He's not on crack. Speaking as a new owner of a 50" display, there is a HUGE difference between DVD video and a hidef signal. If you sit 16' away from the tv, there is no discernable difference. 8' away, and there is a significant difference.
If you want to argue about it, go right ahead. Nothing you say will change what my own eyes can plainly see.
The target audience for this article are those interested in upscaling dvd players (ie: dvd players used with an hd tv). Hooking one up to an SD CRT would be a pointless exercise.
The effect you're complaining about is judder, not "pulldown". Pulldown is the process through which judder is introduced.
The judder created by this encoding scheme is not compounded by watching a movie on a PC unless your dvd player is absolute crap. The same goes with sound sync issues. I find it laughable that you consider such defects common in PCs, when an abundant amount of evidence to the contrary is present.
Reversing the telecine process is rather simple, and most players do so to reconstruct a 480p from from the 480i dvd source material. Meaning that your PC is working with a 24fps source.
In order to eliminate judder on your PC, set your refresh rate to a multiple of 24 (72hz or 120hz would be the most common refresh rates available). You don't need to set your refresh rate as low as 24hz.
Unfortunately, there are very few HD displays that ACCEPT input at rates other than 60hz. So you're still stuck with the level of judder you'd receive from a standalone player on those displays.
It isn't a marginal advantage. These machines have 8-16x more ram than their previous generation cousins, meaning the speed of the drive will have a much larger effect on load times.
Hell, put it at the kernel level. The root problem still exists. Untrusted code running at the kernel level can do whatever it wants, including whatever it wants to other kernel code.
You're missing a crucial difference between this and the "examples" you cite.
You retain the record until a criminal investigation has been opened. This is akin to your browser history being used against you in a child-porn prosecution.
"The man" can't use the data for an alternate purpose, because they don't possess the data or have access to it on a whim.
I'm not missing the point, though apparently you are.
Repeat after me: A security hole requires privlege escallation.
Installing a root kit when you already have admin rights is not an escallation of privilege. If you're running with admin permissions, you can walk all over the machine. You can modify system binaries with impunity, you can install drivers which run code in kernel mode, etc. If they were able to install a rootkit through a privlege escallation hole, THEN there would be a security issue.
Bullshit. Even when running as an Admin on Vista, any problem you launch runs with limited user privs. To get full admin privs in your process token, you have to have an applicaiton manifest which states "this program needs admin rights." This, in turn means that when you launch the program, a dialog appears asking the user if it is ok to run the app as an admin.
So, not only does this "hack" require the user to be logged in as Administrator, the user must click a yes on a "do you really meant to run bluepill.exe?" prompt.
The only legitimate break in the security model here was the end-user.
The length of a "frame" in network play depends on the connection latency. The higher the latency, the longer the frame. When deciding the length of a frame you can use connection statistics to determine a reasonable expected worst case situation to compensate for most types of lag you'd see in an online connection.
It isn't perfect mind you, but they did an excellent job all things considered.
$2000 is relatively inexpensive, considering the traditional cost of development tools and the hardware associated with it. Many people spend far more than that on their gaming PC...
Of course importers don't care; this isn't about importers. This is about distribution. Companies distributing in multiple regions do care about these things.
The question you should be asking yourself is this: does importing a game make it more or less likely for a title to be distributed in multiple regions (keeping in mind distributing in multiple regions does include additional costs). Ask yourself if your answer remains the same for a niche title vs a blockbuster title.
Except that's not the case, the person who says there's different regions is Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. Nintendo makes a game and Nintendo of America will distribute in America, That game is not able to be played in Japan unless I own a US version of the Nintendo console. Getting that US version of the console is also abnormally hard as it is. I should be able to buy a Japanese 360 if i wish to, I have to go to less than reputable organizations for that. Japanese Amazon can not sell me one because of agreements. That's not a console decision, not a distributor decision.
There isn't anything FORCING a company to use region coding. So why, you ask, would a company be stupid enough to do so? Legal bullshit.
Let me spell it out for you.
Company A produces a game. Company B pays company A for exclusive rights to distribute game in X countries. Company C pays company A for exclusive rights to distribute game in Y countries.
Now, how does company A enforce the exclusivity of the contracts they signed with companies B and C? Will company C ever bother to translate and distribute a title in region Y while having to compete with grey market imports?
You tell me. And keep in mind this impacts niche titles more than blockbusters.
I'm sorry you think it would be harmful to people if they could run stuff off the hard drive while the disc was still in the system. I've laid out situations that the console developer themselves decide on, which is Microsoft. They have chosen to force people to use their product in their way or else.
Right, shame on them for not making it easy for pirates to rip them off./roll eyes
Are you physically incapable of considering alternative viewpoints?
