You're right, technically they're not completely preventing *me* from playing, since if I make sure there are no CD's or DVD's in any drives except the first in IDE bus order, and that I inserted the Diablo II CD at least a minute or two ago so the copy protection doesn't get confused by the fact that CD's have to spin up (who'd have thunk it?), I'm able to play the game just fine. I submit, though, that the shoddy programming that makes it such a pain in the ass to play Diablo II on a multi-CD-ROM computer is allowed to go on because, in some middle manager's mind somewhere, since it reduces the set of computers that can successfully load the program, somehow "fights piracy." Now that I think about it, though, it probably is more just the result of general incompetence, since that's not the only problem with Diablo II (how else do you explain 1/2-2 second lag on quiet, switched 100Mbps ethernet, with two stations playing, both of which are 1.2GHz+ Athlon w/GeForce3?)
The "playing" I was really talking about is playing on their own servers. I should have said, "keep legitimate buyers from playing on their own servers." With all the problems with the CD copy protection, though, I can't help feeling they really don't care all that much whether individual people are able to play, on battle.net or anywhere else. And why would they; they've got millions of customers! OTOH, "never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance." So, I could be wrong. Anyway, thanks for your comments.
I admit, I haven't played my "blows up every time" test case (Descent 3) for a couple months, so it's possible the newest drivers actually won't crash. The DirectX component of the nVidia drivers is definitely rock solid. Looks like it's time to download the newest ones and try again:-) Thanks for the link btw.
"Blue Screens" are caused by a fault in the Kernel or something writing to memory it's not meant to be writing to.
This is almost correct. Blue screens are caused by a fault in *kernel mode* (Ring 0 on Intel architecture), which is not equivalent to "in the kernel." WDM drivers (like the nVidia graphics drivers), as well as all NT drivers and in fact the entire USER and GDI subsystem (since NT4), all run in kernel mode. None of these components are technically the kernel. Btw, wild pointer writes are a kind of "fault in kernel mode."
Assuming normal user processes can only write to their own memory space, then it is a fault of the kernel.
No argument there. See also this page. But as I already pointed out, the nVidia driver runs in kernel mode, not user mode, so this argument is not relevant.
Sure, Open GL might be buggy,
OpenGL can't be buggy, it's just a specification. nVidia's implementation is buggy, like I said. This is especially apparent considering that the blue screen errors have the name of nVidia's kernel mode driver in them.
but it's your Windows kernel that's causing the blue screen.
Again, confusing "the Kernel" with "kernel mode." Hey, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but that's no reason to post incorrect technical information about it and hope nobody will realize you're blowing smoke out your ass. Next time, do a little more research first.
I'm sure Blizzard would gladly let *one* software pirate slip through the cracks if they could eliminate the annoyances to honest users.
OK, for the exact number *one*, I admit they would probably let it slip.:-)
Also, what exactly gives you the right to endanger Blizzards revenues just because you are a hobbyist?
Why do I have to have some special "right" to work on a hobby? Blizzard didn't give me my intelligence or my programming skills; they're not representative of society as a whole; what special claim do they have on me? I don't owe them anything (I already paid them for all the Blizzard games I have). It was through the actions of many "hobbyists," along with some people who believed they were fighting to save X (where X is the reason they thought they were in WWII), that this whole thing we call "the computing world" came about. Not through the actions of a bunch of lawyers trying to *limit* what people can do. If you limit what people can do without giving them other possibilities for creative outlet, you are IMHO diminishing the potential of society as a whole.
IOW, I'm not a big fan of the whole "individuals are intrinsically powerless and start off with squat, and then *society* grants them all their rights." I have feet, does society have to come to me when I'm a baby and say, "OK little child, now you may walk?!" Sure society can take this away from me, but society didn't have to explicitly give permission for me to do it in the first place, it just had to not interfere with what I naturally did anyway.
how about *shooting* someone because you are a hobbyist?
