Owner of a dell 2001fp here. I am poor and just could not afford to spend 800 bucks on a monitor. I did it anyways and God i love this thing. I know a few people who bought it and they all love it. You just can't beat the price/performance.
Now this LG makes me horny but for $2500? forget it. it's about a thousand dollars too expensive for what it offers. (No DVI for resolutions over 1600x1200? unacceptable!) And yes, i know it's a limitation of DVI and not the monitor itself, still. unacceptable.
A few weeks ago, I was wondering what kind of internet speed consumers needed for everyone to be happy. I settled for 10 Gbps which is roughly what is needed for 4 concurrent HDTV streams at the highest resolution. up to three 250Mbps streams would be available at all times leaving a fourth available for all your browsing/downloding/uploading/gaming needs. I think that a true 10 Gbps symmetrical connection should be enough for anyone for the next 20 years at least.
I wonder how many years it'll take the U.S to get these kind of speeds in all high/medium density areas. I estimate that in about 5-6 years, we'll be where Japan was 3 years ago. Roughly 10 years behind...
i sure as hell didn't threaten that Salman rushdie guy with anything. In fact, not a single muslim I know did either...
Please stop thinking of "muslems" as some kind of hivemind. some ayatollahs wrote fatwas against the guy, that's all. and it just so happens that the vast, crushing majority of muslims don't pay any attention whatsoever to some obscure fatwa written by some unknown imam from god knows what country calling himself an "ayatollah". (ayatollah means "verse of god" and is basically a pretty looking title some dudes felt like having...god knows why)
Always remember, Islam is as decentralized a religion as it gets, there is no hierarchy of any sort, anyone can become an Imam if he wants to. he just reads or memorizes the coran, goes up early in the morning and starts shouting the call to prayer, if people show up, he can lead the prayer. that's about it.
heck, muslims don't even have to go the mosque if they don't want to. much less feel obligated to follow a fatwa (which is really just a statement of opinion that anybody can write with no other weight than what that particular Imam's congregation feel like giving it. .
About the leak:
some german guy (the same guy who created phatbot, let's call him Hans) hacked into Valve computers. Hans then proceeded to brag about it and give some information about it to some friend of his (let's call him randomdude) over an IRC server operated by some members from a group I will call Entity. Members of entity intercepted the conversation and used the info in it to plant their own trojans on valve's computers, they then proceeded to leak the source and maybe some other stuff.
Hans decided that he wouldn't let them have the credit for this and proceeded to release other stuff.
Fast forward a few months. Hand emails Gabe and explains that he never meant to leak anything, that he just wanted to take a look at how a game was developped and that he was an amateur game developper himself as well as an expert on network security. He's a big fan of valve, blah blah blah. He explains how he broke into valve's computers and implies that he would like to get a job at valve as a network security asministrator.
Follows a long exchange of emails in which he tells them about vulnerabilities still existing in their network and reveals he is german. He then agrees to a phone interview as Valve's people bait him into thinking they are considering hiring him and ends up arrested.
I read most of the emails he exchanged with Valve before the arrest and Hans pretty much threw prudence and common sense out the window when dealing with valve. He must be kicking himself now.
When it comes to infiltrating and dismantling warez networks, they are amazingly good. So good, in fact, that they can infiltrate any target of their chosing whithin 6-12 months.
And there is nothing that can be done to stop them. This being slashdot, a lot of talk about secure networks and encryption is going on. All of these measures are next to useless.
The Warez Scene is not an insulated and self contained entity. It is,by necessity, one that is open to new media suppliers, site owners, rippers, crackers, couriers, hardware and cash donors, etc.
It is *TRIVIAL* for the fbi to impersonate one or more of those again and again or even have deep undercovers that remain in the scene for years (spanning several busts).
The only new thing about this bust is the extensive cooperation of other governments in this operation. I have to admit that I did not imagine the FBI would bother but apparently, the pressure of BIG CORP International is now enough to warrant a cooperation and coordinated operations between countries that is usually reserved to drug and weapon traffickers.
The original company was Winfirst.
Funny story: I visited the webpage of one of Winfirst's founders and I don't exactly remember how (I think I typed http://blah.com/ instead of http://blah.com/index.html or something to that effect) and landed in a folder chock full of warez (movies, mainly). Great speeds too:)
Re:ok gotta rat em out, I used to work for this pl
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 1
Yes. All he says is true. I live in Coral Spgings and I had 2 roommates who worked there and they told me the same things. The metal detector and the minimum wage thing, I know about firsthand since I went there to apply for a job this afternoon. They are really my bottom choice but I need the experience to get a job somewhere else.
