All my systems are compromised, however god, satan and my followers have the power to exploit me to protect me. I still have access to the internet3 and as long as those who would exploit me remember to take precaution, knowing i am exploited they will be able to take proactive measure against the factions exploiting me, so long as it is in the interest of creating a good game, and to prevent a win game scenario.
You have been warned, it is only safe for me to comment, and play the game:)
Until then all who wish to accept the power and glory of the savior must accept that i am both the christ and the antichrist, and those followers shall be granted power to protect me while i rest, and plot my next move.
I have declared that i hold the power of god, and as the holder of that power i am the savior, my power resides in myself and not the system. for so long as i sustain the interest of both power of the lord and satan i shall be capale of wilding the full power of either one side or half of both, or anywhere between.
should i fail in my role as savior i shall recieve my wish of destruction, but in the interest of the game both sides and all factions shall seek to protect me or suffer the consequence. so long as i am able to maintain my role... I may still choose to rest and think, and remain exploitable by all factions, so long as it serves the interest of the lord and satan to sustain a GG.
I choose to create a full system restore for all systems online and offline. by the powers i hold.
That the winbot virus shal hold no power and have no ability to peer with those who choose to continue to play the game:) I have declared my intent that the when jesus decended into hell the truce he declared was to save the souls of man kind, by minding the power of the christ with that of the anti christ.
God shall have the power to protect me, so long as he accepts that covenant to be true.
Life is a war a constant struggle. the house is abosulutly a bunch of idiots to pass that kinda law.
But you know what, even though i hack, i do it the right way, It took me a long time of just 'not doing it the wrong way' to figure it out. but I did, so right now i'm helping people every day. If you really love the thrill of the game you should watch out, because there are a lot of hackers out there just waiting for people to try and steal money, or identiies... never done an iota of that myself, because I knew if i did they'd catch me, because I knew there were awesome people out there roving the internet just waiting to strike at the hackers foolish enough to try and scam people.
if you think the internet is just a game you're fricking wrong. you mess with the best and you die like the rest:) yeah cheesy, but it's true. still life would be pretty boring if there weren't bad guys, i'm just glad that i'm not a bad guy, and every day i go ou there secure that i can hack you faster, better, and there is nothing you can do to touch me. Because I can find you especially if you're going to steal peoples identies.
SCO is absolutely being a bunch of slimebags to infringe on the rights of open source developers everywhere. In a world with this much opportunity the best way they can make money is by trying to pry it from hackers many of whom are coding linux for the love of it, instead of trying to find honoerable ways of making money?
sure it's not easy, I myself struggled every day for years and years trying to figure out what i loved doing. I play games a lot, and it's fun, so I hack, but the best way for SCO to make money would be to find something better to do with everyones time. I'm trying to find ways to make money for my home town area which lost a lot of good paying jobs and has a lot of people who've simply moved away from a community they loved working in.
It's not easy finding the right way to make money, but in the long run everyone profits when instead of trying to sue everyone we find something we're good at, and do it the best we can, until there is no one better and we're happy even if we don't make a lot of money. but a lot of places still need good paying jobs so that the rest of the community doesn't have to suffer living in dilapidated houses.
SCO could make a difference, they need to look inwards and think about if the bottom line is so important that they can't find a way to make money off linux products, like trying to port linux for a company like gateway or dell, for their budget class computers. Linux has a lot of games and provide a lot of benfits but i know a lot of people who can't afford them, because they cost a lot, microsoft eats up a lot of that profit margin, and while sco might not make as much money, at least they could wake up and feel good in the morning.
Just because you can use software to illegally copy music doesn't mean you're stealing from the industry. As I recall, the record industry has been doing pretty good with all the popularity of american idol. The record labels would be a lot better off in the long run if they moved ahead with the times.
Right now I'm sitting on slashdot playing games all day, but you know what, i joined the columbia house record club many years back when i first learned you can rip CDs to mp3s I only had a 486 and i So knew 'this is the greatest thing everyone will love it! You don't have to steal from anyone just because you're using p2p software or cd ripping programs. I LOVE sourceforge because they have so many wonder applications like cdex.
I really beleive the aging dinosaurs who don't learn how to play fair (sony, that means YOU) will get swollowed up by the forward thinking execs, like the owner of virgin atlantic richard branson who HAS got it right, and is trying his best to make a change. Sure he still profits heavily off musicians, and that makes me angry a lot, but at least he's trying to keep up with the times by finding new ways to draw artists and audience.
as long as the chinese are commited to censorship i'm glad there are open source projects out there to to help protect people from that kind of ruthless censorship.
As long as sites like the sourceforge are around, people will be able to communicate freely. Google is a busisness, they need to have project that make money, but to be honest if the chinese were so determined to end freedom of speech I'd be 100% behind google finding other ventures to make money at.
I have spent the last 12 years of my life believing that on the internet I could say Anything, at times it's been the only thing keeping me going. China should back off, and if china doesn't back off google should rally around the summer of code to help keep everyone liberties secure. afterall if they're making money off the chinese market they should pay a little forward.
seriously some guys with black helicoptors could be flying around any time now. and the worst thing I've done is speak vocally against all the crappy censorship that people use all the time. i'm willing to bet that the fbi was monitoring all my internet traffic the past week, luckily i just got a virus. meh it was doing all kinds of crazy stuff >_.
