Patents don't work that way. They can choose to enforce (or not enforce) at any time, without losing the right to enforce the patent in any way (through implicit licenses or whatever). The only thing that can limit their enforcement of the patent is the expiration of the protection granted by the patent.
Actually, something like that seems optimal for a GTA-style MMO game. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to choose a side, whether cop or criminal. Furthermore, you could have informants and cops on the take, so that not all the cops are good guys, and not all the criminals are bad guys, so everyone has to decide who they can and can't trust.
One trick? Vivendi owns a little company called Valve.
No, Vivendi does not own Valve. Valve published Half-Life through a Vivendi-owned company called Sierra, but Valve itself is privately owned and funded (mostly by Gabe Newell). They are not a public company, nor are they owned by anyone other than themselves.
Don't forget the PSX. If they're expecting decent sales of the unit they'll need quite a few more chips than they're producing now. They're also still selling quite a bit more than 2 million PS2s a year (1,707,000 in Japan alone in 2003 through the first week of last month). Who knows what they're really planning to do with these smaller chips, though, as they're obviously not ramping up production to put out more of the current package, unless they plan on revamping the PS2's package once they get production up and get a decent stockpile of these processors.
Note, though, that they stated only the microprocessor and graphics processor have been combined. This excepts the I/O chip, which is the part that acts as a PS1.
Actually, they announced the combining of the CPU and GPU a few months ago, but now they're doing it with the '90-nanometer' technology, meaning it will be even smaller.
The combination of the PS2 chips is also part of what lead to rumours that the PS3 may not do PS1 compatibility, though that still hasn't been confirmed or denied.
I'd say any version of windows is worse. Not to mention new.net, or gator, how about MS office thats definatly worse, quicktime and its download manager?! Cmon mozilla's suite is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
Would anyone willingly install new.net or gator? No, I think not, half the people making recommendations in this thread are including programs that will remove that stuff. MS Office at least gives you choices during the installation process and installs only what's selected. Quicktime doesn't even belong on a non-Apple system, though it's unavoidable if you absolutely must view Sorenson-encoded material. When I install a browser, I expect a browser, hence I use Firebird. If I want email, IRC, calender, WinAmp, etc, I'll install them on my own.
Ouch! why not suggest Outlook or incredimail already, can you say virus prone! You admitedly know nothing about the newest version of thunderbird yet are instructing a user to use ANYthing else!
Use Thunderbird itself rather than the Mozilla suite. I, personally, do use Outlook, because it works for my purposes, and no, I never have had a virus, isn't that interesting?
Like what? checking viru.. I mean mail?
Thunderbird has a built in bayes filter to learn what each user thinks is junk mail, combine this with messagewall and or spamassassin and you have a very reliable spam trap.
Must be nice if those are your requirements. The only filters I use on my mail are to seperate incoming mail based on sender and what address it was sent to. Junk mail/spam simply isn't a problem on my accounts.
I didn't exactly carry around the TI-99/4A or the various Apple II clones we had when I was a kid (and the Apple IIgs we had when I was in 6th grade or the 4x86 we had later). If I had, it probably would've been useless within a year, regardless of how well I tried to care for it.
A notebook, even with a good bag, would've been destroyed as quickly as most of my 3-ring binders were, usually within the first week of school. I wasn't even trying to destroy them, I just didn't think of the consequences of throwing my backpack 3 feet against the wall where it would drop to the ground next to where I planned to sit. It wasn't until high school that I really managed to make most of the stuff last through a semester.
Look at Firebird and stay very far away from the bloated Mozilla app suite.
Use just about anything else for email, though I haven't touched Mozilla's mail client in years, everyone has their own requirements for them anyway. If Mozilla mail works for you, try Thunderbird rather than the app suite. Nothing's worse than the amount of crap the suite installs on your system.
If it is non-networked, how is it going to get a virus
Persumably, home users aren't too worried about a virus on other people's computers. A network-enabled virus scanner would generally be used to scan other computers for viruses, such as a network administrator running a virus scanner that scans every computer on the network rather than running a virus scanner on each computer individually.
