I'd guess it serves a second purpose. Gabe Newell has previously asked for help from the community in helping to track down the people responsible for the leak. If you believe that the break-in caused a four month delay, then the perpetrator has hurt not only Valve but the millions of people eagerly awaiting the game. My guess is that they hope the desire for retribution will encourage people to perhaps be more forthcoming with information about the cracker.
As for security in the network portion of the code, if it were well-designed to begin with, its security would be dependent upon a key and not the secrecy of the encryption algorithm. I highly doubt that's the cause of a four-month delay, and I doubt even more that a publisher would see that as justification for missing the holiday shopping season.
Bzzt. The DRM's not in the DVD drive. That's standard.
The XBox was designed from the ground up to be as difficult to hack as possible. According to Bunnie's surprisingly interesting Hacking the XBox, there's security pretty much everywhere. They even went as far as to place dummy cypher code and boot images in ROM to confuse potential hackers. The bottom line is that, without modification, every piece of code run on the XBox must be cryptographically signed, regardless of where it came from. By running unsigned code, you are circumventing the DRM on the console and most likely violating the DMCA. I don't much like that fact myself, but that's the way it is.
The CPU, however, is a standard off-the-shelf component. The DRM code itself (along with the real boot image), IIRC, is contained in the nVidia-manufactured southbridge chipset. Swapping the CPU out should be fine. Not that it'll make much of a difference, I'm guessing.
...the large print in the poster says something to the extent of "More than a game, look at these super-new images!" It seems to imply that it's a game. I'd do a more thorough job of translating, but I'm at work.
Regardless of what people are saying, it's most likely a game. Remember that FFX and FFX-2 were both games that were released on DVD media. There have also been rumors of a direct FFVII sequel floating around for some time. Nomura himself has commented on it. It's a game, it comes out next year, and it's most likely for PS2.
A group of IBM fab workers (presumably the same group) made an appearance on NBC's Dateline to discuss this very issue five years ago. Here's a transcript.
The UI won't be CPU-intensive at all. Like OS X, Longhorn is completely 3D. Everything is a textured surface to be rendered by the GPU. However, the requirements for graphics cards in Longhorn were released a while ago, and they're pretty steep. (DirectX 9-compliant devices will be required for most of the better effects; DX7 devices for minimal functionality.)
PS2 has Madden (and probably various other EA Sports titles) and a port of Everquest. I think that's about it at the moment. FFXI will be coming out later this year, though.
XBox Live seems ok, but EA has no plans to support it anytime soon (so all the EA titles are single-player only) and it costs money annually. AFAIK, FFXI will not be available for XBox.
The worst game I've played in years is Square's infamous Unlimited SaGa. Generally, I have the good sense to avoid things like this, but I've always had a weakness for Square games, and I thoroughly enjoyed its predecessor, SaGa Frontier 2.
Sure, every publication in the world slammed this game. But none of them managed to adequately portray how miserable it is. The game looks gorgeous, but beauty can be severely misleading. I've never had a worse gameplay experience. It's so bad that it defies description.
If anyone is considering buying this steaming pile of refuse, take the advice of an admitted Square fanboy who usually likes the RPG's that the reviewers pan:
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. PLAYING IT IS AKIN TO HAVING YOUR BRAIN RIPPED OUT OF YOUR HEAD WHILE MIKE TYSON DOES UNSPEAKABLE THINGS TO YOUR BEHIND.
PS2's do have their share of mechanical problems. I've had two of them fail on me, and I've heard many similar stories from friends. There's a glitch that can cause the console to scrape the surface of PS2 CD's (the blue-bottom ones) and render them utterly useless. The DVD drive is prone to serious issues as well--you've never gotten the dreaded "Disc Read Error" from your PS2? This would almost be understandable if Sony didn't charge $120 to take your console apart and clean it. (If you take it apart, they won't service it for any amount of money.)
It's worth noting that I had a PSX for years and never had any problems with it.
