provided you didn't think of it as related to the original. At least it wasn't so easy to get completely ass-raped as it was in FFT if you messed one turn up. A good fit for a play-for-30 minutes here and there type thing on the GBA. (I eventually completed all 300 missions and the judge hunts... hooray for me)
Also, I understand that FFTA was a testing ground for certain elements and art assets that would eventually become FFXII. I'm glad they kept the Viera and didn't go with Mithra in this installment.
Thankfully spell animations are less intrustive this time around and do not eat up battle time (the rest of your party is still doing stuff). The spell caster and targets are singled out for a timer interruption. Even your Espers are realtime, they fight as a guest party member. The exception are Mist Knacks -- but unless you start chaining they're short sequences.
Spybot is the only scanner I trust. AdAware has been known to de-list software that they get paid a lot of money to ignore (I'm looking at you AOL). Are there any others that can't be bought, that detect a decent set of malware, and don't hose up your system?
...that you can do all this with XP but you're going to have to be very dilligent with anything that tries to use IE with OLE (which is a lot of stuff). You've also got a few more steps for locking down things. Some people have access to Server 2003, and they just don't know it. They should investigate it because it is a good workstation OS and more secure by default.
Finally, you'll luck out that a good portion of malware is thrown by Server 2003 because certain assumptions about XP aren't true... permissions of certain registry keys, offset in a DLL of an exploit -- sometimes they check the OS version, don't see 5.0 or 5.1, and give up! (with the introduction of Vista being NT 6, not so much anymore).
And Basch, Fran and Balthier can carry the storyline. They are interesting characters with interesting backgrounds, and motivated to do big things. Ashe to a certain extent as well.
I think Vaan and Penelo are just there to act as the player-at-home's eyes. They represent (the self-imagined version) of your typical male and female game player.
FFXII didn't need that though, with the ominpresent-camera CGs and the gambit system, having a main character at all was irrevelant. They should have just let you pick anyone as the party leader, and if your team needed to split up you could follow either group (and the game would have you doing different tasks depending on who's storyline you chose to follow... hell they could let you switch back and forth in some spots).
If we're lucky, the engine is more portable than first blush (if based on XI) and it could actually come to the PC sometime in the next century before PS2 emulators can tackle it.
I was wary of Gambits when I heard of the game. I played the demo and liked the graphics but didn't know how I felt about the new active battle system.
Then I started playing the game from the beginning. And I realized that I couldn't enjoy the game as much as I did without Gambits. Part of these games is trying to explore and see what you can do, getting neat loot, sidequests, whatever, and in order to do that you're going to have to grind and take on tough fights before you're "supposed to". You have to learn to manage your gambits, when to turn them on and off, when to use the menu button to take a break for a second and maybe re-equip your characters... all of that.
If you want to float through the game, going from hilighted area to hilighted area, and just watch all the CGs, you can. And then complain the game is too easy and too linear.
It's the challenge you make of it. That's why it's fun.
You want to have a game with an interesting story and something resembling character development, and an excuse to throw you a tutorial mission or two. (Bonus points to FFXII for making the initial fight training be a different character completely so you get to experiment).
But you don't want to drag the player down into a lengthy storyline where they're ability to affect the plot is relative to their current EXP. Most casual players would be turned off by this.
Otherwise you throw them in at level 15 into the middle of the story, and pepper the plot development with flashbacks or unlockable CGs to backfill your past.
I don't like Vaan's character either, I think he's a little weak. It's evident that they just plopped him into the story in the place of a stronger individual who would make more of an impression on Balthier... to respond to public demand that wanted the typical effeminate teenage hero.
Then it wouldn't seem so unlikely he could overpower an Imperial guard (also considering the ones on duty in Dalmasca were soldiers looking for an easy post-war deployment, some NPCs said so themselves).
FFXII almost had it right. They should have scrapped Vaan's character altogether and just made you play Balthier or Fran as the main character. Bingo, bango, bongo.
