The undeletable files under the Application Data tree may be protected by the cmdlineext.dll shell extension that is also installed with SecuROM (and gets a lot less fanfare than uaservice7.exe does). In earlier versions of SecuROM, one of the functions of this extension was to prevent you from deleting 16-bit executables (you'd get a sharing violation error if you tried). I've heard that the latest version of SecuROM doesn't do that anymore, but it may have other similar properties or may have its scope narrowed a bit to the so-called sacred files you mentioned.
Note that cmdlineext.dll (and other versions cmdlineext02.dll, cmdlineext03.dll) can be a bit tricky to remove. Since it's registered as a shell extension, and Explorer is invoked during startup, the file will always be in use unless you unregister it:
regsvr32/u cmdlineext.dll
After rebooting, you can then (hopefully) delete the file. Note, however, that the file will be recreated and re-registered the next time you run a SecuROM game, so you have to take some extreme measures if you want to ensure that the file can't come back. I've tried creating a zero-length file and setting the permissions to Deny for all users, as well as setting the file read-only, and that seems to do it for at least some versions of SecuROM.
This functionality is at least as nefarious as the more commonly reported portion of SecuROM, which is indeed a service in the current version and can be stopped like other services.
Anyway, as for the larger question, I didn't buy Civ IV because of SecuROM, and I'm not buying BioShock because of it, either. If 2K decides to capitulate on this issue at some point, I'll reconsider. In any case, it'll give Irrational time to work on a patch for some other issues that have come up.
He originally used the archaic pronunciation, similar to how he calls it "Christmas". Remember, that was a scenario presented by the "What If?" machine when asked, "What if I never fell into that freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy?" So, at the time, he would not have been introduced to the modern version, except possibly from an out-of-control teens episode of Maury Povich.
Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole".
---
Fry: So what do you nerds want? Nichelle Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw. Stephen Hawking: I call it a Hawking Hole. Fry: No fair! I saw it first! Stephen Hawking: Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?
---
Farnsworth: Yes, we tore the universe a new space-hole, alright. But it's clenching shut fast!
Excuse me, but WTF are you talking about? This is about NHTSA employees being told by their employer to refer reporters' questions to the appropriate person. You can BS on the record all you want about shoddy bridges, as long as you're not an employee of the NHTSA. Amazingly enough, this is exactly the policy that the grandparent post was referring to.
In our overlitigious society, this is a good policy, because otherwise, a carelessly-made remark by an engineer representing the NHTSA could result in some other party being dragged into a costly and unnecessary court battle.
Thanks for the info. The hex edit of xinput1_3.dll (which, coincidentally, works to get any version of the XInput DLL to at least load under Win2k) causes that DLL to call the wrong function if ever it were to happen to try to call TraceMessage. The results would almost certainly be a crash, but since I've played other games with this hack present with no problems, I suspect that it would require unusual circumstances to cause this to happen (and that's assuming that the XInput DLLs actually call TraceMessage anywhere at all). Keeping the DLL in the individual game's directory greatly reduces the chances of this hack being used as a security vulnerability.
The demo ran fine for me under Win2k taking the steps mentioned in the parent post. I had installed the nVidia drivers that were also released on Monday. The only problem I had was an annoying tendency for the game to momentarily freeze up when loading new textures, resulting in a disorienting turn to an arbitrary direction if I happened to be turning at that moment.
Anyway, the ease with which a person can get these games to run under Win2k (Overlord was the same way, minus needing dbghelp.dll) makes one wonder why it's not supported directly out of the box. Having the game decline to load the XInput DLL, for instance, unless you're actually using an XBox360 controller on your PC, would eliminate one source of seemingly arbitrary incompatibility that was introduced by Microsoft. The dbghelp.dll file is a good bit different between the two versions of Windows, but the new version seems to function as a drop-in replacement if you add it to the executable directory for whatever game you're playing. Is the incompatibility purely unnecessary, created artificially by Microsoft to induce sales of XP or Vista (perhaps as a strategy that took longer than they expected to start working, due to game manufacturers being reticent to abandon Win2k users for several years)?
Actually, the demo is important for ensuring that the game will run properly on one's computer before laying out $50 for it. For example, the system requirements claim you have to be running WinXP, but is it possible to coerce the game to run under Win2k?
Irrational has been pretty sensitive to the plot-relevant details of their game being ruined by spoilers, so I'm hopeful that the demo won't spoil the full game.
Alienware doesn't put anything in their systems that you can't buy and install yourself for half the price.
Except CableCard receivers, apparently. I (and, I'm sure, bunches of other people out there) would positively love to get my hands on one of those suckers, but you have to be an OEM selling a DRM-wrapped, CableLabs-approved system in order to get them.
