Does anyone know if the 6 Vista vulnerabilities are stopped by protected mode(UAC)? I'm curious if protected mode is working as designed, and the KB article doesn't make a note of this.
AFAIK, the original royalty agreement expired at the start of 2006; they've been operating ever since in limbo since a new agreement hasn't gone to in effect. The new agreement then is retroactive because it includes the period of time where they didn't have an agreement because they were tied up in negotiations.
Uhh, I hate to even sound like I'm agreeing with the MAFIAA on anything, but when exactly are they supposed to depose him if not on a school day? The school week and the work week are pretty well aligned, and forcing them to either work on a weekend or wait until he's on vacation is stretching things. Their actions are certainly deplorable, especially giving a one-day notice, but doing it on a school day isn't one of those deplorable actions.
I'd really like to give Epic a pat on the back for doing the right thing in the situation, but after reading that post a couple of times, I don't think that would be the proper thing to do. Rather I suppose I should air my disappointment in them doing what they did do, which was eventually giving in to Microsoft. Mark is right in stating how Microsoft both built and controls the system, so I won't give them much flak, but at the same time Microsoft is trying damn hard to monetize gaming across the spectrum and that's wrong.
Epic giving in doesn't help in this situation, because it just gives additional validity to Microsoft's scheming. Epic is in a stronger position than just about any other Xbox developer, they've published a massively popular 3rd party game for the console, few other 3rd parties can claim that. This gives them the best position to fight, and yet they don't. What Microsoft is trying to do must be stopped in a combined effort by gamers and developers, even if that means short-term suffering such as holding back the release of maps and/or drawing the ire of Microsoft in order to go on a large smear campaign against them.
Epic could have fought for gamers' rights and developers' rights, this was a missed opportunity that will be a critical battle that everyone just lost.
Software would seem to be the primary problem. The biggest problem is sales numbers, but I'll touch on quality quickly. The PSP games seem are too often remakes and ports of PS2 games; Madden, GTA, etc. It does have some unique games, but unlike the DS these games aren't selling very well.
As far as the game sales numbers go, the PSP is having a terrible time. The best selling PSP game in North America is GTA:LCS at just shy of 1.5 million units, which is behind several DS titles. Additionally a lot of anecdotal evidence suggests that a large fraction of the sales are for PSP firmware hacking, which would seem to back up the fact that no other PSP game is even close to cracking 1 million units yet (according to VGCharts). The situation in Japan is even worse due to both hardware and software problems. Overall the DS is selling much better, which puts the PSP at a significant disadvantage. A PSP game just finally broke 1mil units this year, on a chart overrun with DS titles.
On the whole, the PSP has a much lower attach rate(that is, the number of games sold per console sold) compared to the DS, which is a problem for Sony since they have a greater reliance on software in turning a profit. The primary culprit is that people are not using the PSP as a games machine, and instead are doing other things with it, which is why it's selling so well while simultaneously having a much poorer attach rate. I believe Sony is finally making a profit on each unit they sell(or at least were until they dropped the price), but at the end of the day people hacking their PSPs are causing a massive headache for Sony and their partners. When you consider the higher development cost of PSP games(due to the higher bar on graphics), selling fewer units than DS games while simultaneously costing more to make is squeezing publishers hard and sucking the profitability out of the system.
It's not unlike the Xbox 1 really. It's not doing too poorly, but no one's making a profit on it like they are the DS, and that's leading to a lot of these stories. Unfortunately for Sony it's still a young platform, it's going to be a couple more years before it's ready for retirement, and there's not much left they can do to improve their situation until then.
Unfortunately the hacked firmware pre-dates the DS Lite, so at the very least it would break the backlight settings if not more. This excludes the fact that unlike the DS Fat, the DS Lite is particularly dangerous to flash because bridging the necessary contact pad (to overwrite the first chunk of the firmware) brings a metal object within a millimeter of other components that will short out if touched (the Fat didn't have this problem, the pad was farther away from other electronics).
It's not about what music is related to the RIAA, it's about who has to pay SoundExchange either way, which is everyone unless they have a written contract from some entity granting them music. Ari at DI.fm made an interesting comment on the subject, in short it won't work.
You may ask us about why don't we just play unlicensed tracks or make an agreement with artists directly to avoid paying so much. The reality of the business is that it is virtually impossible to micromanage things this way. You'd have to have a world class communication company to be able to track down so many artists or labels, find where who is, who to contact, what forms to sign, talk them into it, etc. Plus you'd be surprised just how much of the non-mainstream music you love so much here is really signed to a label. That's why in theory the law that allows for a blanket license is really convenient - it's just that the rates which were set now are truly hopeless and stifle any kind of competition. What are we supposed to do, wave a flag and and turn into a payola service? Put a banner out that says "hey, whoever pays us the most in advance gets to have his or her track heard on the radio!"? Because that's the only model that is going to work with these rates.
