it.
Try foxmud, FoxMUD.org:4848 a long running Merc dirivitive, that I have spent more than 1% of my life playing (which is quite a lot of time). One of those few great muds that desperately needs players, quad classes, 20,000 rooms, mud mail and lots of other stuff.
Just curious, speaking of cheap software, is there a lot of open source software developed in India? Presumably all these millions of programmers don't just work on commercial software. All I know is that none of the well known software developers have Indian sounding names (and yes, I am aware that that is a terrible way to measure such things). While I am here I should also probably mention that the above method ensures the best people get the job. Most people I know can live with being replaced by a better person, they might not like it, but it is at least palatable. Many of them would find it hard to be replaced with 3 lesser people (no offence to the quality of Indian developers, I genuinely don't know what the general standard is over there).
Finally, given the option, Ill take cheap beer over cheap speech any day.
Nope, what is hillarious is that all that is required to prevent this is legislation requiring any american company to pay any employee US equivalent wages for the job they do, regardless of the work they are doing. This simple legislation would have sorted out the sweat shops long ago, and is not expensive to enforce. You dont tax Nikes at a higher rate because they are cheap to produce, you should just make sure the company pays all its employees a fair salary. Of course this outsourcing will fuck up the US economy, because every billion paid oversees workers is 3 billion less paid to american workers. That is hauling money straight out of the primary consumers pockets. That has to mess up something.
Nevermind that the offshoot of outsourcing manual labour was cheaper cars, cheaper TVs, cheaper microwaves etc. Does anyone see us getting cheaper software out of this?
So, poor old amazon go and patent the idea of the impulse buy on the internet and use it to screw their competitors, now we are supposed to feel sorry for them because some other moron managed to patent the idea of stacking related items on the same shelf using the internet? I am just waiting for the guy who has patented selling related items on the same website using the internet to come and roll over the lot of em.
BTW, anyone else like the way this guy approached amazon to see if they would like to licence his "defensive" patent. Yeah, thats not a contradiction in terms at all.
This reminds me of the time I wrote my first book, Larry Snotter and the Thinkers Balls (Wizards Balls in the U.S). I read the first Harry Potter book hundreds of times, studied it until I knew it backwards, then went and sat in a room and rewrote the story using an entirely different cast of characters doing the exact same thing. I even included instructions so that if anyone had the Harry Potter books, they could use the names of the chars from that and just interchange them with my own character names. I even had a device which would scan the original book for names and if it found them print over the names in Larry Snotter.
And I have to say I was equally amazed when I was told I couldnt release the book. "Look", I screamed, "I do not use any of the trademarks, and there isnt a single sentence the same, I just wrote the exact same story in different words how can they not see that it was a legitimate thing to do?". But no one would listen and so Larry Snotter and the Thinkers Balls was never published.
But seriously, I never used FreeCraft but I am betting that it did not require the CD to be in the drive to play or validate CD keys, or make sure that only one copy of the CD key could be used online at once. Assuming either of these was true then the program was no different than the No-CD cracks and the Keygen programs, it removed the copyright protection mechanisms that Blizzard built into their games, the only difference was the level of difficulty involved in doing it this way.
I always like a good insult instead of refuting the argument, but I play the game as it comes out of the box, i dont cheat, dont dup, dont use maphack/scripting/whatever. I am not imposing anything on anyone which isnt what they chose to impose upon themselves the moment they bought the game. It is the people using scripts/hacks/etc that are imposing upon me and those like me their view of how they would like the game to be, I have not forced anyone not to use hacks, but everyone using them has forced me to live in a realm consumed by them, so who is imposing on who? Nothing I do on the realms has a negative impact on your game experiance, but you cannot argue the same about the impact your activities have upon my game experiance. The closed realms are there because people hated the dups/bots etc in Diablo 1. The open realms are there for the people who enjoyed that sort of thing. So why do people insist on messing with the closed realms, it is just so they can try to pull a veil of legitimacy over their actions. If you want to play the game as you think it should be, then do it on open where it bothers no one.