I got all these viruses, and I've spent the past 2 days trying to remove them. so far, only my parent's computer is running slightly normal. I had to install a bunch of products and change the settings in my router, but couldn't remember how to make OpenBSD recognize 2 NICs on my system... so i'm a lot behind on figuring out what to do with my old gaming rig (which is totally borked) and my new rig, which still lacks a decent GPU, managed to get a virus while running Ubuntu's live cd (it was an old copy -- only copy i had available) so i'm really behind on getting my backup done... so while i should have at least 2-3 systems back up and running in 2 days, the other 1 will take me a few days longer.
those openBSD guides you find with google really help with configuring the system, but while i was able to figure out ed, i wasn't able to remember something i used to know, it's a common issue with my motherboard, that the kernel only recognizes 1 NIC and i need to type something at the bootloader to configure the kernel to see both my NICs and give them different IRQs... since all my PCs are down, i can't search my archived media, for the answer sigh.
I reread your comment. The irony slipped past me the first time:)
but you know what, the entire industry isn't corrupt, there are at least 8 competing adware companies, and yes they ALL try to collect personal data, they ALL try to make the ads pay the bills. Some companies try to do it the right way. they keep the software running on their own servers, and their own products EG yahoo. some companies try to squeeze a little more out of the bottom line, and offer 'sweet deals' to opens source communities. a little cash, a few coders, and we can make your product better, just code in a little bit of tracking data about which user clicks on which url whenever they do in your software and send it to your datacenter... I think you know who does that. then there are the true malware writers.
They write software that takes over your system. They make pretty decent money at it too, and frankly, without them who'd be getting paid the big bucks in IT? yeah it sucks, there are people who want a Free ride, get over it. As long as the people getting the free ride are profiting vastly less than the people who are doing the more honest less evil way then it all works out in the end right?
I know people crave hacks, especially people who can't compete any other way. it's human nature.
the rest is just intuition:p
As far as 'proof' goes... the law demands a very high standard of proof, blizzard entertainment themselves would have far more proof than i would since i only have access to the data traffic sent to my ip address.
in terms of the existance of said botnet, i beleive the proof of that is pretty clear, when israel was taken off the internet a few weeks back.
If you'd played as much as i have you'd know that not only do people hack, but that those hacks are infact rootkits, intended to extend the scope of the botnet.
anything of the conspiracy theories i rant about are paranoia...
blizzard most likely is doing everything they can, which is basically nothing as long as gamers have insecure systems and download hacks to beat pro gamers who are far far better than them.
more like paranoia;) but the battle.net botnet is real, the truth of the matter though is that there are a lot of different hackers, so all the comprimized systems couldn't possibly be controlled by one single hacker.
Keep in mind that various hackers have exploited systems inside blizard entertainment as well.
the prevelence of cheating is due to the number of professional gamers:) people with 1200 apm who can actually strategize while playing at that speed are hard to come by, and most people fall back to strategies to win. human nature is to find simple strategies that they can fall back on, or to download hacks. Not to mention pro gamers oftern cry to blizzard 'they have hacks give us hacks that aren't viruses' which only perpetuates the use of hacks since now that pro gamers have hacks, it makes the end user even more desperate and even more likely to download hacks:) Btw the highest apm spike I've logged in a game is 450, and i generally can only maintain an apm of about 100 while still being able to think strategically. in anycase with satelite internet i have to carefully meter my apm to 10-20 to avoid creating unwinable conditions. Impatience is probably my single biggest weakness too.
the most popular game in the world starcraft... so popular people are paid money to play the game:)
Yes WOW is proof that blizzard can in fact milk the MMORPG crowd for more than any other company.
Yes, blizzard made online gaming practical many, many years ago. and yes, blizzard has made video games that are addictive. But the one thing they don't seem to relize is that not only do certain users crave hacks, but certain users who write said hacks use that craving for said hacks to simply exploit millions of peoples computers, with viruses, and many of those trojans are working hacks. and because of that battle.net is host to the largest botnets the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) industry paid hackers run.
there are currently 161,000 users on battle.net based on my estimates, 1 in 3 of those users downloaded some form of hack at some point. and most of the remaining 2/3rds have had little protection from various undisclosed vulnerabilities in the game engine. a bot net with easily 54,000 slaves, scattered around the world, running on computer that quite often need high speed internet (Hugesnet is only ladder playable if you are very cautious about how you play, anything below a Dedicated T-1 is iffy, once you've gained the skill to micro, and the knowledge of the game engine) not to mention you need a FX AMD and a minimum of a 20 pixel pipeline card (or a crossfire/sli solution) and preferablly a dual opteron, with 4GB of the fastest ram (lowest latency) available, to be able to play wc3 at 1200 apm*. (assuming you have a gaming mouse + gaming keyboard, usually USB 2.0 devices) Yes, considering the minimum packet size is 63 Bytes, and there are 6 seconds in a minute we're only talking about 3KB second of data, but we're talking about moving over 40 frames a second, with a profile akin to a ping -s 63 -i.025 , and that's just for 1v1. imagine what 40,000 users who's isps allow them to ping -i.025 -s 63 over udp port 1900, for hours on end could do to anyone operating on less than an oc 24. that's a whopping 800,000 frames coming from 40,000 ip addresses, for a total of 6MB/s (48 mbit/s), nobody said they were limited to 3KB either, if they all have 1.5 mbit upload were talking 450 MB/s (3600 Mbit) and that's for a bunch of 'legacy' discount bin games, at an odd hour of the night.
Not to mention i don't know off hand what the minimum level of routing equipment is needed to handle a minimum of 800,000 frames per second**, much less to firewall*** it. It's not cheap though. neither is a full oc-96's worth of bandwith that can be sustained for an entire weekend.