If Sony said that there will be no region coding on their system would it kill the system
You STILL have no freeking clue about what the purpose of region coding serves. Its fine that you don't like it, but failure to even acknowledge its actual intent is ignorant.
If Sony said that there will be no region coding on their system would it kill the system? nope.
Time will tell. It certainly hasn't helped the PSP.
The fact they want to lock me up for moding my PS2 because I wanted to give them more money is hilarious.
If you don't want to be locked up, perhaps you shouldn't break the law... you may not LIKE the fact that the law is on their side, but it IS. They're on the right side of the law, and you're on the wrong side of it. Bitching about it won't fix it; do something about it or stop whining.
Except I can't play Japanese or European games with out a mod chip for the most part.
Complain to the game companies who choose different distributors to distribute games in different regions.
I can't play out of region DVDs.
Complain to the entity which refuses to license players which lack region lockouts.
I can't play any form of a backup of games I legally owned but was destroyed one way or another (I recently lost over 200 PSX and PS2 games because of a moving compnay, they can't find the boxes. Am I supposed to go rebuy Suikoden 1 and 2, Xenogears, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, and Disgaea all from scalpers on Ebay? )
Keep people from using "backups" that aren't really backups.
I can't install an OS on the hard drive if I wish to.
Buy a computer.
I can't install the game on the Hard drive for performance boosts (not all games and systems get it but leave it an option, maybe even allow me to install the game and then use the game as a boot disc but the game must remain in the system)
Keep people from "installing" the game on all of their friends consoles.
I can't load music from my disc unless it's a music cd, I own a couple hundred cds, I use mp3s for ease of use, I have my top 200+ songs on a single cd, now the 360 wants me to insert every CD I own to rerip them to get those songs?
Hook your 360 to your network and use Media Center Connect.
All this shit should at least have a way to achieve it.
In a world where everyone was honest and everything was fair, this shit would be available. Here, in the real world, people aren't honest. In the real world, there are bullshit licensing requirements and distribution agreements.
This crap doesn't exist because some guy working on the project thought it would be fun to introduce artificial restrictions... it exists because those restrictions are required for the product to be successful. That not only means that it must be purchased by consumers, but third parties must also be willing to produce content for it.
MS doesn't care about selling more consoles. They care about the attach rate. If they sell 2 million consoles and each person only purchases an extra controller and a mod-chip, they're going to loose boatloads of cash. If they believed that a mod-chip would result in more games and accessories being sold than without, they'd release one in a heartbeat.
I stopped reading the article after these morons complained that that can't use a 32bit function pointer to 32bit code to hook kernel calls in 64bit Windows...
They are all 1080p 3 chip rear projection lcos based displays with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio. They all have an HDMI input will actually accept a 1080p signal (all you need is a DVI->HDMI cable or adapter).
They are among the better displays on the market, though they certainly aren't the cheapest (the KDS-50A2000 MSRP is $2700).
Cross platform games are still tracked by platform, not as a lump sum. (though some "gaming news" sites do not make this clear and/or just show game sales total [ie: game sales = sum of each platform])
A security flaw requires some escallation of privlege -- the flaw must enable an attacker to perform an operation they would otherwise not be able to perform.
A shatter attack doesn't permit that. An attacker can't perform any new operations; they're just running in the context of a different process. In fact, there are far simpler ways for a process running on the machine to inject code into other processes, such as the CreateRemoteThread API.
I should probably qualify my previous comments a bit; if you're one of the 10 people on the planet that don't logon to XP as an Admin AND you start some process as Admin, then a shatter attack can result in privlege escallation on XP. With Vista, privlege escallation is no longer possible (processes can only send messages to other processes of an equal or lower IL).
The reason why it isn't considered a security flaw is that you can only send messages to windows that are in your current desktop session -- ie: you can't gain privleges that that user doesn't already have. Or put another way, whatever you sent via window messages could have been done in the calling process.
The intended purpose is to hurt Microsoft. The actual effect hurts people other than Microsoft. At best, it is the equivelent of rubbing a dog's nose in its own turd. The turd is still there, the dog wimpers and is ashamed, but you're still left cleaning the shit off of the carpet.
Telling people that you failed to prosecute a criminal only hurts the Police department. Shooting people because the Police department didn't prosecute a criminal hurts people other than the Police department.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not on crack. Speaking as a new owner of a 50" display, there is a HUGE difference between DVD video and a hidef signal. If you sit 16' away from the tv, there is no discernable difference. 8' away, and there is a significant difference.
If you want to argue about it, go right ahead. Nothing you say will change what my own eyes can plainly see.
The target audience for this article are those interested in upscaling dvd players (ie: dvd players used with an hd tv). Hooking one up to an SD CRT would be a pointless exercise.
d own_diagram.png
The effect you're complaining about is judder, not "pulldown". Pulldown is the process through which judder is introduced.