Now, I am sure you are a pretty intelligent person, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to pull off d2jsp, as a sheer technical accomplishment it is amazing. I just dont see how you could fail to see the harm that using it does to the realms. However enough of a flame war, how about changing the direction of this thread, I would be interested to hear if you believe there is anything that Blizzard (or indeed any games company) could do to prevent programs like this being written, short of moving to an utterly dumb client where the client literally only knows the exact information as is shown to the player on screen at any given time?
This is the typical loser talk you hear from every single hacker on bnet. Hack X ruined my game so I use hack Y because its the only way to compete with those using hack X. Its the reasont there are hundreds of maphackers on the realms, and its this kind of talk that makes them think they are legit. Thats why whenever I get into a legit game with people playing through the slow areas in act 1, some maphack user always joins the game then insists on running straight to every wp, every stairway etc before impatiently spamming HERE HERE HERE because the legitimate players havent found the way the old fashioned way yet. Every single person says it just lets them operate faster, but when you come down to it thats the same excuse the dupers have, why run pindleskin 10000 times for a grandfather when you can just dup one, the duping doesnt use any server bandwidth, doesnt require extra servers, but 5000 people running pindlebots 24/7 sure chews up an awful lot of game slots on the bnet servers, sure the pindlebots dont mind waiting through a 2000 game queue to get into a game, but the same queue is a pain in the ass for anyone who is actually sitting at their keyboard playing the game. All those bots chew up resources that were assigned for the use of players and reduces the standard of play for those players. Also dont forget that all the bot generated items have a similar negative effect on real players, they saturate the marketplace meaning that the piddly few items legit players find are worthless for trade, not to mention the trouble with item grabber scripts etc, while im pressing alt to see whats dropped some script has already grabbed the loot for a player who has 50 of everything stashed from his bot anyway, how does this not impact on my game? And dont go blaming blizzard because you havent the guts to play the game as written. "I didnt mean to steal those Nikes" said the criminal, "but dont blame me, blame Nike for making it too hard for people like me to afford them". If your wearin your ill gotten gear, its just stupid to look down on those wearing gear ill gotten in a different manner, your just taking the same path as every other loser-lowlife-cheating-whiner out there, ruining other peoples experiances in life/games/whatever just to improve your own.
I just want to know whether the person who wrote this program realiazes the irony of them slapping a licence agreement on a program whose sole purpose is to violate another programs licence agreement.
"So, does everybody have to sign away their rights to MS just because MS might think they have a related patent?"
No, and that is not what is happening here. Take the Rambus example, the Rambus people joined the standards body, failed to disclose their patents and then tried to use the existance of those patents as a means to dominate the industry at a later date. Here we have Microsoft playing good standards body citizens, they are making their patents known while the standard is in discussion. Whether the patents in question do affect OpenGL or not by declaring them at this time Microsoft give the rest of the OpenGL ARB time to analyze their patents and determine whether or not they depend on the Microsoft patents.
If the patents are nescessary then the OpenGL ARB have to come to some terms with Microsoft for their use, but now is the best time to decide that. Microsoft are playing fair in this situation and we should wait until they do something that either stifles OpenGL or attempts to subsume it into a Microsoft owned standard before we condemn them. I am sure if you check previous minutes you will find SGI, nVidia and other companies declaring patents in related areas, but somehow when Microsoft owns the patents they are being evil.
The time is better spent complaining about Palladium, Kerberos, Passport or any of the other Microsoft endeveaours where they are being underhand than wasting time complaining about one of the situations where Microsoft seem to be doing the right thing.
Read the bloody minutes, they arent demanding that OpenGL cease to exist, they are just declaring that they have related patents and as near as I could gather from the article they are being made available for use by OpenGL as long as the OpenGL people agree to allow Microsoft to use any OpenGL technology developed using them. It's a bit pre-emptive when we are hanging Microsoft just for having the patents, can we please use this effort on people who exploit their patents and not on those who simply posess them?