I am a shoutcast fiend. I scan the top stations every day or two. Hardly any of the stations (even the popular ones) play RIAA music.
It's not about what music is related to the RIAA, it's about who has to pay SoundExchange either way. Looking the top-20 station list on Shoutcast right now, these are the stations that either do or should be paying fees to broadcast in the United States:
All Sky.Fm & Digitally Imported stations(6)
.977 The Hitz Channel(RIAA music)
HOT 108 JAMZ(RIAA music)
Radio Paradise(RIAA music)
181.fm - Kickin' Country(RIAA music)
.977 The 80s Channel(RIAA music)
SMOOTHJAZZ.COM(RIAA music)
HitzRadio.com(RIAA music)
That's 13 out of 20, and I'm fairly sure other stations should be on that list too. The electronic music stations on that list all likely owe royalties(DI.fm did long before they launched Sky), and I can't tell what stations play a mix of indy(which may or may not be approved) and RIAA music, causing me to miss counting them. It's sufficient to say that the vast majority of popular internet radio stations are required to pay the SoundExchange and would be hurt by this pricing change.
Except they were mediocre ports. The GBA wasn't quite up to SNES standards, mainly because its audio system was much weaker. DKC was as much a music game as a visual game, and the audio certainly suffered under the GBA port.
Yes, it's only a software player. Intervideo will work on better hiding the device key, and release a patch for all the current WinDVD8 owners whose players won't be able to play future disks. Breaking a major hardware player is a big deal, however breaking a software player is fairly trivial in the long-run as long as it can be upgraded.
I understand that it would perhaps be more optimal if there was a single package format, but that just isn't going to happen
Then realize you're basically accepting that Linux will never make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple consumer desktop market. You may be able to compile the source code, the rest of us either don't know or don't care. Either Linux is going to be a OS for users, or a OS for geeks. It can't be both because geeks will try to escape a OS too user-centric, and users will escape a OS that resembles the inconsistency caused by groups of splintered geeks.
As odd as it is to face it, it doesn't seem like the gaming audio market has much of a leg to stand on any more. On-board audio is widely popular, and even among gamers the proportion owning modern SoundBlaster cards is fairly low. Hardware acceleration for such a small & shrinking market is just one more headache for a developer, when they could just use an off-the-shelf audio system like FMOD/Miles which can do everything in software and drive as many audio channels through DirectSound as is required. The cost of course is the CPU penalty and the quality penalty (the later to keep the former in check) which means to a certain extent everyone who is above the median is getting dragged down.
But for better or worse*, this is the way things will go. Creative is living on borrowed time unless they can convince developers to use OpenAL themselves, or they convince FMOD/Miles to put in two paths to support both groups. I don't think they'll be successful without a great deal of bullying.
* Worse, IMHO. I use cans for gaming and good head related transfer functions(required for 3D audio over headphones) are not done in software due to the heavy performance hit. There's still a distinct advantage to using hardware here(the X-Fi in particular)
Since most people still don't know anything about how EVE works, I though I'd set up a little explanation on why the devs cheating in this game is so significant.
While undoubtedly devs cheat in all sorts of MMOs, I'd initially hesitate in comparing EVE to any of those MMOs. EVE isn't a PvE game it's a PvP game, and that makes a huge difference in the significance of cheating. Since WoW is the popular game here at Slashdot, I'll use the following analogy to set up this difference:
The EVE universe is Azeroth, and the high-end zones and their dungeons are what would be 0.0(no security) space in EVE. One can't own a high-end zone in WoW under normal PvE rules, all land is open to all players. This is not the case in EVE, 0.0 is designed to be owned and consequently limited to certain parties; in effect you can have your own high-end zone with your own dungeons that no one else can run.
As for why this makes a difference in cheating, cheating in WoW would mean someone gets rich and gets some unbelievably good gear; it knocks you further down the list of cool people and makes the stuff you have worth less, but that's about it. The devs cheating in EVE however can result in one faction controlling more and more pieces of 0.0 space, and the losers from this get kicked out. Unlike the WoW player who can still continue going to high-end zones and running dungeons, the EVE player has lost actual game content, they can't go to the 0.0 space they once held, and the finite amount of 0.0 space in the game means it's unlikely they'll be able to take anyone else's either. Meanwhile the faction that just kicked them out is now even richer, and will go on to take over yet another piece of 0.0 space using their combination of legal and ill-gotten resources.
Cheating sucks for everyone(except the cheater) without a doubt. But this is to my knowledge the first example of significant cheating in an actual massive PvP MMO. It will set a precedent for everyone else, and the results of it will have put the EVE players through a lot more suckage than cheating in most other MMOs would.
