I see your point, but I disagree with your conclusions.
There really isn't much left to chance in a game like Quake 3. It may seem that way, because many things are on timers that you don't know the settings for, but it's not really random.
If you're firing into a group of people who are ignoring you, it's because you were smart enough to find the group and shoot them. This might earn you some derisive remarks (especially if you were camping), but it has nothing to do with blind chance. There are places where fights tend to form; if you're there, you will get frags. The skills required to be a great 1-vs-1 player are different from those required to do well in a 10+ member free-for-all.
The argument about blackjack is somewhat valid, but it's a matter of applying skill to a game of chance, whereas with Quake it's a matter of coping with chance in a game of skill. If you're at a football game, and the weather changes or the field is getting muddy, adapting to the vagaries of chance is one of the skills required to be a great team. Golfers need to understand the wind.
A contest of skill with random elements is generally decided as the best of N rounds, e.g. the World Series, so that skill factors dominate the (much less significant) random factors. Mortal Kombat games were "best 2 of 3" matches for a round, and on XBAND you needed best 2 of 3 rounds to take the fight.
It's a game of skill, not a game of chance, so it would be considered a tournament. XBAND held one or two tournaments with a $1,000 prize; if memory serves, it was won by a minor.
Now, if you were able to place bets on the players, that would be a different story...
It amazes me that companies like Catapult (XBAND), Mpath (Mplayer), and TEN never achieved
much in the way of financial success, but somehow
Microsoft believes it has the Midas touch.
The only way this is going to work is the only
way that pay-for-play games on the Internet have
every worked: MUDs, MMORPGs, and the like.
Even the voice-with-the-game gimmick has been
done before... and
Roger Wilco didn't do so well either.
DTS and AC-3 content, when played through an appropriate decoder, comes out sounding like music. There's nothing at all magic about the discs. In theory, you could inadvertently create an audio CD that got recognized as a fancy format, but in practice you'd have to come up with something decidely un-musical to make that happen.
The real trick to AC-3 and DTS is finding something that's worth storing in AC-3 or DTS. The article talks about mixing your own 5.1 stuff, which is pretty much the only reason you'd want to do this.
Re:Oh boy:: me not worried, it won't work
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 1
Yes indeed. More silliness.
We've had "uncopyable" CD-ROMs for years (either physically damaged or written with funky pit lengths). We've had dongles for years, usually connected to a serial or parallel port.
Now we get both, in one tidy little package. I really doubt this will do anything more than raise the level of difficulty. Once publishers realize they're paying extra for nothing special, it'll go away by itself.
The best advice anyone ever gave me about moonlighting while fully employed was, essentially, "don't ask and don't tell". This falls into the same category. By revealing his idea after a lengthy term of employment with no supporting materials to establish a timeline, he pretty much guaranteed his own demise.
If he'd quit and then developed the idea, he might have had a chance.
That employee agreement was pretty atrocious. Microsoft has a fairly similar one. Any ideas you come up with while at Microsoft, or put into practice within SIX MONTHS after leaving, are owned by the company.
We did get MSFT to change some of the wording, I think partly because California law is pretty specific about the legal status of stuff you do on your own time and equipment so long as it doesn't relate to the business of your employer. I feel bad for the guys in Washington -- they have to fight over non-compete clauses, which is quite a thing to struggle against when you're trying not to compete with Microsoft.
One minor quibble about the guy's claims: the company did NOT offer to pay him $2 million. They offered to provide a small percentage of the savings, capped at two million. There's no telling whether this idea would amount to anything.
The Pioneer Elite DV-37 can remember a bookmark on a handful of discs. So you play the disc up to the menu, set the bookmark, and then the next time you play the disc you skip forward to the bookmark.
Doesn't violate the DVD spec, but it does solve the problem of having to watch 15 minutes of Disney previews.
(1) Microsoft TV (nee WebTV), while a closed system, does run javascript. So you can't add binaries, but you *can* add code.