Actually, if you really do read the article carefully, nowhere does it state that the water itself is incapable of cooling the reactor. It merely states that the river water is "too hot", which could just as well indicate that adding more warm water - especially in drought conditions where the river level is probably lower than normal - would make the river temperature too hot to safely sustain its ecosystem.
whether some guy on teh Intarweb thought a program was really worth five stars or was a steaming sack of elephant feces. I can make that assessment for myself. The real problem is when websites start trying to draw in web hits by evaluating whether a program is free of spyware or not. Take Softpedia, for instance. Sure, they have lots of entries, and they claim to test each piece of software for spyware, but to date, I've never heard a straight and impartial answer on whether they're honest or on the take. They also spend a lot of time messing with their own Wikipedia entry to try to lend themselves further legitimacy, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.
There are other goods and services besides software that are "reviewed" by websites that are even more rife with corruption. Take web hosting, for example. I don't think there's a single web host reviewing website that isn't a shill for the web hosts being reviewed. In many cases, the top five or ten web hosts are all owned by the same guy.
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate?
The point is, quite simply, left-wing evangelism. The question isn't being asked to have a debate on evolution, much less one that actually matters in terms of policy. It's being couched that way, but the purpose is to attempt to drive votes away from right-wing candidates, because the left-wing is under the mistaken impression that they can paint any candidate who disagree with them as either a hypocrite or a moron. You can thank the Daily Show for that; they've essentially taught their base that you can manufacture hypocrisy and pin it on whomever you want, just by putting people on the spot and then stringing the appropriate sound bites together.
Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
Then I submit to you that they didn't really do that bus jump. Sure, they did a bus jump, but I don't think people are claiming they rendered a CGI bus or used a scale model. The complaint has always been that Speed is ostensibly a movie set in the real world, featuring no superheroes (not even normal-guys-with-tools-and-talent such as James Bond or Batman), yet it depicts events that are, quite simply, impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Most often immediately after one person or the other gets fatally stabbed.
Penryn? Wolfdale? Yorkfield? Kentsfield? What are they doing here, making processors, or naming streets in a new upscale subdivision?
The undeletable files under the Application Data tree may be protected by the cmdlineext.dll shell extension that is also installed with SecuROM (and gets a lot less fanfare than uaservice7.exe does). In earlier versions of SecuROM, one of the functions of this extension was to prevent you from deleting 16-bit executables (you'd get a sharing violation error if you tried). I've heard that the latest version of SecuROM doesn't do that anymore, but it may have other similar properties or may have its scope narrowed a bit to the so-called sacred files you mentioned.
/u cmdlineext.dll
Note that cmdlineext.dll (and other versions cmdlineext02.dll, cmdlineext03.dll) can be a bit tricky to remove. Since it's registered as a shell extension, and Explorer is invoked during startup, the file will always be in use unless you unregister it:
regsvr32
After rebooting, you can then (hopefully) delete the file. Note, however, that the file will be recreated and re-registered the next time you run a SecuROM game, so you have to take some extreme measures if you want to ensure that the file can't come back. I've tried creating a zero-length file and setting the permissions to Deny for all users, as well as setting the file read-only, and that seems to do it for at least some versions of SecuROM.
This functionality is at least as nefarious as the more commonly reported portion of SecuROM, which is indeed a service in the current version and can be stopped like other services.
Anyway, as for the larger question, I didn't buy Civ IV because of SecuROM, and I'm not buying BioShock because of it, either. If 2K decides to capitulate on this issue at some point, I'll reconsider. In any case, it'll give Irrational time to work on a patch for some other issues that have come up.
He originally used the archaic pronunciation, similar to how he calls it "Christmas". Remember, that was a scenario presented by the "What If?" machine when asked, "What if I never fell into that freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy?" So, at the time, he would not have been introduced to the modern version, except possibly from an out-of-control teens episode of Maury Povich.
Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole".
---
Fry: So what do you nerds want?
Nichelle Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw.
Stephen Hawking: I call it a Hawking Hole.
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Stephen Hawking: Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?
---
Farnsworth: Yes, we tore the universe a new space-hole, alright. But it's clenching shut fast!
Excuse me, but WTF are you talking about? This is about NHTSA employees being told by their employer to refer reporters' questions to the appropriate person. You can BS on the record all you want about shoddy bridges, as long as you're not an employee of the NHTSA. Amazingly enough, this is exactly the policy that the grandparent post was referring to.
In our overlitigious society, this is a good policy, because otherwise, a carelessly-made remark by an engineer representing the NHTSA could result in some other party being dragged into a costly and unnecessary court battle.
That's not exactly true. Once X, whatever X might be, is shipped back to the US, it is still governed by US copyright.
Big Water Brother.