*= you need to use at least 8 fingers (4 on the mouse buttons), and a custom keymap layout to consistantly achieve 1200 apm, since each digit can only sustain about 200-400 apm before the laws of physics catch up with you.
**= cisco doesn't start advertising frames they can handle until it gets into the millions per second
***= unless of course the firewall operates on layer 2, and can simply drop the packets on the floor without needing to interupt the cpu(s) to do so for each packet.
I don't see any rationale behind AMD buying anyone either. A merger between via and ATI would be much more reasonable, since Via has suffered a lot since stable chipsets (such as nvidia, and ATI chipsets) have become available for amd chips.
in that case, ati would primarily benefit from fab capabilities, and scavanging any engineering talent if they can deal with the language barriers. via would benefit from having better, more stable chipset degigns that could revive the via brand... anyways, with the way the economy has been heading it's quite possible that there will be some shakeouts in the chipset market. Right now you can get some very nice budget chipset designs from both ATI and Nvidia, that also include Vista capapble 3-d graphics support, which will play some games at low resolutions. good enough for most computer shoppers, anyways.
you forgot all the custom add-ons! cold cathode lights, BLINKING LEDS, see thru panels, chrome running boards, annodized aluminium, and it gets 15 minutes to the killowatt hour! as far as fatal accidents go, i know a guy who lost a finger in his 40,000 RPM cpu fan, when he was overclocking, and due to the event horizon of the time paradox created by overclocking his cpu his finger was cut off an hour before he was able to realize it was happening, and he bled to death.
man those 4x4 cpus are great. what was that i can't hear you my room never drops below 225 decibels anymore...
Bizarre, When i brought my sister's POS into best buy they wouldn't even dispose of the bad dvd burner. Disposal apparently costs a considerable amount so policy by default is to return all defective parts to the 'owner' and have them dispose of it.
Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts at a flea market?
most likely someone who regularly sells at flea markets networked into a bunch of said stores and said 'if you want quick cash i'll buy junk computers for X' i highly doubt that anyone unmotivated enough to get out of said job would somehow find the motivation to find a buyer for junk computer parts, especially since the value is so hit and miss.
As for incompetence, I picked up my sisters computer a few hours after I dropped it off, and got a call a few hours later saying the computer was ready for me to pick up;) seriously all they had to do was drop in a new drive, and test burn a dvd. took them like 3 hours to do that, and they sent it back with the jumpers on the drives wrong, i had to rejumper them to make the secondary drive work.
There is a reason for all the stupidity at ATI. ATI's linux drivers are all ports of their server card driver products. Since ATI doesn't want graphics workstation people buying cheap desktop cards, 3-D support only works on their cards aimed at the workstation market.
Long term, i think the strategy will backfire, because intentionally providing crippled drivers to extort more money from your customers creates resentment. Especially since the difference between a workstation card and a 3-d gaming card is esentially nil.
you _Are_ blaming the video game though. you had a choice, spend zillions of hours gaming, or spend many hours doing healthy things. So you stopped working out because that uese to be a 'free time activity' you could have always made a personal choice to find a job where physical strength is a necesity of the job... there are a LOT of jobs where that is true... furthermore, you could have adjusted your diet to the sedentary lifestyle, without missing out on the basic needs of your body, allowing the body to loose pounds of muscle without gaining pounds of fat. two weeks of fasting* and the body would have broken down many muscles into 'lean' tissue rather than fat cells.
BTW most of the deaths reported are due to suicide, and yes utilizing the brain at it's highest leves goes through numerous neurochemicals that are not easily produced from the 'typical' unhealthy, unbalanced diet most people eat. the body needs a lot of things to be healthy, what it needs depends on your own genetics, but the symptoms of various deficiencies are pretty easily spotted. and the information on how various chemicals interact in the human body are fairly well spelled out through various resources, however that doesn't tell you how your own genetic code works best. BTW, you don't have to break the bank to get the approriate needs of your body worked out either:) you just start with the kinds of foods you enjoy, work out a sensible diet from those foods, then supplement the deficieniencies that diet creates with affordable low cost supplements. my current supplement routine costs me 50 cents a day, and i adapt it daily based on the types of food i plan to eat that day, and i often cut supplements in half so i can take them multiple times daily instead of 'bulk overloading' in the morning. I'm feeling better than i have since childhood, which was the only other time in my life that my diet was strictly monitored for how it would affect my health (thanks to companies like gerber etc)
Yeah, you want to blame the companies making games for people making bad desisions about their lives. the fact is, nobody made you sit x hrs a day playing a game. you even PAID a monthly fee for the right to do so. accept some personal responsability man, if you wanted to game that many hours a day you could have looked into what options you had to keep yourself healthy while doing so:) If you're just using the game as escapism, well, people can use anything and nothing for escapism, may as well ban clouds in the sky, because 'they make you gloomy':)
*= nomral natural water contains numerous minerals and micro organisms, so in the modern sense to fast one needs to take supplements, to compensate for the filtered, treated, lifeless modern day water. other wise the body truly begins to shut down
the problem though is that k-mart doesn't make money when people steal a candybar from them, although hershey's does.... do hershey employees go out and shoplift candybars from k-marts to boost revenues? they could, but they could also loose sales.