(2) I doubt very much there is a pre-Microsoft WebTV box. The service can force updates out to boxes. I'm guessing most or all of the clients out there are MSNed at this point.
(3) Even if there were some surviving units, the service side is updated more often, and the service has a lot of control over what the box dials.
I, for one, would *love* to know how this got pulled off. (And, no, it's not "ATH0".)
Every once in a while somebody asks me (in the role of CD-R FAQ maintainer) about distributing on VideoCD instead of VHS. I've gotten a few unsolicited VHS videotapes -- usually constructed of some incredibly lightweight material to reduce postage costs -- and I'm guessing I'd get a lot more if the discs could be sent out for what AOL pays to spam us with CD-ROMs.
The problems can be summarized in two statements:
(1) In the United States, dedicated VideoCD players are almost unheard-of, and a significant percentage of DVD players don't support VideoCD playback. I think most of the MPEG decoder chipsets support MPEG 1 and 2, so it's usually a matter of the DVD player company not wanting to spend resources on something that won't get used.
(2) Many DVD players can't handle CD-R media. Which is fine for large AOL-spamming runs, but poor for company demo videos that you only need a couple hundred of. The problem there is the laser wavelength; it costs extra to handle CD-R. Usually CD-RW works just fine, but the discs could be maliciously replaced with some educational material of an entirely different nature.
VideoCD is fine for a well-contained environment where you can verify that the hardware and media will successfully co-exist. Providing VideoCD as an option is reasonable, but it can't be the only mode of distribution.
The DVD FAQ at www.dvddemystified.com has more details.
Warcraft I and II were downright boring in single-player mode. Every scenario, you'd build up some guys, dealing with the occasional visitor as you did so, and then wander out to an enemy infestation.
Create a formation. Send a fast unit forward to draw them out. Fall back. Swat them as they charge haphazardly into your formation.
The only time the game really got interesting was on the second-to-last scenario of each campaign, where both sides had a lot of stuff, the game was biased against you, and you actually had to struggle to stay on top. The final scenario usually had some game imbalancer that could be exploited, like the summon spell that let you destroy whole bases easily without risking "real" units.
Games like the original Command & Conquer and Total Annihiliation worked, I think, for a couple of reasons. One, the base defenses were formidable, and those were usually pre-set by the game designer rather than the AI. Either you came ready to rock & roll or the static defenses would tear you apart. Two, when the computer came to get you, it didn't come for a polite social visit. The computer would build up a large collection of units and then send 75% of them right down your throat. Without solid defenses backed by the right mix of units you were going to get destroyed, or at least crippled to the point where an immediate counterattack was out of the question.
Remember the dreaded Mission 7 in TA? You have a skinny piece of beach and about 10 minutes to prepare for an onslaught of enemy warships? That's good stuff.
Warcraft I and II had static defenses that you could ignore until it was convenient. Slow firing, low damage, especially compared to the NOD energy tower or TA heavy laser. The enemy units sort of wandered at you, one at a time, when they got bored.
Age of Kings did a pretty fair job, with the computer coming after you in force. My only complaint with AOE2:AOK is personal preference: I'm a "builder", and the bonuses they gave to the computer made it difficult to win a single-player scenario if you built up your forces instead of attacking quickly.
In many ways the original C&C got it right and many of its successors got it wrong. I've played every single-player scenario in WC1 and WC2, and because of that experience I never bothered with StarCraft. Maybe they'll fix it this time?
Re:I learned network programming from Netrek
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wow... this is turning into a class reunion.:-)
There's a little more to the history pages, most notably a timeline of events, that gives you a little more detail.
It's times like this that I'm sad I never finished the original Netrek history document. I still have a few megabytes of material archived, and actually pulled it out to help defend a patent-infringement lawsuit. (Mpath Interactive was suing another company over a multi-player gaming patent. Kevin Smith and I contributed statements and code samples that demonstrated that Netrek was doing what their patent claimed *years* before Mpath even existed.) Someday I may pull out the history stuff and finish the job.
