But Nvidia isn't targeting the mass market, they're targeting PC gaming enthusiasts. You only buy Nvidia if you care about gaming and Intel has consistently failed to deliver a competitive graphics part. They've pretty much admitted that whenever Larabee turns up won't compete with Nvidia's current top end parts, never mind what they've released by then.
Their roadmap does eventually lead to high performance graphics parts but not any time soon. Taking out Nvidia like this will kill Intel in the PC enthusiast market in the short to medium term. They probably think that it's worth it but I find it to be an annoying strategy.
Actually the publisher was terrible. The game in question was the second Elite sequel, Frontier: First Encounters. They released an alpha demo that David Braben had sent them as the full game because they wanted it out for Christmas '95.
I think a few patches came out but the final patch only stopped the game from crashing, the main story missions were never fully implemented, although you can see some of the mission texts if you look in the binary.
Braben sued Gametek and they went bust in '98. Braben got an out of court settlement in '99 I assume from the administrators. I bet they only sent out the patch disks to stave off an immediate class action.
I've only ever seen that for multi-player games, have they ever done it for a SP game? Like MMOs, most people can't be bothered with pirate servers and so pay up if they enjoy it.
You don't need to cool pavements down though, do you? That's why they want to ban dark cars, because they use more fuel in order to keep them cool.
TFA specifically mentions that these techniques have been used successfully in buildings so banning dark asphalt roofs is probably something they'd do for new builds.
That video is fake. We saw it in secondary school but I later found out that the H&S people thought it was too dangerous to have an actual person doing that in front of a camera so they faked it.
I remember looking for an obscure Supreme Commander patch(version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx to version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx), and that was one of the few sites that had it.
I remember the days when publishers were responsible for patches. In the long, dark past before the internet was popular a publisher once sent me a patch for a buggy game on CD, for free.
Another thing I would like to see is allowing to predownload something before buying it
It's relatively easy to crack Steam so I doubt they'll ever let you do that. My understanding is that when you preload games before their release critical files are left out because Valve and the publishers know it's easy enough to crack Steam.
You're missing the point. The Nazi party wasn't just something beamed into Germany from outer-space, it represented real social / political feeling that people felt they had the right to express; something like that just doesn't go away.
Fascism isn't unique to Germany and it doesn't always declare itself as such. We have the BNP here in the UK and both our main parties (Labour & Tory) have, in certain cases, adopted far-right rhetoric on things immigration, race and human rights in order to appeal to BNP voters.
An AC below made the point that the Nazis were ordinary people just like us. That's the key to understanding fascism, the idea that "the end justifies the means" or that it's OK to ignore human rights because we're the "good guys" is what lead the the atrocities not just of the Nazi holocaust but also Stalin's gulags.
Afghanistan didn't attack America. The Taliban were very much aware that the USA (and Israel, funnily enough) were responsible for them being able to defeat the USSR in the 80s.
The Taliban initially insisted on being able to try Osama in Afghanistan without US troops setting foot on their soil. Bush insisted that they hand over Osama to them or face invasion so they tried to agree an extradition but it was blocked by Pakistan.
The Taliban, like almost all the other Muslim clerics in the world (except for certain notable mentalists), condemned the attack on the World Trade Centre.
This is the real stupidity behind Bush's invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban were reasonably pro-US - despite being clerical fascists and condemning our way of life, they didn't want to invade or kill us and privately acknowledged the debt they owed the US. Now Russia is playing the same trick we pulled against them - how do you think the Taliban has re-acquired large amounts of arms and came into a position to attack our forces?
Go to a football game in England to see what socialization does.
You know when you see something on the news that you know something about and you recognise it as bullshit and it causes you to think everything else from that newsroom is bullshit?
What? You activated the game on Steam, then it was deactivated? Once a serial is activated against your Steam ID that's it - it's supposed to be impossible to transfer (hence Valves excuse for not letting us sell our "subscriptions").
And this scheme isn't cryptographic signatures, it looks like they've taken the techniques of polymorphic viruses to create unique executables for each user, which is pretty novel.
