Portables aren't about stunning visuals or immersive games. You want something that you can pick up relatively quickly, have some fun, and be able to stop when something else comes up. The more complex you make a game, the harder it is to play in that fashon.
Additionally, I take a "wait and see" stance on all Sony console specs. They have a habit of making things sound far better than they are when they're actually released. A few months ago they were promising cell technology in the PS3. And from all recent reports, that's not going to happen. I bet Sony changes the specs 10 times between now and launch.
What a horribly bad way of doing things. It would've been smarter to use a one-way hash function, and then store the hash of the password, rather than the encrypted password itself. For verification, you just compare the hash of the entered password to the one stored on the system. This makes passwords unrecoverable, since they're never actually on the system. The major problem with this is that multiple strings can generate the same hash. However, taken in the grand scheme of things, this can also be a strength. While one system may be compromised, the chances that the intruder has generated the user's actual password are very low, greatly reducing the risk of a leapfrog attacks across the network.
It hasn't quite reached CG quality yet, but there has been some progress in this area. No One Lives Forever 2 features ingame cutscenes with the best facial animation I've seen from a game yet. They managed to have realistic looking mouth movement, a fairly convincing range of facial expressions, and models with invividually rendered eyes (they aren't part of the face texture).
They're trying to force Microsoft to release a piece of software that turns the Xbox into a cheap PC that Microsoft sells at a significant loss. I'm sorry, but I don't see that as especially likely. The modification they propose still requires you to solder the mainboard of the Xbox, and to flash the BIOS. That's only moderately cheaper and easier than installing a modchiop, and a lot more prohibitive than popping a disc into the drive. Let's not also forget that flashing your BIOS in that fashion effectively bars you from playing Xbox Live, since it automatically scans the BIOS on load. Many mod chips, on the other hand, can be switched on and off making them a much more reasonable solution for many pirates.
Pardon me if I'm being rude, but this doesn't seem to me to be a review. There is very little commentary on or description of the contents of the book. It seems more like an overview of the history of bunnie's efforts, and the reviewer's thoughts on the government's prohibitive stance on reverse engineering. This is all well and good for a sidebar, but it doesn't quite suffice as a real review.
This may not be true. I recall reading PSO forums a few months before PSO Xbox came out, and barubary (the man who did the ASM hacking for the famous homebrew translation of Final Fantasy 5 as well as the one who released the vast majority of cheats and hacks for the DC version of PSO. I often find myself blessing him and damning him at once) was discussing a recently applied server patch, analyzing the decrypted traffic between client and server. When someone asked how he had done it, he mentioned that he and a Japanese friend had convinced the game to send them the decryption key. If this is true, then it has nothing to do with the Xbox version being released.
I own a Gamecube too, it's my favorite of the current generation of consoles. And I know that homebrew for a console is neat. However, I also recall the likes of Kalisto claiming they were helping homebrewers when they blew the Dreamcast wide open. And while this was true, it also had a different effect. It destroyed the profitability of a damn fine piece of hardware, and shortened its lifespan by a number of years. I'd hate to see that happen to the Gamecube, especially considering the amazing and innovative software Nintendo has been putting out lately.
Perhaps Slashdot Games should rename itself to "Slashdot Console Warez News". Seriously guys, this is inappropriate. Its a hundred times more likely that this information will be used to pirate games than it is to port Linux to the cube, or whatever you say you're going to do.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add: As Bunnie of Xbox hacking fame noted a while ago oh his site he Gamecube BIOS is conained within a nonstandard ROM chip, making it much harder to read or to circumvent without expensive reverse engeneering.
I have no actual proof to back this up, so it's heresay, but interesting nonetheless. I've read from a number of sources that the disc doesn't spin backwards, but is structured in a backwards fashion, with the lead-out on the inside of the disc, and the lead-in on the outside. Additionally (this part is confirmed by myself and others), the information identifying it as a legitimate disc is a barcode around the center of the disc just past the data area, making it extremely hard to fool the system without a hardware mod, since the barcode is nigh on impossible to duplicate at home (unless you live in a professional mastering plant). Both of these phenomena can be observed if you hold in the switch that tells the Cube the drive is open, it goes to the inside of the disc beyond the data region to the barcode, then travels to the outside of the disc before it starts loading. Confirming that the barcode is necessary to load the game is quite simple: take a small piece of tape, or use a dry erase marker, and cover it up. The Gamecube laser will travel to the inside of the disc and then refuse to load. Finally, the Gamecube will not read CDs. If you try obstructing the barcode like I mentioned earlier, the Gamecube will still spin up the disc and attempt to read it. However, if you put a CD in, it will stop spinning immediately.