Actually, yes. As a scientist I have always wondered how the computer nerds (which i'm myself now) can get away with using Kilo and Mega inappropriatly. I'm very glad the IEC is finally trying to come up with a solution. It will get a lot clearer for everybody.
It's masturbatory on the part of any industry standards body that attempts to change the common use of a particular word (in this case, kilobyte/bit, megabyte/bit, and gigabyte/bit). Due to the fact that computers use base 2 mathematics somewhat natively, anything related is calculated in base 2 mathematics. If someone had gotten on their case about using kilo, mega, giga, etc improperly say 40 years ago, something may have been done about it, but as it stands now you're likely to run into confusion for at least the next 40 years, if not indefintely.
That, and until there are 10 bits in a byte, there's not much point to there being 1000 bytes in a kilobyte and 1000KB in 1MB and 1000MB in 1GB.
The operating system uses GB just as it has been used in the computer industry since it's beginning. The NIST can't change that, regardless of how much they'd like to, and the prefix Gibi (or GiB, though cool in some ways, isn't any better) just isn't going to happen in normal speech any time soon.
Actually, though, as far as I have discerned, most geeks know quite well what's going on with the hard drive sizes. It's the average user that comes home with a new drive and has someone install it for them that asks wtf is going on when their 120,000,000 byte hard drive that was advertised as 120GB is actually 113GB.
Come up with your own prefixes if you want to measure them at base 2.
Bytes are a base 2 measurement, as well, and are the source of the entire problem. A byte is 8 bits, or 2^3 bits. A kilobyte is 2^10 bytes, or 1024 bytes. A megabyte is 2^10 kilobytes. A gigabyte is 2^10 megabytes.
Of course, then there's the ever-present megabit vs megabyte, where a megabit = 1 * 1024 * 1024 or 1 * 1000 * 1000 while a megabyte = 8 * 1 megabit (this is most often a problem in networking rather than storage, 56K modems are among the worst offenders, due to requiring compression to acheive even best-case numbers and most 56K techniques only yielding 53000bits/sec under perfect conditions).
Anyway, back to the base 2 thing, even your RAM still comes in base 2 increments, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 MB sticks of RAM (the last mentioned being 1GB). Hard drive manufacturers and the manufacturers of network equipment almost completely rely on these methods to sell more product, but at the same time they're all using the same numbers across the board (no manufacturer is claiming their drive sizes in base 2), and most of them are covering their own asses (by stating, more or less, that it's in base 10, somewhere on the box).
There's also a hell of a difference between a spanking and a beating.
I had absolutely nothing but love for both of my parents until my mother graduated from spankings to slaps on the face and throwing into walls. Even occasional things for excessive problems wouldn't have been a really big deal, might've pissed me off for a while (much like the poster's child was mad at him for a few days, though I'd say pissing his pants was extreme), but overall wouldn't have hurt my relationship with my mother. The fact that it became her sole form of punishment for just about anything was what made it clear that she was unfit to be a parent (and frankly, the part about throwing me into a wall is what made it really clear to my father that she was unfit to raise his children).
That being said, even though my mother was obviously over the line in many cases, I learned (actually from the spanking alone) a healthy fear of punishment in general (no fear of my parents, though, my father is one of my best friends). It kept me out of trouble throughout my teenage years, even if I did occasionally do things behind my parents' backs (and frankly, most teenagers do, but if they don't want to be punished, it's less likely they'll do anything that will come back to the parents, or get in trouble with the law or in school).
The question is whether or not you react more to sexual depictions because sex has a more profound effect on people or because access to it is much more limited in some areas (like the US).
The problem with trying to study it, of course, is that there are ethical issues with sex itself in the US. The only thing you can really do is make observations based on the behavior of people in countries that are much more open sexually, and even then you have to question whether or not the effects would be the same given the different moral cultures.
