I remember running Wolfenstein 3D on my Tandy 1000RLX (286/10MHz XT, yes, a 286 with an 8-bit bus and 256k VGA graphics). Man, that was *the* shiznit back in the day. I have a feeling the latest versions will fail to capture the awe I felt when seeing what was actually possible with the processing power of a 286. Quite a legacy to have to live up to, if you ask me.
To relive the experience, a newer Wolfenstein would have to again push current hardware beyond what is currently viewed as possible. It's quite a shame this is unlikely to happen - Makes me feel like "future generations" of computer users are missing out on something.
All my friends brag about how they can download things so fast - I still haven't bought into the broadband hype. Now I'm even more glad I didn't.
See, I have this huge queue of MP3s waiting to download and I was going to download iTunes 2.0 as soon as it finished... Okay, so it looks like the Xbox will be out before it finishes, but thanks to the slowness of my connection, a bugfixed version of iTunes has already been released, while people with broadband got their hard drives wiped.
...and you wonder why broadband companies are hurtin'. Give the programmers time to fix their bugs - use dialup!;)
The hairspray-powered paintball gun I *built*. I decided to scale down the typical spud gun and sized the barrel for paintballs. Loading is a pain in the ass, so I wouldn't ever use it for an actual game of paintball (not that I play or anything) but it outshoots CO2 guns by a large margin.
I was planning on making a website for this thing (as well as its golfball-firing big brother) but never got around to it... Check out the image at:
Licenced the technology from those "smokeless" cigarettes you kept hearing about but have never seen. It is also possible Truth got to them and wanted them to quit smoking - it's setting a bad example and Intel might start from peer pressure.
Pity, I liked knowing my high-performence processor could "smoke" the competition.
With a very high proof... Once atomized by the high pressure air and ignited - it should make for a nice flame effect even if it doesn't do anything for increased propulsion. Flying two litre bottles of doom!!! Sounds like it would also make a good weapon for the next version of Quake...
Little trip into Virtual PC and fire up my favorite wordprocessor from the days of my youth (Tandy time!), the one bundled with DeskMate called simply "Text". Check out this file date:
Unless your employer says otherwise, you are in essence just borrowing usage of the machine in front of you. It's no different than a car lease - you can't add those super-duper fog lights, 20" chrome rims and turn the trunk into mobile love shack (complete with inflatable matress) because you think the car would be better that way. Of course, if you've *bought* the car, anything goes...
The same applies to computer hardware... If you want to use Linux, Mac OS X, or even just Windows with a crapload of pirated software and MP3s, bring in your own machine (a laptop, preferably). The only downside is, you'll probably have to get permission before you can plug it into the network; however, if you need the freedom your own machine offers, it's the only way to go. After seeing a co-worker get fired merely for using his company-provided laptop to surf for pr0n (while he was AT HOME, no less), I whole-heartedly advise the use of a personally-bought laptop at companies with such draconian policies about how you may and may not use the hardware they "provide" to you.
1. Hack value. You *know* someone will get Linux running on that thing. At the very least I could gut it for the CPU and return it. (It's manufactured by the evil empire, they can deal with some fradulent RMA.) Wait, with Intel's recent price cuts, by the time the Xbox is released, a P3 750MHz would probably cost less than the gas it would take to drive to and from the store. Oh well.
2. It's not easily confused with an IBM PS/2. But wait, that still doesn't make me want one. Shit.
3. It looks cool. I can impress all my... Nevermind.
4. I could play boatloads of cutting-egde, white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat, blast-in-your-face 3D hyper-accelerated games. Hmm, Duke Nukem Forever is still vaporware and probably won't be released for Xbox anyway. Guess not then.
5. It will make my writeups on E2 get C!'d and give me lots of/. karma. No it won't, why the fsck I write that? I think I'm being hit with a Microsoft Mind Control Beam(TM).
6. I can get something high-tech before the Japanese. Only problem... Microsoft != High Tech
A few years ago (can't remember the exact year, but I could look up the receipt for the motherboard) I decided to jump into the car MP3 player craze... Since I frequently made round-the-corner trips, I didn't want something that would take forever to boot. I did a lot of talking with friends about custom-designing something, but ended up using off-the-shelf (actually, out-of-the-discount-pile) PC parts. Basically, I settled on an old Intel-made FX chipset socket 7 board with intergrated Vibra 16 sound, 16MB of RAM and a Pentium 90MHz downclocked to 75MHz to reduce heat.