Movies on a dvd are telecined, whereby 24fps video is encoded at 30fps as shown in this wikipedia diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Three-two_pull
The judder created by this encoding scheme is not compounded by watching a movie on a PC unless your dvd player is absolute crap. The same goes with sound sync issues. I find it laughable that you consider such defects common in PCs, when an abundant amount of evidence to the contrary is present.
Reversing the telecine process is rather simple, and most players do so to reconstruct a 480p from from the 480i dvd source material. Meaning that your PC is working with a 24fps source.
In order to eliminate judder on your PC, set your refresh rate to a multiple of 24 (72hz or 120hz would be the most common refresh rates available). You don't need to set your refresh rate as low as 24hz.
Unfortunately, there are very few HD displays that ACCEPT input at rates other than 60hz. So you're still stuck with the level of judder you'd receive from a standalone player on those displays.
It isn't a marginal advantage. These machines have 8-16x more ram than their previous generation cousins, meaning the speed of the drive will have a much larger effect on load times.
There is a 3rd reason: performance. A 12x DVD drive has better seek and transfer rates than any currently available blue-whatever-laser based drive.
Hell, put it at the kernel level. The root problem still exists. Untrusted code running at the kernel level can do whatever it wants, including whatever it wants to other kernel code.
You're missing a crucial difference between this and the "examples" you cite.
You retain the record until a criminal investigation has been opened. This is akin to your browser history being used against you in a child-porn prosecution.
"The man" can't use the data for an alternate purpose, because they don't possess the data or have access to it on a whim.
Don't forget about Office 2003 ...
I'm not missing the point, though apparently you are.
Repeat after me: A security hole requires privlege escallation.
Installing a root kit when you already have admin rights is not an escallation of privilege. If you're running with admin permissions, you can walk all over the machine. You can modify system binaries with impunity, you can install drivers which run code in kernel mode, etc. If they were able to install a rootkit through a privlege escallation hole, THEN there would be a security issue.
Bullshit. Even when running as an Admin on Vista, any problem you launch runs with limited user privs. To get full admin privs in your process token, you have to have an applicaiton manifest which states "this program needs admin rights." This, in turn means that when you launch the program, a dialog appears asking the user if it is ok to run the app as an admin.
So, not only does this "hack" require the user to be logged in as Administrator, the user must click a yes on a "do you really meant to run bluepill.exe?" prompt.
The only legitimate break in the security model here was the end-user.
The length of a "frame" in network play depends on the connection latency. The higher the latency, the longer the frame. When deciding the length of a frame you can use connection statistics to determine a reasonable expected worst case situation to compensate for most types of lag you'd see in an online connection.
It isn't perfect mind you, but they did an excellent job all things considered.
$2000 is relatively inexpensive, considering the traditional cost of development tools and the hardware associated with it. Many people spend far more than that on their gaming PC...
Of course importers don't care; this isn't about importers. This is about distribution. Companies distributing in multiple regions do care about these things.
The question you should be asking yourself is this: does importing a game make it more or less likely for a title to be distributed in multiple regions (keeping in mind distributing in multiple regions does include additional costs). Ask yourself if your answer remains the same for a niche title vs a blockbuster title.
Except that's not the case, the person who says there's different regions is Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. Nintendo makes a game and Nintendo of America will distribute in America, That game is not able to be played in Japan unless I own a US version of the Nintendo console. Getting that US version of the console is also abnormally hard as it is. I should be able to buy a Japanese 360 if i wish to, I have to go to less than reputable organizations for that. Japanese Amazon can not sell me one because of agreements. That's not a console decision, not a distributor decision.
/roll eyes
... you may not LIKE the fact that the law is on their side, but it IS. They're on the right side of the law, and you're on the wrong side of it. Bitching about it won't fix it; do something about it or stop whining.
There isn't anything FORCING a company to use region coding. So why, you ask, would a company be stupid enough to do so? Legal bullshit.
Let me spell it out for you.
Company A produces a game.
Company B pays company A for exclusive rights to distribute game in X countries.
Company C pays company A for exclusive rights to distribute game in Y countries.
Now, how does company A enforce the exclusivity of the contracts they signed with companies B and C? Will company C ever bother to translate and distribute a title in region Y while having to compete with grey market imports?
You tell me. And keep in mind this impacts niche titles more than blockbusters.
I'm sorry you think it would be harmful to people if they could run stuff off the hard drive while the disc was still in the system. I've laid out situations that the console developer themselves decide on, which is Microsoft. They have chosen to force people to use their product in their way or else.
Right, shame on them for not making it easy for pirates to rip them off.
Are you physically incapable of considering alternative viewpoints?
