Maybe I'll mail the company a few bucks. I have been seeking such a system for years. Every developer should have a clause in their contract with the publisher that allows them to accept online donations. And they should actually DO it. At least try it to see if it brings any additional revenue. If it's a popular developer I think they would see rather large donations piling up. In fact if you earmark those donations towards helping pay for currently developed games. Maybe for $250+ you could have a brief chat with your choice of dev. Or maybe you could donate directly to one of the devs themselves. If Bioware instituted such a system on their site I would be over their right now to make a donation even though I haven't even downloaded the cracked game yet. The only reason I won't buy the game is due to the totally over the top insane DRM. No way would I even think about buying it. Not even if a fully working crack hadn't been released within a week of wide game availablity. And if I could give individual donations to devs I would send Chris Avellone $100 right now. Even though I bought and paid for the original Planescape:Torment years ago. But $50 isn't even enough to express my gratitude for that game. Maybe $500. I'm not rich or anything. I just am very grateful to have any computer games that I truly love.
All of that is irrelevant. It would only matter if someone could come up with DRM that actually works. And by "works" I don't mean seeking some perfect balance between annoying the fuck out of your paying customers and delaying the crack by a few days as in 99% of DRM so far. I mean no cracks at all Not even partially playable cracks.
The problem is not even that this task is literally impossible, although it may in fact be. The problem is that the man-hours and cost per shipped unit involved in a scheme that even has the tiniest chance of holding off the crackers for more than a week is non-trivial. We're talking about things like hardware dongles and parts of the code that are not even included with the game but which would have to run on servers that you are paying for. Maybe each customer would have their own unique sections of the game which have to be accessed online before the game could continue.
One of the more succesful attempts I have heard of was from Cubase. It had so many dongle hooks that for a while it seemed the sheer tedium of finding and removing them all would be too daunting, but eventually it was cracked. No more need for the dongle after all the references have been removed from the code.
A first step may be to try to design and build your own dongle. Don't use an established vendor since their techniques are already widely known by the cracking community. Probably the simplest idea would be to just assign a unique digital key to each customer in the form of a USB dongle and but tens of thousands of dongle lookups in the code. In fact at least half the executable size should be attributable to the lookups.
Another option is to sell your software with its own computer. Preferably something that the crackers aren't using very much or even would have a hard time getting their hands on. Maybe a Sun or a DEC Alpha or an SGI Indigo (although I do have one of those here). Other options may be an Amiga 500 or TRS80 Model III or Apple IIc. Except that some hackers may own some of those or could buy them cheaply. Probably the most practical option for this would be to just design/build your own custom computers. An entirely custom designed CPU and GPU with no published specs and which no one has ever heard of.
I am old enough that I can remember a time when there were no home computer games at all. Before the Atari 2600. During that time I used to play little handheld electronic games. I remember there was a car racing game that had a little steering wheel and a very basic black and white screen where you steered the car. I bought a game AND a piece of hardware. That definitely makes it harder to crack.
You could also try coding the whole thing in extremely obfuscated spaghetti assembly code. Don't use a compiled language because the compiler will clean up the code for you. Make the code so crazy with all kinds of blind alleys that lead nowhere. Hell say 50% of the code would be a blind alley that just ends up doing yet another dongle or other hardware check.
Yet another possibility is releasing the game initially as a sort of ruse. Yes, people would pay for it, but it wouldn't actually do anything except check for its dongle. Then you issue a new patch from your server that makes the first 10 minutes of the game playable after trying to search for valid dongles across the internet on the remote machine that is requesting the additional game material. Then you go to the next customer and repeat until everyone has the first 10 minutes of the game to keep themselves amused. And of course you don't release to the public any information about this system ever. As far as they are concerned they really do have the "game". Hehe. Even though they really only have a bunch of dongle lookup code written in insanely obfuscated assembly code. After everyone has their first 10 minutes (the intro or whatever) the server will then send some random but connected other part of the game to make it playable in some limited way for another ten minutes. Keep repeating that checking
XP was a very minor update to 2000. Faster boot times are really the only major improvement. And the Fisher Price theme if you like it. XP with no service packs was actually a slightly lighter weight version than Windows 2000 SP4. It had a smaller memory footprint and a smaller hard drive footprint. Along with some important bug fixes XP SP2 also introduced a large amount of bloat. So much so that Windows 2000 SP4 became lighter weight again.
It's not like someone like Barack Obama could ever be a presidential candidate, Sure. Obama Bin Laden is going to change the world. EVERYTHING will be completely different if he is president. Yup. And the fact that the democratic party wouldn't agree with even one of those changes doesn't matter. Sorry, but the democrats are in bed with the corporation too. Look at the vote on this law. Neither party is the solution. Which becomes increasingly obvious with each new law consistent with our new brand of police state fascism.