It discourages open piracy but still lets you get away with casual copying amongst friends. If this kills off SecuROM then, well, hooray.
Second, Gabe himself said that if steam were ever to go down, he would remove any and all restrictions from playing your game, without the steam servers.
Where? I've honestly tried to find the source for that in the past but come up blank.
Plus, that's not a promise he can give for non-Valve games. If the receivers get called in, it won't be a promise he can honour for Valve games either.
I buy games on Steam because it's convenient and just as easy to crack as physical media (should I need to for any reason - Steam means I don't really need to tho). I don't delude myself about what I'm getting in to, however.
Valve is privately owned, not publicly traded. Gabe could decide to start making statues of himself and sell them just to himself.
Incidentally, not all publicly traded corporations are profit motivated either. Google is controlled by Larry & Sergie through a double stock structure. They and the other founders have control of the company (by a 10:1 margin over class B stock), when you buy GOOG you're placing your trust in them and their vision, be it profits or statues of themselves, that they sell to themselves...
their assets would come under the control of a trust established to do it's best to get the most value out of the assets
A.K.A a liquidation auction or firesale. Microsoft would buy it - at any cost - and link it into GFWL.
The only reason that I buy games on Steam is because I reckon Valve will stick around for at least the next ten years. Chances are any games I buy physically I'll have either lost or destroyed by then anyway so at the very least it's not worse than buying discs.
If they don't lose their heads and carry on as they are then they should be able to carry on indefinitely, making this a moot point. I don't think that should stop us from being honest about the fact that we don't control our games on Steam though; there is a loss of freedom compared to physical disks.
Still, it's not like cracking games from Steam is harder than cracking SecuROM games so in the even of a Steam doomsday, I feel pretty secure.
Where? I've tried to find the source of that quote but I've only ever found people repeating it as gospel on forums.
In the event of Valve going under (unlikely, but anything could happen) do you really think the directors would risk criminal prosecution by destroying their most valuable asset in such a manner? Because that's what destroying your assets when you owe creditors results in.
It's an impossible promise, especially now that Valve has to honour contracts with third-party publishers. At best it's a promise they can keep for their own games.
That post is the best sane answer to this question. Well done for getting in first too!
I'd only add that a lot of countries have software associations that offer rewards for snitching on firms that use pirated software. The BSA has branches everywhere and even has a $1m reward scheme with an easy online reporting form (that one is for the EU, click from the homepage if you're from the USA).
Even with today's economy it might be worth your while grassing up your current firm for the reward money. You could use it to go back to school and get better qualifications; hopefully by the time you're done the outlook will be better too!
I think my BIOS actually has an option for flash prevention, although I don't have it turned on. I remember I owned a board once that would only let you flash when the CMOS clear jumper was set. That was actually quite convenient because you should generally clear CMOS before a BIOS flash anyway.
You seem to have quite a simplified view of games console hardware and software development. All consumer electronics devices go through hardware re-factoring in order to reduce or otherwise simplify the internal design.
When it comes to the software side of things then that gets updated too. The PlayStation had several system firmware revisions and the development libraries were updated on many occasions throughout the consoles lifecycle too. The important thing is that the game/library combination you ship is tested against all the hardware / firmware revision combinations out in the wild; the fact that there were a limited number of hardware / firmware combinations made QA easier compared to, say, a PC game.
Your limited view of what a console OS should be is at odds with what gamers actually want. I want to be able to receive voice calls from friends in different games inviting me to join them. I want to be able to stream music from my fileserver so that I can listen to it in game. Admittedly my PS3 isn't up to my 360 in this regard but hopefully it'll get there. Expecting each game to handle this themselves and still have it work is a recipe for failure.
Comparing modern games consoles to BBC Micros is so facile, a PS3 is a few orders of magnitude more complex than a BBC. If you left a modern games console in skip then all it would take is a few extreme thermal cycles and excessive amounts of moisture getting in sensitive places to knacker it. That's not bad design, it's just a fact of life.