I also learned a lot from Netrek. The UDP code in Netrek was, to the best of knowledge, the first time UDP was used for an Internet game. I didn't think it would make a difference.:-) Everything that followed used UDP instead of TCP -- you didn't have to look very hard to see the advantages.
Netrek is probably the only game that uses both UDP and TCP for game state updates. It remains the most salient example of why that approach is a bad idea.:-)
I remember using Netrek as a system diagnostic tool. If there were hiccups in the OS or network, you'd notice them almost immediately. There as a router outside KSU that was reloading its routing tables periodically, causing a small network storm, that was spotted by Netrek players who were stalling briefly at fairly precise intervals.
I learned a trememdous amount about RSA encryption and the difficulty in making a game tamper-proof. We kept trying to find ways to keep people from cheating, but there's always another approach when you don't control the target system. It's fun to watch game companies struggle with that even now.
It also taught me a lot about game balance, and how a simple change to the way score (DI) is computed can change *everything*. People want solitary goals, and will pursue them even to the detriment of others (substitute Quake "campers" for Netrek "DI scum"). Netrek had so many opportunities for tweaks that we needed a separate FAQ for Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions (FOCS) just to keep the newsgroup sane.
I miss playing Netrek almost as much as I miss writing code for it. How many games can programmers say that about?
They overlooked Cytron Masters for the Apple II, which is likely the very first RTS game.
You sent different types of units marching across the screen at the opponent, who did the same to you. Could be played against the computer or a human opponent.
Games can also be a fine thing to work on when you're stuck in a dead-end job and the job market sucks. The dot-com crash is fresh in everybody's memories, but things were pretty unhappy back in '91.
Which is how I got into hacking on Netrek (Roger, is that you??). In some ways I actually *did* push the boundaries of technology -- name one multiplayer Internet game that used UDP before Netrek did -- and I'm far prouder of the things I did in my spare time than the things I was getting paid to do.
That said, don't jump into something that's going to make you unhappy. If you don't like coding *at all*, don't take a coding job. If it's the nature of the project that bothers you, find a project that's more to your liking.
The article has a link to the section of the CD-Recordable FAQ
(section (2-4-4)) where one of the techniques is
explained.
Section (2-4-4) talks about MediaCloQ and how to remove the protection. Section (2-4-3) explains what is known about Macrovision's stuff, and what the options are for working around it. Nearby sections talk about Cactus Data Shield and the protection used on the Michael Jackson single.
See this item for details on the protection. In short, they've screwed up the disc's table of contents so the CD-ROM drive can't make heads or tails of it. Audio CD players just ignore all the gunk. You can trivially work around the problem by reading the disc as a series of blocks.
A related story on news.com is a "news.com special report" on the
subject of copy-protected audio CDs.
If the NSA knows they're using public key tools, then can't we crack the transmissions with the same techniques that were applied to the various PK encryption challenges?
I'd leave my machines on 24/7 if it would help crack terrorist messages.
Of course, this would open the possibility for the NSA to slip in a few ACLU messages as well...
The "Cactus Data Shield" brand has been around for a while, but this appears to be an updated version.
The original implementation tweaked out the table of contents on discs, making it appear that the disc was only 30 seconds long (28 after you subtract the mandatory two-second pregap). This allowed most CD players to play the disc, because they ignored the lead-out value, but CD-ROM drives got confused. Unfortunately for BMG, some Philips CD players did pay attention to the value and refused to play the CDs. The scheme was abandoned.
This updated scheme uses an entirely different approach, one that could be worse than the Macrovision stuff. If it works as well as they claim, it would have to produce distortion on all digital outputs -- otherwise their claims of defeating audio CD copiers wouldn't hold.
I'd love to get my hands on one of these. I tried to get some of the German discs with the old Cactus protection, but the import I got from Amazon was, of all things, a copy on CD-R media.
One thing to note: the article did not say that damaging CDs were released (shame on slashdot for going for hype instead of fact). It said that they *could* be released. Highly unlikely they ever would.