Sony's become the typical 80% market share fat cat. They don't care about your problems, and they have no incentive to--they already dominate the market.
There's a bit of information already available on FFXII. For one, it will be produced by Yasumi Matsuno, who headed development on FF Tactics and Vagrant Story. Akihiko Yoshida, also a part of the FFT team, will be FFXII's character designer, displacing Tetsuya Nomura (Character designer for VII, VIII, X and Kingdom Hearts). Hideo Minaba (of FFIX and FFT) will be the art director. Nobuo Uematsu is confirmed to be working on music for FFXII, but I wouldn't be surprised if he weren't the only composer on the project. (FFX had 3; the names of the other two elude me at the moment. The guy who composed for the recent SaGa games was one of them.)
There are a few pieces of preliminary artwork available: a simple poster and a profile of a few of the more prominent members of the development team.
I'd think it would be in Diebold's best interest to get these problems corrected ASAP. If vulnerable machines are deployed in elections, someone will exploit them. The stakes in a major political election are so high that the flaws will attract enormous quantities of attention from those with less-than-morally-upstanding intentions.
What I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet is that many, many media organizations conduct very accurate exit polls on election days. If there is a sudden inconsistency in vote counts, it will be noticed, and it will be investigated. By the next evening, everyone in America who owns a TV will realize what's going on. I'd imagine that this would induce a bit of an uproar among the populace, and any confidence that people have in electronic voting would vanish immediately. The whole nation would immedately regress to punch-card voting, and would most likely remain there for years to come.
Which would make it kind of hard for Diebold to sell electronic voting machines.
Making movies from licenses from good movies isn't necessarily hard. I think the main factor in explaining why almost all movie licenses suck is that most movie-licensed games must be released, ready or not, at the same time as their respective movies. Add to that the fact that the production cycle of a typical movie is shorter than that of the average game, and you have a recipe for disaster that smells vaguely like most of what Acclaim releases.
There's no reason that licensed games have to suck. Somedon't. (Goldeneye was released years after its movie counterpart, and didn't really have a strict deadline to meet.) It's just that rushed games tend to suck.
Producing a good game nowadays requires more time and money than most licensors realize. When licensed games are treated less as a marketing tie-in and more as separate entities, their quality will improve dramatically.
A few gigs? Hardly. Let's go with a conservative estimate of 1 MB per book. Amazon has, IIRC, over a million books in their collection. That's a terabyte of data right there. Not to mention that in the state that they'd likely be in, you'd need an enterprise-class database server just to retrieve the information.
I don't know where 'Jenseits von Gut und Bose' came from, but the subtitle of Episode I, 'Der Wille zur Macht,' was pulled from the writings of Nietzsche. He spoke German.:)
The Xenosaga series is targeted toward the hardcore RPG fan demographic. People like that won't care if a game has a German title, and people who do care would most likely not enjoy the game's long-winded and extremely complex story.
That other 90% falls into the "put parentheses around everything else" catagory.
That all depends on where you draw that line of distinction. The fact that most people (myself included) do not know the order of precedence and favor "cheating" using parentheses over actually learning the order speaks volumes about the difficulty of it.
What does increment operator "good practice" have to do with the complexity of operator precedence? The fact that it's there and can be used all over the place means that people will use it, which in turn means other people have to read it and understand it.
It's possible to write a fairly straightforward C++ program. The problem is that the language is so munged and complex that virtually no one bothers doing so.
What are you talking about? You're forgetting 90% of C's operators, from the increment and decrement operators to the sizeof operator to bitwise math and shifts to boolean logic to casts to assignment to the comma.
...I know at least three people that independently named Barret Wallace of FFVII "Frogman." It remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of life, even today,
The bandwidth is there if you really want it. It would just cost more than the fifty cents they pay in postal fees. And far more people have mailboxes than high-speed connections and huge hard drives.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess it serves a second purpose. Gabe Newell has previously asked for help from the community in helping to track down the people responsible for the leak. If you believe that the break-in caused a four month delay, then the perpetrator has hurt not only Valve but the millions of people eagerly awaiting the game. My guess is that they hope the desire for retribution will encourage people to perhaps be more forthcoming with information about the cracker.