Thanks for the info. The hex edit of xinput1_3.dll (which, coincidentally, works to get any version of the XInput DLL to at least load under Win2k) causes that DLL to call the wrong function if ever it were to happen to try to call TraceMessage. The results would almost certainly be a crash, but since I've played other games with this hack present with no problems, I suspect that it would require unusual circumstances to cause this to happen (and that's assuming that the XInput DLLs actually call TraceMessage anywhere at all). Keeping the DLL in the individual game's directory greatly reduces the chances of this hack being used as a security vulnerability.
The demo ran fine for me under Win2k taking the steps mentioned in the parent post. I had installed the nVidia drivers that were also released on Monday. The only problem I had was an annoying tendency for the game to momentarily freeze up when loading new textures, resulting in a disorienting turn to an arbitrary direction if I happened to be turning at that moment.
Anyway, the ease with which a person can get these games to run under Win2k (Overlord was the same way, minus needing dbghelp.dll) makes one wonder why it's not supported directly out of the box. Having the game decline to load the XInput DLL, for instance, unless you're actually using an XBox360 controller on your PC, would eliminate one source of seemingly arbitrary incompatibility that was introduced by Microsoft. The dbghelp.dll file is a good bit different between the two versions of Windows, but the new version seems to function as a drop-in replacement if you add it to the executable directory for whatever game you're playing. Is the incompatibility purely unnecessary, created artificially by Microsoft to induce sales of XP or Vista (perhaps as a strategy that took longer than they expected to start working, due to game manufacturers being reticent to abandon Win2k users for several years)?
Actually, the demo is important for ensuring that the game will run properly on one's computer before laying out $50 for it. For example, the system requirements claim you have to be running WinXP, but is it possible to coerce the game to run under Win2k?
Irrational has been pretty sensitive to the plot-relevant details of their game being ruined by spoilers, so I'm hopeful that the demo won't spoil the full game.
Spock: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what.
Ilia: Vger requires more cowbell.
Fry: If only they'd built it with 6001 cores! When will they ever learn!
Well, he did mention screaming a huge, lispy "yes".
Alienware doesn't put anything in their systems that you can't buy and install yourself for half the price.
Except CableCard receivers, apparently. I (and, I'm sure, bunches of other people out there) would positively love to get my hands on one of those suckers, but you have to be an OEM selling a DRM-wrapped, CableLabs-approved system in order to get them.
Why do you have to bring the devices back to their previous state? Why can't you just reset them and reload their drivers instead?
Thanks for the link. I was able to go from there to arrive at this group as having produced the film.
Actually, if you really do read the article carefully, nowhere does it state that the water itself is incapable of cooling the reactor. It merely states that the river water is "too hot", which could just as well indicate that adding more warm water - especially in drought conditions where the river level is probably lower than normal - would make the river temperature too hot to safely sustain its ecosystem.
Could you provide a citation for that documentary? Because right now, I've got a pretty strong guess as to where its producers come from.
whether some guy on teh Intarweb thought a program was really worth five stars or was a steaming sack of elephant feces. I can make that assessment for myself. The real problem is when websites start trying to draw in web hits by evaluating whether a program is free of spyware or not. Take Softpedia, for instance. Sure, they have lots of entries, and they claim to test each piece of software for spyware, but to date, I've never heard a straight and impartial answer on whether they're honest or on the take. They also spend a lot of time messing with their own Wikipedia entry to try to lend themselves further legitimacy, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.
There are other goods and services besides software that are "reviewed" by websites that are even more rife with corruption. Take web hosting, for example. I don't think there's a single web host reviewing website that isn't a shill for the web hosts being reviewed. In many cases, the top five or ten web hosts are all owned by the same guy.
What is this, Digg?
Well, kinda, yeah.
Since when have "new media" or "manager" ever implied "tech savvy"?
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate?
The point is, quite simply, left-wing evangelism. The question isn't being asked to have a debate on evolution, much less one that actually matters in terms of policy. It's being couched that way, but the purpose is to attempt to drive votes away from right-wing candidates, because the left-wing is under the mistaken impression that they can paint any candidate who disagree with them as either a hypocrite or a moron. You can thank the Daily Show for that; they've essentially taught their base that you can manufacture hypocrisy and pin it on whomever you want, just by putting people on the spot and then stringing the appropriate sound bites together.
AdBlock Plus didn't block the site for me. Then again, I've been using it for so long that my base ad blocking list comes from waaaay back.
Because there's one very good reason that my players and I are using 3.5ed right now instead of the 3ed that we bought all those books for.
They actually did that bus jump. It's real.
-snip-
Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
Then I submit to you that they didn't really do that bus jump. Sure, they did a bus jump, but I don't think people are claiming they rendered a CGI bus or used a scale model. The complaint has always been that Speed is ostensibly a movie set in the real world, featuring no superheroes (not even normal-guys-with-tools-and-talent such as James Bond or Batman), yet it depicts events that are, quite simply, impossible.