Shooting someone kills them (if you are a good shot). Working on battle.net-compatible server software (a) doesn't threaten anyone's life (surely you're not going to tell me $25 for Diablo II is worth equivalent to someone's life!), (b) *doesn't actually even cause software piracy.* It just means "maybe" it could happen. In speech (a lot of people at/., including me, think code is speech), this is called a "prior restraint" when it's done by a government. It may or may not be legal, but it's scary that people think there's "nothing wrong with it."
what's the deal with that little daughter-card looking thing where the power comes in?
I haven't seen the one on the A7M266-D, but I remember some older ASUS boards did this as well. In that case, it was some kind of power filter; it was on a daughtercard to keep the motherboard from heating up too much.:-)
I'm assuming the two 64-bit PCI slots are on a separate bus from the 32-bit slots... would this mean less IRQ conflicts?
Unfortunately, it depends on the design of the board, but I doubt you'll run into IRQ conflicts on a modern SMP board. All the PCI interrupts end up on PCI INTA-INTD lines, which on SMP boards are routed to the APIC. PCI interrupts are level-triggered (i.e. intrinsically shareable) so most IRQ conflicts are caused by devices on the ISA bus, e.g. parallel ports, serial ports, floppy disk, many sound cards, ISA modems, etc., *except* in cases where the BIOS insists on allocating a separate interrupt for each device. Anyway, I've heard that some OS's show APIC interrupts as INT1-INT24 (so you obviously couldn't possibly have an interrupt conflict), and I know my SMP board hasn't had any interrupt conflict-type problems, so I doubt you'll have any problems, but YMMV.
Oh, and did you use Athlon MP's or did you cheat and use the XP's?
I used the MP's, only because I wanted to make sure if something went wrong with the system it *wasn't* going to be the processors. A lot of people use the XP's instead, they seem to work well. I heard a rumor that AMD is going to lock out SMP capabilities on the XP's. I also heard that they're releasing Duron MP's. Isn't the rumor mill fun?:-)
...has always been that driver support is buggy. nVidia is notoriously bad at this; their DirectX drivers are quite stable, but OpenGL blue screens left and right (especially with a lot of detail in the scene graph). I always wondered why they even bothered to include OpenGL support in their drivers, although I suppose with such a major standard they have pretty much no choice.
Now, with OpenGL 2.0, if they have to support three different API's, isn't driver quality going to suffer even more? Oh well, ATI has been getting a lot better recently, I guess we can always switch to them.:-)
Blizzard just needs to release a legitimate version of the B.Net server
This is a great idea. A couple problems though:
The current battle.net server is an in-house application, which means (since they probably didn't develop it with a public release in mind), it's probably (a) really warty (not that this would matter to the average buyer) and (b) probably horribly coupled to all kinds of internal proprietary servers. I mean, look at Bugzilla; it's successfully used by a lot of projects, but it started as an in-house bug tracking system and *it still really shows.* Just try to set it up sometime!
The server would probably only run on Windows, since that seems to be the main audience Blizzard develops for. Or, alternately, if it runs on *nix, their marketing types would probably say, "well, our customers aren't running *nix, so there's no point selling it." Catch-22 here.
Also, with LAN parties combined with Microsoft's infamous "no more than 10 people may connect to a Win2K Pro machine over TCP/IP" (yieh! you're just a *consumer*, a *nobody*, so sit down biotch!), Blizzard's lawyers might warn them about people violating Microsoft's EULA. And heavens, that might be worse than Software Piracy!
With the server released, that would be more code crackers could look at to try to reverse-engineer the CD key algorithm. True, this can be done with the game too, but maybe the authentication is written in perl or some other text based language that would be trivial to reverse engineer.
Blizzard/*Vivendi*. How likely is Vivendi to do anything that even resembles giving customers freedom? They're all about control of "consumers," nowadays.
Blizzard tech support, like any large tech support organization, is already overworked from idiots emailing them about trivial problems. At least they probably have a good procedure in place for dealing with this though. Server software is a completely different ballgame, and they'd probably have to hire new staff just to deal with it. To their minds, this could be just more money down the tube.