As far as Ministry CDs not playing, they probably did something bizarre to be cute and inadvertently caused problems. Artists will occasionally do strange things with CDs, e.g. Nine Inch Nails putting 99 tracks on their "Broken" CD, most of which are only one second long. (Red Book says mininum track length is 4 seconds.)
I've yet to see anything describing how many titles and which ones. What I have seen is a lot of people claim to have one, but really all they have is a disc that didn't "rip" cleanly with the hardware and software they used. The perception is that switching to a high-quality DAE program (e.g. EAC or cdparanoia) avoids the copy protection, but really all it does is correctly handle scratched discs and suboptimal drives.
Suddenly every disc that doesn't extract cleanly is copy protected. I'm waiting for somebody to accuse Macrovision of poisoning wells.:-)
The Charlie Pride disc used technology from SunComm (http://www.suncomm.com/), which doesn't seem to share any press releases with Macrovision. The technology may well be the same. They've been quiet since their big release in May, and their web site has nothing but content-free content. (I'll add a blurb about them to the FAQ sometime soon.)
Yup. I'd guess it's a move to placate the many people complaining to them about spammers on their site (of which I am one).
The trouble is, it won't fix the problems that I've encountered with their users. I don't believe I've received spam *sent* from their site, just spam *referring* to their users. According to my anti-spam logs, I've received eight messages that ask you to reply to a verizon mail account in the first half of this year, which is pretty remarkable for a site that didn't have a working "postmaster" address the first couple of times I complained.
(Yes, I'm one of those rabid anti-spam types. If you're pre-spam, kindly head down the hall, turn left, and take the door marked "straight to hell". Thanks.)
Now, if they had announced a policy of "spam clean-up" fines for users found guilty of spamming, I'd get all warm and fuzzy.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point, but I disagree with your conclusions.
There really isn't much left to chance in a game like Quake 3. It may seem that way, because many things are on timers that you don't know the settings for, but it's not really random.
If you're firing into a group of people who are ignoring you, it's because you were smart enough to find the group and shoot them. This might earn you some derisive remarks (especially if you were camping), but it has nothing to do with blind chance. There are places where fights tend to form; if you're there, you will get frags. The skills required to be a great 1-vs-1 player are different from those required to do well in a 10+ member free-for-all.
The argument about blackjack is somewhat valid, but it's a matter of applying skill to a game of chance, whereas with Quake it's a matter of coping with chance in a game of skill. If you're at a football game, and the weather changes or the field is getting muddy, adapting to the vagaries of chance is one of the skills required to be a great team. Golfers need to understand the wind.
A contest of skill with random elements is generally decided as the best of N rounds, e.g. the World Series, so that skill factors dominate the (much less significant) random factors. Mortal Kombat games were "best 2 of 3" matches for a round, and on XBAND you needed best 2 of 3 rounds to take the fight.
It's a game of skill, not a game of chance, so it would be considered a tournament. XBAND held one or two tournaments with a $1,000 prize; if memory serves, it was won by a minor.
Now, if you were able to place bets on the players, that would be a different story...
Wow... they're resurrecting the XBAND Video Game Modem and Network!
It amazes me that companies like Catapult (XBAND), Mpath (Mplayer), and TEN never achieved much in the way of financial success, but somehow Microsoft believes it has the Midas touch. The only way this is going to work is the only way that pay-for-play games on the Internet have every worked: MUDs, MMORPGs, and the like.
Even the voice-with-the-game gimmick has been done before... and Roger Wilco didn't do so well either.
This is, in fact, remarkably uninteresting. :-)
DTS and AC-3 content, when played through an appropriate decoder, comes out sounding like music. There's nothing at all magic about the discs. In theory, you could inadvertently create an audio CD that got recognized as a fancy format, but in practice you'd have to come up with something decidely un-musical to make that happen.
The real trick to AC-3 and DTS is finding something that's worth storing in AC-3 or DTS. The article talks about mixing your own 5.1 stuff, which is pretty much the only reason you'd want to do this.
Yes indeed. More silliness.