A movie about media's obsession with violence, it's fairly easy to see why the media would be upset over it. Beyond that, it's also fairly easy for a lot of people to miss the point of the movie, even after several portions of violence were removed to get an R rating.
do you also have a problem with video stores that won't rent porno to 10 year olds too then? ratings are there for a reason.
porn isn't normally submitted for ratings in the first place (no, X is not a rating handed down by the same people that rate the movies PG and R in your local theater, NC-17 is the closest they have).
Furthermore, there's a mixture of local, state, and federal laws regarding the availability of porn to minors that means regardless of your personal views or the views of the store owners, they can not make the videos available to minors, and neither can you (even to your own 17 year old son/daughter).
You can't get high grades if you can't perform well in groups. I know that at my university you can't even graduate unless you perform well on a group based senior design project.
I, on the other hand, would never continue my education in a school knowing it required this sort of project. I work perfectly fine with other people in a work environment, but in a school environment, working in groups always feels more like carrying the weight of others and doing the teacher's job for him/her. Not to mention that if you're graded as a group, the 4.0 student's grade is going to come down, while other students are brought up, making the grade itself worthless.
Personally, I saw this throughout grade school and high school, and eventually I just got sick of it. It was fairly routine that I'd get stuck with extremely under-performing students because the teachers felt that I might help them (whether in behavior or in grades), while in reality it just distracted from any real learning.
In a work environment, on the other hand, if someone's not pulling their weight, everyone knows about it, and they usually get transferred to another project (something easier for them, like inventory, which takes up about 3-6 months of each year for a small group of people).
I play fiddle in a punk band [siobhan.ca] that seriously doesn't suck.
Punk bands are supposed to suck. Just one of my pet peeves, I guess, but it seems that punk bands of the last 10 years or so have lost sight of this (not that they don't suck, but rather they think they don't suck). It's supposed to be offensive music in bad taste and deliberately so.
Anyway, no personal offense I hope, it's just something that gets to me.
PSX was never meant to be the acronym used for the PSOne/1, but was used internally for the system and found it's way into mainstream usage.
I think Sony's trying to cash in on name recognition, even if the name recognition doesn't really help them. They can't really call it a PS3, and PS2.5 would basically detract from the real point of the device: extending the PS2's market space into a mostly unrelated market. They're basically trying to come in with a high end DVR device, and throwing a PS2 into the thing is fairly cheap (for Sony) and extends the PS2's market to include people that might not otherwise buy a PS2 (which is something they need since their numbers are dropping, though this is unlikely to recover even a large percent of the numbers).
well, i haven't known anybody to play half-life online too much, ever. they play counter strike which (conviently for valve, and very luckily for them as well) happened to born as an addon for half-life
It doesn't matter which mod they're playing, it's still Half-Life. CS regularly has some 50-60K users online (or at least last time I looked), but the game itself sold about 7 million copies in the US.
(well, i never knew too many people who played tfc when compared to the hordes that play cs, and kept half-life selling for years after the usual shelf life of a pc game).
To each their own, I only play CS at LAN parties, and haven't been to one of those in about 2 years. Of course it keeps the game selling much longer, though, even if people are only buying a replacement copy for the extra CD Key or to keep from having to download the patches.
It is bad for the game not to ship in time for XMas, but there are many cases where games missed the date and still did very well. It would be significantly worse in terms of mod development and long-term sales if the multiplayer portion was easily hacked and cheaters ran rampant. The original Half-Life was remarkably resistant to this problem for quite a while, despite having the largest multiplayer FPS fan-base (even before CS).
or do some type of aimbots do some dynamic patching of the executable?
Many aimbots use DirectX to 'scrape' the screen and send spoofed mouse + keyboard inputs to the executable. There's also the possibility of finding holes in the code, or wrapping game DLLs (or DirectX DLLs as above, though many HL bots and hacks use OpenGL wrappers).
Yes, dynamic patching is also an option, used especially for things like radar hacks and others. Also used against anti-cheat software.
Since VU is operating at a substantial lost, they are prime to be saved by Bill Gate's wallet. Since Half Life2 [neoseeker.com] and Xbox2 [arstechnica.com] are both optimized to run on ATI's hardware, I can see the Richmond's Borg needing their killer app for XBOX2. Gates says "Hmmmm, Half Life2 sounds good. Buy them out boys!"