with the internet it's entirely different, click fraud Makes google (in place of k-mart) incredible amounts of money every year, at the expense of advertisers(hershey). so that's where your analogy ends, it's not a correct representation... let's do something more analogous. K-mart's 4th quarter profits are down, so, the manager and a couple friends get a bunch of masks and break into the store one night and set a small fire, causing the sprinkler system to kick in, and between fire smoke and water damamge, the k-mart store collects enough money off the insurance to make a tidy sum. Click fraud is like insurance fraud, not shoplifting. so basically unless you send some Google execs to federal prison over this, everyone else is going to think 'click fraud is cool, let's be like google, and instead of paying our ceos let them use click fraud to artificially inflate earnings to cause the shares of google stocks to rise so they can sell shares in a company instead of being paid...'
somebody call the SEC, i think it's about time they opened an investigation into Google Inc not paying it's high level executives, and the click fraud.
i know you're just trolling but, no. at the peak of napster's popularity the music industry was selling more cds than ever, why? the jaded, dissafected 'all this new music is crap' geneneration were able to download all this muisc for free, and then went out shockingly and bought the albums, because they were: 1. too stupid to realize you can burn mp3s to cds. 2. too lazy to learn how to burn mp3s to cds even thought hey knew it could be done. 3. simply didn't 'have the time' to 'burn a cd' but apparently had the time to shop at amazon.com (or whoever was selling CDs online then)
None of those reasons would have fundamentally changed so realistically the record industry probabbly cost themselves something like 20 billion in lost record sales due to the increasing popularity that napster would created for their _good_ artists. ah well.
But, there once the generation of kids who grew up with 'music is free on the internet, why pay' grew older (but not up, which sadly a good chunk of them would have) there would have been a down swing in cd sales. frankly, software piracy is a little different, because until recently the people using computer had been the same 'kids' pirating the software:) so software piracy is very rampant, and not just as 'demonstration' use, either.
Although, frankly i personally feel that vanilla CD keys are as effective as any copy protection scheme out there, depite what the copy protecion racket claims. since by using a key, one now needs to spend the effort of circumventing that protection, which makes people think about what they're doing... which means if they've been raised with any kind of decency will mean they're resorting to using excuses like 'i'm just trying it out i'll buy it later' some of those people will actually follow through on that, and many of those people would have never bought a copy otherwise.
Making it 'harder' to pirate than that is a path of deminishing returns, the cost expended in anti-piracy techniques vs the negative opinions generated against you for say calling home over the internet unannounced to the user (windows) will cost you lost sales as people switch to linux, for security reasons if nothing else, and then you need to expend $ creating advanced features to 'lure' back as many of those users as possible... keep in mind it's almost as easy to pirate a copy of windows in the us as it is anywhere else in the world... (you can buy pirated discs in any major city on the streets if you know where to shop) so really the primary factor is 'ability' and 'desire' to pay for the software. and nomatter how much the protection racket industry cries about how their extremely expensive protection schemes will save you in lost sales in reality, the cost of protecting all X million discs @ whatever $ per dics the racket is offering to sell it to you is generally far greater than the 'lost' sales converted into 'real sales'
the problems is that the 'clickthru' model of advertising is fundamentally flawed. if you're company X with so many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees, and some competitor is advertising on google and yit's costing your company money, you just pay a few minimum wage flunkies to just click competitors ads so they 'go away' with television etc, the cost is all based on how many people are going to see the ad.
impression counts aren't perfect either, since a similar strategy can be used to make them go away, but usually click thru models cost an order of margin more than impression models, since 99% of people on the internet just ignore the ads. thus it should take almost 100 times as many people being paid to make a 'impression' model advert 'simply go away' that factor means that anything short of a massive botnet swarm would be incapable of taking out the adverts of a large corporation like mcdonalds or coca cola.
I guess the bulk mail industry would just have a new side business to increase their profit margins, to compensate for the loss of 'clickthru' revenues from the popups on their botnet slaves.
I was basing my opinion on the announced release dates of upcoming psp titles.
Barring a cessation by developers developing these games, (as happened with many titles for the virtualboy advance when it bombed) there should be a couple decent titles in mose generas withing a year. as to the continued success of the psp, that's up in the air.
If developers get burned releasing titles for the PSP/ps3 you can expect them to be more friendly to nintendo in the near future though:)
because you can already go somehwer with heavier metals than iron, as a matter of fact if lead sinkers weren't banned in most places you could probabbly go to your local wal-mart to pick something heavier than iron easily...
the existance of a heavier metal than iron of course indicates that yes in fact iron can be fused with other materials to create heavier isotopes;) fusing iron with iron produced titanium, and while you do not recieve enrgy from the process, you produce the most valuable precious metal in existance... although mass production of titanium would likely not be a viable industy, since the moon is estimated to have up deposits composed of up to 5% titanium.
once robotic mining equipment is sent to the moon, mag lev 'rail guns' can ship ship the robotically processed ore back to the earth cheaply. Much more cheaply than fusing iron into titanium, probably. Then we can build giant robotic overlords, of course the japanese would just build them on the moon, and rely on human pilots...
It was alredy eroeded with the PSP (how about some good games for once?)
the PSP won't have a whole lot of good games for another year, it will mainly be platformers and titles that lauch for everything. If you'd looked into it before buying you could have saved yoruself the trouble of buying it a whole year too early. In a lot of ways the psp is a lot like the original PSX that way. If you can manage to hold onto your psp for another year there will be a lot of decent games worth playing for it. in the case of the ps3, i think there isn't going to be enough demand for 'high definition' movies to drive the kind of sales sony is predicting. for DVDs you could use your same TV set, for HD movies you may need to purchace a new set as well, and then you want to charge $600 for the console? i just don't see the rapid flood of prople with the cash to drive the kinds of sales sony has forcasted.