So basically I agree with you, but with the analysis for blizzard = spending more $$ on development + spending more $$ on tech support + fear of "software pirates" + general belligerence, I doubt it will ever happen. Oh well, we can always hope, right?:-)
Q. What about the hobbyists who are not pirating your software but just want to use these servers as an alternative to Battle.net?
A. Unfortunately, software pirates have spoiled this situation for hobbyists.
"Software Pirates" didn't spoil this for hobbyists. *Blizzard* spoiled it for hobbyists. In the style typical of any arrogant corporation, they don't care what their customers want; they just want to control every aspect of everyone's interaction with them. (IMO, this is typified by the horribly buggy CD copy protection on Diablo II -- ever try to play it with more than one CD-ROM drive, or the CD not in the first drive? Feh. They'd rather keep legitimate buyers from playing (hell, they already have our money) than risk letting even *one* "software pirate" slip through the cracks!)
Don't let Blizzard fool you. *They* are the ones who are causing problems here, not bnetd. What ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" (Yes, I know it's a legal principle, but it used to be widely practiced even by ordinary people... until the lawyers found they could make more money by pre-shafting people, so to speak.) Anyway, just my $0.02.
Sure, I tried pretty much every value from 0xB0 to 0xFF in steps of four over a period of about two weeks. I could never figure out what *exactly* the AGP driving value meant, though (need to bust out the reference books), so maybe the right answer was somewhere outside that range. It's a moot issue at this point though, since that motherboard (KT7A-RAID) is dead (oops).
I always wonder if it was some kind of Freudian slip when I killed that motherboard.:-)
As far as I know the Duron itself will not permit being run with anything other than a 100 mhz bus,
That's true. However, this particular board is an ABIT KT7A, which has an option to run the RAM bus at host clock + PCI clock, = 133 MHz. It works fine with a single 128MB PC133 DIMM (NEC, not sure of CAS rating, it's "virtual channel memory" -- anyone else remember virtual channel memory?:-), also with dual 256MB PC133 DIMM's (CAS 2, Crucial), but with a 512MB CAS3 DIMM (also Crucial), it won't post with 133MHz RAM clock. With 100 MHz RAM clock, it works just fine (of course). Oh well, that's my worst system anyway, so who cares. Thanks for your comments though.
You're right, it *does* have the AMD northbridge. My bad. I just remembered that it was the only system I built with VIA components in it which actually worked.:-)
Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?
Wow, that's a good idea. I wonder how the cost of manufacturing for, e.g. a ZIF socket + chip compares to just surface-mounting or whatever the motherboard makers do now. (Although, actually I think at least one of my current motherboards has the southbridge in a socket).
I see two problems though:
How big of a target market would there be, initially? I mean, sure probably 50% of the people on/. would be in the market, but what about the big OEM's? I don't see "consumers" going to the local CompUSA to upgrade their northbridge, I mean hell, (a) most people don't even know what a "northbridge" is, (b) the CompUSA folks would be more likely to tell them they just needed a new motherboard or new computer. "Oh yeah, your power switch is broken, better upgrade your case, motherboard, and processor while you're at it.":-)
The programming interface to each chipset is proprietary. Ever try to get information about the registers on a VIA chipset? They want you to sign a giant NDA just to look at the specs PDF, for crying out loud! (Although last time I looked, some people had slipped up and posted NDA'd VIA specsheets where google could find it. Shh, don't tell anyone.:-) And since it's proprietary, that means the developers are used to being able to change it whenever they want. IOW, there's no engineering pressure to make things backward-compatible, because the only software that is affected is the BIOS. So, you could say, just distribute BIOS images with the new chipsets. But how many tech support calls do you think they're going to get when people accidentally plug in the new chipset with ACPI power off registers are in the same place the DRAM timing registers used to be? (so the board won't power on anymore).