One big problem: VU doesn't own Valve. VU owns Sierra, and Sierra is the publisher for Half-Life (and currently for HL2), but Valve owns Half-Life 2 and is self-funded. Gabe Newell formed Valve with his own money (gotten from being a well-payed Microsoft employee) and funded Half-Life without Sierra's (or VU) help. This is why Valve was able to delay Half-Life for a year in the first place. This is why Valve can push back HL2 without VU forcing it out when VU is operating at a loss. VU has no say in when the game is released unless their own QA finds problems with the final code and sends it back to Valve for more work (in other words, Sierra can delay HL2, but they can't force it to be released early).
Microsoft could probably buy Valve if they wanted HL2 bad enough, but I think it would be more than it's worth, since Valve is privately owned, self-funded, and making money hand over fist off the best-selling FPS of all time.
moreover, IT'S A SINGLE PLAYER GAME mainly. and fuck, some id's games can be played pretty decently still on public servers when the source has been out for years
No one would still be playing Half-Life if it was selling for single player only (that being said, it's sold about 140x as many copies as there have been people playing it online).
As for id's games, Quake was completely pointless to play after the source was released. It may be significantly better now, after people have spent years working on anti-cheat software for the game, but for the year after release you couldn't join a game without at least one person using a blatantly hacked client, and who knows how many others using more subtle cheats. I didn't even bother trying Quake 2 after the source release, as I was already playing TFC (and by that time dealing with cheaters there, too).
That being said, I can only see the source release being a fairly minor delay, depending on how heavily Steam and the CD key verification need to be rewritten. For the rest of their code, they just need to be extra careful in reviewing their code for exploits, as now they have plenty of other eyes looking for anything that might be missed in the final code, and probably at least a dozen little utilities being developed to scan the HL2 binaries for anything found in that code.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents don't work that way. They can choose to enforce (or not enforce) at any time, without losing the right to enforce the patent in any way (through implicit licenses or whatever). The only thing that can limit their enforcement of the patent is the expiration of the protection granted by the patent.
Actually, something like that seems optimal for a GTA-style MMO game. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to choose a side, whether cop or criminal. Furthermore, you could have informants and cops on the take, so that not all the cops are good guys, and not all the criminals are bad guys, so everyone has to decide who they can and can't trust.
he did say open source or otherwise, though he might have been looking for free or cheap software.
Not only did that not happen, but Vivendi doesn't own Valve, either. No one but Valve owns Valve.
One trick? Vivendi owns a little company called Valve.
No, Vivendi does not own Valve. Valve published Half-Life through a Vivendi-owned company called Sierra, but Valve itself is privately owned and funded (mostly by Gabe Newell). They are not a public company, nor are they owned by anyone other than themselves.
Don't forget the PSX. If they're expecting decent sales of the unit they'll need quite a few more chips than they're producing now. They're also still selling quite a bit more than 2 million PS2s a year (1,707,000 in Japan alone in 2003 through the first week of last month). Who knows what they're really planning to do with these smaller chips, though, as they're obviously not ramping up production to put out more of the current package, unless they plan on revamping the PS2's package once they get production up and get a decent stockpile of these processors.
Note, though, that they stated only the microprocessor and graphics processor have been combined. This excepts the I/O chip, which is the part that acts as a PS1.
Actually, they announced the combining of the CPU and GPU a few months ago, but now they're doing it with the '90-nanometer' technology, meaning it will be even smaller.
The combination of the PS2 chips is also part of what lead to rumours that the PS3 may not do PS1 compatibility, though that still hasn't been confirmed or denied.
I'd say any version of windows is worse. Not to mention new.net, or gator, how about MS office thats definatly worse, quicktime and its download manager?! Cmon mozilla's suite is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
Would anyone willingly install new.net or gator? No, I think not, half the people making recommendations in this thread are including programs that will remove that stuff. MS Office at least gives you choices during the installation process and installs only what's selected. Quicktime doesn't even belong on a non-Apple system, though it's unavoidable if you absolutely must view Sorenson-encoded material. When I install a browser, I expect a browser, hence I use Firebird. If I want email, IRC, calender, WinAmp, etc, I'll install them on my own.