1) Get rid of XP. If you're going to run Windows, then run Server 2003. Try to get your company to pay for it if you can. 2) Don't disable the "MSIE Enhanced Security Configuration", whatever you do. 3) Use Firefox or Opera, never use IE, unless absolutely necessary (Windows Update) 4) Always run as a limited user. Never as a user with Administrator access. Right-click on installers and say "Run as... The Following User: Administrator" to install them. 5) Get yourself all of the SysInternals tools you can get your hands on. This can help you monitor file, registry and process access to look for unexpected behavior. Always check online to see if something is "normal" though before taking action, you don't want to kill your system accidentally. 5a) Software that requires administrator privledges to run iss probably not worth using anyway. You can special case essential software by using "Run as..." or by giving your user permissions on key files that it can't access. Use RegMon and FileMon in SysInternals to determine what the application is trying to access and give your user (or the Users group) the appropriate permissions on those files/registry keys. 6) Don't use software you haven't heard of. Free software is usually okay if it's open source, or you can independantly verify its reputation as safe and without adware or malware. Most $30 and below shareware you find through quick google searches is garbage and usually a malware vector, don't buy it. 7) Don't use Outlook to open mail. Never open unexpected attachments. Always turn off HTML email support and use plain text viewing instead. 8) Get a virus scanner. Don't use the home versions of McAfee or Symantec, they're garbage. The Norton PC suites are garbage too. Personally I use Symantec Corporate. You should try AVG, BitDefender, or F-Prot. The free versions are decent. 9) Install and periodically run SpyBot Search and Destroy. 10) Don't bother with a 3rd party firewall. Use the builtin windows firewall, or an external device. Learn how to properly use them. 11) Investigate Windows OneCare offerings. I haven't used them, but I hear they are okay. It's a service though, so pony up the cash.
This is what you have to do to protect yourself in Windows. It's no wonder people have issues.
It's browbeating you with broad strokes of concepts and emotions. * It will make you feel emotions, refresh the genre (baby) * It will be very powerful (hovering self-solving rubix cube) etc.
They place the stuff in a stock gray room which forces you to interpret and accept these concepts. Then the use the weird sound effects and music and make the monolith, i mean system hover: THE PS3 IS GOING TO BE VERY GOOD HEY THIS LOOKS KINDA LIKE 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY NO?
This isn't art. This is hype and hackery. It isn't clever, or introspective. It just makes the same outlandish claims about a product only in a new shell. It's only supposed to make the viewer _feel_ like they are clever and "got it". It's like the Matrix. There isn't anything to get. Philosophy and art 101, with a masturbation option.
Well you can't degauss a modern hard disk and then re-use it... so unless you have lots of bulk tape there's no point investing in a degausser since it's essentially free to destroy at the NSA (you just send it in with the rest of your printed material, appropriate labeled in document control, of course).
DSA also recommends not to sanitize and re-use secret-level hard disks anyway because it occurs often enough that projects that were once Secret become Top Secret and then you have to go round up all those disks and destroy them (among other implications if they are out in the open). I'm not getting this from the NISPOM, this is just what some of their guys recommended as best practice and it makes control procedures a bit easier (the paperwork for doing sanitization of media in document control is a bitch).
Also, DSS released that matrix years ago. It's not an official part of the NISPOM, and people like to claim that it is. It's just a guide. DSS and the NSA have the ultimate authority and they approve your operating procedurs. Currently, they'd like you to send the documents (in this case, the disk platters) back to them unless it's confidential/FOUO/SBU, and thus not under control.
For SBU, a 3 pass is just fine. That's the method we use.
DoD grade is complete destruction by an NSA-approved procedure. They remove and shred the platters.
Please don't perpetuate that myth. DoD would rather not deal with issues like unpredictable sector reallocation, varying densities of magnetic domains... it's much simpler (and much faster) to destroy the drive.
Also, many vendors who supply hard drives with equipment on GSA schedule have policies that allow users to keep harddrives from leased machines for destruction, or for sending empty drive shells back for RMA replacement of failed drives.
...with conv=noerror. dd is probably faster than cat provided you use bs=4k or thereabouts.
Also, use/dev/urandom, not/dev/random. The latter takes forever. And you want to follow up with a final/dev/zero so that it's not obvious the disk was securely erased, and that you read 0s (and not random garbage) when a filesystem driver has an error and reads from unallocated space.
The NSA (and by extension the DoD) does not allow, under any circumstances, the use of wiping software to declassify hard disks. No matter how many passes. They might have at one point but nowadays there are no guarantees with the way storage technology changes so quickly so that they decided it would no longer be a good policy.