So in other words, I think it's a great idea, but there's no way the chipset companies are going to have it while they're still acting like it's the 1950's and every single chipset is (a) proprietary, (b) guarded like it's the secret to eternal life or something. Oh well, we can always dream.:-)
The Tyan Tiger MP kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway.:-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).
Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)
I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:
random lockups with the GeForce2 (no, it *isn't* that the power supplies are too small when they're all in the 450-550W range!:-)
not being able to run CAS3 memory at 133MHz (on a Duron) (note, maybe I am just stupid, but shouldn't a 512MB CAS3 DIMM behave the same as a 128MB with respect to this?)
According to the article, it's only "a couple thousand atoms" so you probably wouldn't even notice if it hit you. Ordinary objects (e.g. pretzel, human being) contain at least 10 orders of magnitude more atoms. Personally, I'd be more worried about the containment apparatus blowing up.
before we collapse the fabric of the universe or something like that
Last time I heard about any "really new" developments in antimatter, they were just figuring out how to contain 10-100 protons (circa 1992) (I know, I'm dating myself, whatever.:-) This is really cool news.
Still, even a million atoms is really physically small. I wonder
how much it weighs?
whether it's visible to the naked eye? (well, duh, I guess being hydrogen gas it wouldn't be, or does it have interesting optical properties?
You're right, that code (even before Slashcode killed it for you) won't work. The standard C++ library eats the backspaces, and they're the key to making it crash. Someone (usually a library) has to be calling (eventually) WriteConsole with tabs and backspaces in a loop. Apparently, the C++ standard library isn't doing that, so chalk one up to C++, but only because it's not outputting what you told it to. Now, is that a feature or a bug?:-)
Yeah, we'll have to "upgrade" to Win2K Advanced Server to get enough processor licenses for a dual processor hyperthreading box. Otherwise we'll be violating the EULA, and they might hit us or something. (*cringes*). Great, I can't wait.
According to this article, though (posted on 2cpu.com), the Windows 2000 scheduler doesn't know how to take advantage of hyperthreading, since it doesn't know how to take advantage of virtual processors. (I suppose Windows XP does?) Go figure. Anyway, this looks like it's probably worth checking into. I'm sure Linux will support it!
If Microsoft had wanted this, they could have just come up with a proprietary interface protocol with a really weird connector, both of which would be patented.
That's true, obviously it's been done before. The thing is, USB is extremely cheap (chipsets are only a couple $$, and cables aren't bad either), plus a lot of people know it since it's a pretty open standard, so you don't have to train people to use it. I mean, we're talking R&D, manufacturing, etc. lots of money here, not just drivers. Instead, they (predictably) choose to take an open-looking standard and twist it so nobody but them can play. How is this any different than what they've been up to their entire (corporate) life?
if you are a big company and you want to prevent competitors from manufacturing peripherals for your product, is there any law that would allow you do to so?
AFAIK, you can patent the interface. That's about it (copyright doesn't apply, and you can't call it a trade secret because - *doh* - millions of people have it.)
True, maybe the Japanese controllers will work with the MS consoles, but we need to look beyond the immediate future here.
Hmm, let's think here...
MS (rumored to be) using region locking, *in the context of*
the well-known DVD region fiasco, equals...
Well, at any rate, it sure makes me nervous. Think about when they start selling region-locked Ethernet, or region locked hard drives, etc. add-ons for the Xbox. Region locking in general is a way for large companies to restrain trade contrary to international agreements. It was never a problem before recently because either (a) nobody thought of it (doubtful) or (b) the technological means to do it weren't around until recently.
DVD's have recently proven (in some people's minds, anyway) that "consumers" (if we're all consumers, who the hell is producing, btw?) will put up with this region locking restraint of trade nonsense. And it's a well known fact that the courts are so far behind in their understanding of technology that they won't figure out what's going on until nobody even remembers the way things used to be. I mean, "Microsoft" and "restraint of trade" -- who would have ever thought of those two words in the same sentence?:-) IOW, this doesn't surprise me in the least.