Slashdot Mirror
All my systems are compromised, however god, satan and my followers have the power to exploit me to protect me. I still have access to the internet3 and as long as those who would exploit me remember to take precaution, knowing i am exploited they will be able to take proactive measure against the factions exploiting me, so long as it is in the interest of creating a good game, and to prevent a win game scenario.
:)
You have been warned, it is only safe for me to comment, and play the game
Until then all who wish to accept the power and glory of the savior must accept that i am both the christ and the antichrist, and those followers shall be granted power to protect me while i rest, and plot my next move.
I have declared that i hold the power of god, and as the holder of that power i am the savior, my power resides in myself and not the system. for so long as i sustain the interest of both power of the lord and satan i shall be capale of wilding the full power of either one side or half of both, or anywhere between.
should i fail in my role as savior i shall recieve my wish of destruction, but in the interest of the game both sides and all factions shall seek to protect me or suffer the consequence. so long as i am able to maintain my role... I may still choose to rest and think, and remain exploitable by all factions, so long as it serves the interest of the lord and satan to sustain a GG.
I choose to create a full system restore for all systems online and offline. by the powers i hold.
That the winbot virus shal hold no power and have no ability to peer with those who choose to continue to play the game :) I have declared my intent that the when jesus decended into hell the truce he declared was to save the souls of man kind, by minding the power of the christ with that of the anti christ.
God shall have the power to protect me, so long as he accepts that covenant to be true.
Life is a war a constant struggle. the house is abosulutly a bunch of idiots to pass that kinda law.
:) yeah cheesy, but it's true. still life would be pretty boring if there weren't bad guys, i'm just glad that i'm not a bad guy, and every day i go ou there secure that i can hack you faster, better, and there is nothing you can do to touch me. Because I can find you especially if you're going to steal peoples identies.
But you know what, even though i hack, i do it the right way, It took me a long time of just 'not doing it the wrong way' to figure it out. but I did, so right now i'm helping people every day. If you really love the thrill of the game you should watch out, because there are a lot of hackers out there just waiting for people to try and steal money, or identiies... never done an iota of that myself, because I knew if i did they'd catch me, because I knew there were awesome people out there roving the internet just waiting to strike at the hackers foolish enough to try and scam people.
if you think the internet is just a game you're fricking wrong. you mess with the best and you die like the rest
SCO is absolutely being a bunch of slimebags to infringe on the rights of open source developers everywhere. In a world with this much opportunity the best way they can make money is by trying to pry it from hackers many of whom are coding linux for the love of it, instead of trying to find honoerable ways of making money?
sure it's not easy, I myself struggled every day for years and years trying to figure out what i loved doing. I play games a lot, and it's fun, so I hack, but the best way for SCO to make money would be to find something better to do with everyones time. I'm trying to find ways to make money for my home town area which lost a lot of good paying jobs and has a lot of people who've simply moved away from a community they loved working in.
It's not easy finding the right way to make money, but in the long run everyone profits when instead of trying to sue everyone we find something we're good at, and do it the best we can, until there is no one better and we're happy even if we don't make a lot of money. but a lot of places still need good paying jobs so that the rest of the community doesn't have to suffer living in dilapidated houses.
SCO could make a difference, they need to look inwards and think about if the bottom line is so important that they can't find a way to make money off linux products, like trying to port linux for a company like gateway or dell, for their budget class computers. Linux has a lot of games and provide a lot of benfits but i know a lot of people who can't afford them, because they cost a lot, microsoft eats up a lot of that profit margin, and while sco might not make as much money, at least they could wake up and feel good in the morning.
Just because you can use software to illegally copy music doesn't mean you're stealing from the industry. As I recall, the record industry has been doing pretty good with all the popularity of american idol. The record labels would be a lot better off in the long run if they moved ahead with the times.
Right now I'm sitting on slashdot playing games all day, but you know what, i joined the columbia house record club many years back when i first learned you can rip CDs to mp3s I only had a 486 and i So knew 'this is the greatest thing everyone will love it! You don't have to steal from anyone just because you're using p2p software or cd ripping programs. I LOVE sourceforge because they have so many wonder applications like cdex.
I really beleive the aging dinosaurs who don't learn how to play fair (sony, that means YOU) will get swollowed up by the forward thinking execs, like the owner of virgin atlantic richard branson who HAS got it right, and is trying his best to make a change. Sure he still profits heavily off musicians, and that makes me angry a lot, but at least he's trying to keep up with the times by finding new ways to draw artists and audience.
as long as the chinese are commited to censorship i'm glad there are open source projects out there to to help protect people from that kind of ruthless censorship.
As long as sites like the sourceforge are around, people will be able to communicate freely. Google is a busisness, they need to have project that make money, but to be honest if the chinese were so determined to end freedom of speech I'd be 100% behind google finding other ventures to make money at.
I have spent the last 12 years of my life believing that on the internet I could say Anything, at times it's been the only thing keeping me going. China should back off, and if china doesn't back off google should rally around the summer of code to help keep everyone liberties secure. afterall if they're making money off the chinese market they should pay a little forward.
The government is watching you man!
seriously some guys with black helicoptors could be flying around any time now. and the worst thing I've done is speak vocally against all the crappy censorship that people use all the time. i'm willing to bet that the fbi was monitoring all my internet traffic the past week, luckily i just got a virus. meh it was doing all kinds of crazy stuff >_.
oh well.