Not only that, but people who own both consoles might prefer to buy multiplatform games for PS3, since that platform has less problems and might be expected to have a longer future (Sony supports its old consoles, Microsoft drops them like hot potatoes).
I think that's a little bit unfair to MS. They acknowledged that they dropped support for the original Xbox far too rapidly but that was due to several factors, the most notable being Nvidia wanting more money for the gfx part. That was one of the main reasons that they made sure that they did all the design for the 360 in house: so that they wouldn't have a similar licensing nightmare at some point in the future.
Still, I buy multiplatform games on PC first or if they're console only, PS3. I like playing games without having to put up with what sounds like an airfield in my room (NXE is an improvement, no horrible whirring drive noise at least) and the PS3 controller just feels nicer.
I'd guesstimate that the number of broken 360s is about equal in the difference in sales between 360 and PS3, which is currently 6 million. Even if that number is a little high then I think it takes into account the number of hacked 360s that just play pirated games.
Sony needs to cut the price of the PS3, then they'll start taking a sales lead over MS and this generation will start to look a lot more interesting in the console wars department!
I've been using Windows based BIOS flashers for a decade. It was originally a feature limited to enthusiast boards but now it's standard. You can even sometimes flash from within Linux for boards that support it via/dev/nvram.
I find your statement confusing. A NAT provides a very _simple_ firewall effect
But it's a lot more difficult to administer than a simple firewall. If you want to disallow everything except HTTP then you can do that very easily using a simple firewall rule: DROP or DENY everything except outbound traffic on port 80.
The point is that IPv6 gets rid of the headaches associated with NAT, using NAT because of its firewall side-effects is dumb. It's already possible for certain clever applications to punch their way through a NAT, if double NAT became the norm then they'd figure out a way to do that too.
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But Nvidia isn't targeting the mass market, they're targeting PC gaming enthusiasts. You only buy Nvidia if you care about gaming and Intel has consistently failed to deliver a competitive graphics part. They've pretty much admitted that whenever Larabee turns up won't compete with Nvidia's current top end parts, never mind what they've released by then.
Their roadmap does eventually lead to high performance graphics parts but not any time soon. Taking out Nvidia like this will kill Intel in the PC enthusiast market in the short to medium term. They probably think that it's worth it but I find it to be an annoying strategy.
The argument would be to favour pale concrete for new builds. Tearing down old builds would obviously create far more CO2 than it would save.
Actually the publisher was terrible. The game in question was the second Elite sequel, Frontier: First Encounters. They released an alpha demo that David Braben had sent them as the full game because they wanted it out for Christmas '95.
I think a few patches came out but the final patch only stopped the game from crashing, the main story missions were never fully implemented, although you can see some of the mission texts if you look in the binary.
Braben sued Gametek and they went bust in '98. Braben got an out of court settlement in '99 I assume from the administrators. I bet they only sent out the patch disks to stave off an immediate class action.
I've only ever seen that for multi-player games, have they ever done it for a SP game? Like MMOs, most people can't be bothered with pirate servers and so pay up if they enjoy it.
You don't need to cool pavements down though, do you? That's why they want to ban dark cars, because they use more fuel in order to keep them cool.
TFA specifically mentions that these techniques have been used successfully in buildings so banning dark asphalt roofs is probably something they'd do for new builds.
Won't that mean lots of glare? Is the plan to reduce carbon emissions by causing everyone to crash into each other?
That video is fake. We saw it in secondary school but I later found out that the H&S people thought it was too dangerous to have an actual person doing that in front of a camera so they faked it.
I remember looking for an obscure Supreme Commander patch(version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx to version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx), and that was one of the few sites that had it.
I remember the days when publishers were responsible for patches. In the long, dark past before the internet was popular a publisher once sent me a patch for a buggy game on CD, for free.
Another thing I would like to see is allowing to predownload something before buying it
It's relatively easy to crack Steam so I doubt they'll ever let you do that. My understanding is that when you preload games before their release critical files are left out because Valve and the publishers know it's easy enough to crack Steam.