The implications of this in relation to Gamecube piracy are these: First of all, unmodified Gamecubes will have no way of reading copied discs, as it's not a simple matter of disc structuring like the Dreamcast. Secondly, I'm not sure how easy it will be to get a DVD burner to write a disc in such a fashion, as they're geared towards making standards compliant DVDs. Finally, even the smallest games will have to be burned to DVD, meaning the vast majority of would-be pirates will be left out in the cold, as they're too cheap to buy DVD burners.
Sampling music should be covered as a derivative work under fair use laws. Then again, the music industry won't go quietly even against themselves. Oh well, theres a possible good side, maybe they'll sue eachother into bankruptcy.;)
The author of the article doesn't seem to get that an early launch can work against you as much as launching late. Drive the PS2 to obsolescence now, and you piss off developers with software in the works, and gamers who just bought one. Not to mention that a launch now would mean exactly zero launch titles for the PS3, since I doubt most developers have the final specs, let alone an actual development unit. And if they did manage to miraculously pull a title out of their proverbial rear ends, it probably wouldn't be very good considering the huge complexity of the PS3's proposed architecture (something on the order of 74 processors total).
Ok, ok, its not all that shameful. But I'm still waiting for a version of Duck Hunt where you can shoot that goddamn dog. "Not laughing now, are you Fido?"
WebWasher works like a search and replace engine on incoming HTML code, and probably already had a filter for that piece of code in place. I run Proxomitron, a similar freeware program which allows you to write your own filters, and after a few minutes of fiddling I wrote a filter that removed the offending code.
Slashdot Mirror
Portables aren't about stunning visuals or immersive games. You want something that you can pick up relatively quickly, have some fun, and be able to stop when something else comes up. The more complex you make a game, the harder it is to play in that fashon. Additionally, I take a "wait and see" stance on all Sony console specs. They have a habit of making things sound far better than they are when they're actually released. A few months ago they were promising cell technology in the PS3. And from all recent reports, that's not going to happen. I bet Sony changes the specs 10 times between now and launch.
What a horribly bad way of doing things. It would've been smarter to use a one-way hash function, and then store the hash of the password, rather than the encrypted password itself. For verification, you just compare the hash of the entered password to the one stored on the system. This makes passwords unrecoverable, since they're never actually on the system. The major problem with this is that multiple strings can generate the same hash. However, taken in the grand scheme of things, this can also be a strength. While one system may be compromised, the chances that the intruder has generated the user's actual password are very low, greatly reducing the risk of a leapfrog attacks across the network.
It hasn't quite reached CG quality yet, but there has been some progress in this area. No One Lives Forever 2 features ingame cutscenes with the best facial animation I've seen from a game yet. They managed to have realistic looking mouth movement, a fairly convincing range of facial expressions, and models with invividually rendered eyes (they aren't part of the face texture).
...seems to scream for an "In Soviet Russia" joke, but taste dictates otherwise.
They're trying to force Microsoft to release a piece of software that turns the Xbox into a cheap PC that Microsoft sells at a significant loss. I'm sorry, but I don't see that as especially likely. The modification they propose still requires you to solder the mainboard of the Xbox, and to flash the BIOS. That's only moderately cheaper and easier than installing a modchiop, and a lot more prohibitive than popping a disc into the drive. Let's not also forget that flashing your BIOS in that fashion effectively bars you from playing Xbox Live, since it automatically scans the BIOS on load. Many mod chips, on the other hand, can be switched on and off making them a much more reasonable solution for many pirates.
Pardon me if I'm being rude, but this doesn't seem to me to be a review. There is very little commentary on or description of the contents of the book. It seems more like an overview of the history of bunnie's efforts, and the reviewer's thoughts on the government's prohibitive stance on reverse engineering. This is all well and good for a sidebar, but it doesn't quite suffice as a real review.