What is even strang4er is that they cut the headbutts from the cert 18 Matrix film when it came out in the uk. And what is really annoying is that here in Ireland where we have a sane censors office (who pretty much let everything through) we got to see the original cut in the cinemas and are then given the UK cut when it comes out on video and DVD. I can handle the british government forcing their opinions on their own people but when we are forced to have their cut because it probably saves a piddly few pence to just give Irish people the british DVDs (whereas since we just get recycled american film reels in the cinema) rather than getting the cuts which our own film censors approved. Now that sucks bigtime.
JavaRanch people add a space becoming Java Ranch. You then tell Sun that Java is an adjective in that name, Sun who obviously wanted an amicable solution agree that Java is an adjective in that context and everyone is happy. Add a small (tm) after Java in your logo and all thr troubles go away.
Ok I have read the article, then went back and re-read it paying close attention to the mails from Sun. As far as I can see they are doing their best to resolve this amicably. They sent an email mentioning the problem, in it they were polite, they did not tell the JavaRanch people that they had to change their name to "The Java(tm) Technology Ranch" they just offered that name as an example of a valid usage of their trademark. The people sending that mail do not have to come up with the new name, they just have to give some examples of valid usage.
So what do the JavaRanch people do? They very maturely shove the mail under the carpet and hope it goes away. They were being discourteous to sun when they didn't respond, then they later have the gall to get their knickers in a twist when Sun dont get back to them immediately? So it is ok for them to ignore Sun for months, but if Sun dont respond immediately they are assholes? Do I detect a bit of a double standard here? Sun seemed very willing to discuss an arrangment with them, maybe they would have allowed them permission to use the name JavaRanch but it is nieve to think that they will just magically come up with that idea if you don't even take the trouble to respond to their mail. Perhaps asking Sun if you can do that would be a good idea? You think?
Sun HAVE to look after their trademark. They go so far as to list the 8 offending pages (and sorry but claiming one person cannot be expected to singlehandedly modify eight pages is a bit weak). When they offer to work with you in resolving the problem then the smart thing to do is to send a reply to their email. Voice your concerns, discuss your options with Sun before you decide you are under siege. All the Sun correspondance seems to have an amicable tone. So what if they dont offer you a huge sponsership deal just to comply with their trademark. I cannot believe that no one there just suggested working with Sun to resolve this in the amicable manner in which it began instead of doing their best to force Sun into more action, and Sun still have not taken that action. Adam Cohn described his position at Sun so that the JavaRanch people would realize that sun cared enough to assign someone who could make a decision to their case.
Here is a quick timeline;
November 6 2001: Sun send JavaRanch an amicably phrased email asking them to comply with their trademark usage requirements, the mail is concise yet clear and offers examples of valid trademark usage. The JavaRanch people decide to ignore it and hope it goes away (which Einstein there came up with that plan?)
A few weeks ago? Someone accosts Scott McNealy about it, sun not having troubled JavaRanch about the matter at all in the meantime. So what does Scott do? He gets someone from sun to contact JavaRanch about their concerns. JavaRanch respond and try to talk about a completely different topic. And when the V.P of marketing is busy they assign someone else to the matter. He sends an email and suddenly JavaRanch decide that they are under siege.
It is unwarranted bad press for Sun. They acted sincerely and obviously seem to be making every effort to an amicable solution. Sorry, but it is the JavaRanch people who are being unreasonable (I daresay even childish) here and they need to start behaving in a much more mature manner. They have now put Sun on the defensive and may force Suns hand. They have switched from accidental non-complience to opponents of sun over a minor issue.
Maybe you can use the sample size calculator linked here to find the sample popluation required. With a large population that calculator suggests 384 people as a suitibla sample size to aim for a 95/5 accuracy. A sample size of 20 people is highly unlikely to give a 5% margin. Think about it, if you swap any one person in there for any one person outside the group you have immediately skewed your results by over 5%. The reason for large samples is to avoid these problems. It would seem that you are the one who needs to read a statistics book or two because if you for a second believe that a sample of 20 can represent accurately a large population you obviously have not had any exposure to statistics, or if you have it has been way over your head.
Are we really expected to pay any attention to a test involving only 3 groups of 25 test subjects? The odds of this being anyway accurate must be minute. A simple survey generally requires a little over 1000 people to get a 95/5 accuracy and yet these fools publish data where they claim from a group of 75 people that chewing gum makes you smarter. Could someone please teach these people about conducting proper scientific research (as if their premice wasnt ridiculous anyway).