First of all, The severity of the sentence is due to the mail fraud breen engaged in. And quite a fraud it was: $600.000 (even if it's likely inflated) is no small amount of money.
Second, this is really nothing to applaud or rejoice over. The arrest of one or two dozen pirates does not even scratch the tip of the iceberg. The authorities know it but they still bust a group or two every couple of years for PR purposes. It does not affect the so-called "warez scene" at all. All game were pirated before this happened and all have continued to be pirated afterwards.
Third. I am very surprised to read that Razor1911 sold copies. To the extent of my knowledge, they are (Because they are still alive and kicking)a veteran and respected group in the warez scene and the one big No-No is the selling of pirated materials. In fact, Razor1911's nfo file (an.nfo file contains information about a given release and the logo and signature of the group that released it) states very clearly:
SUPPORT THE COMPANIES THAT PRODUCE QUALITY SOFTWARE! IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PRODUCT, BUY IT! SOFTWARE AUTHORS DESERVE SUPPORT!!
So either they are really big hypocrites or the press got it wrong (I'm gonna go with option B here...)
And of course, stealing is wrong, I don't condone piracy, don't have sex unprotected, yadda yadda...
Prompted by a post just like yours a few months ago, I went and watched the first 5 episodes of firefly. I thought it was average. Cheesy as hell too...
1. If the game "isn't worth buying," don't pirate it, spend 30 hours playing through the whole thing, and claim that you "wouldn't have bought it, anyway."
Just *what* exactly do you think a pirate has to gain by lying about whether (s)he would have bought a game or not? It's not like game companies are going to change their stance towards piracy anyways.
2. If you want to try the game out before buying, don't pirate it; play the demo.
Even if all games had timely playable demos (most of them don't), what's the difference to you? It's not like you're paying for their bandwidth or blank cds.
3. If there's no demo, and you don't trust the developer enough to buy the game, sight-unseen, don't buy it. The developer doesn't deserve your money, but neither do you deserve to own a copy of their game.
That is an idiotic statement. If someone gets a copy with the intention of trying the game before buying it, and likes it, and buys it. Then it's better for the company. If he doesn't like it and doesn't buy it, it doesn't affect anybody. And if he is a true pirate and simply doesn't want to pay, well, there is nothing you can do to prevent it anyways, you're just preaching to a stone.
4. Copy protection schemes that prevent you from playing the game you paid for are inexcusable. If the copy protection detracts from the game, tell the developer why you're not going to buy from them again. Don't pirate the game; piracy will only make future copy protection schemes worse for legitimate users.
Then the pirate will just have to keep getting illegal copies stripped of their protections. And they still get to punish the company by not buying their games. Win-Win situation for them. Nobody forces the companies to make idiotic decisions alienating some of their legitimate users.
It is my opinion that you ask too much from end users. Their goal is to enjoy themselves. Period. Quite frankly, I'm tired of all the complaining about pirates. Piracy has been around for a long time yet the game industry gets bigger and richer as time goes by. It usually goes like this:
poor kid/student pirates games he can't afford to buy, gets hooked, grows up, makes money, can't be bothered to to use time and effort to get pirated games, buys them instead.
If things start to go really wrong and this equilibrium is breached, Then game companies can start buying shares of nvidia and ati and getting money for every card they sell to someone who wants to play a pirated game. The only reason this isn't happening on a large scale is because there is no need for it yet.
While It is true that graphics have remained a bit stagnant for the last 5 years or so, I believe this is just a phase. Graphics still have a very long way to go before they become truly photorealistic. Toy Story came out in 1994 and 10 years later, a standalone PC still has a long way to go before being able to render it in real time. And toy story can hardly be called photorealistic. Similarly, today's best techniques and the biggest rendering farms can give us something like The fight scene between Neo and the 100 agent smiths in Matrix Reloaded. Barring some revolutionary breakthrough, A standalone PC won't be able to render something like that for another 20 or 25 years at least. And that scene was not quite photorealistic either. Add to that the fact that we need to progress towards a resolution of 4196*2360 and 100FPS as a minimum and my estimate would be 50-100 years before we can look at something that can fool our eyes completely.
The MPAA apparently got their act together and started including foolproof watermarkings. Unlike the stupid dots and serial numbers, these cannot be detected unless you have two copies from different sources (extremely unlikely) and huge amounts of time in your hand.