Ouch! why not suggest Outlook or incredimail already, can you say virus prone! You admitedly know nothing about the newest version of thunderbird yet are instructing a user to use ANYthing else!
Use Thunderbird itself rather than the Mozilla suite. I, personally, do use Outlook, because it works for my purposes, and no, I never have had a virus, isn't that interesting?
Like what? checking viru.. I mean mail?
Thunderbird has a built in bayes filter to learn what each user thinks is junk mail, combine this with messagewall and or spamassassin and you have a very reliable spam trap.
Must be nice if those are your requirements. The only filters I use on my mail are to seperate incoming mail based on sender and what address it was sent to. Junk mail/spam simply isn't a problem on my accounts.
I didn't exactly carry around the TI-99/4A or the various Apple II clones we had when I was a kid (and the Apple IIgs we had when I was in 6th grade or the 4x86 we had later). If I had, it probably would've been useless within a year, regardless of how well I tried to care for it.
A notebook, even with a good bag, would've been destroyed as quickly as most of my 3-ring binders were, usually within the first week of school. I wasn't even trying to destroy them, I just didn't think of the consequences of throwing my backpack 3 feet against the wall where it would drop to the ground next to where I planned to sit. It wasn't until high school that I really managed to make most of the stuff last through a semester.
Look at Firebird and stay very far away from the bloated Mozilla app suite.
Use just about anything else for email, though I haven't touched Mozilla's mail client in years, everyone has their own requirements for them anyway. If Mozilla mail works for you, try Thunderbird rather than the app suite. Nothing's worse than the amount of crap the suite installs on your system.
If it is non-networked, how is it going to get a virus
Persumably, home users aren't too worried about a virus on other people's computers. A network-enabled virus scanner would generally be used to scan other computers for viruses, such as a network administrator running a virus scanner that scans every computer on the network rather than running a virus scanner on each computer individually.
Actually, yes. As a scientist I have always wondered how the computer nerds (which i'm myself now) can get away with using Kilo and Mega inappropriatly. I'm very glad the IEC is finally trying to come up with a solution. It will get a lot clearer for everybody.
It's masturbatory on the part of any industry standards body that attempts to change the common use of a particular word (in this case, kilobyte/bit, megabyte/bit, and gigabyte/bit). Due to the fact that computers use base 2 mathematics somewhat natively, anything related is calculated in base 2 mathematics. If someone had gotten on their case about using kilo, mega, giga, etc improperly say 40 years ago, something may have been done about it, but as it stands now you're likely to run into confusion for at least the next 40 years, if not indefintely.
That, and until there are 10 bits in a byte, there's not much point to there being 1000 bytes in a kilobyte and 1000KB in 1MB and 1000MB in 1GB.
So what's a byte again?
The operating system uses GB just as it has been used in the computer industry since it's beginning. The NIST can't change that, regardless of how much they'd like to, and the prefix Gibi (or GiB, though cool in some ways, isn't any better) just isn't going to happen in normal speech any time soon.
Actually, though, as far as I have discerned, most geeks know quite well what's going on with the hard drive sizes. It's the average user that comes home with a new drive and has someone install it for them that asks wtf is going on when their 120,000,000 byte hard drive that was advertised as 120GB is actually 113GB.
Come up with your own prefixes if you want to measure them at base 2.
Bytes are a base 2 measurement, as well, and are the source of the entire problem. A byte is 8 bits, or 2^3 bits. A kilobyte is 2^10 bytes, or 1024 bytes. A megabyte is 2^10 kilobytes. A gigabyte is 2^10 megabytes.
Of course, then there's the ever-present megabit vs megabyte, where a megabit = 1 * 1024 * 1024 or 1 * 1000 * 1000 while a megabyte = 8 * 1 megabit (this is most often a problem in networking rather than storage, 56K modems are among the worst offenders, due to requiring compression to acheive even best-case numbers and most 56K techniques only yielding 53000bits/sec under perfect conditions).
