"Crackers just disassemble the.exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release."
I read an article on 'Spyro the Dragon' in Game Developer Magazine. The company that made that game had an amusing protection scheme: They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.
This meant that whoever was working on cracking the game had to play the game, level by level, and check for stuff that was missing. Heh.
It took them an entire month to get the game fully cracked. That's all the team really needed because that's about as long as a game lasts on the shelf. (I think it was for PC, not PSOne...) Any longer than that, and the copy protection wasn't really benefiting them a whole lot.
Personally, I find this story entertaining because I can imagine the crackers were tearing their hair out. Heh.
I'm an Opera user, but I'm relatively happy with the web basically working like it should now. I don't wanna muck it up with having to use one browser for some sites and another for others. That is so 1995.
"One of the (many!) drawbacks of VHS is that it is analog; there is no reasonable way of watching a VHS tape on one's computer."
On the flip side, they can't prevent you from capturing VHS to a PC. Unfortunately, DVD's make it a lot harder for you to do that. And since DVD's are digital, they can concievably mutate the standard to force you to take new steps to rip them.
Heh I wonder if I can take my firewire video camera and get it to capture NTSC somehow. There isn't a jack to do that. Pity because once the video's on tape (at broadcast quality...) I can run it down the Firewire port and have a perfect copy of it, ready for encoding.
1.) They can't play games with new encryption technologies or whatever to prevent me from capturing it. *Glares at the RIAA and their computer crashing CD's*
2.) Since DVD's are decidedly superior, VHS versions are usually cheaper. There are some movies that are worth $10, but not worth $20, even if the quality is higher. For example: Castaway. This is a movie you watch maybe once or twice, and the extra resolution isn't going to change your appreciation of the movie. It's not like AI where the visuals are incredible and you ache for every pixel you can lay your eyes on.
So yah, they degrade, but they're a nice alternative to paying $20 - $25 for a movie you only kind of want.
Lol!! I heard a mutated version of this story. Instead what happened was they were going to make it a 'rail ride'. They pointed it towards a mining shaft so that they wouldn't lose the car. (The story's very long so my details may be a little muddled..)
When the ignited the rocket, the car drifted off the rails a bit and collided with the entry to the mine, causing some rocks to fall on it. The kids that set this up went home, not sure what to do. They had no idea how to hide the car. (The rocket they used came from a junk yard and their dad woulda been in huge trouble if they traced the JATO rocket to him.)
A day or two later, a huge dust storm covered the area in a thick layer of dust. They drove out to investigate, only to find that pieces of the car were exposed. They backed up and left.
The tracks that they made when they left made it look a little like the car had driven down this road and turned sharply into the side of a mountain. The rails leading to the mine were submersed in dust/dirt, so the investigators cooked up a story that somebody tried to drive across the desert in this thing and wiped out.
I may have gotten a couple of the details flubbed, but here's my source for the story:
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-363/
This is a first hand account of the guy who claims to have been the source of this urban legend. Is it true? Heck I dunno, but it's a fun story to read. It's reasonably believable too.
It's a pity this'll probably get modded down. Afterall, the more we understand about urban legends, the easier it is to fish the truth out of them. Somebody might read the account of the Rocket Powered Chevy Impala and figure out if the 'Breeder Reactor' story is an urban legend.
"Beowulf clusters matching the performance of Cray T3E Supercomputers?"
Sorry, but I find making a reactor out of old smoke detectors to be far more interesting than Beowulf clusters. Not all of us blow a load over processor cycles.
I honestly don't know, heh. I never got the impression that the Enterprise going to warp created a big inertia problem. By the time TNG took place, warp was such a common thing that they don't put the crew through any special procedures. I can imagine the prerparation for warp being similar to an airplane preparing for take off.
*Shrug*
We're getting into an area where my banking idea may not be air-tight. I admit that. My complaint wasn't that people don't see it the way I see it, but rather they weren't trying to see explanations like that.
I'll give you an example: There's a book called the "Nitpicker's Guide to STNG". This guy went episode by episode and ripped it to shreds. It was an amusing read, but halfway through it one of his complaints about the series startled me because I realized why they were doing just what he hated.