We've had "uncopyable" CD-ROMs for years (either physically damaged or written with funky pit lengths). We've had dongles for years, usually connected to a serial or parallel port.
Now we get both, in one tidy little package. I really doubt this will do anything more than raise the level of difficulty. Once publishers realize they're paying extra for nothing special, it'll go away by itself.
Neat technology though.
The best advice anyone ever gave me about moonlighting while fully employed was, essentially, "don't ask and don't tell". This falls into the same category. By revealing his idea after a lengthy term of employment with no supporting materials to establish a timeline, he pretty much guaranteed his own demise.
If he'd quit and then developed the idea, he might have had a chance.
That employee agreement was pretty atrocious. Microsoft has a fairly similar one. Any ideas you come up with while at Microsoft, or put into practice within SIX MONTHS after leaving, are owned by the company.
We did get MSFT to change some of the wording, I think partly because California law is pretty specific about the legal status of stuff you do on your own time and equipment so long as it doesn't relate to the business of your employer. I feel bad for the guys in Washington -- they have to fight over non-compete clauses, which is quite a thing to struggle against when you're trying not to compete with Microsoft.
One minor quibble about the guy's claims: the company did NOT offer to pay him $2 million. They offered to provide a small percentage of the savings, capped at two million. There's no telling whether this idea would amount to anything.
The Pioneer Elite DV-37 can remember a bookmark on a handful of discs. So you play the disc up to the menu, set the bookmark, and then the next time you play the disc you skip forward to the bookmark.
Doesn't violate the DVD spec, but it does solve the problem of having to watch 15 minutes of Disney previews.
Some observations...
(1) Microsoft TV (nee WebTV), while a closed system, does run javascript. So you can't add binaries, but you *can* add code.
(2) I doubt very much there is a pre-Microsoft WebTV box. The service can force updates out to boxes. I'm guessing most or all of the clients out there are MSNed at this point.
(3) Even if there were some surviving units, the service side is updated more often, and the service has a lot of control over what the box dials.
I, for one, would *love* to know how this got pulled off. (And, no, it's not "ATH0".)
Every once in a while somebody asks me (in the role of CD-R FAQ maintainer) about distributing on VideoCD instead of VHS. I've gotten a few unsolicited VHS videotapes -- usually constructed of some incredibly lightweight material to reduce postage costs -- and I'm guessing I'd get a lot more if the discs could be sent out for what AOL pays to spam us with CD-ROMs.
The problems can be summarized in two statements:
(1) In the United States, dedicated VideoCD players are almost unheard-of, and a significant percentage of DVD players don't support VideoCD playback. I think most of the MPEG decoder chipsets support MPEG 1 and 2, so it's usually a matter of the DVD player company not wanting to spend resources on something that won't get used.
(2) Many DVD players can't handle CD-R media. Which is fine for large AOL-spamming runs, but poor for company demo videos that you only need a couple hundred of. The problem there is the laser wavelength; it costs extra to handle CD-R. Usually CD-RW works just fine, but the discs could be maliciously replaced with some educational material of an entirely different nature.
VideoCD is fine for a well-contained environment where you can verify that the hardware and media will successfully co-exist. Providing VideoCD as an option is reasonable, but it can't be the only mode of distribution.
The DVD FAQ at www.dvddemystified.com has more details.
[Note: the page either pops up an ad or tries to inflict some sort of download from Gator on you if you're running MSIE.]
Warcraft I and II were downright boring in single-player mode. Every scenario, you'd build up some guys, dealing with the occasional visitor as you did so, and then wander out to an enemy infestation.
Create a formation. Send a fast unit forward to draw them out. Fall back. Swat them as they charge haphazardly into your formation.
The only time the game really got interesting was on the second-to-last scenario of each campaign, where both sides had a lot of stuff, the game was biased against you, and you actually had to struggle to stay on top. The final scenario usually had some game imbalancer that could be exploited, like the summon spell that let you destroy whole bases easily without risking "real" units.
