No, it wouldn't have. For Windows Vista I just checked the Display Settings control panel, the window is 477x480; this is small enough to fit on a 640x480 screen even when the bare minimum resolution that the Windows desktop supports is 800x600. I'm fairly sure the Windows XP Display Settings window is even smaller, not that XP supports a resolution below 640x480 anyhow.
If all these real gamers are the downloading guys, how come those games are sold so well that Uwe wants to license them?
Warcraft 3 used a CD-key system, you could pirate the game but you'd never be able to play on Battle.net, a problem with a game that is so heavily multiplayer. World of Warcraft is a MMO, the game itself is chump-change compared to the subscription fee you have to pay to play it.
In other words, the games sold well in part because Blizzard used tight enough DRM and authentication procedures that you couldn't feasibly pirate them. Had easy piracy been possible, it's logical to assume piracy rates would be far more in-line with other games of their time that didn't have such strong protection. PC Gamers are notoriously cheap and pirate-happy, there's no denying that.
Bring on the The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour! I know that what I really want in TV is amazing advertising and a by-the-numbers plot, not cruddy shows where the writers are unconstrained by advertisers and free to write based on the artistic merit of their ideas.
Now if they'd just replace the news (it's depressing and boooring) with this kind of quality programming, TV may be worth watching again.
For those of you asking "what's the big deal about this?" here are what people have found so far digging through the code.
1) Since the client logic is in Python, introducing new logic is a matter of injecting new Python code in to the game. It turns out this is very easy to do right now, there are several ways, including using the telnet server the client runs so that CCP can upload code to the client computer when it connects
2) The big concern is bots, EVE can be botted and this is a problem like any MMO
3) The other big concern is that the EVE client knows far more than it shows, a problem for a PvP game. It is possible to hack the client to the point where it will tell you exactly who and what entered a system you are in, and where they are at at all times.
4) It's also possible to disable the client's "anti-addiction" code required to meet China's MMO laws. Apparently the server isn't actually booting players, it's telling the client to disconnect. The Chinese government is going to love that one
5) Finally, the game has a custom made built-in web browser (the In Game Browser) that's extremely cruddy and isn't used very much. It's also so cruddy that it's holier than the Pope himself; it's possible to craft links to induce it to execute external applications and web browsers. Basically with a little social engineering you can be trick people in to letting you compromise their machine.
EVE is a fine game, but the code is a joke. This is very likely going to lead to a lot of problems for CCP for some time to come. If they're lucky they'll only get a flood of bots, if they're not then the game may very well turn in to a wild west of hacking players looking for an edge.
The article's author has posted a short follow up piece after someone pointed out that some of the RightMark Audio Analyzer results don't make any sense. The X-Fi's frequency response is all over the place in the loopback (and only the loopback) tests, which causes most of the RMAA results to come in far lower than they should, or indeed where they did score when the card was initially reviewed a couple of years ago. The Xonar still does well regardless, but the RMAA results are effectively useless right now. I suspect the issue is that they used Vista; RMAA is a very peculiar program and has not been certified for use on Vista in all cases because of the UAA screwing with things.
Also, for the sake of being pedantic, the X-Fi they used isn't Creative's best (hence the submission title is wrong); the Xtreme Music was the low-end model and was discontinued last year, to be replaced by the Xtreme Gamer. The Elite Pro is still Creative's highest-end X-Fi.
Does anyone know how Comcast is progressing with its Switched Digital Video trials? From what I understand if SDV ever got off of the ground there would be little to no need to recompress HD video due to the bandwidth savings.
Apparently there's some sort of FCC regulation about the matter. They aren't allowed to mess around with any of the OTA stuff they carry, so all of those channels (including the usualy lame subchannels) are not recompressed. If you have cable you shouldn't need an OTA receiver, the quality should be the same from both.
No, it's really not. There's nothing really "twichy" about the game that requires particularly low latency. Heck, they only keep their servers in one place and players as far away as Australia regularly play the game just fine, I don't think anyone is going to notice an additional 50ms. A bigger problem is the fact that the country is only connected by a couple of cables; a couple of weeks ago the biggest cable was cut which caused a bandwidth shortage and made internet performance tank country-wide. Such little redundancy would be a far bigger problem.