Remember the ep where Wesley and Picard took a 6 hour shuttle trip to some planet? He said that the Enterprise could have lapped the shuttle many, many times before Picard and Wesley arrived. "The Enterprise could have warped there in seconds..."
This sounds like a fair comment, but then I realized that what the author failed to see was that the Entperise doesn't warp very often when it's inside the gravity well of a star system. They seem to avoid it whenever they can. I figured that was a Federation saftey protocol, or some jazz like that. Well, turns out that theory is backed up: Deep Space Nine had an ep where Kira ordered the Defiant to do a warp jump inside a system, and got some flack for it. "That's not recommended." "Do it anyway." And then, the original Star Trek movie came out recently, and they made a pretty big point about not leaving warp until they cleared Pluto. Interestingly, Enterprise has done that quite a few times. I get the impression this might be intentional, perhaps they'll have that 'saftey guideline' developed as the Enterprise destroys a planet by leaving it. Who knows?
In any case, this self proclaimed "Nitpicker" nitpicked a detail that he could have understood a little better if he had opened his mind a bit. In this particular case, he would have had supporting evidence to ease his mind about it. Instead, he found an 'incongruity', and in the spirit of Nitpicking, he didn't ask the question "Had the writers considered this?"
This happens a lot. Most of the time I've seen it, it was a case of somebody trying to act like they were more observant than most people. I think it's funny people'll pass off trivia as knowledge heh. I've done it.
"The true victory will come when when we manage to reattach nerve connections completely, because then we can repair spinal cord injuries and the like. "
Agreed. However, there are some hopeful alternatives. The brain has some very powerful processing capabilities. I don't remember where I read it, but recently I ran across a story where they were sending signals to the part of the brain that processes sound. Using sound, the patient was able to create a crude image of basic solid shapes. This isn't sight, but this person was able to recognize the dresser in her bedroom.
I can imagine that they'll find inventive ways to send some sort of signal to the brain, and it'll make use of the information it's getting. Heck, we may see a VISOR like Geordi LaForge weas. Imagine sight via RF signals...
THe amusing thing is that none of the prequal theories will be close. The people coming up with these theories have put way more thought into it than Lucas is. It's hard to read when your eyes are shaped like dollar signs. ($_$)
The Enterprise, Defiant, or any ship where people walk upright, have a very good reason to bank: You dun want stuff falling over.
If the Enterprise banks and then uses lateral thrust, like I described in my previous post, then the intertia that the crew might feel (perhaps it slips by their intertia dampners? heh) would push them down instead of towards the back of the ship. Since everything is laid out on the ship to withstand down pointing gravity, it makes sense that they'd try to point more energy in that direction instead of simply going backwards.
Just to be clear, though, the Enterprise and the Defiant both have pivoted like you have described on many occasions. However, I've seen the Defiant bank in combat. I never had an issue with it because it makes sense to me. Again, I'll say that the strongest thrust that ship can provide (besides foward) would be lateral. That ship can bank super fast, and then push down hard to complete a turn.
No, in this particular case, the movie was trying too hard to be a WWII movie. Remember, I wasn't the only one bothered by this, there were people in the audience who were grumbling about it. In this case, they blew it big time. Ya cannae rationalize this one.
Just to bed super uber clear, I'm talking about Wing Commander, not movies in general.
Hhe, I dunno. Normally I wouldn't worry about it, but I recently watched Empire Strikes Back, and I think whoever wrote it just had no idea about the realities of space travel.
"...but he does not seem to understand that it is sometimes okay to bend or break the laws of physics in fiction for the sake of dramatic or plot effect. As long as the rules are consistent within the fictional world, what's the problem? "
Ever see the Wing Commander movie? They went for a 'WW2-esque' adventure movie, but they made the movie ridiculous. I'll give you an example: the bad guy ship has chased the good guy ship iinto an asteroid. They managed to hide in a crevice. For a few minutes, the crew on the good guy ship discussed their situation.
They sat there talking in a whisper, much like they'd do in a submarine movie where sonar could give them away. But this is space! They could scream at the top of their lungs and the other ship'd none the wiser.
This scene in particular really bothered the audience when I watched this, I think they were ready to flush the whole movie over it. It was pretty bad.
My point is that movies can only get away with so much before the experience becomes negative.