I got all these viruses, and I've spent the past 2 days trying to remove them. so far, only my parent's computer is running slightly normal. I had to install a bunch of products and change the settings in my router, but couldn't remember how to make OpenBSD recognize 2 NICs on my system... so i'm a lot behind on figuring out what to do with my old gaming rig (which is totally borked) and my new rig, which still lacks a decent GPU, managed to get a virus while running Ubuntu's live cd (it was an old copy -- only copy i had available) so i'm really behind on getting my backup done... so while i should have at least 2-3 systems back up and running in 2 days, the other 1 will take me a few days longer.
those openBSD guides you find with google really help with configuring the system, but while i was able to figure out ed, i wasn't able to remember something i used to know, it's a common issue with my motherboard, that the kernel only recognizes 1 NIC and i need to type something at the bootloader to configure the kernel to see both my NICs and give them different IRQs... since all my PCs are down, i can't search my archived media, for the answer sigh.
I reread your comment. The irony slipped past me the first time :)
but you know what, the entire industry isn't corrupt, there are at least 8 competing adware companies, and yes they ALL try to collect personal data, they ALL try to make the ads pay the bills. Some companies try to do it the right way. they keep the software running on their own servers, and their own products EG yahoo. some companies try to squeeze a little more out of the bottom line, and offer 'sweet deals' to opens source communities. a little cash, a few coders, and we can make your product better, just code in a little bit of tracking data about which user clicks on which url whenever they do in your software and send it to your datacenter... I think you know who does that. then there are the true malware writers.
They write software that takes over your system. They make pretty decent money at it too, and frankly, without them who'd be getting paid the big bucks in IT? yeah it sucks, there are people who want a Free ride, get over it. As long as the people getting the free ride are profiting vastly less than the people who are doing the more honest less evil way then it all works out in the end right?
I know people crave hacks, especially people who can't compete any other way. it's human nature.
:p
the rest is just intuition
As far as 'proof' goes... the law demands a very high standard of proof, blizzard entertainment themselves would have far more proof than i would since i only have access to the data traffic sent to my ip address.
in terms of the existance of said botnet, i beleive the proof of that is pretty clear, when israel was taken off the internet a few weeks back.
If you'd played as much as i have you'd know that not only do people hack, but that those hacks are infact rootkits, intended to extend the scope of the botnet.
anything of the conspiracy theories i rant about are paranoia...
blizzard most likely is doing everything they can, which is basically nothing as long as gamers have insecure systems and download hacks to beat pro gamers who are far far better than them.
more like paranoia ;) but the battle.net botnet is real, the truth of the matter though is that there are a lot of different hackers, so all the comprimized systems couldn't possibly be controlled by one single hacker.
:) people with 1200 apm who can actually strategize while playing at that speed are hard to come by, and most people fall back to strategies to win. human nature is to find simple strategies that they can fall back on, or to download hacks. Not to mention pro gamers oftern cry to blizzard 'they have hacks give us hacks that aren't viruses' which only perpetuates the use of hacks since now that pro gamers have hacks, it makes the end user even more desperate and even more likely to download hacks :) Btw the highest apm spike I've logged in a game is 450, and i generally can only maintain an apm of about 100 while still being able to think strategically. in anycase with satelite internet i have to carefully meter my apm to 10-20 to avoid creating unwinable conditions. Impatience is probably my single biggest weakness too.
Keep in mind that various hackers have exploited systems inside blizard entertainment as well.
the prevelence of cheating is due to the number of professional gamers
the most popular game in the world starcraft... so popular people are paid money to play the game :)
.025 , and that's just for 1v1. imagine what 40,000 users who's isps allow them to ping -i .025 -s 63 over udp port 1900, for hours on end could do to anyone operating on less than an oc 24. that's a whopping 800,000 frames coming from 40,000 ip addresses, for a total of 6MB/s (48 mbit/s), nobody said they were limited to 3KB either, if they all have 1.5 mbit upload were talking 450 MB/s (3600 Mbit) and that's for a bunch of 'legacy' discount bin games, at an odd hour of the night.
Yes WOW is proof that blizzard can in fact milk the MMORPG crowd for more than any other company.
Yes, blizzard made online gaming practical many, many years ago. and yes, blizzard has made video games that are addictive. But the one thing they don't seem to relize is that not only do certain users crave hacks, but certain users who write said hacks use that craving for said hacks to simply exploit millions of peoples computers, with viruses, and many of those trojans are working hacks. and because of that battle.net is host to the largest botnets the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) industry paid hackers run.
there are currently 161,000 users on battle.net based on my estimates, 1 in 3 of those users downloaded some form of hack at some point. and most of the remaining 2/3rds have had little protection from various undisclosed vulnerabilities in the game engine. a bot net with easily 54,000 slaves, scattered around the world, running on computer that quite often need high speed internet (Hugesnet is only ladder playable if you are very cautious about how you play, anything below a Dedicated T-1 is iffy, once you've gained the skill to micro, and the knowledge of the game engine) not to mention you need a FX AMD and a minimum of a 20 pixel pipeline card (or a crossfire/sli solution) and preferablly a dual opteron, with 4GB of the fastest ram (lowest latency) available, to be able to play wc3 at 1200 apm*. (assuming you have a gaming mouse + gaming keyboard, usually USB 2.0 devices) Yes, considering the minimum packet size is 63 Bytes, and there are 6 seconds in a minute we're only talking about 3KB second of data, but we're talking about moving over 40 frames a second, with a profile akin to a ping -s 63 -i
Not to mention i don't know off hand what the minimum level of routing equipment is needed to handle a minimum of 800,000 frames per second**, much less to firewall*** it. It's not cheap though. neither is a full oc-96's worth of bandwith that can be sustained for an entire weekend.