With two sources, you could theorically be able to contrast everything in the movie (scene lenghts, colors,etc.) but the amount of work required is huge and the probability of oversights is very high. That's assuming you have two sources willing to take the risk. It's not going to happen.
Well, that's that then. No more screeners for you and me. So long and thanks for all the fish.
I asked JPL-jeff on IRC about it and his answer was:
gozu - I don't have the numbers in front of me. It's like about 15 Mbits of products per day on the HGA, more like 180 Mbits per day on the UHF if we do all the orbiter passes.
So it averages out to 2.3 Kbps!
Of course, this is in bursts so the real speeds are higher than this. But still...It's shocking.
I'm having trouble connecting. Any idea how to fix this? (I have no problem connecting to other irc servers such as linknet and efnet)
[12:54am] *** Connecting to irc.freenode.net (6667)
????????????????????
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Looking up your hostname...
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Checking ident
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Found your hostname
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Got ident response
????????????????????
[12:54am] Closing Link: gozu (Bad user info)
1- The Xbox, with all its "mighty" Microsoft DRM was made to run linux.
2- It's a PC that, according to the article, geatures a non-proprietary formatting, standard USB ports, ethernet ports and whatnot.
3- comes from a manufacturer that allows you to disable region-coding on its DVD players just by hitting a couple buttons on the remote.
4- does not have any real hopes of signing up the big game developers (especially not japaneese behemoths like SquareEnix, Capcom or Konami)
I think they definitely want their units to be hacked to death. And if they don't, they are blind, ignorant fools. I mean, this is obviously the ultimate set top box. Wireless gamepads? Please! More like wireless remotes...
You could stream media from your computer, install mythTV and record your favorite tv shows, back them up to the computer over ethernet, emulate old arcade/console games. Basically everything the Xbox can do, only more and better thanks to the increased amount of ram and cpu speed. The possibilities are too many to list.
It would be funny if I got it all wrong and this becomes the next ps2...
Slashdot Mirror
lameness filters are annoying.
Hopefully by then Cedega will be good enough to play everything i'm interested in playing. And hopefully, I'll be dating Lucy Liu. Get real.
Owner of a dell 2001fp here. I am poor and just could not afford to spend 800 bucks on a monitor. I did it anyways and God i love this thing. I know a few people who bought it and they all love it. You just can't beat the price/performance.
Now this LG makes me horny but for $2500? forget it. it's about a thousand dollars too expensive for what it offers. (No DVI for resolutions over 1600x1200? unacceptable!) And yes, i know it's a limitation of DVI and not the monitor itself, still. unacceptable.
thanks for the laugh :)
A few weeks ago, I was wondering what kind of internet speed consumers needed for everyone to be happy. I settled for 10 Gbps which is roughly what is needed for 4 concurrent HDTV streams at the highest resolution. up to three 250Mbps streams would be available at all times leaving a fourth available for all your browsing/downloding/uploading/gaming needs. I think that a true 10 Gbps symmetrical connection should be enough for anyone for the next 20 years at least.
I wonder how many years it'll take the U.S to get these kind of speeds in all high/medium density areas. I estimate that in about 5-6 years, we'll be where Japan was 3 years ago. Roughly 10 years behind...
who's this "muslems" guy you're talking about???
i sure as hell didn't threaten that Salman rushdie guy with anything. In fact, not a single muslim I know did either...
Please stop thinking of "muslems" as some kind of hivemind. some ayatollahs wrote fatwas against the guy, that's all. and it just so happens that the vast, crushing majority of muslims don't pay any attention whatsoever to some obscure fatwa written by some unknown imam from god knows what country calling himself an "ayatollah". (ayatollah means "verse of god" and is basically a pretty looking title some dudes felt like having...god knows why)
Always remember, Islam is as decentralized a religion as it gets, there is no hierarchy of any sort, anyone can become an Imam if he wants to. he just reads or memorizes the coran, goes up early in the morning and starts shouting the call to prayer, if people show up, he can lead the prayer. that's about it.
heck, muslims don't even have to go the mosque if they don't want to. much less feel obligated to follow a fatwa (which is really just a statement of opinion that anybody can write with no other weight than what that particular Imam's congregation feel like giving it.
.
I came to the conclusion that the article author is insane, and, as a consequence of that, full of shit.