It was interesting alright, but that movie also put you through seemingly 10 minutes of just the guy breathing. I know it was suspenseful and all, but the effect was likely 10x better in the theater than late night on cable tv. Heh.
Re:The Force violates conservation of momentum
on
Physics in the Movies
·
· Score: 1
Why not pick on the selective use of jump engine recharge delays instead? "
Because I never watched B5 except for a chunk here and there. That explains why I wasn't aware of this 'telepathic element'. Heh. I useta call this show 'Babble On'.
Re:The Force violates conservation of momentum
on
Physics in the Movies
·
· Score: 2
"1) "...Jump to hyperspace..." There not traveling "light speed" there travelling in an alternate space."
Heh okay, I'll bite: ESB uses the term 'light speed' at least 3 or 4 times. In ANH, Solo says that they exceed the speed of light. By that definition, 'hyperspace' would be how they actually break the light barrier.
Now normally I'd accept your explanation, except for a fatal flaw in ESB: The hyperdrive in the Millineum Falcon doesn't work until the very end of the movie, yet they traveled from one star system to another before the Empire could nab them. (And before they grew old and died.)
This is what lead me to the 'mini galaxy' theory. There's no possible way they could travel inter-stellar without an FTL drive.
Slashdot Mirror
"Crackers just disassemble the .exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release."
I read an article on 'Spyro the Dragon' in Game Developer Magazine. The company that made that game had an amusing protection scheme: They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.
This meant that whoever was working on cracking the game had to play the game, level by level, and check for stuff that was missing. Heh.
It took them an entire month to get the game fully cracked. That's all the team really needed because that's about as long as a game lasts on the shelf. (I think it was for PC, not PSOne...) Any longer than that, and the copy protection wasn't really benefiting them a whole lot.
Personally, I find this story entertaining because I can imagine the crackers were tearing their hair out. Heh.
Security by Annoyance.
Agreed.
I'm an Opera user, but I'm relatively happy with the web basically working like it should now. I don't wanna muck it up with having to use one browser for some sites and another for others. That is so 1995.
"That'll bleed when my heart beats."
"One of the (many!) drawbacks of VHS is that it is analog; there is no reasonable way of watching a VHS tape on one's computer."
On the flip side, they can't prevent you from capturing VHS to a PC. Unfortunately, DVD's make it a lot harder for you to do that. And since DVD's are digital, they can concievably mutate the standard to force you to take new steps to rip them.
Heh I wonder if I can take my firewire video camera and get it to capture NTSC somehow. There isn't a jack to do that. Pity because once the video's on tape (at broadcast quality...) I can run it down the Firewire port and have a perfect copy of it, ready for encoding.
"VHS tapes degrage horribly over time. "
There are two things I like about VHS:
1.) They can't play games with new encryption technologies or whatever to prevent me from capturing it. *Glares at the RIAA and their computer crashing CD's*
2.) Since DVD's are decidedly superior, VHS versions are usually cheaper. There are some movies that are worth $10, but not worth $20, even if the quality is higher. For example: Castaway. This is a movie you watch maybe once or twice, and the extra resolution isn't going to change your appreciation of the movie. It's not like AI where the visuals are incredible and you ache for every pixel you can lay your eyes on.
So yah, they degrade, but they're a nice alternative to paying $20 - $25 for a movie you only kind of want.
Lol!! I heard a mutated version of this story. Instead what happened was they were going to make it a 'rail ride'. They pointed it towards a mining shaft so that they wouldn't lose the car. (The story's very long so my details may be a little muddled..)
When the ignited the rocket, the car drifted off the rails a bit and collided with the entry to the mine, causing some rocks to fall on it. The kids that set this up went home, not sure what to do. They had no idea how to hide the car. (The rocket they used came from a junk yard and their dad woulda been in huge trouble if they traced the JATO rocket to him.)
A day or two later, a huge dust storm covered the area in a thick layer of dust. They drove out to investigate, only to find that pieces of the car were exposed. They backed up and left.
The tracks that they made when they left made it look a little like the car had driven down this road and turned sharply into the side of a mountain. The rails leading to the mine were submersed in dust/dirt, so the investigators cooked up a story that somebody tried to drive across the desert in this thing and wiped out.