For storage, since I had just gotten one of those cheapie $199 2x CD-RW drives, I decided to use cheap, reliable CD-R media and an old 4x CD-ROM drive. I've seen FAR too many hard drives die in much more comfortable enviorments than the trunk of a car, so a hard drive was out of the question. Since this motherboard was old, it didn't have a CD bootable BIOS, so I figured I'd boot from a floppy. After all, it only needed DOS 5.0, the ATAPI CD-ROM driver, MSCDEX and MPXPlay (a very versatile DOS MP3 player) - space wasn't an issue. It worked fine but took forever to boot.
I then remembered that there were flash drives for embedded computers that required no spin-up time and are resistant to heat and vibration. I bought a 8MB M-Systems IDE flash drive for about $90... I look back on that price and cringe. This improved the power-to-music time to about 30 seconds - better, but not perfect.
It then dawned on me that since the motherboard I was using was old, there may be an MR BIOS available for it. Back in the day, I ran a BBS and still had all the files archived... MR BIOS was once distributed as shareware. Sure enough, I had a MR BIOS image for that motherboard. Since the flash drive requires no spin-up time, the system boots INSTANTLY. I'd try and stopwatch it, but I don't think my reaction time is quick enough. The system was now able to go from power on to MP3 playback in under 7 seconds, a process that involves booting DOS, loading CD-ROM drivers, loading MPXplay and scanning the disc for MP3s. I figure if I found a faster loading CD-ROM driver or bought a faster drive, I could get this total start time even lower.
Nowadays this hardware is worthless, but back when I got it, it was just cheap. MPXPlay has been updated since I started using it and now my car MP3 player also supports OGG. It is nice to know that if a new format comes out that requires a LOT more processing power, I can make a PIII boot just as fast as my old underclockded P90.:)
Or you could call it Pok'eMP3 - Gotta Trade 'em All! Could also include virtual avatars to represent the artists of each MP3, so you could have Eminem beat the shit out of the Backstreet Boys in a VS mode. Could include the "virtual pet" features too... You'd help your artist get gigs, a record contract, sell albums and rise up the charts - or fail miserably and become a one hit wonder. Hmm, if I wrote games, I'd get started on this one...
Yoshi's Island, anyone?
on
The New Zelda
·
· Score: 1
This SNES game was VERY cartoon-ish and is regarded by most as one of the best games ever released on the SNES. Flashy graphics are nice, but if Nintendo is going back to concentrating on the plot and the gameplay - they'll have a winner on their hands.
If the interface used by the P4 is in fact patented, Intel is just protecting their IP as allowed under current patent law. Sure, you can have a problem with the patent laws, but then you should be attacking the patent laws, not how companies (such as Intel or Unisys) choose to use them to their advantage. Yes, Intel can take their ball and go home if they don't like how you play... If you have a problem with that, use someone else's ball or bring your own. Unisys's patenting of GIF spawned the creation of PNG, MP3 patents spawned OGG... Intel's patents got you down? Buy AMD.
Every time I hear news like this, it reminds me of the movie Armageddon. Why can't life imitate a different hollywood blockbuster? I'd really like to see the look on the alien's faces when their ships start blowing up when they get attacked by Code Red...
---
No wonder there's no more good domain names left
on
Quake 4 Announced
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· Score: 1
It must be hard to come up with new names. Hmm, Pentium IV, Quake IV, Code Red III. While we're at it, has anyone come up with a name for this decade? I propose we call it: Y2K + 1
Seriously though, this is going to have to stop sometime - I don't want to be playing Quake 69 on my Pentium 69.
It sounds like another way of saying "celebrity deathmatch".
Yadda, yadda, yadda...
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I primarially use PCs, but recently obtained a second-hand iMac (Rev C. 266MHz G3, 6GB, 32MB RAM) to get familar with the platform and possibly port some of my Windows programs I've written to it. First thing to go was that stupid urinal puck mouse, I replaced it with a USB trackman marble.
Opinions about Windows aside, 98lite runs at acceptable speeds in 32MB of RAM. Sure, RAM is cheap, so there really is no excuse to have *that* little amount of RAM... On the Mac however, 32MB with OS 8.6 is unusable. With virtual memory disabled, you get "Out of memory" messages left and right - with it turned on, the system swaps, and swaps, and SWAPS. Yuck. Okay, time to buy more RAM.