What happened to Ron Paul? I don't happen to like Ron too much, but I do consider myself a Libertarian. I probably won't be in the country at polling time, but I would vote Libertarian if I were here, and I didn't have to vote for Ronny.
I have recently had the opportunity to get to know a child who is so dumb that I regard him as basically unteachable. I seriously don't see the point of trying to educate him to do anything more intellectual than janitorial work or "fries with that?" kind of work. I'm tired of all the blame being left at the feet of the poor teachers trying to educate these idiots who clearly hate studying and thinking. Let them just go out and play sports or play in traffic or whatever. They are only going to very negatively contribute to the gene pool. So, yes, "leaving them behind" is definitely what we should be doing. Otherwise the smart kids whose brains are actually able to accomplish something useful will be the ones "left behind".
Rather than focus on the dumb people (say because they represent the majority of voters), we should be mandating some basic IQ and/or knowledge testing before we even allow a child to progress to the next grade. And I'm not talking about weeding out only those who are both mentally retarded AND lazy. We should be weeding out something like the bottom 30% of the curve entirely from intellectual pursuits. What's the point? They will never be succesful at it anyway. If they suddenly "get smart" at some later point they can always test themselves back onto one of the intellectual tracks. We should make staying in school something that is challenging and requires lots of work for the average person. The square peg in round hole kiddies should be derailed onto less intellectually challenging pursuits like the building trades or sewing or cooking. We should be making an effort to train people at something they might actually be useful at rather than just assuming every kid is some kind of budding genius. What we are doing now is our own kind of square peg to round hole fitting. It's not going to work no matter how much we wish it would.
So given the choice of a bunch of stupid corporate cock sucking lawyers looking for money and power, I'm supposed to choose the one who is slightly less of an idiot? Sorry. I'm not playing that game. Voting for *any* of the major party candidates is just voting for more of the same fascism. Which one of you *wouldn't* hold to the corporate line when presented with a suitcase with 1,000,000 pounds sterling (equal to one shipping container of dollars). Campaign promises or "positions" mean less than nothing. The kinds of folks who can't be persuaded by a suitcase full of cash are not the ones who run for office and especially not as a democrat or republican.
Well I was thinking of trying it without any context as you are providing. I wasn't provided any context for Osama's comment. Obviously if you provide such a wide context you can mitigate something that would otherwise be insulting without it. How about: "He is a typical genius"? That doesn't sound right though. And it sounds to me as if the speaker would be about to launch into how geniuses are unbalanced or introverted or something. People just don't seem to use the word "typical" with praise. In fact "Well, that's typical" is considered a sort of complaint all by itself. Granted, it is also an expression.
I thought pull tabs were gone by the end of the 70s. As well as 8" floppies. The only 8" floppies I can remember were from a DEC PDP-11 that my friend's father (who worked at Digital) had. That must have been about 1979. My first computer, an Atari 400, used 5 1/4" floppies I think (although that external drive was huge and very loud). Also the Apple II and TRS80 computers at the time had 5 1/4" floppies too unless I am really remembering it wrong.
Sure there was a lot of drivel in there, but a lot of it could be considered as artistic license. Artistic license my ass. This is slashdot. If we don't care about all the steaming bullshit they try to shovel every time a computer gets a few seconds of screen time then who will? Sorry, but I saw this movie in the cinema at the time and I saw it again some years ago on cable and I was actually floored by the ridiculousness of it. It was just plain stupid. And in so many ways.
The rest of the movie was similar to the movies for children that they make today like spy-kids While I will be the first to admit that WarGames was in fact totally UNrealistic with more than its share of absurd hollywood computer moments, that is a bit unfair. That's the kind of kiddie show that my 9 year old nephew would watch and he's a complete rocks-for-brains moron. Different demographics I think. Wargames was shooting more for teens than preteens.
Unlike last time, we have two people who are competent at speaking and who have a powerful presence. These are the US elections we are talking about here.
I know a lot of Cubans and they're all racist. Most of the Miami "Cubans" are no more Cuban than my George Bush. They don't know shite about Cuba except for what their nouveau riche pre-Castro parents tell them. I want to laugh when I hear them claim to be Cuban. They don't know anything about what it is like to live in their parents' country. They are more American in their habits and customs than anyone who came across on the Mayflower. Oooh. They can speak marble-mouthed Cuban Spanish. I'm sooo impressed. Were you aware that something like half of Cuba is black? Forget the official statistics. All lies. Go for a walk in most Cuban cities (except a few like Camaguey, Sancti Spiritus, or Holguin) and at least half the people have at least some African blood (black or mulatto). There are probably more mixed race marriages in just one city in Cuba than there are in the whole United States. And such relationships are pretty well accepted. Sure there are some racists who will show it by rubbing their index finger across their forearm a few times when talking about black people. But on the whole I would say that the average Cuban is definitely less racist than the average American. This shouldn't be too surprising though when you consider that nearly half of them are black. Although I'm always surprised at how dark skinned a Cuban can be without considering themselves "negro". I am amazed at the ignorance of your post. I remember having to tell my black Cuban friend who wants to move to America how he might be a bit surprised at the racism here. How black people and white people tend to keep their distance and live in separate communities. I didn't realize quite how racist and separatist this country really was until I lived in a place like Cuba for a while.