And like a fool, I open my mouth about 5 seconds too early. I had quickly skipped over the post in TFA since I thought it was something I had already read before. It turns out that Creative has asked him to stop, but at the same time they basically confirm what my points were anyhow, which brings us back to the point that some of the stuff he was doing was shady.
I've been following this issue since Creative first removed the links, and two things stood out to me as very good reasons Creative would have to remove links to his stuff.
1) He was taking donations for his work. This gets sketchy because he wasn't hosting anything, all of the money went straight in to his pocket
2) One of the packages he was distributing was a version of Alchemy (Creative's DS3D->OpenAL wrapper) called Universal Alchemy. Alchemy is a product that Creative sells (free w/X-Fi's however), it's my understanding he somehow removed the DRM from one of their releases as part of the Universal Alchemy package. This would basically be pirated software.
Of course Creative is Creative, so the situation has been handled with their usual degree of overreacting, but at the same time it seems to me that they'd have some good reasons to stop letting this guy's software be listed on their forums. As far as I know he hasn't even been asked/told to stop developing the software, only that he's not welcome to advertise it on Creative's forums.
Frankly this comes off to me more as the users getting their panties tied up in a knot over Creative moderating their forum, than any real concerns about the technical issues. Creative's forums can be a bit wild at times thanks to the seemingly endless supply of Creative haters and the trolls they evolve in to.
Those numbers are just for the PS2 versions. The Xbox and PC versions are listed separately on the charts. GTA didn't actually sell all that well on other platforms compared to the PS2, it was some 4.2m units on the Xbox(GTA3+VC: 2.2m, SA: 2m) and none of the PC titles even cracked a million AFAIK.
I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they don't jive with what VGChartz has. The top series from the last generation:
- Grand Theft Auto: 41.16m units (SA: 15.36, VC: 14.20, GTA3:11.60)
- Gran Turismo: 23.75m units(GT3:14.87, GT4:8.88)
- Halo: 14.88m units (H1: 6.43, H2: 8.45)
- Super Smash Bros Melee: 7.08mil
And the list goes on and on and on. GTA was huge, followed by Gran Turismo, and then finally you get Halo. A lot of this has to do with the PS2 being the top selling console of the generation, but when a GTA game was the biggest selling game of a whole generation and the series by far the biggest of the generation, it's pretty rational to expect a ton of sales based on the name alone.
Making other people do your work for free makes your own costs cheaper. Film at 11.
In other words, why is this news? It's something that has been obvious about BitTorrent since day 1: if you can get/make your users use their own upload bandwidth, you won't need as much of your own, and in a cost model that means your costs are lower. Did this really require a study?
While this is good news for those of us in the geek crowd, I'm extremely surprised MS went this route. When IE8 is pushed out and it breaks a bunch of non-conforming non-tagged pages built for IE7 and IE6, there will be much hell raising to be had. MS will of course be blamed since they're the ones that changed things and I wouldn't be surprised if the backlash was well in excess of IE7's, if not close to the kind of backlash Vista initially got.
Ultimately everything will be worked out as developers fix their pages, but in the short-term period following IE8's release it's going to cost MS dearly. I can't for the life of me figure out why MS would want to put their neck on the line like this, it's not doing them any favors and "benevolent" usually isn't a term we use to describe Microsoft.
Except that's not the case. Sure, running the BR drive takes a bit of power, but the main culprit in power consumption is decoding. He had better battery life because he was using a reduced quality rip; the lower bit rate is easier on the CPU/GPU and hence consumes less power.
SP1 actually has some changes in it to placate the AV vendors. Windows x64 introduced a feature called Kernel Patch Protection which as the name implies blocks (at least as much as humanly possible) attempts to patch or otherwise hook things in to the kernel. This has been something that Windows has been needing for some time since it stops certain malware/rootkit vectors along with lazy software authors dinking around with the kernel causing it to crash. But most of the AV vendors simply keep brining their code forward from earlier versions of Windows, where they used kernel hooking to set up their access method for real-time virus scanning. Ergo Windows x64 caused a huge problem when AV vendors couldn't use kernel hooking, and while there were real APIs that worked about as well, they were not in the least bit happy about the issue and hence all the bitching in recent months.