I assume that your NAT/firewall box is just redirecting those packets to where they were originally sent anyway (i.e. battle.net) so you are not in violation of the agreement. Or maybe you aren't aware that part of the TCP/IP and UDP protocols is that the packets get bounced from machine to machine to reach it's destination. If however you are redirecting those packets to somewhere other than the original destination you are redirecting them.
Maybe you should look up the difference between redirecting and forwarding.
Of course it is possible but it is highly unlikely that a group of people who do not use bnetd to play Blizzard games developed it. But I think its fair to say that in this case it is highly unlikely. It's hard to get a good look at the bnetd site somewhere but I don't doubt that it mentions somewhere that it was developed by fans of the games, not by people who had never played them at all.
What I was saying was the pass through authentication even if implemented by the bnetd people would be fairly easy to remove from a copy of bnetd once you have the source code. Thus in order to prevent emulation Blizzard would have too implement encryption on all in game communications to make it very hard to hack the game. If for example Blizzard used public key encryption on all server to client traffic it becomes a lot harder to emulate the server and even then it would require for the client to be hacked as well. To do that would take more computing power on the server and so isn't really a viable option.
Even if Blizzard did allow pass-through authentication to battle.net and even if the bnetd people did implement it one of the problems here is the Open Source nature of bnetd. It would be a trivial task for a lot of people to remove this authentication from bnetd so the problem still remains.
Also implementing high level crypto for real time strategy games that you want to provide access to for free on servers would at the very least greatly increase the computing horsepower required by those servers (thats assuming that sort of real time high powered encryption is even possible). Blizzard wants to provide a free service to anyone who wants to play their games online, but they can only continue to do that while it is economically viable. Anything that increases the cost of this service will also have a knock on effect on its quality.
Finally if you check the licence agreement that comes with your Blizzard games you will see:
you are not entitled to: (iv) host or provide matchmaking services for the Program or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by the Licensor in the network feature of the Program, though protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Progran, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter deceloped, for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet, network play utilising commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks withoug the Licensor prior written consent.
Unless all the people involved in the bnetd project have never purchaesd and played a Blizzard game they are violating this licence agreement.
But the really sad thing is that if Blizzard feel that the public beta is lending itself to piracy in such a manner that it is affecting sales then that will be the end of their public betas. I also find it really depressing that Blizzard have been unable to find a group of 5000 people to test, whom they have trusted with their beta versions and who have no doubt signed all sorts of non-disclosure agreements, but who are willing to abide by that and not release the games to warez sites. Regardless of what happens to the bnetd project I really hope that the people who released the warez versions of the WC3 beta feel the full strength of Blizzards laywers brought to bear on them.
Touche, for what its worth I have done similar in C but it was messy, simple rule of thumb is if you want to do anything badly enough in any language then you more than likely can. Only difference is how easy or hard that language will make it for you.
I'm pretty sure doesn't allow you to directly use the function name as a string as a paramater though. Granted you can always fudge your way around it. But I would be surprised (and very interested in finding out more about how to do it) if you can do the full equivalent of javas reflection in C++ without having to fudge a lot of stuff.
You most certainly can tell a swing button to do that. Look at the Method class of the java.reflect api. Hell in java you can specify the name of the method and java can go find it for you. Check out java.reflect.Method and its all there for you.
Just because you don't know how to do it in java doesn't mean it cannot be done. You can do what you say runtime in java. I.e. prompt the user for the name of the class, the name of the method and the paramaters and pass them. Try doing that with C++.
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Or you could just use the system restore facility that you got free with Windows XP. Install your games, set a system restore point (start->programs->accessories->system tools->system restore) and give full admin access to the kids. Then when they mess anything up go back to your known good restore point. Thats a hell of a lot easier than dual booting and ghosting and you dont need any extra software to do it.
Try foxmud, FoxMUD.org:4848 a long running Merc dirivitive, that I have spent more than 1% of my life playing (which is quite a lot of time). One of those few great muds that desperately needs players, quad classes, 20,000 rooms, mud mail and lots of other stuff.