At least I know which gaming console I won't be buying anytime soon, though!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I find the attitude "as long as it doesnt kill anyone, its OK!!" simpleminded.
Well of course that attitude's simpleminded, but that wasn't the intention. No need for a strawman argument here!
My main point was that:
IOW, I was mainly saying that it wasn't an appropriate simile. Sorry for any confusion. :-)
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
How are they keeping you from playing?
You're right, technically they're not completely preventing *me* from playing, since if I make sure there are no CD's or DVD's in any drives except the first in IDE bus order, and that I inserted the Diablo II CD at least a minute or two ago so the copy protection doesn't get confused by the fact that CD's have to spin up (who'd have thunk it?), I'm able to play the game just fine. I submit, though, that the shoddy programming that makes it such a pain in the ass to play Diablo II on a multi-CD-ROM computer is allowed to go on because, in some middle manager's mind somewhere, since it reduces the set of computers that can successfully load the program, somehow "fights piracy." Now that I think about it, though, it probably is more just the result of general incompetence, since that's not the only problem with Diablo II (how else do you explain 1/2-2 second lag on quiet, switched 100Mbps ethernet, with two stations playing, both of which are 1.2GHz+ Athlon w/GeForce3?)
The "playing" I was really talking about is playing on their own servers. I should have said, "keep legitimate buyers from playing on their own servers." With all the problems with the CD copy protection, though, I can't help feeling they really don't care all that much whether individual people are able to play, on battle.net or anywhere else. And why would they; they've got millions of customers! OTOH, "never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance." So, I could be wrong. Anyway, thanks for your comments.
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
I admit, I haven't played my "blows up every time" test case (Descent 3) for a couple months, so it's possible the newest drivers actually won't crash. The DirectX component of the nVidia drivers is definitely rock solid. Looks like it's time to download the newest ones and try again :-) Thanks for the link btw.
"Blue Screens" are caused by a fault in the Kernel or something writing to memory it's not meant to be writing to.
This is almost correct. Blue screens are caused by a fault in *kernel mode* (Ring 0 on Intel architecture), which is not equivalent to "in the kernel." WDM drivers (like the nVidia graphics drivers), as well as all NT drivers and in fact the entire USER and GDI subsystem (since NT4), all run in kernel mode. None of these components are technically the kernel. Btw, wild pointer writes are a kind of "fault in kernel mode."
Assuming normal user processes can only write to their own memory space, then it is a fault of the kernel.
No argument there. See also this page. But as I already pointed out, the nVidia driver runs in kernel mode, not user mode, so this argument is not relevant.
Sure, Open GL might be buggy,
OpenGL can't be buggy, it's just a specification. nVidia's implementation is buggy, like I said. This is especially apparent considering that the blue screen errors have the name of nVidia's kernel mode driver in them.
but it's your Windows kernel that's causing the blue screen.
Again, confusing "the Kernel" with "kernel mode." Hey, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but that's no reason to post incorrect technical information about it and hope nobody will realize you're blowing smoke out your ass. Next time, do a little more research first.
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
I'm sure Blizzard would gladly let *one* software pirate slip through the cracks if they could eliminate the annoyances to honest users.
OK, for the exact number *one*, I admit they would probably let it slip. :-)
Also, what exactly gives you the right to endanger Blizzards revenues just because you are a hobbyist?
Why do I have to have some special "right" to work on a hobby? Blizzard didn't give me my intelligence or my programming skills; they're not representative of society as a whole; what special claim do they have on me? I don't owe them anything (I already paid them for all the Blizzard games I have). It was through the actions of many "hobbyists," along with some people who believed they were fighting to save X (where X is the reason they thought they were in WWII), that this whole thing we call "the computing world" came about. Not through the actions of a bunch of lawyers trying to *limit* what people can do. If you limit what people can do without giving them other possibilities for creative outlet, you are IMHO diminishing the potential of society as a whole.