With SP1, Microsoft is scaling back the KPP functionality in Vista x64. Now Microsoft is going to let certain parties patch the kernel again, providing an API to do so. This will make the AV vendors happy, as they won't have to rewrite a bunch of code for x64. The loser of course is the rest of us, Microsoft basically had to scale back some of Vista x64's security so that AV vendors could make their own wares work better (and in a roundabout way make them more necessary).
The AV vendors don't really have a problem with SP1 breaking any existing software since they're getting kernel hooking back, which is a far bigger win for them.
The above parent needs to be modded down, it's factually incorrect. The idea that Celerons were extremely overclockable is correct, but that's not how things worked. The Celeron 300A's core was Intel's first chip with on-die L2 cache, the Pentium II and Katami P3 lines still used off-die on-PCB L2 cache chips. Intel didn't ship P2 cores as the second generation Celerons*, those were all produced separately.
* The first gen Celerons (266 and 300, not to be confused with 300A and later) had no on-die L2, so technically Intel could do that, but they probably didn't considering those Celerons sold poorly
Not to be too much of a smartass, but Microsoft did cut off some backwards compatibility with Vista x64. Vista x64 drops 16-bit executable support entirely, so most 3.11 programs will fail to run unless they were built using Win32s. With that said, it's anyone's guess when support for software designed for Win9x will be phased out.
The summary is partially incorrect. The NPD Group is a research firm, they do not own the HD-DVD format or anything close to it. The closest thing to HD-DVD's owners would be the DVD Forum, which is a consortium of companies.
The reason NPD is involved in this is because they are one of the big research firms for tracking sales data. NPD is the firm that released the earlier reporting talking about HD-DVD hardware sales slowing and this is a clarification of that. They are pointing out that one week's results can not be extrapolated to argue that HD-DVD is dying/dead like many people did, it's too short of a time period in a week with several unusual variables.
Does anyone know what processors the DoD is using? 265 Million Processor-Hours is a pointless metric on its own, there's a big difference between those hours on a 486 and an Itanium 2 or a modern Xeon. They should have used something like FLOPS to measure the processor power being awarded.
Ditto to this. The original version of SimCity Classic for Windows technically runs, but besides not working under 64bit versions of Windows (no 16bit compatibility layer) it runs far too quickly on modern machines. It would be great to have it playable on Windows again.
EVE-Online for Linux is just a custom tuned version of Cedega packed with the normal EVE client for Windows. It runs like shit and frankly is pretty buggy at times compared to running under Windows, so I wouldn't consider that a gold standard.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wouldn't have. For Windows Vista I just checked the Display Settings control panel, the window is 477x480; this is small enough to fit on a 640x480 screen even when the bare minimum resolution that the Windows desktop supports is 800x600. I'm fairly sure the Windows XP Display Settings window is even smaller, not that XP supports a resolution below 640x480 anyhow.
Warcraft 3 used a CD-key system, you could pirate the game but you'd never be able to play on Battle.net, a problem with a game that is so heavily multiplayer. World of Warcraft is a MMO, the game itself is chump-change compared to the subscription fee you have to pay to play it.
In other words, the games sold well in part because Blizzard used tight enough DRM and authentication procedures that you couldn't feasibly pirate them. Had easy piracy been possible, it's logical to assume piracy rates would be far more in-line with other games of their time that didn't have such strong protection. PC Gamers are notoriously cheap and pirate-happy, there's no denying that.
Bring on the The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour! I know that what I really want in TV is amazing advertising and a by-the-numbers plot, not cruddy shows where the writers are unconstrained by advertisers and free to write based on the artistic merit of their ideas.
Now if they'd just replace the news (it's depressing and boooring) with this kind of quality programming, TV may be worth watching again.
FYI, this may be fake. I can not find a copy of this post anywhere on CCP's site.
For those of you asking "what's the big deal about this?" here are what people have found so far digging through the code.
EVE is a fine game, but the code is a joke. This is very likely going to lead to a lot of problems for CCP for some time to come. If they're lucky they'll only get a flood of bots, if they're not then the game may very well turn in to a wild west of hacking players looking for an edge.