Does anyone remember Eddie Murphy's take on what would happen with the first black president? Also his "White Like Me" skit. I don't think even a half-black president would survive for more than the first year. Some inbred redneck hillbilly would take him out with a deer rifle. Eddie Murpy was actually funny in the 80s on SNL before he started acting in movies. He'd probably make one hell of a president. We need to stop electing lawyers.
The phrase "Typical X person" is not inherently bad How about an example of where it isn't pejorative? I can't think of any at the moment. Even something that would seem like it should be positive like "the typical hot girl" is pejorative. "The typical geek"? Anyway, he's half white. So he's only stereotyping himself anyway.
No this is the bacteria that eats all things rubber and turns humans into stiffs It's been a while since I read the book, but wasn't the rubber eating mutation harmless to humans? Well at least humans who were not depending on rubber seal integrity for their continued existence.
While evolution isn't, life is. It seems there are two purposes in every form of life: 1) Spread your genetic material 2) Don't die. Someone is watching too much porn. I think you have those in the wrong order. I am alive and have no interest in either of those goals. But especially not #1. In fact just the opposite. I would much rather die than spread any of my genetic material.
Firefox 3 has a very fast javascript interpreter in it. But not as fast as version 2 with noscript running. When noscript runs on version 3 it will be even faster. I can't wait!
The United States No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), a federal law passed in 1997, provides for criminal prosecution of individuals who engage in copyright infringement, even when there is no monetary profit or commercial benefit from the infringement. Maximum penalties can be five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines. The NET Act also raised statutory damages by 50%. Yes, but it was never intended to apply to corporations. I highly doubt that the government is going to pursue this in any significant way. They are on the same side after all. In a few months these agents will find themselves employed by the MPAA or RIAA at double the salary they are making now.
Slashdot Mirror
All of that is irrelevant. It would only matter if someone could come up with DRM that actually works. And by "works" I don't mean seeking some perfect balance between annoying the fuck out of your paying customers and delaying the crack by a few days as in 99% of DRM so far. I mean no cracks at all Not even partially playable cracks.
The problem is not even that this task is literally impossible, although it may in fact be. The problem is that the man-hours and cost per shipped unit involved in a scheme that even has the tiniest chance of holding off the crackers for more than a week is non-trivial. We're talking about things like hardware dongles and parts of the code that are not even included with the game but which would have to run on servers that you are paying for. Maybe each customer would have their own unique sections of the game which have to be accessed online before the game could continue.
One of the more succesful attempts I have heard of was from Cubase. It had so many dongle hooks that for a while it seemed the sheer tedium of finding and removing them all would be too daunting, but eventually it was cracked. No more need for the dongle after all the references have been removed from the code.
A first step may be to try to design and build your own dongle. Don't use an established vendor since their techniques are already widely known by the cracking community. Probably the simplest idea would be to just assign a unique digital key to each customer in the form of a USB dongle and but tens of thousands of dongle lookups in the code. In fact at least half the executable size should be attributable to the lookups.
Another option is to sell your software with its own computer. Preferably something that the crackers aren't using very much or even would have a hard time getting their hands on. Maybe a Sun or a DEC Alpha or an SGI Indigo (although I do have one of those here). Other options may be an Amiga 500 or TRS80 Model III or Apple IIc. Except that some hackers may own some of those or could buy them cheaply. Probably the most practical option for this would be to just design/build your own custom computers. An entirely custom designed CPU and GPU with no published specs and which no one has ever heard of.
I am old enough that I can remember a time when there were no home computer games at all. Before the Atari 2600. During that time I used to play little handheld electronic games. I remember there was a car racing game that had a little steering wheel and a very basic black and white screen where you steered the car. I bought a game AND a piece of hardware. That definitely makes it harder to crack.
You could also try coding the whole thing in extremely obfuscated spaghetti assembly code. Don't use a compiled language because the compiler will clean up the code for you. Make the code so crazy with all kinds of blind alleys that lead nowhere. Hell say 50% of the code would be a blind alley that just ends up doing yet another dongle or other hardware check.