Disks can be wiped using a single 0-pass to be re-used for a different project at the same or higher classification level (but different need-to-know).
But disks can never go lower. Than can only be destroyed by melting or shredding. You remove the platters from the drive, send them to Ft. Meade, and they run it through the shedder, and send you a receipt of destruction.
This also applies to flash media (compact flash, USB memory sticks). Same rules.
You are already paying a monthly fee to access a virtual world, and you take all risk and responsibility as a client uploading models into the world. When you buy items from other people, you are exchanging virtual in game currency, there are no EULAs to click through, let alone VALID contracts being signed here that describe the terms of use.
It is foolish for a vendor to enter this market and expect to somehow impose scarcity onto entites that which the game engine does not pretend to enforce any resource control. The risk of violating 2nd Life's policy (if this activity is forbidden without permission) is low for those that would use these techniques, so it's meaningless.
In this case, this is the seller's fault, their own calculated risk.
Clearly a different model is required for successful sale of objects in Second Life to guarantee success for vendors. I applaud the action of those that exploit obvious weaknesses in the system because they will cause people to take notice and change their business approaches to minimize their risk.
They should not expect Linden Labs to do this job for them. That is poor business practice and it artificially restricts the rights of individuals who are not the clients of these vendors.
Any game that requires an arms race of technology to support distributed-yet-centralized processing and a monthly fee is just too much shit for me to deal with to supposedly be having fun. It's not a job or an Olympic sport.
I much rather prefer games where you can run private servers and you have your own rules about client anti-cheat measures. I've played on plenty of Q2/Q3A servers w/o punkbuster and you know, we keep out the griefers and cheaters driftin through with a password. And we just have fun.
I don't want to chat with people while playing a game. I just want to fucking play. I much preferred the CS servers where you could only text dead players, and you could only use radio commands. It made you much more focused, forcing your team to think on its feet and work together.
The only games where in-game voice/text is really useful are MMORPGS. But I'll play those on a PC where I have a keyboard and mouse thank you very much. Arcade/action is the stuff of the consoles and ugh... to have people yelling in my ear about how I should ease up because they haven't played in like 3 months, dude... forget that shit!
I know that if I tried to stretch for a PS3 now that once I get tired of launch titles all I would do is play all my old PS2 titles in 480p on my (smallish) HDTV tube set. Of course, the tube set has a decent interlacing mode so the PS2 looks fine on it too, so what's my motivation?
I'm going to wait about 18 months for the price to drop and to see what games filter out of the pipeline. But I'm willing to drop coin on the Wii right now just to see how the online emulation experience is...
The summary (to me) implied nothing about the purpose of the LinuxBIOS firmware. Was it confusing that the one example usage as the OLPC project? To me, it was obvious that it is used in the OLPC project is a by-product of wanting to reduce the per-machine royalty costs, since the hardware is well-known and standardized (compare to a cluster). End-user have no need to worry about such an issue, they buy mainboards with BIOS bundled, and absorb the per-unit cost which is not worth mentioning. What would make them think that LinuxBIOS is somehow necessary, other than wanting a "really free" complete software stack?
Most new Intel Core 2 systems and all workstation and server AMD systems come with "legacy" BIOS. Very few vendors ship with EFI at all even if it is supported, especially on platforms that are to be compatible with 32-bit operating systems (stock Windows XP).
So LinuxBIOS is still very relevant. In fact, it is still useful even if EFI was prevelant, as it is popular in the construction of clustered systems with homogeneous hardware. It makes dealing with distributed consoles and disk arrays simpler, and you can bounce machines with new boot images rapidly.
And OpenFirmware is difficult for add-on card makers to support. LinuxBIOS sort of sidesteps the issue by supporting the necessary hardware directly (drawing from the existing pool of device driver support).
Slashdot Mirror
... and while it's accepted by some as a star wars fandom "fact", it ain't canon.
Fran slash _is_ canon (see my journal).
Also, Fran contributes heavily to the story, while Chewbacca was there for deus-ex-muscle and so Jim Henson could get paid more.