Just curious, speaking of cheap software, is there a lot of open source software developed in India? Presumably all these millions of programmers don't just work on commercial software. All I know is that none of the well known software developers have Indian sounding names (and yes, I am aware that that is a terrible way to measure such things). While I am here I should also probably mention that the above method ensures the best people get the job. Most people I know can live with being replaced by a better person, they might not like it, but it is at least palatable. Many of them would find it hard to be replaced with 3 lesser people (no offence to the quality of Indian developers, I genuinely don't know what the general standard is over there). Finally, given the option, Ill take cheap beer over cheap speech any day.
Nope, what is hillarious is that all that is required to prevent this is legislation requiring any american company to pay any employee US equivalent wages for the job they do, regardless of the work they are doing. This simple legislation would have sorted out the sweat shops long ago, and is not expensive to enforce. You dont tax Nikes at a higher rate because they are cheap to produce, you should just make sure the company pays all its employees a fair salary. Of course this outsourcing will fuck up the US economy, because every billion paid oversees workers is 3 billion less paid to american workers. That is hauling money straight out of the primary consumers pockets. That has to mess up something. Nevermind that the offshoot of outsourcing manual labour was cheaper cars, cheaper TVs, cheaper microwaves etc. Does anyone see us getting cheaper software out of this?
So, poor old amazon go and patent the idea of the impulse buy on the internet and use it to screw their competitors, now we are supposed to feel sorry for them because some other moron managed to patent the idea of stacking related items on the same shelf using the internet? I am just waiting for the guy who has patented selling related items on the same website using the internet to come and roll over the lot of em. BTW, anyone else like the way this guy approached amazon to see if they would like to licence his "defensive" patent. Yeah, thats not a contradiction in terms at all.
This reminds me of the time I wrote my first book, Larry Snotter and the Thinkers Balls (Wizards Balls in the U.S). I read the first Harry Potter book hundreds of times, studied it until I knew it backwards, then went and sat in a room and rewrote the story using an entirely different cast of characters doing the exact same thing. I even included instructions so that if anyone had the Harry Potter books, they could use the names of the chars from that and just interchange them with my own character names. I even had a device which would scan the original book for names and if it found them print over the names in Larry Snotter. And I have to say I was equally amazed when I was told I couldnt release the book. "Look", I screamed, "I do not use any of the trademarks, and there isnt a single sentence the same, I just wrote the exact same story in different words how can they not see that it was a legitimate thing to do?". But no one would listen and so Larry Snotter and the Thinkers Balls was never published. But seriously, I never used FreeCraft but I am betting that it did not require the CD to be in the drive to play or validate CD keys, or make sure that only one copy of the CD key could be used online at once. Assuming either of these was true then the program was no different than the No-CD cracks and the Keygen programs, it removed the copyright protection mechanisms that Blizzard built into their games, the only difference was the level of difficulty involved in doing it this way.
I always like a good insult instead of refuting the argument, but I play the game as it comes out of the box, i dont cheat, dont dup, dont use maphack/scripting/whatever. I am not imposing anything on anyone which isnt what they chose to impose upon themselves the moment they bought the game. It is the people using scripts/hacks/etc that are imposing upon me and those like me their view of how they would like the game to be, I have not forced anyone not to use hacks, but everyone using them has forced me to live in a realm consumed by them, so who is imposing on who? Nothing I do on the realms has a negative impact on your game experiance, but you cannot argue the same about the impact your activities have upon my game experiance. The closed realms are there because people hated the dups/bots etc in Diablo 1. The open realms are there for the people who enjoyed that sort of thing. So why do people insist on messing with the closed realms, it is just so they can try to pull a veil of legitimacy over their actions. If you want to play the game as you think it should be, then do it on open where it bothers no one.
Now, I am sure you are a pretty intelligent person, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to pull off d2jsp, as a sheer technical accomplishment it is amazing. I just dont see how you could fail to see the harm that using it does to the realms. However enough of a flame war, how about changing the direction of this thread, I would be interested to hear if you believe there is anything that Blizzard (or indeed any games company) could do to prevent programs like this being written, short of moving to an utterly dumb client where the client literally only knows the exact information as is shown to the player on screen at any given time?