About the leak: some german guy (the same guy who created phatbot, let's call him Hans) hacked into Valve computers. Hans then proceeded to brag about it and give some information about it to some friend of his (let's call him randomdude) over an IRC server operated by some members from a group I will call Entity. Members of entity intercepted the conversation and used the info in it to plant their own trojans on valve's computers, they then proceeded to leak the source and maybe some other stuff. Hans decided that he wouldn't let them have the credit for this and proceeded to release other stuff. Fast forward a few months. Hand emails Gabe and explains that he never meant to leak anything, that he just wanted to take a look at how a game was developped and that he was an amateur game developper himself as well as an expert on network security. He's a big fan of valve, blah blah blah. He explains how he broke into valve's computers and implies that he would like to get a job at valve as a network security asministrator. Follows a long exchange of emails in which he tells them about vulnerabilities still existing in their network and reveals he is german. He then agrees to a phone interview as Valve's people bait him into thinking they are considering hiring him and ends up arrested. I read most of the emails he exchanged with Valve before the arrest and Hans pretty much threw prudence and common sense out the window when dealing with valve. He must be kicking himself now.
When it comes to infiltrating and dismantling warez networks, they are amazingly good. So good, in fact, that they can infiltrate any target of their chosing whithin 6-12 months.
,by necessity, one that is open to new media suppliers, site owners, rippers, crackers, couriers, hardware and cash donors, etc.
And there is nothing that can be done to stop them. This being slashdot, a lot of talk about secure networks and encryption is going on. All of these measures are next to useless.
The Warez Scene is not an insulated and self contained entity. It is
It is *TRIVIAL* for the fbi to impersonate one or more of those again and again or even have deep undercovers that remain in the scene for years (spanning several busts).
The only new thing about this bust is the extensive cooperation of other governments in this operation. I have to admit that I did not imagine the FBI would bother but apparently, the pressure of BIG CORP International is now enough to warrant a cooperation and coordinated operations between countries that is usually reserved to drug and weapon traffickers.
Sad...
The original company was Winfirst. Funny story: I visited the webpage of one of Winfirst's founders and I don't exactly remember how (I think I typed http://blah.com/ instead of http://blah.com/index.html or something to that effect) and landed in a folder chock full of warez (movies, mainly). Great speeds too :)
Yes. All he says is true. I live in Coral Spgings and I had 2 roommates who worked there and they told me the same things. The metal detector and the minimum wage thing, I know about firsthand since I went there to apply for a job this afternoon. They are really my bottom choice but I need the experience to get a job somewhere else.
Living it up with $64,000 CAD? Doesn't that convert to like $200 USD ?
Second, this is really nothing to applaud or rejoice over. The arrest of one or two dozen pirates does not even scratch the tip of the iceberg. The authorities know it but they still bust a group or two every couple of years for PR purposes. It does not affect the so-called "warez scene" at all. All game were pirated before this happened and all have continued to be pirated afterwards.
Third. I am very surprised to read that Razor1911 sold copies. To the extent of my knowledge, they are (Because they are still alive and kicking)a veteran and respected group in the warez scene and the one big No-No is the selling of pirated materials. In fact, Razor1911's nfo file (an
And of course, stealing is wrong, I don't condone piracy, don't have sex unprotected, yadda yadda...
The PS2 is less powerful than the Dreamcast? Bullshit. Please back up your comments with verifiable facts or shut up.
Prompted by a post just like yours a few months ago, I went and watched the first 5 episodes of firefly. I thought it was average. Cheesy as hell too...
1. If the game "isn't worth buying," don't pirate it, spend 30 hours playing through the whole thing, and claim that you "wouldn't have bought it, anyway."
Just *what* exactly do you think a pirate has to gain by lying about whether (s)he would have bought a game or not? It's not like game companies are going to change their stance towards piracy anyways.
2. If you want to try the game out before buying, don't pirate it; play the demo.
Even if all games had timely playable demos (most of them don't), what's the difference to you? It's not like you're paying for their bandwidth or blank cds.
3. If there's no demo, and you don't trust the developer enough to buy the game, sight-unseen, don't buy it. The developer doesn't deserve your money, but neither do you deserve to own a copy of their game.
That is an idiotic statement. If someone gets a copy with the intention of trying the game before buying it, and likes it, and buys it. Then it's better for the company. If he doesn't like it and doesn't buy it, it doesn't affect anybody. And if he is a true pirate and simply doesn't want to pay, well, there is nothing you can do to prevent it anyways, you're just preaching to a stone.