Yet another possibility is releasing the game initially as a sort of ruse. Yes, people would pay for it, but it wouldn't actually do anything except check for its dongle. Then you issue a new patch from your server that makes the first 10 minutes of the game playable after trying to search for valid dongles across the internet on the remote machine that is requesting the additional game material. Then you go to the next customer and repeat until everyone has the first 10 minutes of the game to keep themselves amused. And of course you don't release to the public any information about this system ever. As far as they are concerned they really do have the "game". Hehe. Even though they really only have a bunch of dongle lookup code written in insanely obfuscated assembly code. After everyone has their first 10 minutes (the intro or whatever) the server will then send some random but connected other part of the game to make it playable in some limited way for another ten minutes. Keep repeating that checking
XP was a very minor update to 2000. Faster boot times are really the only major improvement. And the Fisher Price theme if you like it. XP with no service packs was actually a slightly lighter weight version than Windows 2000 SP4. It had a smaller memory footprint and a smaller hard drive footprint. Along with some important bug fixes XP SP2 also introduced a large amount of bloat. So much so that Windows 2000 SP4 became lighter weight again.
Hey! Where is the link to the plans? Maybe someone can post it on Freenet.
What happened to your parents, Orion Blastar?
What happened to Ron Paul? I don't happen to like Ron too much, but I do consider myself a Libertarian. I probably won't be in the country at polling time, but I would vote Libertarian if I were here, and I didn't have to vote for Ronny.
I have recently had the opportunity to get to know a child who is so dumb that I regard him as basically unteachable. I seriously don't see the point of trying to educate him to do anything more intellectual than janitorial work or "fries with that?" kind of work. I'm tired of all the blame being left at the feet of the poor teachers trying to educate these idiots who clearly hate studying and thinking. Let them just go out and play sports or play in traffic or whatever. They are only going to very negatively contribute to the gene pool. So, yes, "leaving them behind" is definitely what we should be doing. Otherwise the smart kids whose brains are actually able to accomplish something useful will be the ones "left behind".
Rather than focus on the dumb people (say because they represent the majority of voters), we should be mandating some basic IQ and/or knowledge testing before we even allow a child to progress to the next grade. And I'm not talking about weeding out only those who are both mentally retarded AND lazy. We should be weeding out something like the bottom 30% of the curve entirely from intellectual pursuits. What's the point? They will never be succesful at it anyway. If they suddenly "get smart" at some later point they can always test themselves back onto one of the intellectual tracks. We should make staying in school something that is challenging and requires lots of work for the average person. The square peg in round hole kiddies should be derailed onto less intellectually challenging pursuits like the building trades or sewing or cooking. We should be making an effort to train people at something they might actually be useful at rather than just assuming every kid is some kind of budding genius. What we are doing now is our own kind of square peg to round hole fitting. It's not going to work no matter how much we wish it would.
So given the choice of a bunch of stupid corporate cock sucking lawyers looking for money and power, I'm supposed to choose the one who is slightly less of an idiot? Sorry. I'm not playing that game. Voting for *any* of the major party candidates is just voting for more of the same fascism. Which one of you *wouldn't* hold to the corporate line when presented with a suitcase with 1,000,000 pounds sterling (equal to one shipping container of dollars). Campaign promises or "positions" mean less than nothing. The kinds of folks who can't be persuaded by a suitcase full of cash are not the ones who run for office and especially not as a democrat or republican.
If you were accepting bribes, would you list them on your tax return?
Well I was thinking of trying it without any context as you are providing. I wasn't provided any context for Osama's comment. Obviously if you provide such a wide context you can mitigate something that would otherwise be insulting without it. How about: "He is a typical genius"? That doesn't sound right though. And it sounds to me as if the speaker would be about to launch into how geniuses are unbalanced or introverted or something. People just don't seem to use the word "typical" with praise. In fact "Well, that's typical" is considered a sort of complaint all by itself. Granted, it is also an expression.
I thought pull tabs were gone by the end of the 70s. As well as 8" floppies. The only 8" floppies I can remember were from a DEC PDP-11 that my friend's father (who worked at Digital) had. That must have been about 1979. My first computer, an Atari 400, used 5 1/4" floppies I think (although that external drive was huge and very loud). Also the Apple II and TRS80 computers at the time had 5 1/4" floppies too unless I am really remembering it wrong.
Does anyone remember Eddie Murphy's take on what would happen with the first black president? Also his "White Like Me" skit. I don't think even a half-black president would survive for more than the first year. Some inbred redneck hillbilly would take him out with a deer rifle. Eddie Murpy was actually funny in the 80s on SNL before he started acting in movies. He'd probably make one hell of a president. We need to stop electing lawyers.
1) Spread your genetic material
2) Don't die. Someone is watching too much porn. I think you have those in the wrong order. I am alive and have no interest in either of those goals. But especially not #1. In fact just the opposite. I would much rather die than spread any of my genetic material.