As for security in the network portion of the code, if it were well-designed to begin with, its security would be dependent upon a key and not the secrecy of the encryption algorithm. I highly doubt that's the cause of a four-month delay, and I doubt even more that a publisher would see that as justification for missing the holiday shopping season.
Zelda 3 is currently being sold as a GBA port. That's why it's not in the package.
Bzzt. The DRM's not in the DVD drive. That's standard.
The XBox was designed from the ground up to be as difficult to hack as possible. According to Bunnie's surprisingly interesting Hacking the XBox, there's security pretty much everywhere. They even went as far as to place dummy cypher code and boot images in ROM to confuse potential hackers. The bottom line is that, without modification, every piece of code run on the XBox must be cryptographically signed, regardless of where it came from. By running unsigned code, you are circumventing the DRM on the console and most likely violating the DMCA. I don't much like that fact myself, but that's the way it is.
The CPU, however, is a standard off-the-shelf component. The DRM code itself (along with the real boot image), IIRC, is contained in the nVidia-manufactured southbridge chipset. Swapping the CPU out should be fine. Not that it'll make much of a difference, I'm guessing.
...the large print in the poster says something to the extent of "More than a game, look at these super-new images!" It seems to imply that it's a game. I'd do a more thorough job of translating, but I'm at work.
Regardless of what people are saying, it's most likely a game. Remember that FFX and FFX-2 were both games that were released on DVD media. There have also been rumors of a direct FFVII sequel floating around for some time. Nomura himself has commented on it. It's a game, it comes out next year, and it's most likely for PS2.
A group of IBM fab workers (presumably the same group) made an appearance on NBC's Dateline to discuss this very issue five years ago. Here's a transcript.
The UI won't be CPU-intensive at all. Like OS X, Longhorn is completely 3D. Everything is a textured surface to be rendered by the GPU. However, the requirements for graphics cards in Longhorn were released a while ago, and they're pretty steep. (DirectX 9-compliant devices will be required for most of the better effects; DX7 devices for minimal functionality.)
PS2 has Madden (and probably various other EA Sports titles) and a port of Everquest. I think that's about it at the moment. FFXI will be coming out later this year, though.
XBox Live seems ok, but EA has no plans to support it anytime soon (so all the EA titles are single-player only) and it costs money annually. AFAIK, FFXI will not be available for XBox.
I've heard all sorts of stories about Ph.Ds being less likely to find a job than their less-educated counterparts, but not a lot of credible evidence.
So if you're looking for something other than anecdotal evidence, why are you asking Slashdot readers to share their experiences?
The worst game I've played in years is Square's infamous Unlimited SaGa. Generally, I have the good sense to avoid things like this, but I've always had a weakness for Square games, and I thoroughly enjoyed its predecessor, SaGa Frontier 2.
Sure, every publication in the world slammed this game. But none of them managed to adequately portray how miserable it is. The game looks gorgeous, but beauty can be severely misleading. I've never had a worse gameplay experience. It's so bad that it defies description.
If anyone is considering buying this steaming pile of refuse, take the advice of an admitted Square fanboy who usually likes the RPG's that the reviewers pan:
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. PLAYING IT IS AKIN TO HAVING YOUR BRAIN RIPPED OUT OF YOUR HEAD WHILE MIKE TYSON DOES UNSPEAKABLE THINGS TO YOUR BEHIND.
You have been warned.
Look at the date.
You have an output port on your behind.
Do yoga.
Alternately, be reincarnated as Darl McBride.
Andre LaMothe has plenty of book deals. He's the editor of the Prima/Premier Press game development series.
It's worth noting that I had a PSX for years and never had any problems with it.
Sony's become the typical 80% market share fat cat. They don't care about your problems, and they have no incentive to--they already dominate the market.