*= you need to use at least 8 fingers (4 on the mouse buttons), and a custom keymap layout to consistantly achieve 1200 apm, since each digit can only sustain about 200-400 apm before the laws of physics catch up with you.
**= cisco doesn't start advertising frames they can handle until it gets into the millions per second
***= unless of course the firewall operates on layer 2, and can simply drop the packets on the floor without needing to interupt the cpu(s) to do so for each packet.
I don't see any rationale behind AMD buying anyone either. A merger between via and ATI would be much more reasonable, since Via has suffered a lot since stable chipsets (such as nvidia, and ATI chipsets) have become available for amd chips.
in that case, ati would primarily benefit from fab capabilities, and scavanging any engineering talent if they can deal with the language barriers. via would benefit from having better, more stable chipset degigns that could revive the via brand... anyways, with the way the economy has been heading it's quite possible that there will be some shakeouts in the chipset market. Right now you can get some very nice budget chipset designs from both ATI and Nvidia, that also include Vista capapble 3-d graphics support, which will play some games at low resolutions. good enough for most computer shoppers, anyways.
you forgot all the custom add-ons! cold cathode lights, BLINKING LEDS, see thru panels, chrome running boards, annodized aluminium, and it gets 15 minutes to the killowatt hour! as far as fatal accidents go, i know a guy who lost a finger in his 40,000 RPM cpu fan, when he was overclocking, and due to the event horizon of the time paradox created by overclocking his cpu his finger was cut off an hour before he was able to realize it was happening, and he bled to death.
man those 4x4 cpus are great. what was that i can't hear you my room never drops below 225 decibels anymore...
Bizarre, When i brought my sister's POS into best buy they wouldn't even dispose of the bad dvd burner. Disposal apparently costs a considerable amount so policy by default is to return all defective parts to the 'owner' and have them dispose of it.
;) seriously all they had to do was drop in a new drive, and test burn a dvd. took them like 3 hours to do that, and they sent it back with the jumpers on the drives wrong, i had to rejumper them to make the secondary drive work.
Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts at a flea market?
most likely someone who regularly sells at flea markets networked into a bunch of said stores and said 'if you want quick cash i'll buy junk computers for X' i highly doubt that anyone unmotivated enough to get out of said job would somehow find the motivation to find a buyer for junk computer parts, especially since the value is so hit and miss.
As for incompetence, I picked up my sisters computer a few hours after I dropped it off, and got a call a few hours later saying the computer was ready for me to pick up
There is a reason for all the stupidity at ATI. ATI's linux drivers are all ports of their server card driver products. Since ATI doesn't want graphics workstation people buying cheap desktop cards, 3-D support only works on their cards aimed at the workstation market.
Long term, i think the strategy will backfire, because intentionally providing crippled drivers to extort more money from your customers creates resentment. Especially since the difference between a workstation card and a 3-d gaming card is esentially nil.
you _Are_ blaming the video game though. you had a choice, spend zillions of hours gaming, or spend many hours doing healthy things. So you stopped working out because that uese to be a 'free time activity' you could have always made a personal choice to find a job where physical strength is a necesity of the job... there are a LOT of jobs where that is true... furthermore, you could have adjusted your diet to the sedentary lifestyle, without missing out on the basic needs of your body, allowing the body to loose pounds of muscle without gaining pounds of fat. two weeks of fasting*
:) you just start with the kinds of foods you enjoy, work out a sensible diet from those foods, then supplement the deficieniencies that diet creates with affordable low cost supplements. my current supplement routine costs me 50 cents a day, and i adapt it daily based on the types of food i plan to eat that day, and i often cut supplements in half so i can take them multiple times daily instead of 'bulk overloading' in the morning. I'm feeling better than i have since childhood, which was the only other time in my life that my diet was strictly monitored for how it would affect my health (thanks to companies like gerber etc)
:) If you're just using the game as escapism, well, people can use anything and nothing for escapism, may as well ban clouds in the sky, because 'they make you gloomy' :)
and the body would have broken down many muscles into 'lean' tissue rather than fat cells.
BTW most of the deaths reported are due to suicide, and yes utilizing the brain at it's highest leves goes through numerous neurochemicals that are not easily produced from the 'typical' unhealthy, unbalanced diet most people eat. the body needs a lot of things to be healthy, what it needs depends on your own genetics, but the symptoms of various deficiencies are pretty easily spotted. and the information on how various chemicals interact in the human body are fairly well spelled out through various resources, however that doesn't tell you how your own genetic code works best. BTW, you don't have to break the bank to get the approriate needs of your body worked out either
Yeah, you want to blame the companies making games for people making bad desisions about their lives. the fact is, nobody made you sit x hrs a day playing a game. you even PAID a monthly fee for the right to do so. accept some personal responsability man, if you wanted to game that many hours a day you could have looked into what options you had to keep yourself healthy while doing so
*= nomral natural water contains numerous minerals and micro organisms, so in the modern sense to fast one needs to take supplements, to compensate for the filtered, treated, lifeless modern day water. other wise the body truly begins to shut down
the problem though is that k-mart doesn't make money when people steal a candybar from them, although hershey's does.... do hershey employees go out and shoplift candybars from k-marts to boost revenues? they could, but they could also loose sales.