This is the typical loser talk you hear from every single hacker on bnet. Hack X ruined my game so I use hack Y because its the only way to compete with those using hack X. Its the reasont there are hundreds of maphackers on the realms, and its this kind of talk that makes them think they are legit. Thats why whenever I get into a legit game with people playing through the slow areas in act 1, some maphack user always joins the game then insists on running straight to every wp, every stairway etc before impatiently spamming HERE HERE HERE because the legitimate players havent found the way the old fashioned way yet. Every single person says it just lets them operate faster, but when you come down to it thats the same excuse the dupers have, why run pindleskin 10000 times for a grandfather when you can just dup one, the duping doesnt use any server bandwidth, doesnt require extra servers, but 5000 people running pindlebots 24/7 sure chews up an awful lot of game slots on the bnet servers, sure the pindlebots dont mind waiting through a 2000 game queue to get into a game, but the same queue is a pain in the ass for anyone who is actually sitting at their keyboard playing the game. All those bots chew up resources that were assigned for the use of players and reduces the standard of play for those players. Also dont forget that all the bot generated items have a similar negative effect on real players, they saturate the marketplace meaning that the piddly few items legit players find are worthless for trade, not to mention the trouble with item grabber scripts etc, while im pressing alt to see whats dropped some script has already grabbed the loot for a player who has 50 of everything stashed from his bot anyway, how does this not impact on my game? And dont go blaming blizzard because you havent the guts to play the game as written. "I didnt mean to steal those Nikes" said the criminal, "but dont blame me, blame Nike for making it too hard for people like me to afford them". If your wearin your ill gotten gear, its just stupid to look down on those wearing gear ill gotten in a different manner, your just taking the same path as every other loser-lowlife-cheating-whiner out there, ruining other peoples experiances in life/games/whatever just to improve your own.
I just want to know whether the person who wrote this program realiazes the irony of them slapping a licence agreement on a program whose sole purpose is to violate another programs licence agreement.
"So, does everybody have to sign away their rights to MS just because MS might think they have a related patent?"
No, and that is not what is happening here. Take the Rambus example, the Rambus people joined the standards body, failed to disclose their patents and then tried to use the existance of those patents as a means to dominate the industry at a later date. Here we have Microsoft playing good standards body citizens, they are making their patents known while the standard is in discussion. Whether the patents in question do affect OpenGL or not by declaring them at this time Microsoft give the rest of the OpenGL ARB time to analyze their patents and determine whether or not they depend on the Microsoft patents.
If the patents are nescessary then the OpenGL ARB have to come to some terms with Microsoft for their use, but now is the best time to decide that. Microsoft are playing fair in this situation and we should wait until they do something that either stifles OpenGL or attempts to subsume it into a Microsoft owned standard before we condemn them. I am sure if you check previous minutes you will find SGI, nVidia and other companies declaring patents in related areas, but somehow when Microsoft owns the patents they are being evil.
The time is better spent complaining about Palladium, Kerberos, Passport or any of the other Microsoft endeveaours where they are being underhand than wasting time complaining about one of the situations where Microsoft seem to be doing the right thing.
Read the bloody minutes, they arent demanding that OpenGL cease to exist, they are just declaring that they have related patents and as near as I could gather from the article they are being made available for use by OpenGL as long as the OpenGL people agree to allow Microsoft to use any OpenGL technology developed using them. It's a bit pre-emptive when we are hanging Microsoft just for having the patents, can we please use this effort on people who exploit their patents and not on those who simply posess them?
What is even strang4er is that they cut the headbutts from the cert 18 Matrix film when it came out in the uk. And what is really annoying is that here in Ireland where we have a sane censors office (who pretty much let everything through) we got to see the original cut in the cinemas and are then given the UK cut when it comes out on video and DVD. I can handle the british government forcing their opinions on their own people but when we are forced to have their cut because it probably saves a piddly few pence to just give Irish people the british DVDs (whereas since we just get recycled american film reels in the cinema) rather than getting the cuts which our own film censors approved. Now that sucks bigtime.