I was mometarily astonished and was going to reply and ask how you got "FTW" past the "wordfilter"... then I remembered where I am.
provided you didn't think of it as related to the original. At least it wasn't so easy to get completely ass-raped as it was in FFT if you messed one turn up. A good fit for a play-for-30 minutes here and there type thing on the GBA. (I eventually completed all 300 missions and the judge hunts... hooray for me)
Also, I understand that FFTA was a testing ground for certain elements and art assets that would eventually become FFXII. I'm glad they kept the Viera and didn't go with Mithra in this installment.
Thankfully spell animations are less intrustive this time around and do not eat up battle time (the rest of your party is still doing stuff). The spell caster and targets are singled out for a timer interruption. Even your Espers are realtime, they fight as a guest party member. The exception are Mist Knacks -- but unless you start chaining they're short sequences.
Spybot is the only scanner I trust. AdAware has been known to de-list software that they get paid a lot of money to ignore (I'm looking at you AOL). Are there any others that can't be bought, that detect a decent set of malware, and don't hose up your system?
...that you can do all this with XP but you're going to have to be very dilligent with anything that tries to use IE with OLE (which is a lot of stuff). You've also got a few more steps for locking down things.
Some people have access to Server 2003, and they just don't know it. They should investigate it because it is a good workstation OS and more secure by default.
Finally, you'll luck out that a good portion of malware is thrown by Server 2003 because certain assumptions about XP aren't true... permissions of certain registry keys, offset in a DLL of an exploit -- sometimes they check the OS version, don't see 5.0 or 5.1, and give up! (with the introduction of Vista being NT 6, not so much anymore).
*shrugs*
(please don't mod me down for language... but it's true)
And Basch, Fran and Balthier can carry the storyline. They are interesting characters with interesting backgrounds, and motivated to do big things. Ashe to a certain extent as well.
I think Vaan and Penelo are just there to act as the player-at-home's eyes. They represent (the self-imagined version) of your typical male and female game player.
FFXII didn't need that though, with the ominpresent-camera CGs and the gambit system, having a main character at all was irrevelant. They should have just let you pick anyone as the party leader, and if your team needed to split up you could follow either group (and the game would have you doing different tasks depending on who's storyline you chose to follow... hell they could let you switch back and forth in some spots).
Ah well.
because Eidos sucked ass at doing it. :-p
If we're lucky, the engine is more portable than first blush (if based on XI) and it could actually come to the PC sometime in the next century before PS2 emulators can tackle it.
I was wary of Gambits when I heard of the game. I played the demo and liked the graphics but didn't know how I felt about the new active battle system.
Then I started playing the game from the beginning. And I realized that I couldn't enjoy the game as much as I did without Gambits. Part of these games is trying to explore and see what you can do, getting neat loot, sidequests, whatever, and in order to do that you're going to have to grind and take on tough fights before you're "supposed to". You have to learn to manage your gambits, when to turn them on and off, when to use the menu button to take a break for a second and maybe re-equip your characters... all of that.
If you want to float through the game, going from hilighted area to hilighted area, and just watch all the CGs, you can. And then complain the game is too easy and too linear.
It's the challenge you make of it. That's why it's fun.
You want to have a game with an interesting story and something resembling character development, and an excuse to throw you a tutorial mission or two. (Bonus points to FFXII for making the initial fight training be a different character completely so you get to experiment).
... to respond to public demand that wanted the typical effeminate teenage hero.
But you don't want to drag the player down into a lengthy storyline where they're ability to affect the plot is relative to their current EXP. Most casual players would be turned off by this.
Otherwise you throw them in at level 15 into the middle of the story, and pepper the plot development with flashbacks or unlockable CGs to backfill your past.
I don't like Vaan's character either, I think he's a little weak. It's evident that they just plopped him into the story in the place of a stronger individual who would make more of an impression on Balthier
Then it wouldn't seem so unlikely he could overpower an Imperial guard (also considering the ones on duty in Dalmasca were soldiers looking for an easy post-war deployment, some NPCs said so themselves).
FFXII almost had it right. They should have scrapped Vaan's character altogether and just made you play Balthier or Fran as the main character. Bingo, bango, bongo.
... then you probably are.
Steps:
1) Get rid of XP. If you're going to run Windows, then run Server 2003. Try to get your company to pay for it if you can.