with the internet it's entirely different, click fraud Makes google (in place of k-mart) incredible amounts of money every year, at the expense of advertisers(hershey). so that's where your analogy ends, it's not a correct representation... let's do something more analogous. K-mart's 4th quarter profits are down, so, the manager and a couple friends get a bunch of masks and break into the store one night and set a small fire, causing the sprinkler system to kick in, and between fire smoke and water damamge, the k-mart store collects enough money off the insurance to make a tidy sum. Click fraud is like insurance fraud, not shoplifting. so basically unless you send some Google execs to federal prison over this, everyone else is going to think 'click fraud is cool, let's be like google, and instead of paying our ceos let them use click fraud to artificially inflate earnings to cause the shares of google stocks to rise so they can sell shares in a company instead of being paid...'
somebody call the SEC, i think it's about time they opened an investigation into Google Inc not paying it's high level executives, and the click fraud.
i know you're just trolling but, no. at the peak of napster's popularity the music industry was selling more cds than ever, why? the jaded, dissafected 'all this new music is crap' geneneration were able to download all this muisc for free, and then went out shockingly and bought the albums, because they were:
:) so software piracy is very rampant, and not just as 'demonstration' use, either.
1. too stupid to realize you can burn mp3s to cds.
2. too lazy to learn how to burn mp3s to cds even thought hey knew it could be done.
3. simply didn't 'have the time' to 'burn a cd' but apparently had the time to shop at amazon.com (or whoever was selling CDs online then)
None of those reasons would have fundamentally changed so realistically the record industry probabbly cost themselves something like 20 billion in lost record sales due to the increasing popularity that napster would created for their _good_ artists. ah well.
But, there once the generation of kids who grew up with 'music is free on the internet, why pay' grew older (but not up, which sadly a good chunk of them would have) there would have been a down swing in cd sales. frankly, software piracy is a little different, because until recently the people using computer had been the same 'kids' pirating the software
Although, frankly i personally feel that vanilla CD keys are as effective as any copy protection scheme out there, depite what the copy protecion racket claims. since by using a key, one now needs to spend the effort of circumventing that protection, which makes people think about what they're doing... which means if they've been raised with any kind of decency will mean they're resorting to using excuses like 'i'm just trying it out i'll buy it later' some of those people will actually follow through on that, and many of those people would have never bought a copy otherwise.
Making it 'harder' to pirate than that is a path of deminishing returns, the cost expended in anti-piracy techniques vs the negative opinions generated against you for say calling home over the internet unannounced to the user (windows) will cost you lost sales as people switch to linux, for security reasons if nothing else, and then you need to expend $ creating advanced features to 'lure' back as many of those users as possible... keep in mind it's almost as easy to pirate a copy of windows in the us as it is anywhere else in the world... (you can buy pirated discs in any major city on the streets if you know where to shop) so really the primary factor is 'ability' and 'desire' to pay for the software. and nomatter how much the protection racket industry cries about how their extremely expensive protection schemes will save you in lost sales in reality, the cost of protecting all X million discs @ whatever $ per dics the racket is offering to sell it to you is generally far greater than the 'lost' sales converted into 'real sales'
the problems is that the 'clickthru' model of advertising is fundamentally flawed. if you're company X with so many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees, and some competitor is advertising on google and yit's costing your company money, you just pay a few minimum wage flunkies to just click competitors ads so they 'go away' with television etc, the cost is all based on how many people are going to see the ad.
impression counts aren't perfect either, since a similar strategy can be used to make them go away, but usually click thru models cost an order of margin more than impression models, since 99% of people on the internet just ignore the ads. thus it should take almost 100 times as many people being paid to make a 'impression' model advert 'simply go away' that factor means that anything short of a massive botnet swarm would be incapable of taking out the adverts of a large corporation like mcdonalds or coca cola.
I guess the bulk mail industry would just have a new side business to increase their profit margins, to compensate for the loss of 'clickthru' revenues from the popups on their botnet slaves.
I was basing my opinion on the announced release dates of upcoming psp titles.
:)
Barring a cessation by developers developing these games, (as happened with many titles for the virtualboy advance when it bombed) there should be a couple decent titles in mose generas withing a year. as to the continued success of the psp, that's up in the air.
If developers get burned releasing titles for the PSP/ps3 you can expect them to be more friendly to nintendo in the near future though
because you can already go somehwer with heavier metals than iron, as a matter of fact if lead sinkers weren't banned in most places you could probabbly go to your local wal-mart to pick something heavier than iron easily...
;) fusing iron with iron produced titanium, and while you do not recieve enrgy from the process, you produce the most valuable precious metal in existance... although mass production of titanium would likely not be a viable industy, since the moon is estimated to have up deposits composed of up to 5% titanium.
the existance of a heavier metal than iron of course indicates that yes in fact iron can be fused with other materials to create heavier isotopes
once robotic mining equipment is sent to the moon, mag lev 'rail guns' can ship ship the robotically processed ore back to the earth cheaply. Much more cheaply than fusing iron into titanium, probably. Then we can build giant robotic overlords, of course the japanese would just build them on the moon, and rely on human pilots...
It was alredy eroeded with the PSP (how about some good games for once?)
the PSP won't have a whole lot of good games for another year, it will mainly be platformers and titles that lauch for everything. If you'd looked into it before buying you could have saved yoruself the trouble of buying it a whole year too early. In a lot of ways the psp is a lot like the original PSX that way. If you can manage to hold onto your psp for another year there will be a lot of decent games worth playing for it. in the case of the ps3, i think there isn't going to be enough demand for 'high definition' movies to drive the kind of sales sony is predicting. for DVDs you could use your same TV set, for HD movies you may need to purchace a new set as well, and then you want to charge $600 for the console? i just don't see the rapid flood of prople with the cash to drive the kinds of sales sony has forcasted.