IOW, I'm not a big fan of the whole "individuals are intrinsically powerless and start off with squat, and then *society* grants them all their rights." I have feet, does society have to come to me when I'm a baby and say, "OK little child, now you may walk?!" Sure society can take this away from me, but society didn't have to explicitly give permission for me to do it in the first place, it just had to not interfere with what I naturally did anyway.
how about *shooting* someone because you are a hobbyist?
Shooting someone kills them (if you are a good shot). Working on battle.net-compatible server software (a) doesn't threaten anyone's life (surely you're not going to tell me $25 for Diablo II is worth equivalent to someone's life!), (b) *doesn't actually even cause software piracy.* It just means "maybe" it could happen. In speech (a lot of people at /., including me, think code is speech), this is called a "prior restraint" when it's done by a government. It may or may not be legal, but it's scary that people think there's "nothing wrong with it."
---Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf!
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---what's the deal with that little daughter-card looking thing where the power comes in?
I haven't seen the one on the A7M266-D, but I remember some older ASUS boards did this as well. In that case, it was some kind of power filter; it was on a daughtercard to keep the motherboard from heating up too much. :-)
I'm assuming the two 64-bit PCI slots are on a separate bus from the 32-bit slots... would this mean less IRQ conflicts?
Unfortunately, it depends on the design of the board, but I doubt you'll run into IRQ conflicts on a modern SMP board. All the PCI interrupts end up on PCI INTA-INTD lines, which on SMP boards are routed to the APIC. PCI interrupts are level-triggered (i.e. intrinsically shareable) so most IRQ conflicts are caused by devices on the ISA bus, e.g. parallel ports, serial ports, floppy disk, many sound cards, ISA modems, etc., *except* in cases where the BIOS insists on allocating a separate interrupt for each device. Anyway, I've heard that some OS's show APIC interrupts as INT1-INT24 (so you obviously couldn't possibly have an interrupt conflict), and I know my SMP board hasn't had any interrupt conflict-type problems, so I doubt you'll have any problems, but YMMV.
Oh, and did you use Athlon MP's or did you cheat and use the XP's?
I used the MP's, only because I wanted to make sure if something went wrong with the system it *wasn't* going to be the processors. A lot of people use the XP's instead, they seem to work well. I heard a rumor that AMD is going to lock out SMP capabilities on the XP's. I also heard that they're releasing Duron MP's. Isn't the rumor mill fun? :-)
Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf!
...has always been that driver support is buggy. nVidia is notoriously bad at this; their DirectX drivers are quite stable, but OpenGL blue screens left and right (especially with a lot of detail in the scene graph). I always wondered why they even bothered to include OpenGL support in their drivers, although I suppose with such a major standard they have pretty much no choice.
Now, with OpenGL 2.0, if they have to support three different API's, isn't driver quality going to suffer even more? Oh well, ATI has been getting a lot better recently, I guess we can always switch to them. :-)
---Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf!
Blizzard just needs to release a legitimate version of the B.Net server
This is a great idea. A couple problems though:
The current battle.net server is an in-house application, which means (since they probably didn't develop it with a public release in mind), it's probably (a) really warty (not that this would matter to the average buyer) and (b) probably horribly coupled to all kinds of internal proprietary servers. I mean, look at Bugzilla; it's successfully used by a lot of projects, but it started as an in-house bug tracking system and *it still really shows.* Just try to set it up sometime!
The server would probably only run on Windows, since that seems to be the main audience Blizzard develops for. Or, alternately, if it runs on *nix, their marketing types would probably say, "well, our customers aren't running *nix, so there's no point selling it." Catch-22 here.
Also, with LAN parties combined with Microsoft's infamous "no more than 10 people may connect to a Win2K Pro machine over TCP/IP" (yieh! you're just a *consumer*, a *nobody*, so sit down biotch!), Blizzard's lawyers might warn them about people violating Microsoft's EULA. And heavens, that might be worse than Software Piracy!