Games like the original Command & Conquer and Total Annihiliation worked, I think, for a couple of reasons. One, the base defenses were formidable, and those were usually pre-set by the game designer rather than the AI. Either you came ready to rock & roll or the static defenses would tear you apart. Two, when the computer came to get you, it didn't come for a polite social visit. The computer would build up a large collection of units and then send 75% of them right down your throat. Without solid defenses backed by the right mix of units you were going to get destroyed, or at least crippled to the point where an immediate counterattack was out of the question.
Remember the dreaded Mission 7 in TA? You have a skinny piece of beach and about 10 minutes to prepare for an onslaught of enemy warships? That's good stuff.
Warcraft I and II had static defenses that you could ignore until it was convenient. Slow firing, low damage, especially compared to the NOD energy tower or TA heavy laser. The enemy units sort of wandered at you, one at a time, when they got bored.
Age of Kings did a pretty fair job, with the computer coming after you in force. My only complaint with AOE2:AOK is personal preference: I'm a "builder", and the bonuses they gave to the computer made it difficult to win a single-player scenario if you built up your forces instead of attacking quickly.
In many ways the original C&C got it right and many of its successors got it wrong. I've played every single-player scenario in WC1 and WC2, and because of that experience I never bothered with StarCraft. Maybe they'll fix it this time?
There's a little more to the history pages, most notably a timeline of events, that gives you a little more detail.
It's times like this that I'm sad I never finished the original Netrek history document. I still have a few megabytes of material archived, and actually pulled it out to help defend a patent-infringement lawsuit. (Mpath Interactive was suing another company over a multi-player gaming patent. Kevin Smith and I contributed statements and code samples that demonstrated that Netrek was doing what their patent claimed *years* before Mpath even existed.) Someday I may pull out the history stuff and finish the job.
I also learned a lot from Netrek. The UDP code in Netrek was, to the best of knowledge, the first time UDP was used for an Internet game. I didn't think it would make a difference. :-) Everything that followed used UDP instead of TCP -- you didn't have to look very hard to see the advantages.
Netrek is probably the only game that uses both UDP and TCP for game state updates. It remains the most salient example of why that approach is a bad idea. :-)
I remember using Netrek as a system diagnostic tool. If there were hiccups in the OS or network, you'd notice them almost immediately. There as a router outside KSU that was reloading its routing tables periodically, causing a small network storm, that was spotted by Netrek players who were stalling briefly at fairly precise intervals.
I learned a trememdous amount about RSA encryption and the difficulty in making a game tamper-proof. We kept trying to find ways to keep people from cheating, but there's always another approach when you don't control the target system. It's fun to watch game companies struggle with that even now.
It also taught me a lot about game balance, and how a simple change to the way score (DI) is computed can change *everything*. People want solitary goals, and will pursue them even to the detriment of others (substitute Quake "campers" for Netrek "DI scum"). Netrek had so many opportunities for tweaks that we needed a separate FAQ for Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions (FOCS) just to keep the newsgroup sane.
I miss playing Netrek almost as much as I miss writing code for it. How many games can programmers say that about?
-- Andy McFadden (ShadowSpawn)
They overlooked Cytron Masters for the Apple II, which is likely the very first RTS game.
You sent different types of units marching across the screen at the opponent, who did the same to you. Could be played against the computer or a human opponent.
Pre-dates Herzog Zwei by about eight years...
"Oubliette" on PLATO was the inspiration for the first Wizardry, in the same way that "Empire" was the inspiration for xtrek/netrek.
PLATO was pretty remarkable...
Some history of Netrek, with a discussion of Plato and a mention of Oubliette, is here.
Games can also be a fine thing to work on when you're stuck in a dead-end job and the job market sucks. The dot-com crash is fresh in everybody's memories, but things were pretty unhappy back in '91.
Which is how I got into hacking on Netrek (Roger, is that you??). In some ways I actually *did* push the boundaries of technology -- name one multiplayer Internet game that used UDP before Netrek did -- and I'm far prouder of the things I did in my spare time than the things I was getting paid to do.