That's not a bad idea: move it to a country where we already know about the human rights abuses!
You're missing the point. The Nazi party wasn't just something beamed into Germany from outer-space, it represented real social / political feeling that people felt they had the right to express; something like that just doesn't go away.
Fascism isn't unique to Germany and it doesn't always declare itself as such. We have the BNP here in the UK and both our main parties (Labour & Tory) have, in certain cases, adopted far-right rhetoric on things immigration, race and human rights in order to appeal to BNP voters.
An AC below made the point that the Nazis were ordinary people just like us. That's the key to understanding fascism, the idea that "the end justifies the means" or that it's OK to ignore human rights because we're the "good guys" is what lead the the atrocities not just of the Nazi holocaust but also Stalin's gulags.
Afghanistan didn't attack America. The Taliban were very much aware that the USA (and Israel, funnily enough) were responsible for them being able to defeat the USSR in the 80s.
The Taliban initially insisted on being able to try Osama in Afghanistan without US troops setting foot on their soil. Bush insisted that they hand over Osama to them or face invasion so they tried to agree an extradition but it was blocked by Pakistan.
The Taliban, like almost all the other Muslim clerics in the world (except for certain notable mentalists), condemned the attack on the World Trade Centre.
This is the real stupidity behind Bush's invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban were reasonably pro-US - despite being clerical fascists and condemning our way of life, they didn't want to invade or kill us and privately acknowledged the debt they owed the US. Now Russia is playing the same trick we pulled against them - how do you think the Taliban has re-acquired large amounts of arms and came into a position to attack our forces?
Go to a football game in England to see what socialization does.
You know when you see something on the news that you know something about and you recognise it as bullshit and it causes you to think everything else from that newsroom is bullshit?
What? You activated the game on Steam, then it was deactivated? Once a serial is activated against your Steam ID that's it - it's supposed to be impossible to transfer (hence Valves excuse for not letting us sell our "subscriptions").
And this scheme isn't cryptographic signatures, it looks like they've taken the techniques of polymorphic viruses to create unique executables for each user, which is pretty novel.
It discourages open piracy but still lets you get away with casual copying amongst friends. If this kills off SecuROM then, well, hooray.
Second, Gabe himself said that if steam were ever to go down, he would remove any and all restrictions from playing your game, without the steam servers.
Where? I've honestly tried to find the source for that in the past but come up blank.
Plus, that's not a promise he can give for non-Valve games. If the receivers get called in, it won't be a promise he can honour for Valve games either.
I buy games on Steam because it's convenient and just as easy to crack as physical media (should I need to for any reason - Steam means I don't really need to tho). I don't delude myself about what I'm getting in to, however.
Valve isn't a publicly traded company
Fail reading comprehension? If you open a shop your workers can't vote to evict you.
Valve is privately owned, not publicly traded. Gabe could decide to start making statues of himself and sell them just to himself.
Incidentally, not all publicly traded corporations are profit motivated either. Google is controlled by Larry & Sergie through a double stock structure. They and the other founders have control of the company (by a 10:1 margin over class B stock), when you buy GOOG you're placing your trust in them and their vision, be it profits or statues of themselves, that they sell to themselves...
their assets would come under the control of a trust established to do it's best to get the most value out of the assets
A.K.A a liquidation auction or firesale. Microsoft would buy it - at any cost - and link it into GFWL.
The only reason that I buy games on Steam is because I reckon Valve will stick around for at least the next ten years. Chances are any games I buy physically I'll have either lost or destroyed by then anyway so at the very least it's not worse than buying discs.
If they don't lose their heads and carry on as they are then they should be able to carry on indefinitely, making this a moot point. I don't think that should stop us from being honest about the fact that we don't control our games on Steam though; there is a loss of freedom compared to physical disks.
Still, it's not like cracking games from Steam is harder than cracking SecuROM games so in the even of a Steam doomsday, I feel pretty secure.
Where? I've tried to find the source of that quote but I've only ever found people repeating it as gospel on forums.