The article's author has posted a short follow up piece after someone pointed out that some of the RightMark Audio Analyzer results don't make any sense. The X-Fi's frequency response is all over the place in the loopback (and only the loopback) tests, which causes most of the RMAA results to come in far lower than they should, or indeed where they did score when the card was initially reviewed a couple of years ago. The Xonar still does well regardless, but the RMAA results are effectively useless right now. I suspect the issue is that they used Vista; RMAA is a very peculiar program and has not been certified for use on Vista in all cases because of the UAA screwing with things.
Also, for the sake of being pedantic, the X-Fi they used isn't Creative's best (hence the submission title is wrong); the Xtreme Music was the low-end model and was discontinued last year, to be replaced by the Xtreme Gamer. The Elite Pro is still Creative's highest-end X-Fi.
Steve? Is that you?
Does anyone know how Comcast is progressing with its Switched Digital Video trials? From what I understand if SDV ever got off of the ground there would be little to no need to recompress HD video due to the bandwidth savings.
Apparently there's some sort of FCC regulation about the matter. They aren't allowed to mess around with any of the OTA stuff they carry, so all of those channels (including the usualy lame subchannels) are not recompressed. If you have cable you shouldn't need an OTA receiver, the quality should be the same from both.
No, it's really not. There's nothing really "twichy" about the game that requires particularly low latency. Heck, they only keep their servers in one place and players as far away as Australia regularly play the game just fine, I don't think anyone is going to notice an additional 50ms. A bigger problem is the fact that the country is only connected by a couple of cables; a couple of weeks ago the biggest cable was cut which caused a bandwidth shortage and made internet performance tank country-wide. Such little redundancy would be a far bigger problem.
And like a fool, I open my mouth about 5 seconds too early. I had quickly skipped over the post in TFA since I thought it was something I had already read before. It turns out that Creative has asked him to stop, but at the same time they basically confirm what my points were anyhow, which brings us back to the point that some of the stuff he was doing was shady.
I've been following this issue since Creative first removed the links, and two things stood out to me as very good reasons Creative would have to remove links to his stuff.
1) He was taking donations for his work. This gets sketchy because he wasn't hosting anything, all of the money went straight in to his pocket
2) One of the packages he was distributing was a version of Alchemy (Creative's DS3D->OpenAL wrapper) called Universal Alchemy. Alchemy is a product that Creative sells (free w/X-Fi's however), it's my understanding he somehow removed the DRM from one of their releases as part of the Universal Alchemy package. This would basically be pirated software.
Of course Creative is Creative, so the situation has been handled with their usual degree of overreacting, but at the same time it seems to me that they'd have some good reasons to stop letting this guy's software be listed on their forums. As far as I know he hasn't even been asked/told to stop developing the software, only that he's not welcome to advertise it on Creative's forums.
Frankly this comes off to me more as the users getting their panties tied up in a knot over Creative moderating their forum, than any real concerns about the technical issues. Creative's forums can be a bit wild at times thanks to the seemingly endless supply of Creative haters and the trolls they evolve in to.
Those numbers are just for the PS2 versions. The Xbox and PC versions are listed separately on the charts. GTA didn't actually sell all that well on other platforms compared to the PS2, it was some 4.2m units on the Xbox(GTA3+VC: 2.2m, SA: 2m) and none of the PC titles even cracked a million AFAIK.
I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they don't jive with what VGChartz has. The top series from the last generation:
- Grand Theft Auto: 41.16m units (SA: 15.36, VC: 14.20, GTA3:11.60)
- Gran Turismo: 23.75m units(GT3:14.87, GT4:8.88)
- Halo: 14.88m units (H1: 6.43, H2: 8.45)
- Super Smash Bros Melee: 7.08mil
And the list goes on and on and on. GTA was huge, followed by Gran Turismo, and then finally you get Halo. A lot of this has to do with the PS2 being the top selling console of the generation, but when a GTA game was the biggest selling game of a whole generation and the series by far the biggest of the generation, it's pretty rational to expect a ton of sales based on the name alone.
Making other people do your work for free makes your own costs cheaper. Film at 11.
In other words, why is this news? It's something that has been obvious about BitTorrent since day 1: if you can get/make your users use their own upload bandwidth, you won't need as much of your own, and in a cost model that means your costs are lower. Did this really require a study?