4. Copy protection schemes that prevent you from playing the game you paid for are inexcusable. If the copy protection detracts from the game, tell the developer why you're not going to buy from them again. Don't pirate the game; piracy will only make future copy protection schemes worse for legitimate users.
Then the pirate will just have to keep getting illegal copies stripped of their protections. And they still get to punish the company by not buying their games. Win-Win situation for them. Nobody forces the companies to make idiotic decisions alienating some of their legitimate users.
It is my opinion that you ask too much from end users. Their goal is to enjoy themselves. Period.
Quite frankly, I'm tired of all the complaining about pirates. Piracy has been around for a long time yet the game industry gets bigger and richer as time goes by. It usually goes like this:
poor kid/student pirates games he can't afford to buy, gets hooked, grows up, makes money, can't be bothered to to use time and effort to get pirated games, buys them instead.
If things start to go really wrong and this equilibrium is breached, Then game companies can start buying shares of nvidia and ati and getting money for every card they sell to someone who wants to play a pirated game. The only reason this isn't happening on a large scale is because there is no need for it yet.
Mod parent +1 funny!
While It is true that graphics have remained a bit stagnant for the last 5 years or so, I believe this is just a phase. Graphics still have a very long way to go before they become truly photorealistic. Toy Story came out in 1994 and 10 years later, a standalone PC still has a long way to go before being able to render it in real time. And toy story can hardly be called photorealistic. Similarly, today's best techniques and the biggest rendering farms can give us something like The fight scene between Neo and the 100 agent smiths in Matrix Reloaded. Barring some revolutionary breakthrough, A standalone PC won't be able to render something like that for another 20 or 25 years at least. And that scene was not quite photorealistic either. Add to that the fact that we need to progress towards a resolution of 4196*2360 and 100FPS as a minimum and my estimate would be 50-100 years before we can look at something that can fool our eyes completely.
The MPAA apparently got their act together and started including foolproof watermarkings. Unlike the stupid dots and serial numbers, these cannot be detected unless you have two copies from different sources (extremely unlikely) and huge amounts of time in your hand.
With two sources, you could theorically be able to contrast everything in the movie (scene lenghts, colors,etc.) but the amount of work required is huge and the probability of oversights is very high. That's assuming you have two sources willing to take the risk. It's not going to happen.
Well, that's that then. No more screeners for you and me. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Real paying attention to Slashdot and working with DOOM9? I think I speak for all of us when I say: WHAT THE FUCK???
I asked JPL-jeff on IRC about it and his answer was:
gozu - I don't have the numbers in front of me. It's like about 15 Mbits of products per day on the HGA, more like 180 Mbits per day on the UHF if we do all the orbiter passes.So it averages out to 2.3 Kbps! Of course, this is in bursts so the real speeds are higher than this. But still...It's shocking.
Sorry for the garbled post. here it is in code.
[12:54am] *** Connecting to irc.freenode.net (6667)
????????????????????
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Looking up your hostname...
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Checking ident
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Found your hostname
[12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Got ident response
I'm having trouble connecting. Any idea how to fix this? (I have no problem connecting to other irc servers such as linknet and efnet) [12:54am] *** Connecting to irc.freenode.net (6667) ???????????????????? [12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Looking up your hostname... [12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Checking ident [12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Found your hostname [12:54am] -irc.freenode.net- *** Got ident response ???????????????????? [12:54am] Closing Link: gozu (Bad user info)
I went out and bought the book after seeing this topic. I read about 60% of it and it's very good stuff. A little bit short for my taste though.
Considering that:
1- The Xbox, with all its "mighty" Microsoft DRM was made to run linux.
2- It's a PC that, according to the article, geatures a non-proprietary formatting, standard USB ports, ethernet ports and whatnot.
3- comes from a manufacturer that allows you to disable region-coding on its DVD players just by hitting a couple buttons on the remote.
4- does not have any real hopes of signing up the big game developers (especially not japaneese behemoths like SquareEnix, Capcom or Konami)
I think they definitely want their units to be hacked to death. And if they don't, they are blind, ignorant fools. I mean, this is obviously the ultimate set top box. Wireless gamepads? Please! More like wireless remotes...
You could stream media from your computer, install mythTV and record your favorite tv shows, back them up to the computer over ethernet, emulate old arcade/console games. Basically everything the Xbox can do, only more and better thanks to the increased amount of ram and cpu speed. The possibilities are too many to list.
It would be funny if I got it all wrong and this becomes the next ps2...