This may not be true. I recall reading PSO forums a few months before PSO Xbox came out, and barubary (the man who did the ASM hacking for the famous homebrew translation of Final Fantasy 5 as well as the one who released the vast majority of cheats and hacks for the DC version of PSO. I often find myself blessing him and damning him at once) was discussing a recently applied server patch, analyzing the decrypted traffic between client and server. When someone asked how he had done it, he mentioned that he and a Japanese friend had convinced the game to send them the decryption key. If this is true, then it has nothing to do with the Xbox version being released.
I own a Gamecube too, it's my favorite of the current generation of consoles. And I know that homebrew for a console is neat. However, I also recall the likes of Kalisto claiming they were helping homebrewers when they blew the Dreamcast wide open. And while this was true, it also had a different effect. It destroyed the profitability of a damn fine piece of hardware, and shortened its lifespan by a number of years. I'd hate to see that happen to the Gamecube, especially considering the amazing and innovative software Nintendo has been putting out lately.
Perhaps Slashdot Games should rename itself to "Slashdot Console Warez News". Seriously guys, this is inappropriate. Its a hundred times more likely that this information will be used to pirate games than it is to port Linux to the cube, or whatever you say you're going to do.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add: As Bunnie of Xbox hacking fame noted a while ago oh his site he Gamecube BIOS is conained within a nonstandard ROM chip, making it much harder to read or to circumvent without expensive reverse engeneering.
I take it you have a professional mastering plant in your basement.
I have no actual proof to back this up, so it's heresay, but interesting nonetheless. I've read from a number of sources that the disc doesn't spin backwards, but is structured in a backwards fashion, with the lead-out on the inside of the disc, and the lead-in on the outside. Additionally (this part is confirmed by myself and others), the information identifying it as a legitimate disc is a barcode around the center of the disc just past the data area, making it extremely hard to fool the system without a hardware mod, since the barcode is nigh on impossible to duplicate at home (unless you live in a professional mastering plant). Both of these phenomena can be observed if you hold in the switch that tells the Cube the drive is open, it goes to the inside of the disc beyond the data region to the barcode, then travels to the outside of the disc before it starts loading. Confirming that the barcode is necessary to load the game is quite simple: take a small piece of tape, or use a dry erase marker, and cover it up. The Gamecube laser will travel to the inside of the disc and then refuse to load. Finally, the Gamecube will not read CDs. If you try obstructing the barcode like I mentioned earlier, the Gamecube will still spin up the disc and attempt to read it. However, if you put a CD in, it will stop spinning immediately. The implications of this in relation to Gamecube piracy are these: First of all, unmodified Gamecubes will have no way of reading copied discs, as it's not a simple matter of disc structuring like the Dreamcast. Secondly, I'm not sure how easy it will be to get a DVD burner to write a disc in such a fashion, as they're geared towards making standards compliant DVDs. Finally, even the smallest games will have to be burned to DVD, meaning the vast majority of would-be pirates will be left out in the cold, as they're too cheap to buy DVD burners.
Sampling music should be covered as a derivative work under fair use laws. Then again, the music industry won't go quietly even against themselves. Oh well, theres a possible good side, maybe they'll sue eachother into bankruptcy. ;)
The author of the article doesn't seem to get that an early launch can work against you as much as launching late. Drive the PS2 to obsolescence now, and you piss off developers with software in the works, and gamers who just bought one. Not to mention that a launch now would mean exactly zero launch titles for the PS3, since I doubt most developers have the final specs, let alone an actual development unit. And if they did manage to miraculously pull a title out of their proverbial rear ends, it probably wouldn't be very good considering the huge complexity of the PS3's proposed architecture (something on the order of 74 processors total).
Ok, ok, its not all that shameful. But I'm still waiting for a version of Duck Hunt where you can shoot that goddamn dog. "Not laughing now, are you Fido?"
How long would it take before the excessive number of corpses with holes in their necks scared everyone away?
WebWasher works like a search and replace engine on incoming HTML code, and probably already had a filter for that piece of code in place. I run Proxomitron, a similar freeware program which allows you to write your own filters, and after a few minutes of fiddling I wrote a filter that removed the offending code.