That said, don't jump into something that's going to make you unhappy. If you don't like coding *at all*, don't take a coding job. If it's the nature of the project that bothers you, find a project that's more to your liking.
Section (2-4-4) talks about MediaCloQ and how to remove the protection. Section (2-4-3) explains what is known about Macrovision's stuff, and what the options are for working around it. Nearby sections talk about Cactus Data Shield and the protection used on the Michael Jackson single.
(Shameless plug warning: I wrote the FAQ.)
See this item for details on the protection. In short, they've screwed up the disc's table of contents so the CD-ROM drive can't make heads or tails of it. Audio CD players just ignore all the gunk. You can trivially work around the problem by reading the disc as a series of blocks.
A related story on news.com is a "news.com special report" on the subject of copy-protected audio CDs.
If the NSA knows they're using public key tools, then can't we crack the transmissions with the same techniques that were applied to the various PK encryption challenges?
I'd leave my machines on 24/7 if it would help crack terrorist messages.
Of course, this would open the possibility for the NSA to slip in a few ACLU messages as well...
The "Cactus Data Shield" brand has been around for a while, but this appears to be an updated version.
The original implementation tweaked out the table of contents on discs, making it appear that the disc was only 30 seconds long (28 after you subtract the mandatory two-second pregap). This allowed most CD players to play the disc, because they ignored the lead-out value, but CD-ROM drives got confused. Unfortunately for BMG, some Philips CD players did pay attention to the value and refused to play the CDs. The scheme was abandoned.
This updated scheme uses an entirely different approach, one that could be worse than the Macrovision stuff. If it works as well as they claim, it would have to produce distortion on all digital outputs -- otherwise their claims of defeating audio CD copiers wouldn't hold.
I'd love to get my hands on one of these. I tried to get some of the German discs with the old Cactus protection, but the import I got from Amazon was, of all things, a copy on CD-R media.
One thing to note: the article did not say that damaging CDs were released (shame on slashdot for going for hype instead of fact). It said that they *could* be released. Highly unlikely they ever would.
As far as Ministry CDs not playing, they probably did something bizarre to be cute and inadvertently caused problems. Artists will occasionally do strange things with CDs, e.g. Nine Inch Nails putting 99 tracks on their "Broken" CD, most of which are only one second long. (Red Book says mininum track length is 4 seconds.)
For a list of "odd" CDs, see http://www.turbine.com/oddcd/.
For details about the current audio CD copy protection stuff, see http://www.cdrfaq.org/, sections 2-4-2, 2-4-3 2-4-4
I've yet to see anything describing how many titles and which ones. What I have seen is a lot of people claim to have one, but really all they have is a disc that didn't "rip" cleanly with the hardware and software they used. The perception is that switching to a high-quality DAE program (e.g. EAC or cdparanoia) avoids the copy protection, but really all it does is correctly handle scratched discs and suboptimal drives.
:-)
Suddenly every disc that doesn't extract cleanly is copy protected. I'm waiting for somebody to accuse Macrovision of poisoning wells.
The Charlie Pride disc used technology from SunComm (http://www.suncomm.com/), which doesn't seem to share any press releases with Macrovision. The technology may well be the same. They've been quiet since their big release in May, and their web site has nothing but content-free content. (I'll add a blurb about them to the FAQ sometime soon.)
Yup. I'd guess it's a move to placate the many people complaining to them about spammers on their site (of which I am one).
The trouble is, it won't fix the problems that I've encountered with their users. I don't believe I've received spam *sent* from their site, just spam *referring* to their users. According to my anti-spam logs, I've received eight messages that ask you to reply to a verizon mail account in the first half of this year, which is pretty remarkable for a site that didn't have a working "postmaster" address the first couple of times I complained.
(Yes, I'm one of those rabid anti-spam types. If you're pre-spam, kindly head down the hall, turn left, and take the door marked "straight to hell". Thanks.)
Now, if they had announced a policy of "spam clean-up" fines for users found guilty of spamming, I'd get all warm and fuzzy.