The system didn't seem terribly stable for web browsing... Browsing the web with the latest IE or Netscape would frequently crash every few hours or so, Force quit almost never worked, usually it just brought up the dialog box and left the system in a frozen state. Overall, MacOS 8.6 seems roughly as stable as Windows 3.1. I hope OS X is a lot better.
Performence widely varied with the task being performed. Forget about good performence Divx;) playback, cause "it ain't happenin' mon!" While even on a measily PII 233MHz you can play MP3s in the background with Winamp with no skipping or noticable performence hit, the iMac's MP3 playback via Quicktime skipped and slowed the system to a crawl. Yuck. As expected, Photoshop was fast and stable. Connectix virtual game station (PSX Emulator) ran at roughly the speed the PC version does on a PII 350MHz... Not bad, not bad at all. SNES9X seems to perform better than the PII 233MHz, but not as good as the PII 350MHz. Shockwave web animations seemed sluggish, but no worse than the PII 233MHz. Web pages seemed to render much faster on the PII 233MHz, though. So much for the Mac as a browsing platform.
Overall, this wasn't a bad system... Not cutting edge, but at least as useful as my low end PII PCs. Well, it *was*... Then it got an Invalid PEOF error after an application crash and refuses to boot from the hard drive unless I reinitalize and reinstall. I can boot from a MacOS CD, but it refuses to let me eject it so I can insert one with Norton on it. If the damn thing only had a floppy drive... Eventually, I'll get around to buying a bootable Diskwarrior CD so I can get the damn thing working again without reformatting.
All things considered, it has been a nice learning experience; however, PCs are still my platform of choice.
Just checked my logs... Great, I'm on fucking dialup and there's a stupid worm bouncing invalid requests off port 80 of a Linux box I have setup to do NAT. Normally I wouldn't condone drastic measures, but I think ISPs (broadband or otherwise) should start logging the IPs their boxes are getting hit with and if the IP matches that of a customer - BOOM! there goes their access! Finally, envoke TOS for a useful purpose! If the user(s) in question want restored access, they must either update their affected Microsoft product, change to a better OS or STOP RUNNING ANY TYPE OF WEBSERVER if the ISP's terms of service forbids running a webserver.
These ID10Ts need to patch their 'doze boxen or get the hell off the Internet.
Sandpaper is sold as being abrasive. If you put sandpaper on glass and it scratches it - you were just plain stupid. If the CDs include no warning and damage your equipment - you can sue, plain and simple.
I considered purchasing a P4 for faster Divx;) encoding - some benchmarks on Tom's Hardware Guide placed one (I forget the exact GHz, who really cares) as twice as fast as my PIII 750MHz. Then I looked on pricewatch and justdeals and got ANOTHER PIII 750MHz CPU and Tyan BX mobo for $125. Already had a nic, 20GB HD and a few other parts lying around so I made a barebones system and put it on the network... Okay, so I don't REALLY get twice my frame rate when encoding, but if I convert 2 DVDs at once - they both get done at the same time.;)
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet... How is this copy protection going to effect the newly-released MP3 CD Players which are more CD-ROM-like then a standard CD player? I'd imagine the Charlie Pride CD wouldn't work on them since they differenciate between data/audio CDs and the protection on the Charlie Pride CD exploits that feature of CD-ROM drives. As for the Macrovision, some standard audio CD players are terrible with scratched CDs as it is... On the other hand, I've personally ripped some BADLY scratched CDs on my DVD-ROM drive and gotten good results, does that mean the copy protection won't work? One thing is certain, expect the prices on drives with "golden firmware" that defeat the copy protection to skyrocket on eBay.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember running Wolfenstein 3D on my Tandy 1000RLX (286/10MHz XT, yes, a 286 with an 8-bit bus and 256k VGA graphics). Man, that was *the* shiznit back in the day. I have a feeling the latest versions will fail to capture the awe I felt when seeing what was actually possible with the processing power of a 286. Quite a legacy to have to live up to, if you ask me.
To relive the experience, a newer Wolfenstein would have to again push current hardware beyond what is currently viewed as possible. It's quite a shame this is unlikely to happen - Makes me feel like "future generations" of computer users are missing out on something.
It wasn't a meteor - it was a bug in iTunes 2.0.
Rest assured though, iTunes 2.1 WILL not wipe out hard drives OR civilizations.
All my friends brag about how they can download things so fast - I still haven't bought into the broadband hype. Now I'm even more glad I didn't.