If Sony said that there will be no region coding on their system would it kill the system
You STILL have no freeking clue about what the purpose of region coding serves. Its fine that you don't like it, but failure to even acknowledge its actual intent is ignorant.
If Sony said that there will be no region coding on their system would it kill the system? nope.
Time will tell. It certainly hasn't helped the PSP.
The fact they want to lock me up for moding my PS2 because I wanted to give them more money is hilarious.
If you don't want to be locked up, perhaps you shouldn't break the law
Except I can't play Japanese or European games with out a mod chip for the most part.
... it exists because those restrictions are required for the product to be successful. That not only means that it must be purchased by consumers, but third parties must also be willing to produce content for it.
Complain to the game companies who choose different distributors to distribute games in different regions.
I can't play out of region DVDs.
Complain to the entity which refuses to license players which lack region lockouts.
I can't play any form of a backup of games I legally owned but was destroyed one way or another (I recently lost over 200 PSX and PS2 games because of a moving compnay, they can't find the boxes. Am I supposed to go rebuy Suikoden 1 and 2, Xenogears, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, and Disgaea all from scalpers on Ebay? )
Keep people from using "backups" that aren't really backups.
I can't install an OS on the hard drive if I wish to.
Buy a computer.
I can't install the game on the Hard drive for performance boosts (not all games and systems get it but leave it an option, maybe even allow me to install the game and then use the game as a boot disc but the game must remain in the system)
Keep people from "installing" the game on all of their friends consoles.
I can't load music from my disc unless it's a music cd, I own a couple hundred cds, I use mp3s for ease of use, I have my top 200+ songs on a single cd, now the 360 wants me to insert every CD I own to rerip them to get those songs?
Hook your 360 to your network and use Media Center Connect.
All this shit should at least have a way to achieve it.
In a world where everyone was honest and everything was fair, this shit would be available. Here, in the real world, people aren't honest. In the real world, there are bullshit licensing requirements and distribution agreements.
This crap doesn't exist because some guy working on the project thought it would be fun to introduce artificial restrictions
MS doesn't care about selling more consoles. They care about the attach rate. If they sell 2 million consoles and each person only purchases an extra controller and a mod-chip, they're going to loose boatloads of cash. If they believed that a mod-chip would result in more games and accessories being sold than without, they'd release one in a heartbeat.
I stopped reading the article after these morons complained that that can't use a 32bit function pointer to 32bit code to hook kernel calls in 64bit Windows...
Look at the new Sony KDS-xxA2000 line just starting to roll out ( http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-S tart?ProductSKU=KDS50A2000 ). They'll be sold in 50", 55", and 60" versions. Or, if you've got the dough to blow, you can look at the XBR2 sets that will have 60" and 70" screens.
They are all 1080p 3 chip rear projection lcos based displays with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio. They all have an HDMI input will actually accept a 1080p signal (all you need is a DVI->HDMI cable or adapter).
They are among the better displays on the market, though they certainly aren't the cheapest (the KDS-50A2000 MSRP is $2700).
Cross platform games are still tracked by platform, not as a lump sum. (though some "gaming news" sites do not make this clear and/or just show game sales total [ie: game sales = sum of each platform])
Even that isn't news. They talked about a 256mb card during E3 if I recall correctly ...
3.3m sold in the US
/ 536283.aspx
1.3m sold in the EU
400k sold elsewhere
http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2006/07/20
A security flaw requires some escallation of privlege -- the flaw must enable an attacker to perform an operation they would otherwise not be able to perform.
A shatter attack doesn't permit that. An attacker can't perform any new operations; they're just running in the context of a different process. In fact, there are far simpler ways for a process running on the machine to inject code into other processes, such as the CreateRemoteThread API.
I should probably qualify my previous comments a bit; if you're one of the 10 people on the planet that don't logon to XP as an Admin AND you start some process as Admin, then a shatter attack can result in privlege escallation on XP. With Vista, privlege escallation is no longer possible (processes can only send messages to other processes of an equal or lower IL).
A shatter attack won't lead to an escallation of privlege on Vista. Windows with a given IL can only send messages to windows of an equal or lower IL.
The reason why it isn't considered a security flaw is that you can only send messages to windows that are in your current desktop session -- ie: you can't gain privleges that that user doesn't already have. Or put another way, whatever you sent via window messages could have been done in the calling process.
The intended purpose is to hurt Microsoft. The actual effect hurts people other than Microsoft. At best, it is the equivelent of rubbing a dog's nose in its own turd. The turd is still there, the dog wimpers and is ashamed, but you're still left cleaning the shit off of the carpet.
Telling people that you failed to prosecute a criminal only hurts the Police department. Shooting people because the Police department didn't prosecute a criminal hurts people other than the Police department.
Microsoft is the manufacturer of the door. The door allowed the user to leave the home without locking it.