Anyway, back to the base 2 thing, even your RAM still comes in base 2 increments, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 MB sticks of RAM (the last mentioned being 1GB). Hard drive manufacturers and the manufacturers of network equipment almost completely rely on these methods to sell more product, but at the same time they're all using the same numbers across the board (no manufacturer is claiming their drive sizes in base 2), and most of them are covering their own asses (by stating, more or less, that it's in base 10, somewhere on the box).
There's also a hell of a difference between a spanking and a beating.
I had absolutely nothing but love for both of my parents until my mother graduated from spankings to slaps on the face and throwing into walls. Even occasional things for excessive problems wouldn't have been a really big deal, might've pissed me off for a while (much like the poster's child was mad at him for a few days, though I'd say pissing his pants was extreme), but overall wouldn't have hurt my relationship with my mother. The fact that it became her sole form of punishment for just about anything was what made it clear that she was unfit to be a parent (and frankly, the part about throwing me into a wall is what made it really clear to my father that she was unfit to raise his children).
That being said, even though my mother was obviously over the line in many cases, I learned (actually from the spanking alone) a healthy fear of punishment in general (no fear of my parents, though, my father is one of my best friends). It kept me out of trouble throughout my teenage years, even if I did occasionally do things behind my parents' backs (and frankly, most teenagers do, but if they don't want to be punished, it's less likely they'll do anything that will come back to the parents, or get in trouble with the law or in school).
The question is whether or not you react more to sexual depictions because sex has a more profound effect on people or because access to it is much more limited in some areas (like the US).
The problem with trying to study it, of course, is that there are ethical issues with sex itself in the US. The only thing you can really do is make observations based on the behavior of people in countries that are much more open sexually, and even then you have to question whether or not the effects would be the same given the different moral cultures.
Look at the stink over "Natural Born Killers".
A movie about media's obsession with violence, it's fairly easy to see why the media would be upset over it. Beyond that, it's also fairly easy for a lot of people to miss the point of the movie, even after several portions of violence were removed to get an R rating.
do you also have a problem with video stores that won't rent porno to 10 year olds too then? ratings are there for a reason.
porn isn't normally submitted for ratings in the first place (no, X is not a rating handed down by the same people that rate the movies PG and R in your local theater, NC-17 is the closest they have).
Furthermore, there's a mixture of local, state, and federal laws regarding the availability of porn to minors that means regardless of your personal views or the views of the store owners, they can not make the videos available to minors, and neither can you (even to your own 17 year old son/daughter).
You can't get high grades if you can't perform well in groups. I know that at my university you can't even graduate unless you perform well on a group based senior design project.
I, on the other hand, would never continue my education in a school knowing it required this sort of project. I work perfectly fine with other people in a work environment, but in a school environment, working in groups always feels more like carrying the weight of others and doing the teacher's job for him/her. Not to mention that if you're graded as a group, the 4.0 student's grade is going to come down, while other students are brought up, making the grade itself worthless.
Personally, I saw this throughout grade school and high school, and eventually I just got sick of it. It was fairly routine that I'd get stuck with extremely under-performing students because the teachers felt that I might help them (whether in behavior or in grades), while in reality it just distracted from any real learning.
In a work environment, on the other hand, if someone's not pulling their weight, everyone knows about it, and they usually get transferred to another project (something easier for them, like inventory, which takes up about 3-6 months of each year for a small group of people).
I play fiddle in a punk band [siobhan.ca] that seriously doesn't suck.
Punk bands are supposed to suck. Just one of my pet peeves, I guess, but it seems that punk bands of the last 10 years or so have lost sight of this (not that they don't suck, but rather they think they don't suck). It's supposed to be offensive music in bad taste and deliberately so.
Anyway, no personal offense I hope, it's just something that gets to me.
PSX was never meant to be the acronym used for the PSOne/1, but was used internally for the system and found it's way into mainstream usage.