While this is good news for those of us in the geek crowd, I'm extremely surprised MS went this route. When IE8 is pushed out and it breaks a bunch of non-conforming non-tagged pages built for IE7 and IE6, there will be much hell raising to be had. MS will of course be blamed since they're the ones that changed things and I wouldn't be surprised if the backlash was well in excess of IE7's, if not close to the kind of backlash Vista initially got.
Ultimately everything will be worked out as developers fix their pages, but in the short-term period following IE8's release it's going to cost MS dearly. I can't for the life of me figure out why MS would want to put their neck on the line like this, it's not doing them any favors and "benevolent" usually isn't a term we use to describe Microsoft.
Except that's not the case. Sure, running the BR drive takes a bit of power, but the main culprit in power consumption is decoding. He had better battery life because he was using a reduced quality rip; the lower bit rate is easier on the CPU/GPU and hence consumes less power.
SP1 actually has some changes in it to placate the AV vendors. Windows x64 introduced a feature called Kernel Patch Protection which as the name implies blocks (at least as much as humanly possible) attempts to patch or otherwise hook things in to the kernel. This has been something that Windows has been needing for some time since it stops certain malware/rootkit vectors along with lazy software authors dinking around with the kernel causing it to crash. But most of the AV vendors simply keep brining their code forward from earlier versions of Windows, where they used kernel hooking to set up their access method for real-time virus scanning. Ergo Windows x64 caused a huge problem when AV vendors couldn't use kernel hooking, and while there were real APIs that worked about as well, they were not in the least bit happy about the issue and hence all the bitching in recent months.
With SP1, Microsoft is scaling back the KPP functionality in Vista x64. Now Microsoft is going to let certain parties patch the kernel again, providing an API to do so. This will make the AV vendors happy, as they won't have to rewrite a bunch of code for x64. The loser of course is the rest of us, Microsoft basically had to scale back some of Vista x64's security so that AV vendors could make their own wares work better (and in a roundabout way make them more necessary).
The AV vendors don't really have a problem with SP1 breaking any existing software since they're getting kernel hooking back, which is a far bigger win for them.
The above parent needs to be modded down, it's factually incorrect. The idea that Celerons were extremely overclockable is correct, but that's not how things worked. The Celeron 300A's core was Intel's first chip with on-die L2 cache, the Pentium II and Katami P3 lines still used off-die on-PCB L2 cache chips. Intel didn't ship P2 cores as the second generation Celerons*, those were all produced separately.
* The first gen Celerons (266 and 300, not to be confused with 300A and later) had no on-die L2, so technically Intel could do that, but they probably didn't considering those Celerons sold poorly
Not to be too much of a smartass, but Microsoft did cut off some backwards compatibility with Vista x64. Vista x64 drops 16-bit executable support entirely, so most 3.11 programs will fail to run unless they were built using Win32s. With that said, it's anyone's guess when support for software designed for Win9x will be phased out.
The summary is partially incorrect. The NPD Group is a research firm, they do not own the HD-DVD format or anything close to it. The closest thing to HD-DVD's owners would be the DVD Forum, which is a consortium of companies.
The reason NPD is involved in this is because they are one of the big research firms for tracking sales data. NPD is the firm that released the earlier reporting talking about HD-DVD hardware sales slowing and this is a clarification of that. They are pointing out that one week's results can not be extrapolated to argue that HD-DVD is dying/dead like many people did, it's too short of a time period in a week with several unusual variables.
Does anyone know what processors the DoD is using? 265 Million Processor-Hours is a pointless metric on its own, there's a big difference between those hours on a 486 and an Itanium 2 or a modern Xeon. They should have used something like FLOPS to measure the processor power being awarded.
Ditto to this. The original version of SimCity Classic for Windows technically runs, but besides not working under 64bit versions of Windows (no 16bit compatibility layer) it runs far too quickly on modern machines. It would be great to have it playable on Windows again.
That mirror is busted too (exceeds CPU usage). Does anyone else have one?
EVE-Online for Linux is just a custom tuned version of Cedega packed with the normal EVE client for Windows. It runs like shit and frankly is pretty buggy at times compared to running under Windows, so I wouldn't consider that a gold standard.