In the event of Valve going under (unlikely, but anything could happen) do you really think the directors would risk criminal prosecution by destroying their most valuable asset in such a manner? Because that's what destroying your assets when you owe creditors results in.
It's an impossible promise, especially now that Valve has to honour contracts with third-party publishers. At best it's a promise they can keep for their own games.
That post is the best sane answer to this question. Well done for getting in first too!
I'd only add that a lot of countries have software associations that offer rewards for snitching on firms that use pirated software. The BSA has branches everywhere and even has a $1m reward scheme with an easy online reporting form (that one is for the EU, click from the homepage if you're from the USA).
Even with today's economy it might be worth your while grassing up your current firm for the reward money. You could use it to go back to school and get better qualifications; hopefully by the time you're done the outlook will be better too!
I think my BIOS actually has an option for flash prevention, although I don't have it turned on. I remember I owned a board once that would only let you flash when the CMOS clear jumper was set. That was actually quite convenient because you should generally clear CMOS before a BIOS flash anyway.
You seem to have quite a simplified view of games console hardware and software development. All consumer electronics devices go through hardware re-factoring in order to reduce or otherwise simplify the internal design.
When it comes to the software side of things then that gets updated too. The PlayStation had several system firmware revisions and the development libraries were updated on many occasions throughout the consoles lifecycle too. The important thing is that the game/library combination you ship is tested against all the hardware / firmware revision combinations out in the wild; the fact that there were a limited number of hardware / firmware combinations made QA easier compared to, say, a PC game.
Your limited view of what a console OS should be is at odds with what gamers actually want. I want to be able to receive voice calls from friends in different games inviting me to join them. I want to be able to stream music from my fileserver so that I can listen to it in game. Admittedly my PS3 isn't up to my 360 in this regard but hopefully it'll get there. Expecting each game to handle this themselves and still have it work is a recipe for failure.
Comparing modern games consoles to BBC Micros is so facile, a PS3 is a few orders of magnitude more complex than a BBC. If you left a modern games console in skip then all it would take is a few extreme thermal cycles and excessive amounts of moisture getting in sensitive places to knacker it. That's not bad design, it's just a fact of life.
Not only that, but people who own both consoles might prefer to buy multiplatform games for PS3, since that platform has less problems and might be expected to have a longer future (Sony supports its old consoles, Microsoft drops them like hot potatoes).
I think that's a little bit unfair to MS. They acknowledged that they dropped support for the original Xbox far too rapidly but that was due to several factors, the most notable being Nvidia wanting more money for the gfx part. That was one of the main reasons that they made sure that they did all the design for the 360 in house: so that they wouldn't have a similar licensing nightmare at some point in the future.
Still, I buy multiplatform games on PC first or if they're console only, PS3. I like playing games without having to put up with what sounds like an airfield in my room (NXE is an improvement, no horrible whirring drive noise at least) and the PS3 controller just feels nicer.
I'd guesstimate that the number of broken 360s is about equal in the difference in sales between 360 and PS3, which is currently 6 million. Even if that number is a little high then I think it takes into account the number of hacked 360s that just play pirated games.
Sony needs to cut the price of the PS3, then they'll start taking a sales lead over MS and this generation will start to look a lot more interesting in the console wars department!
I've been using Windows based BIOS flashers for a decade. It was originally a feature limited to enthusiast boards but now it's standard. You can even sometimes flash from within Linux for boards that support it via /dev/nvram.
I find your statement confusing. A NAT provides a very _simple_ firewall effect
But it's a lot more difficult to administer than a simple firewall. If you want to disallow everything except HTTP then you can do that very easily using a simple firewall rule: DROP or DENY everything except outbound traffic on port 80.
The point is that IPv6 gets rid of the headaches associated with NAT, using NAT because of its firewall side-effects is dumb. It's already possible for certain clever applications to punch their way through a NAT, if double NAT became the norm then they'd figure out a way to do that too.
NAT is a hack, firewalls are for policy.