;)
See, I have this huge queue of MP3s waiting to download and I was going to download iTunes 2.0 as soon as it finished... Okay, so it looks like the Xbox will be out before it finishes, but thanks to the slowness of my connection, a bugfixed version of iTunes has already been released, while people with broadband got their hard drives wiped.
...and you wonder why broadband companies are hurtin'. Give the programmers time to fix their bugs - use dialup!
The hairspray-powered paintball gun I *built*. I decided to scale down the typical spud gun and sized the barrel for paintballs. Loading is a pain in the ass, so I wouldn't ever use it for an actual game of paintball (not that I play or anything) but it outshoots CO2 guns by a large margin.
I was planning on making a website for this thing (as well as its golfball-firing big brother) but never got around to it... Check out the image at:
pballgun.jpg
Licenced the technology from those "smokeless" cigarettes you kept hearing about but have never seen. It is also possible Truth got to them and wanted them to quit smoking - it's setting a bad example and Intel might start from peer pressure.
Pity, I liked knowing my high-performence processor could "smoke" the competition.
With a very high proof... Once atomized by the high pressure air and ignited - it should make for a nice flame effect even if it doesn't do anything for increased propulsion. Flying two litre bottles of doom!!! Sounds like it would also make a good weapon for the next version of Quake...
Idiot:
{ No meaning found }
Guess Microsoft got to Apple too.
Little trip into Virtual PC and fire up my favorite wordprocessor from the days of my youth (Tandy time!), the one bundled with DeskMate called simply "Text". Check out this file date:
THES RES 6,040 10-10-88 9:11a
Yes, that's the thesaurus resource, from '88!
Looked up "idiot", DeskMate didn't slack:
ass, asshole, blockhead, boor, clad, clod, creep, cretin, dimwit, dolt, dope, dullard, dumbbell, dummy, dunce, fool, goof, imbecile, jerk, nerd, nincompoop, numskull, oaf, pain, schlemiel, schmuck, simpleton, stooge, turd, turkey
So what if it couldn't multitask and was designed to run on XTs? It has one hell of a kick-ass thesaurus!
Okay, so the Tom's Hardware Guide video of two Athlons getting a bad case of China Syndrome was one thing, but this is totally uncalled for!
Poor AMD, first bad press - now a "grub" (obviously, a worm!) that targets only AMD processors. When will it end?
Unless your employer says otherwise, you are in essence just borrowing usage of the machine in front of you. It's no different than a car lease - you can't add those super-duper fog lights, 20" chrome rims and turn the trunk into mobile love shack (complete with inflatable matress) because you think the car would be better that way. Of course, if you've *bought* the car, anything goes...
The same applies to computer hardware... If you want to use Linux, Mac OS X, or even just Windows with a crapload of pirated software and MP3s, bring in your own machine (a laptop, preferably). The only downside is, you'll probably have to get permission before you can plug it into the network; however, if you need the freedom your own machine offers, it's the only way to go. After seeing a co-worker get fired merely for using his company-provided laptop to surf for pr0n (while he was AT HOME, no less), I whole-heartedly advise the use of a personally-bought laptop at companies with such draconian policies about how you may and may not use the hardware they "provide" to you.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005221K/ qid=1000253354/sr=2-8/ref=aps_sr_d_3_2/102-5341976 -1662552
Yes, the movie The Seige. Noteworthy is the comment by one of the user-written reviews. "The story is implausible"
This whole ordeal seems unreal.
1. Hack value. You *know* someone will get Linux running on that thing. At the very least I could gut it for the CPU and return it. (It's manufactured by the evil empire, they can deal with some fradulent RMA.) Wait, with Intel's recent price cuts, by the time the Xbox is released, a P3 750MHz would probably cost less than the gas it would take to drive to and from the store. Oh well.
/. karma. No it won't, why the fsck I write that? I think I'm being hit with a Microsoft Mind Control Beam(TM).
2. It's not easily confused with an IBM PS/2. But wait, that still doesn't make me want one. Shit.
3. It looks cool. I can impress all my... Nevermind.
4. I could play boatloads of cutting-egde, white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat, blast-in-your-face 3D hyper-accelerated games. Hmm, Duke Nukem Forever is still vaporware and probably won't be released for Xbox anyway. Guess not then.
5. It will make my writeups on E2 get C!'d and give me lots of
6. I can get something high-tech before the Japanese. Only problem... Microsoft != High Tech
Gee, I guess I DON'T want an Xbox!