I may have gotten a couple of the details flubbed, but here's my source for the story:
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-363/
This is a first hand account of the guy who claims to have been the source of this urban legend. Is it true? Heck I dunno, but it's a fun story to read. It's reasonably believable too.
It's a pity this'll probably get modded down. Afterall, the more we understand about urban legends, the easier it is to fish the truth out of them. Somebody might read the account of the Rocket Powered Chevy Impala and figure out if the 'Breeder Reactor' story is an urban legend.
"I don't suppose a story about Mozilla vs. Microsoft on CNN [cnn.com] would be more useful than this old, useless story?"
Hasn't Mozilla been covered ad nauseum on Slashdot already?
At least with this story, I got a peek into how nuclear reactors work, and I had no idea what a "Breeder Reactor" was until today.
I dunno about you guys, but I'm all for diversity. Even if the story is 'old', doesn't mean we've all heard it.
"This same basic story was posted about a year ago."
I wasn't a Slashdot visitor a year ago. I found the story mildly entertaining.
Stop acting like posting a story means another story doesn't get posted.
"Beowulf clusters matching the performance of Cray T3E Supercomputers?"
Sorry, but I find making a reactor out of old smoke detectors to be far more interesting than Beowulf clusters. Not all of us blow a load over processor cycles.
"Would I be willing to teleport myself to that beer and drink it there? Hell no. Would you? "
I wouldn't, either. The last thing I wanna do is be in a pub with my mates and shout "Why didn't anybody tell me my ass was so big!?!?"
I honestly don't know, heh. I never got the impression that the Enterprise going to warp created a big inertia problem. By the time TNG took place, warp was such a common thing that they don't put the crew through any special procedures. I can imagine the prerparation for warp being similar to an airplane preparing for take off.
*Shrug*
We're getting into an area where my banking idea may not be air-tight. I admit that. My complaint wasn't that people don't see it the way I see it, but rather they weren't trying to see explanations like that.
I'll give you an example: There's a book called the "Nitpicker's Guide to STNG". This guy went episode by episode and ripped it to shreds. It was an amusing read, but halfway through it one of his complaints about the series startled me because I realized why they were doing just what he hated.
Remember the ep where Wesley and Picard took a 6 hour shuttle trip to some planet? He said that the Enterprise could have lapped the shuttle many, many times before Picard and Wesley arrived. "The Enterprise could have warped there in seconds..."
This sounds like a fair comment, but then I realized that what the author failed to see was that the Entperise doesn't warp very often when it's inside the gravity well of a star system. They seem to avoid it whenever they can. I figured that was a Federation saftey protocol, or some jazz like that. Well, turns out that theory is backed up: Deep Space Nine had an ep where Kira ordered the Defiant to do a warp jump inside a system, and got some flack for it. "That's not recommended." "Do it anyway." And then, the original Star Trek movie came out recently, and they made a pretty big point about not leaving warp until they cleared Pluto. Interestingly, Enterprise has done that quite a few times. I get the impression this might be intentional, perhaps they'll have that 'saftey guideline' developed as the Enterprise destroys a planet by leaving it. Who knows?
In any case, this self proclaimed "Nitpicker" nitpicked a detail that he could have understood a little better if he had opened his mind a bit. In this particular case, he would have had supporting evidence to ease his mind about it. Instead, he found an 'incongruity', and in the spirit of Nitpicking, he didn't ask the question "Had the writers considered this?"
This happens a lot. Most of the time I've seen it, it was a case of somebody trying to act like they were more observant than most people. I think it's funny people'll pass off trivia as knowledge heh. I've done it.
Just imagine, if he goes to the theater, he'll be violating the DMCA.
"The true victory will come when when we manage to reattach nerve connections completely, because then we can repair spinal cord injuries and the like. "
Agreed. However, there are some hopeful alternatives. The brain has some very powerful processing capabilities. I don't remember where I read it, but recently I ran across a story where they were sending signals to the part of the brain that processes sound. Using sound, the patient was able to create a crude image of basic solid shapes. This isn't sight, but this person was able to recognize the dresser in her bedroom.
I can imagine that they'll find inventive ways to send some sort of signal to the brain, and it'll make use of the information it's getting. Heck, we may see a VISOR like Geordi LaForge weas. Imagine sight via RF signals...