JavaRanch people add a space becoming Java Ranch. You then tell Sun that Java is an adjective in that name, Sun who obviously wanted an amicable solution agree that Java is an adjective in that context and everyone is happy. Add a small (tm) after Java in your logo and all thr troubles go away.
Ok I have read the article, then went back and re-read it paying close attention to the mails from Sun. As far as I can see they are doing their best to resolve this amicably. They sent an email mentioning the problem, in it they were polite, they did not tell the JavaRanch people that they had to change their name to "The Java(tm) Technology Ranch" they just offered that name as an example of a valid usage of their trademark. The people sending that mail do not have to come up with the new name, they just have to give some examples of valid usage.
So what do the JavaRanch people do? They very maturely shove the mail under the carpet and hope it goes away. They were being discourteous to sun when they didn't respond, then they later have the gall to get their knickers in a twist when Sun dont get back to them immediately? So it is ok for them to ignore Sun for months, but if Sun dont respond immediately they are assholes? Do I detect a bit of a double standard here? Sun seemed very willing to discuss an arrangment with them, maybe they would have allowed them permission to use the name JavaRanch but it is nieve to think that they will just magically come up with that idea if you don't even take the trouble to respond to their mail. Perhaps asking Sun if you can do that would be a good idea? You think?
Sun HAVE to look after their trademark. They go so far as to list the 8 offending pages (and sorry but claiming one person cannot be expected to singlehandedly modify eight pages is a bit weak). When they offer to work with you in resolving the problem then the smart thing to do is to send a reply to their email. Voice your concerns, discuss your options with Sun before you decide you are under siege. All the Sun correspondance seems to have an amicable tone. So what if they dont offer you a huge sponsership deal just to comply with their trademark. I cannot believe that no one there just suggested working with Sun to resolve this in the amicable manner in which it began instead of doing their best to force Sun into more action, and Sun still have not taken that action. Adam Cohn described his position at Sun so that the JavaRanch people would realize that sun cared enough to assign someone who could make a decision to their case.
Here is a quick timeline;
November 6 2001: Sun send JavaRanch an amicably phrased email asking them to comply with their trademark usage requirements, the mail is concise yet clear and offers examples of valid trademark usage. The JavaRanch people decide to ignore it and hope it goes away (which Einstein there came up with that plan?)
A few weeks ago? Someone accosts Scott McNealy about it, sun not having troubled JavaRanch about the matter at all in the meantime. So what does Scott do? He gets someone from sun to contact JavaRanch about their concerns. JavaRanch respond and try to talk about a completely different topic. And when the V.P of marketing is busy they assign someone else to the matter. He sends an email and suddenly JavaRanch decide that they are under siege.
It is unwarranted bad press for Sun. They acted sincerely and obviously seem to be making every effort to an amicable solution. Sorry, but it is the JavaRanch people who are being unreasonable (I daresay even childish) here and they need to start behaving in a much more mature manner. They have now put Sun on the defensive and may force Suns hand. They have switched from accidental non-complience to opponents of sun over a minor issue.
Grow Up.
Maybe you can use the sample size calculator linked here to find the sample popluation required. With a large population that calculator suggests 384 people as a suitibla sample size to aim for a 95/5 accuracy. A sample size of 20 people is highly unlikely to give a 5% margin. Think about it, if you swap any one person in there for any one person outside the group you have immediately skewed your results by over 5%. The reason for large samples is to avoid these problems. It would seem that you are the one who needs to read a statistics book or two because if you for a second believe that a sample of 20 can represent accurately a large population you obviously have not had any exposure to statistics, or if you have it has been way over your head.
Are we really expected to pay any attention to a test involving only 3 groups of 25 test subjects? The odds of this being anyway accurate must be minute. A simple survey generally requires a little over 1000 people to get a 95/5 accuracy and yet these fools publish data where they claim from a group of 75 people that chewing gum makes you smarter. Could someone please teach these people about conducting proper scientific research (as if their premice wasnt ridiculous anyway).