I think Sony's trying to cash in on name recognition, even if the name recognition doesn't really help them. They can't really call it a PS3, and PS2.5 would basically detract from the real point of the device: extending the PS2's market space into a mostly unrelated market. They're basically trying to come in with a high end DVR device, and throwing a PS2 into the thing is fairly cheap (for Sony) and extends the PS2's market to include people that might not otherwise buy a PS2 (which is something they need since their numbers are dropping, though this is unlikely to recover even a large percent of the numbers).
well, i haven't known anybody to play half-life online too much, ever. they play counter strike which (conviently for valve, and very luckily for them as well) happened to born as an addon for half-life
It doesn't matter which mod they're playing, it's still Half-Life. CS regularly has some 50-60K users online (or at least last time I looked), but the game itself sold about 7 million copies in the US.
(well, i never knew too many people who played tfc when compared to the hordes that play cs, and kept half-life selling for years after the usual shelf life of a pc game).
To each their own, I only play CS at LAN parties, and haven't been to one of those in about 2 years. Of course it keeps the game selling much longer, though, even if people are only buying a replacement copy for the extra CD Key or to keep from having to download the patches.
It is bad for the game not to ship in time for XMas, but there are many cases where games missed the date and still did very well. It would be significantly worse in terms of mod development and long-term sales if the multiplayer portion was easily hacked and cheaters ran rampant. The original Half-Life was remarkably resistant to this problem for quite a while, despite having the largest multiplayer FPS fan-base (even before CS).
or do some type of aimbots do some dynamic patching of the executable?
Many aimbots use DirectX to 'scrape' the screen and send spoofed mouse + keyboard inputs to the executable. There's also the possibility of finding holes in the code, or wrapping game DLLs (or DirectX DLLs as above, though many HL bots and hacks use OpenGL wrappers).
Yes, dynamic patching is also an option, used especially for things like radar hacks and others. Also used against anti-cheat software.
Since VU is operating at a substantial lost, they are prime to be saved by Bill Gate's wallet. Since Half Life2 [neoseeker.com] and Xbox2 [arstechnica.com] are both optimized to run on ATI's hardware, I can see the Richmond's Borg needing their killer app for XBOX2. Gates says "Hmmmm, Half Life2 sounds good. Buy them out boys!"
One big problem:
VU doesn't own Valve. VU owns Sierra, and Sierra is the publisher for Half-Life (and currently for HL2), but Valve owns Half-Life 2 and is self-funded. Gabe Newell formed Valve with his own money (gotten from being a well-payed Microsoft employee) and funded Half-Life without Sierra's (or VU) help. This is why Valve was able to delay Half-Life for a year in the first place. This is why Valve can push back HL2 without VU forcing it out when VU is operating at a loss. VU has no say in when the game is released unless their own QA finds problems with the final code and sends it back to Valve for more work (in other words, Sierra can delay HL2, but they can't force it to be released early).
Microsoft could probably buy Valve if they wanted HL2 bad enough, but I think it would be more than it's worth, since Valve is privately owned, self-funded, and making money hand over fist off the best-selling FPS of all time.
moreover, IT'S A SINGLE PLAYER GAME mainly. and fuck, some id's games can be played pretty decently still on public servers when the source has been out for years
No one would still be playing Half-Life if it was selling for single player only (that being said, it's sold about 140x as many copies as there have been people playing it online).
As for id's games, Quake was completely pointless to play after the source was released. It may be significantly better now, after people have spent years working on anti-cheat software for the game, but for the year after release you couldn't join a game without at least one person using a blatantly hacked client, and who knows how many others using more subtle cheats. I didn't even bother trying Quake 2 after the source release, as I was already playing TFC (and by that time dealing with cheaters there, too).
That being said, I can only see the source release being a fairly minor delay, depending on how heavily Steam and the CD key verification need to be rewritten. For the rest of their code, they just need to be extra careful in reviewing their code for exploits, as now they have plenty of other eyes looking for anything that might be missed in the final code, and probably at least a dozen little utilities being developed to scan the HL2 binaries for anything found in that code.