With the server released, that would be more code crackers could look at to try to reverse-engineer the CD key algorithm. True, this can be done with the game too, but maybe the authentication is written in perl or some other text based language that would be trivial to reverse engineer.
Blizzard/*Vivendi*. How likely is Vivendi to do anything that even resembles giving customers freedom? They're all about control of "consumers," nowadays.
Blizzard tech support, like any large tech support organization, is already overworked from idiots emailing them about trivial problems. At least they probably have a good procedure in place for dealing with this though. Server software is a completely different ballgame, and they'd probably have to hire new staff just to deal with it. To their minds, this could be just more money down the tube.
So basically I agree with you, but with the analysis for blizzard = spending more $$ on development + spending more $$ on tech support + fear of "software pirates" + general belligerence, I doubt it will ever happen. Oh well, we can always hope, right? :-)
---Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf!
From the FAQ:
Q. What about the hobbyists who are not pirating your software but just want to use these servers as an alternative to Battle.net? A. Unfortunately, software pirates have spoiled this situation for hobbyists.
"Software Pirates" didn't spoil this for hobbyists. *Blizzard* spoiled it for hobbyists. In the style typical of any arrogant corporation, they don't care what their customers want; they just want to control every aspect of everyone's interaction with them. (IMO, this is typified by the horribly buggy CD copy protection on Diablo II -- ever try to play it with more than one CD-ROM drive, or the CD not in the first drive? Feh. They'd rather keep legitimate buyers from playing (hell, they already have our money) than risk letting even *one* "software pirate" slip through the cracks!)
Don't let Blizzard fool you. *They* are the ones who are causing problems here, not bnetd. What ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" (Yes, I know it's a legal principle, but it used to be widely practiced even by ordinary people... until the lawyers found they could make more money by pre-shafting people, so to speak.) Anyway, just my $0.02.
---Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf!
Sure, I tried pretty much every value from 0xB0 to 0xFF in steps of four over a period of about two weeks. I could never figure out what *exactly* the AGP driving value meant, though (need to bust out the reference books), so maybe the right answer was somewhere outside that range. It's a moot issue at this point though, since that motherboard (KT7A-RAID) is dead (oops).
I always wonder if it was some kind of Freudian slip when I killed that motherboard. :-)
---Crash Windows XP with just a simple printf!
As far as I know the Duron itself will not permit being run with anything other than a 100 mhz bus,
That's true. However, this particular board is an ABIT KT7A, which has an option to run the RAM bus at host clock + PCI clock, = 133 MHz. It works fine with a single 128MB PC133 DIMM (NEC, not sure of CAS rating, it's "virtual channel memory" -- anyone else remember virtual channel memory? :-), also with dual 256MB PC133 DIMM's (CAS 2, Crucial), but with a 512MB CAS3 DIMM (also Crucial), it won't post with 133MHz RAM clock. With 100 MHz RAM clock, it works just fine (of course). Oh well, that's my worst system anyway, so who cares. Thanks for your comments though.
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Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
You're right, it *does* have the AMD northbridge. My bad. I just remembered that it was the only system I built with VIA components in it which actually worked. :-)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?
Wow, that's a good idea. I wonder how the cost of manufacturing for, e.g. a ZIF socket + chip compares to just surface-mounting or whatever the motherboard makers do now. (Although, actually I think at least one of my current motherboards has the southbridge in a socket).
I see two problems though:
So in other words, I think it's a great idea, but there's no way the chipset companies are going to have it while they're still acting like it's the 1950's and every single chipset is (a) proprietary, (b) guarded like it's the secret to eternal life or something. Oh well, we can always dream. :-)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
The Tyan Tiger MP kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway. :-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).
Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board.
Could you post a link to this?