2) Don't disable the "MSIE Enhanced Security Configuration", whatever you do.
3) Use Firefox or Opera, never use IE, unless absolutely necessary (Windows Update)
4) Always run as a limited user. Never as a user with Administrator access. Right-click on installers and say "Run as... The Following User: Administrator" to install them.
5) Get yourself all of the SysInternals tools you can get your hands on. This can help you monitor file, registry and process access to look for unexpected behavior. Always check online to see if something is "normal" though before taking action, you don't want to kill your system accidentally.
5a) Software that requires administrator privledges to run iss probably not worth using anyway. You can special case essential software by using "Run as..." or by giving your user permissions on key files that it can't access. Use RegMon and FileMon in SysInternals to determine what the application is trying to access and give your user (or the Users group) the appropriate permissions on those files/registry keys.
6) Don't use software you haven't heard of. Free software is usually okay if it's open source, or you can independantly verify its reputation as safe and without adware or malware. Most $30 and below shareware you find through quick google searches is garbage and usually a malware vector, don't buy it.
7) Don't use Outlook to open mail. Never open unexpected attachments. Always turn off HTML email support and use plain text viewing instead.
8) Get a virus scanner. Don't use the home versions of McAfee or Symantec, they're garbage. The Norton PC suites are garbage too. Personally I use Symantec Corporate. You should try AVG, BitDefender, or F-Prot. The free versions are decent.
9) Install and periodically run SpyBot Search and Destroy.
10) Don't bother with a 3rd party firewall. Use the builtin windows firewall, or an external device. Learn how to properly use them.
11) Investigate Windows OneCare offerings. I haven't used them, but I hear they are okay. It's a service though, so pony up the cash.
This is what you have to do to protect yourself in Windows. It's no wonder people have issues.
It's browbeating you with broad strokes of concepts and emotions.
* It will make you feel emotions, refresh the genre (baby)
* It will be very powerful (hovering self-solving rubix cube)
etc.
They place the stuff in a stock gray room which forces you to interpret and accept these concepts. Then the use the weird sound effects and music and make the monolith, i mean system hover: THE PS3 IS GOING TO BE VERY GOOD HEY THIS LOOKS KINDA LIKE 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY NO?
This isn't art. This is hype and hackery. It isn't clever, or introspective. It just makes the same outlandish claims about a product only in a new shell. It's only supposed to make the viewer _feel_ like they are clever and "got it". It's like the Matrix. There isn't anything to get. Philosophy and art 101, with a masturbation option.
Well you can't degauss a modern hard disk and then re-use it... so unless you have lots of bulk tape there's no point investing in a degausser since it's essentially free to destroy at the NSA (you just send it in with the rest of your printed material, appropriate labeled in document control, of course).
DSA also recommends not to sanitize and re-use secret-level hard disks anyway because it occurs often enough that projects that were once Secret become Top Secret and then you have to go round up all those disks and destroy them (among other implications if they are out in the open). I'm not getting this from the NISPOM, this is just what some of their guys recommended as best practice and it makes control procedures a bit easier (the paperwork for doing sanitization of media in document control is a bitch).
Also, DSS released that matrix years ago. It's not an official part of the NISPOM, and people like to claim that it is. It's just a guide. DSS and the NSA have the ultimate authority and they approve your operating procedurs. Currently, they'd like you to send the documents (in this case, the disk platters) back to them unless it's confidential/FOUO/SBU, and thus not under control.
For SBU, a 3 pass is just fine. That's the method we use.
They actually have guidelines for core memory :-) and CRT screens, which can leave magnetic signatures.
But uh capicator-based DRAM (and SRAM) is all good, just remove power.
DoD grade is complete destruction by an NSA-approved procedure. They remove and shred the platters.
Please don't perpetuate that myth. DoD would rather not deal with issues like unpredictable sector reallocation, varying densities of magnetic domains... it's much simpler (and much faster) to destroy the drive.
Also, many vendors who supply hard drives with equipment on GSA schedule have policies that allow users to keep harddrives from leased machines for destruction, or for sending empty drive shells back for RMA replacement of failed drives.
...with conv=noerror.