"Oh, and the million dollar man references are all lies: The procedure, hospitalization and equipment cost about $98,000 US.. "
What are you talking about? 98 grand was about 6 million then. Didn't you watch Austin Powers?
THe amusing thing is that none of the prequal theories will be close. The people coming up with these theories have put way more thought into it than Lucas is. It's hard to read when your eyes are shaped like dollar signs. ($_$)
Hee he, no worries. Tis all in fun! :)
cheers
I diagree:
The Enterprise, Defiant, or any ship where people walk upright, have a very good reason to bank: You dun want stuff falling over.
If the Enterprise banks and then uses lateral thrust, like I described in my previous post, then the intertia that the crew might feel (perhaps it slips by their intertia dampners? heh) would push them down instead of towards the back of the ship. Since everything is laid out on the ship to withstand down pointing gravity, it makes sense that they'd try to point more energy in that direction instead of simply going backwards.
Just to be clear, though, the Enterprise and the Defiant both have pivoted like you have described on many occasions. However, I've seen the Defiant bank in combat. I never had an issue with it because it makes sense to me. Again, I'll say that the strongest thrust that ship can provide (besides foward) would be lateral. That ship can bank super fast, and then push down hard to complete a turn.
Hmm I feel like I've come around full circle heh.
"And when the Winnebago made skid marks in space...ugh I can't stand when people do things that aren't realisitc, especially in sci fi spoofs!"
:P
This is exactly the type of post I was referring to in my sig. Here's a copy/paste of my sig in case you're wondering what I'm babbling about:
"Don't bother using an over-simplified metaphor to prove me wrong. It means you don't understand my point.", NanoG
Thank you for illustrating why I have it in place.
No, in this particular case, the movie was trying too hard to be a WWII movie. Remember, I wasn't the only one bothered by this, there were people in the audience who were grumbling about it. In this case, they blew it big time. Ya cannae rationalize this one.
Just to bed super uber clear, I'm talking about Wing Commander, not movies in general.
Hhe, I dunno. Normally I wouldn't worry about it, but I recently watched Empire Strikes Back, and I think whoever wrote it just had no idea about the realities of space travel.
Check out my post here:
My comments on Lightspeed and ESB
The short summary is: "ESB Supports my mini-galaxy theory better than the 'lightspeed really isnt lightspeed' theory."
"...but he does not seem to understand that it is sometimes okay to bend or break the laws of physics in fiction for the sake of dramatic or plot effect. As long as the rules are consistent within the fictional world, what's the problem? "
Ever see the Wing Commander movie? They went for a 'WW2-esque' adventure movie, but they made the movie ridiculous. I'll give you an example: the bad guy ship has chased the good guy ship iinto an asteroid. They managed to hide in a crevice. For a few minutes, the crew on the good guy ship discussed their situation.
They sat there talking in a whisper, much like they'd do in a submarine movie where sonar could give them away. But this is space! They could scream at the top of their lungs and the other ship'd none the wiser.
This scene in particular really bothered the audience when I watched this, I think they were ready to flush the whole movie over it. It was pretty bad.
My point is that movies can only get away with so much before the experience becomes negative.
It was interesting alright, but that movie also put you through seemingly 10 minutes of just the guy breathing. I know it was suspenseful and all, but the effect was likely 10x better in the theater than late night on cable tv. Heh.
Why not pick on the selective use of jump engine recharge delays instead? "
Because I never watched B5 except for a chunk here and there. That explains why I wasn't aware of this 'telepathic element'. Heh. I useta call this show 'Babble On'.
"YHBT. YHL. HAND!"
Somebody explain pls? *hates feeling left out*
"1) "...Jump to hyperspace..." There not traveling "light speed" there travelling in an alternate space."
Heh okay, I'll bite: ESB uses the term 'light speed' at least 3 or 4 times. In ANH, Solo says that they exceed the speed of light. By that definition, 'hyperspace' would be how they actually break the light barrier.
Now normally I'd accept your explanation, except for a fatal flaw in ESB: The hyperdrive in the Millineum Falcon doesn't work until the very end of the movie, yet they traveled from one star system to another before the Empire could nab them. (And before they grew old and died.)
This is what lead me to the 'mini galaxy' theory. There's no possible way they could travel inter-stellar without an FTL drive.