There's a bit of information already available on FFXII. For one, it will be produced by Yasumi Matsuno, who headed development on FF Tactics and Vagrant Story. Akihiko Yoshida, also a part of the FFT team, will be FFXII's character designer, displacing Tetsuya Nomura (Character designer for VII, VIII, X and Kingdom Hearts). Hideo Minaba (of FFIX and FFT) will be the art director. Nobuo Uematsu is confirmed to be working on music for FFXII, but I wouldn't be surprised if he weren't the only composer on the project. (FFX had 3; the names of the other two elude me at the moment. The guy who composed for the recent SaGa games was one of them.)
There are a few pieces of preliminary artwork available: a simple poster and a profile of a few of the more prominent members of the development team.
I'd think it would be in Diebold's best interest to get these problems corrected ASAP. If vulnerable machines are deployed in elections, someone will exploit them. The stakes in a major political election are so high that the flaws will attract enormous quantities of attention from those with less-than-morally-upstanding intentions.
What I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet is that many, many media organizations conduct very accurate exit polls on election days. If there is a sudden inconsistency in vote counts, it will be noticed, and it will be investigated. By the next evening, everyone in America who owns a TV will realize what's going on. I'd imagine that this would induce a bit of an uproar among the populace, and any confidence that people have in electronic voting would vanish immediately. The whole nation would immedately regress to punch-card voting, and would most likely remain there for years to come.
Which would make it kind of hard for Diebold to sell electronic voting machines.
Making movies from licenses from good movies isn't necessarily hard. I think the main factor in explaining why almost all movie licenses suck is that most movie-licensed games must be released, ready or not, at the same time as their respective movies. Add to that the fact that the production cycle of a typical movie is shorter than that of the average game, and you have a recipe for disaster that smells vaguely like most of what Acclaim releases.
There's no reason that licensed games have to suck. Some don't. (Goldeneye was released years after its movie counterpart, and didn't really have a strict deadline to meet.) It's just that rushed games tend to suck.
Producing a good game nowadays requires more time and money than most licensors realize. When licensed games are treated less as a marketing tie-in and more as separate entities, their quality will improve dramatically.
A few gigs? Hardly. Let's go with a conservative estimate of 1 MB per book. Amazon has, IIRC, over a million books in their collection. That's a terabyte of data right there. Not to mention that in the state that they'd likely be in, you'd need an enterprise-class database server just to retrieve the information.
No, that was Valkyrie Studios.
I don't know where 'Jenseits von Gut und Bose' came from, but the subtitle of Episode I, 'Der Wille zur Macht,' was pulled from the writings of Nietzsche. He spoke German. :)
The Xenosaga series is targeted toward the hardcore RPG fan demographic. People like that won't care if a game has a German title, and people who do care would most likely not enjoy the game's long-winded and extremely complex story.
Perhaps his comment on Gates is instead a gentle dig at the American religion of capitalism?
That'd be rather hypocritical, as the Japanese are every bit as capitalist as we are, if not more so.
That other 90% falls into the "put parentheses around everything else" catagory.
That all depends on where you draw that line of distinction. The fact that most people (myself included) do not know the order of precedence and favor "cheating" using parentheses over actually learning the order speaks volumes about the difficulty of it.
What does increment operator "good practice" have to do with the complexity of operator precedence? The fact that it's there and can be used all over the place means that people will use it, which in turn means other people have to read it and understand it.
It's possible to write a fairly straightforward C++ program. The problem is that the language is so munged and complex that virtually no one bothers doing so.
What are you talking about? You're forgetting 90% of C's operators, from the increment and decrement operators to the sizeof operator to bitwise math and shifts to boolean logic to casts to assignment to the comma.
This is obviously some definition of "cool" that I have never seen before.
...I know at least three people that independently named Barret Wallace of FFVII "Frogman." It remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of life, even today,
The bandwidth is there if you really want it. It would just cost more than the fifty cents they pay in postal fees. And far more people have mailboxes than high-speed connections and huge hard drives.