A few years ago (can't remember the exact year, but I could look up the receipt for the motherboard) I decided to jump into the car MP3 player craze... Since I frequently made round-the-corner trips, I didn't want something that would take forever to boot. I did a lot of talking with friends about custom-designing something, but ended up using off-the-shelf (actually, out-of-the-discount-pile) PC parts. Basically, I settled on an old Intel-made FX chipset socket 7 board with intergrated Vibra 16 sound, 16MB of RAM and a Pentium 90MHz downclocked to 75MHz to reduce heat.
:)
For storage, since I had just gotten one of those cheapie $199 2x CD-RW drives, I decided to use cheap, reliable CD-R media and an old 4x CD-ROM drive. I've seen FAR too many hard drives die in much more comfortable enviorments than the trunk of a car, so a hard drive was out of the question. Since this motherboard was old, it didn't have a CD bootable BIOS, so I figured I'd boot from a floppy. After all, it only needed DOS 5.0, the ATAPI CD-ROM driver, MSCDEX and MPXPlay (a very versatile DOS MP3 player) - space wasn't an issue. It worked fine but took forever to boot.
I then remembered that there were flash drives for embedded computers that required no spin-up time and are resistant to heat and vibration. I bought a 8MB M-Systems IDE flash drive for about $90... I look back on that price and cringe. This improved the power-to-music time to about 30 seconds - better, but not perfect.
It then dawned on me that since the motherboard I was using was old, there may be an MR BIOS available for it. Back in the day, I ran a BBS and still had all the files archived... MR BIOS was once distributed as shareware. Sure enough, I had a MR BIOS image for that motherboard. Since the flash drive requires no spin-up time, the system boots INSTANTLY. I'd try and stopwatch it, but I don't think my reaction time is quick enough. The system was now able to go from power on to MP3 playback in under 7 seconds, a process that involves booting DOS, loading CD-ROM drivers, loading MPXplay and scanning the disc for MP3s. I figure if I found a faster loading CD-ROM driver or bought a faster drive, I could get this total start time even lower.
Nowadays this hardware is worthless, but back when I got it, it was just cheap. MPXPlay has been updated since I started using it and now my car MP3 player also supports OGG. It is nice to know that if a new format comes out that requires a LOT more processing power, I can make a PIII boot just as fast as my old underclockded P90.
Or you could call it Pok'eMP3 - Gotta Trade 'em All! Could also include virtual avatars to represent the artists of each MP3, so you could have Eminem beat the shit out of the Backstreet Boys in a VS mode. Could include the "virtual pet" features too... You'd help your artist get gigs, a record contract, sell albums and rise up the charts - or fail miserably and become a one hit wonder. Hmm, if I wrote games, I'd get started on this one...
This SNES game was VERY cartoon-ish and is regarded by most as one of the best games ever released on the SNES. Flashy graphics are nice, but if Nintendo is going back to concentrating on the plot and the gameplay - they'll have a winner on their hands.
If the interface used by the P4 is in fact patented, Intel is just protecting their IP as allowed under current patent law. Sure, you can have a problem with the patent laws, but then you should be attacking the patent laws, not how companies (such as Intel or Unisys) choose to use them to their advantage. Yes, Intel can take their ball and go home if they don't like how you play... If you have a problem with that, use someone else's ball or bring your own. Unisys's patenting of GIF spawned the creation of PNG, MP3 patents spawned OGG... Intel's patents got you down? Buy AMD.
Every time I hear news like this, it reminds me of the movie Armageddon. Why can't life imitate a different hollywood blockbuster? I'd really like to see the look on the alien's faces when their ships start blowing up when they get attacked by Code Red...
---
It must be hard to come up with new names. Hmm, Pentium IV, Quake IV, Code Red III. While we're at it, has anyone come up with a name for this decade? I propose we call it: Y2K + 1
Seriously though, this is going to have to stop sometime - I don't want to be playing Quake 69 on my Pentium 69.
---
It sounds like another way of saying "celebrity deathmatch".
I primarially use PCs, but recently obtained a second-hand iMac (Rev C. 266MHz G3, 6GB, 32MB RAM) to get familar with the platform and possibly port some of my Windows programs I've written to it. First thing to go was that stupid urinal puck mouse, I replaced it with a USB trackman marble.