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:
Personally, I'm terrified of VIA chipsets at this point. I like the AMD 760MP much better. :-)
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Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
According to the article, it's only "a couple thousand atoms" so you probably wouldn't even notice if it hit you. Ordinary objects (e.g. pretzel, human being) contain at least 10 orders of magnitude more atoms. Personally, I'd be more worried about the containment apparatus blowing up.
before we collapse the fabric of the universe or something like that
Antimatter behaves just like ordinary matter, except (a) opposite electric charge, (b) opposite parity (left-right orientation, e.g. of spin), (c) opposite direction in time (whatever that means). I wouldn't worry. Besides, how would we stop these people anyway? :-)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
Last time I heard about any "really new" developments in antimatter, they were just figuring out how to contain 10-100 protons (circa 1992) (I know, I'm dating myself, whatever. :-) This is really cool news.
Still, even a million atoms is really physically small. I wonder
Anyway, just my $0.01. :-)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
You're right, that code (even before Slashcode killed it for you) won't work. The standard C++ library eats the backspaces, and they're the key to making it crash. Someone (usually a library) has to be calling (eventually) WriteConsole with tabs and backspaces in a loop. Apparently, the C++ standard library isn't doing that, so chalk one up to C++, but only because it's not outputting what you told it to. Now, is that a feature or a bug? :-)
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
I did. It works in C++ too. :-)
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
Yeah, we'll have to "upgrade" to Win2K Advanced Server to get enough processor licenses for a dual processor hyperthreading box. Otherwise we'll be violating the EULA, and they might hit us or something. (*cringes*). Great, I can't wait.
---Have you crashed Windows XP with a simple printf recently? Try it!
Hyperthreading is a pretty cool idea, especially for those of us who would like to see SMP move more into the mainstream.
According to this article, though (posted on 2cpu.com), the Windows 2000 scheduler doesn't know how to take advantage of hyperthreading, since it doesn't know how to take advantage of virtual processors. (I suppose Windows XP does?) Go figure. Anyway, this looks like it's probably worth checking into. I'm sure Linux will support it!
---Have you crashed Windows XP with a simple printf recently? Try it!
This is, in fact, legal in some states (California being one).
Holy shit, now that is scary.
---Have you crashed Windows XP with a simple printf recently? Try it!
If Microsoft had wanted this, they could have just come up with a proprietary interface protocol with a really weird connector, both of which would be patented.
That's true, obviously it's been done before. The thing is, USB is extremely cheap (chipsets are only a couple $$, and cables aren't bad either), plus a lot of people know it since it's a pretty open standard, so you don't have to train people to use it. I mean, we're talking R&D, manufacturing, etc. lots of money here, not just drivers. Instead, they (predictably) choose to take an open-looking standard and twist it so nobody but them can play. How is this any different than what they've been up to their entire (corporate) life?
if you are a big company and you want to prevent competitors from manufacturing peripherals for your product, is there any law that would allow you do to so?
AFAIK, you can patent the interface. That's about it (copyright doesn't apply, and you can't call it a trade secret because - *doh* - millions of people have it.)
---Have you crashed Windows XP with a simple printf recently? Try it!
Xbox To Use Region-Locked Peripherals
True, maybe the Japanese controllers will work with the MS consoles, but we need to look beyond the immediate future here.
Hmm, let's think here...
Well, at any rate, it sure makes me nervous. Think about when they start selling region-locked Ethernet, or region locked hard drives, etc. add-ons for the Xbox. Region locking in general is a way for large companies to restrain trade contrary to international agreements. It was never a problem before recently because either (a) nobody thought of it (doubtful) or (b) the technological means to do it weren't around until recently.
DVD's have recently proven (in some people's minds, anyway) that "consumers" (if we're all consumers, who the hell is producing, btw?) will put up with this region locking restraint of trade nonsense. And it's a well known fact that the courts are so far behind in their understanding of technology that they won't figure out what's going on until nobody even remembers the way things used to be. I mean, "Microsoft" and "restraint of trade" -- who would have ever thought of those two words in the same sentence? :-) IOW, this doesn't surprise me in the least.
At least I know which gaming console I won't be buying anytime soon, though! :-)
---Have you crashed Windows XP with a simple printf recently? Try it!