No, he is talking about J.R. Tolkien the little known oil baron of Middle Earth.
I assume that your NAT/firewall box is just redirecting those packets to where they were originally sent anyway (i.e. battle.net) so you are not in violation of the agreement. Or maybe you aren't aware that part of the TCP/IP and UDP protocols is that the packets get bounced from machine to machine to reach it's destination. If however you are redirecting those packets to somewhere other than the original destination you are redirecting them.
Maybe you should look up the difference between redirecting and forwarding.
Of course it is possible but it is highly unlikely that a group of people who do not use bnetd to play Blizzard games developed it. But I think its fair to say that in this case it is highly unlikely. It's hard to get a good look at the bnetd site somewhere but I don't doubt that it mentions somewhere that it was developed by fans of the games, not by people who had never played them at all.
What I was saying was the pass through authentication even if implemented by the bnetd people would be fairly easy to remove from a copy of bnetd once you have the source code. Thus in order to prevent emulation Blizzard would have too implement encryption on all in game communications to make it very hard to hack the game. If for example Blizzard used public key encryption on all server to client traffic it becomes a lot harder to emulate the server and even then it would require for the client to be hacked as well. To do that would take more computing power on the server and so isn't really a viable option.
Even if Blizzard did allow pass-through authentication to battle.net and even if the bnetd people did implement it one of the problems here is the Open Source nature of bnetd. It would be a trivial task for a lot of people to remove this authentication from bnetd so the problem still remains.
Also implementing high level crypto for real time strategy games that you want to provide access to for free on servers would at the very least greatly increase the computing horsepower required by those servers (thats assuming that sort of real time high powered encryption is even possible). Blizzard wants to provide a free service to anyone who wants to play their games online, but they can only continue to do that while it is economically viable. Anything that increases the cost of this service will also have a knock on effect on its quality.
Finally if you check the licence agreement that comes with your Blizzard games you will see:
you are not entitled to:
(iv) host or provide matchmaking services for the Program or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by the Licensor in the network feature of the Program, though protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Progran, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter deceloped, for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet, network play utilising commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks withoug the Licensor prior written consent.
Unless all the people involved in the bnetd project have never purchaesd and played a Blizzard game they are violating this licence agreement.
But the really sad thing is that if Blizzard feel that the public beta is lending itself to piracy in such a manner that it is affecting sales then that will be the end of their public betas. I also find it really depressing that Blizzard have been unable to find a group of 5000 people to test, whom they have trusted with their beta versions and who have no doubt signed all sorts of non-disclosure agreements, but who are willing to abide by that and not release the games to warez sites. Regardless of what happens to the bnetd project I really hope that the people who released the warez versions of the WC3 beta feel the full strength of Blizzards laywers brought to bear on them.
Touche, for what its worth I have done similar in C but it was messy, simple rule of thumb is if you want to do anything badly enough in any language then you more than likely can. Only difference is how easy or hard that language will make it for you.
I'm pretty sure doesn't allow you to directly use the function name as a string as a paramater though. Granted you can always fudge your way around it. But I would be surprised (and very interested in finding out more about how to do it) if you can do the full equivalent of javas reflection in C++ without having to fudge a lot of stuff.
Mutter, meant java.lang.reflect api.
To make ammends for my mistake here is a simple example
class ReflectionTest
class Callee
{
void method() { System.out.println("method called"); }
}
class Caller
{
void callMethod(Callee c, String method)
{
Method m = c.getClass().getMethod(method, null);
m.invoke(c, null);
}
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Callee cee;
Caller cer;
cer.callMethod(cee, "method");
}
}
And there you go, reflection at its finest.
One last thing:
int add_one(int n) { return add1(1, n); }
Is that really so hard to do?
You most certainly can tell a swing button to do that. Look at the Method class of the java.reflect api. Hell in java you can specify the name of the method and java can go find it for you. Check out java.reflect.Method and its all there for you.
Just because you don't know how to do it in java doesn't mean it cannot be done. You can do what you say runtime in java. I.e. prompt the user for the name of the class, the name of the method and the paramaters and pass them. Try doing that with C++.