;) playback, cause "it ain't happenin' mon!" While even on a measily PII 233MHz you can play MP3s in the background with Winamp with no skipping or noticable performence hit, the iMac's MP3 playback via Quicktime skipped and slowed the system to a crawl. Yuck. As expected, Photoshop was fast and stable. Connectix virtual game station (PSX Emulator) ran at roughly the speed the PC version does on a PII 350MHz... Not bad, not bad at all. SNES9X seems to perform better than the PII 233MHz, but not as good as the PII 350MHz. Shockwave web animations seemed sluggish, but no worse than the PII 233MHz. Web pages seemed to render much faster on the PII 233MHz, though. So much for the Mac as a browsing platform.
Opinions about Windows aside, 98lite runs at acceptable speeds in 32MB of RAM. Sure, RAM is cheap, so there really is no excuse to have *that* little amount of RAM... On the Mac however, 32MB with OS 8.6 is unusable. With virtual memory disabled, you get "Out of memory" messages left and right - with it turned on, the system swaps, and swaps, and SWAPS. Yuck. Okay, time to buy more RAM.
The system didn't seem terribly stable for web browsing... Browsing the web with the latest IE or Netscape would frequently crash every few hours or so, Force quit almost never worked, usually it just brought up the dialog box and left the system in a frozen state. Overall, MacOS 8.6 seems roughly as stable as Windows 3.1. I hope OS X is a lot better.
Performence widely varied with the task being performed. Forget about good performence Divx
Overall, this wasn't a bad system... Not cutting edge, but at least as useful as my low end PII PCs. Well, it *was*... Then it got an Invalid PEOF error after an application crash and refuses to boot from the hard drive unless I reinitalize and reinstall. I can boot from a MacOS CD, but it refuses to let me eject it so I can insert one with Norton on it. If the damn thing only had a floppy drive... Eventually, I'll get around to buying a bootable Diskwarrior CD so I can get the damn thing working again without reformatting.
All things considered, it has been a nice learning experience; however, PCs are still my platform of choice.
Just checked my logs... Great, I'm on fucking dialup and there's a stupid worm bouncing invalid requests off port 80 of a Linux box I have setup to do NAT. Normally I wouldn't condone drastic measures, but I think ISPs (broadband or otherwise) should start logging the IPs their boxes are getting hit with and if the IP matches that of a customer - BOOM! there goes their access! Finally, envoke TOS for a useful purpose! If the user(s) in question want restored access, they must either update their affected Microsoft product, change to a better OS or STOP RUNNING ANY TYPE OF WEBSERVER if the ISP's terms of service forbids running a webserver.
These ID10Ts need to patch their 'doze boxen or get the hell off the Internet.
Sandpaper is sold as being abrasive. If you put sandpaper on glass and it scratches it - you were just plain stupid. If the CDs include no warning and damage your equipment - you can sue, plain and simple.
I considered purchasing a P4 for faster Divx ;) encoding - some benchmarks on Tom's Hardware Guide placed one (I forget the exact GHz, who really cares) as twice as fast as my PIII 750MHz. Then I looked on pricewatch and justdeals and got ANOTHER PIII 750MHz CPU and Tyan BX mobo for $125. Already had a nic, 20GB HD and a few other parts lying around so I made a barebones system and put it on the network... Okay, so I don't REALLY get twice my frame rate when encoding, but if I convert 2 DVDs at once - they both get done at the same time. ;)
Imagine if people bitched about losing weapons/powerups in a FPS game (Unreal Tournament, Quake, Half-Life, etc.)...
(message from complaining lamer) "Hey, where'd my MegaNuke and SuperDouble Shield thingie go?"
(a nearby player) "Shut up!" (Frags 'em)
(complainging lamer) "Shit, now I lost everything!"
(another player frags him AGAIN) "Shut up chatty bitch and play!"
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet... How is this copy protection going to effect the newly-released MP3 CD Players which are more CD-ROM-like then a standard CD player? I'd imagine the Charlie Pride CD wouldn't work on them since they differenciate between data/audio CDs and the protection on the Charlie Pride CD exploits that feature of CD-ROM drives. As for the Macrovision, some standard audio CD players are terrible with scratched CDs as it is... On the other hand, I've personally ripped some BADLY scratched CDs on my DVD-ROM drive and gotten good results, does that mean the copy protection won't work? One thing is certain, expect the prices on drives with "golden firmware" that defeat the copy protection to skyrocket on eBay.
The server is smoking? Great, a computer that has to take cigarette breaks... Get that thing a nicotine patch (kernel patch?) and put it back to work!