/dev/urandom, not /dev/random. The latter takes forever. /dev/zero so that it's not obvious the disk was securely erased, and that you read 0s (and not random garbage) when a filesystem driver has an error and reads from unallocated space.
dd is probably faster than cat provided you use bs=4k or thereabouts.
Also, use
And you want to follow up with a final
The NSA (and by extension the DoD) does not allow, under any circumstances, the use of wiping software to declassify hard disks. No matter how many passes. They might have at one point but nowadays there are no guarantees with the way storage technology changes so quickly so that they decided it would no longer be a good policy.
Disks can be wiped using a single 0-pass to be re-used for a different project at the same or higher classification level (but different need-to-know).
But disks can never go lower. Than can only be destroyed by melting or shredding. You remove the platters from the drive, send them to Ft. Meade, and they run it through the shedder, and send you a receipt of destruction.
This also applies to flash media (compact flash, USB memory sticks). Same rules.
You are already paying a monthly fee to access a virtual world, and you take all risk and responsibility as a client uploading models into the world. When you buy items from other people, you are exchanging virtual in game currency, there are no EULAs to click through, let alone VALID contracts being signed here that describe the terms of use.
It is foolish for a vendor to enter this market and expect to somehow impose scarcity onto entites that which the game engine does not pretend to enforce any resource control. The risk of violating 2nd Life's policy (if this activity is forbidden without permission) is low for those that would use these techniques, so it's meaningless.
In this case, this is the seller's fault, their own calculated risk.
Clearly a different model is required for successful sale of objects in Second Life to guarantee success for vendors. I applaud the action of those that exploit obvious weaknesses in the system because they will cause people to take notice and change their business approaches to minimize their risk.
They should not expect Linden Labs to do this job for them. That is poor business practice and it artificially restricts the rights of individuals who are not the clients of these vendors.
Any game that requires an arms race of technology to support distributed-yet-centralized processing and a monthly fee is just too much shit for me to deal with to supposedly be having fun. It's not a job or an Olympic sport.
I much rather prefer games where you can run private servers and you have your own rules about client anti-cheat measures. I've played on plenty of Q2/Q3A servers w/o punkbuster and you know, we keep out the griefers and cheaters driftin through with a password. And we just have fun.
I don't want to chat with people while playing a game. I just want to fucking play.
I much preferred the CS servers where you could only text dead players, and you could only use radio commands. It made you much more focused, forcing your team to think on its feet and work together.
The only games where in-game voice/text is really useful are MMORPGS. But I'll play those on a PC where I have a keyboard and mouse thank you very much. Arcade/action is the stuff of the consoles and ugh... to have people yelling in my ear about how I should ease up because they haven't played in like 3 months, dude... forget that shit!
I know that if I tried to stretch for a PS3 now that once I get tired of launch titles all I would do is play all my old PS2 titles in 480p on my (smallish) HDTV tube set. Of course, the tube set has a decent interlacing mode so the PS2 looks fine on it too, so what's my motivation?
I'm going to wait about 18 months for the price to drop and to see what games filter out of the pipeline. But I'm willing to drop coin on the Wii right now just to see how the online emulation experience is...
The summary (to me) implied nothing about the purpose of the LinuxBIOS firmware. Was it confusing that the one example usage as the OLPC project? To me, it was obvious that it is used in the OLPC project is a by-product of wanting to reduce the per-machine royalty costs, since the hardware is well-known and standardized (compare to a cluster).
End-user have no need to worry about such an issue, they buy mainboards with BIOS bundled, and absorb the per-unit cost which is not worth mentioning. What would make them think that LinuxBIOS is somehow necessary, other than wanting a "really free" complete software stack?
Most new Intel Core 2 systems and all workstation and server AMD systems come with "legacy" BIOS. Very few vendors ship with EFI at all even if it is supported, especially on platforms that are to be compatible with 32-bit operating systems (stock Windows XP).
So LinuxBIOS is still very relevant. In fact, it is still useful even if EFI was prevelant, as it is popular in the construction of clustered systems with homogeneous hardware. It makes dealing with distributed consoles and disk arrays simpler, and you can bounce machines with new boot images rapidly.
And OpenFirmware is difficult for add-on card makers to support. LinuxBIOS sort of sidesteps the issue by supporting the necessary hardware directly (drawing from the existing pool of device driver support).