Just as a little bit more information on when WMS is sending back anything: Vista actually has a pre-installed database of games through the built-in system compatibility database; known games are identified via executable and the database applies a fix called "GameUX" to them. GameUX is what's triggering WMS to pull stuff up via the internet and to add the game to the Games Explorer. Presumably this could be entirely pre-loaded in to Vista, but I'd imagine MS went for the WMS approach to save space and deal with the fact that ratings change.
XM has argued it is protected from infringement lawsuits by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which permits individuals to record music off the radio for private use. The judge said she did not believe the company was protected in this instance by the act.
If they're not protected, who is?
It isn't as if XM was stretching the rules to fit their case, this situation is exactly what the law is about: individuals recording music off of the radio.
And how will the MPAA and the device manufacturers react when people who pay out the nose for players and films are no longer able to use them?
If the keys are being extracted out of software players, then that's not going to be a problem. Cyberlink/Intervideo will just release a point-upgrade with a new obfuscation scheme and new keys. Owners will just need to update their player(or better yet, it'll update itself), and things will continue on as normal. If you want to "break" AACS, the key from a popular hardware player needs to be extracted. Software players will only get you so far as the developers will get better and better at hiding the keys.
For example the Xbox 360 has unified architecture graphics processing that is just coming into the market through the gefoce 8800's which cost MORE than an entire 360.
Except that a unified architecture means nothing for performance. If we can agree that the PS3 and 360 are roughly equal in graphics performance, then I'd encourage you to compare the RSX GPU with the GeForce 8800 series. The RSX is a cut down 7800, clearly it would be blown away by the 8800, and since we agree the PS3 and 360 are similar, the Xenos GPU on the 360 would be equally surpassed. The fact that the Xenos uses a unified shader architecture does nothing for it here, high-end PCs are already well ahead of it.
It's not the graphical changes that gamers should be worried about with Vista, it's the changes to the audio subsystem. MS completely rebuilt that subsystem for Vista, it's now a black-box for all intents and purposes that takes program inputs and dumps fully processed audio streams that just need to be hit with a DAC to be presented. The problem with this is that it means that audio cards can no longer bind to the audio subsystem at anywhere other than this endpoint, which breaks a lot of 3D audio features such as EAX and some HRTF's(for simulating 3D audio from directions where there are no speakers) since these cards need the raw data from the games and not the fully processed streams.
OpenAL bypasses this limitation, but anything that uses DirectSound3D(which is most older games and some modern games) now gets neutered on systems with high-end audio cards. Of course this mainly screws over Creative since EAX3+ is a closed spec anyhow(and you won't find much love for that), but since no one is or will be working on a competing standard anyhow, it's just going to make things harder for everyone since it breaks the only modern standard.
The graphical changes due to DX10 won't cause much trouble, MS has thought this through both forwards and back, but there are going to be a lot of angry EAX users once Vista comes out.
I can't see how this is a good thing. The hedonistic style of E3 was the whole problem with the expo; it was sucking up money and manpower so that increasing numbers of members of the public could gawk at CGI trailers and scantly-clad women. Getting rid of E3 for something that's more focused on game development, purchasing, and tighter press controls was supposed to free up those previous wasted resources and put them to better use. If someone is just recreating E3, how has anything improved?
Threewave released a CTF mod for Quake back in the day, it was more or less the first time CTF became a popular FPS game option. Threewave didn't invent CTF, but they are largely responsible for making it a staple of the FPS.
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Does anyone know if the 6 Vista vulnerabilities are stopped by protected mode(UAC)? I'm curious if protected mode is working as designed, and the KB article doesn't make a note of this.
AFAIK, the original royalty agreement expired at the start of 2006; they've been operating ever since in limbo since a new agreement hasn't gone to in effect. The new agreement then is retroactive because it includes the period of time where they didn't have an agreement because they were tied up in negotiations.
Uhh, I hate to even sound like I'm agreeing with the MAFIAA on anything, but when exactly are they supposed to depose him if not on a school day? The school week and the work week are pretty well aligned, and forcing them to either work on a weekend or wait until he's on vacation is stretching things. Their actions are certainly deplorable, especially giving a one-day notice, but doing it on a school day isn't one of those deplorable actions.
The price cut is in a little less than 2 weeks(April 22nd). Shamelessly ripped from AnandTech:
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 2.93GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $1199
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $999
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz 4MB $999
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $530
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz 4MB $316
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz 4MB $224
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz 2MB $183
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz 2MB $163
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.80GHz 2MB $113
Epic giving in doesn't help in this situation, because it just gives additional validity to Microsoft's scheming. Epic is in a stronger position than just about any other Xbox developer, they've published a massively popular 3rd party game for the console, few other 3rd parties can claim that. This gives them the best position to fight, and yet they don't. What Microsoft is trying to do must be stopped in a combined effort by gamers and developers, even if that means short-term suffering such as holding back the release of maps and/or drawing the ire of Microsoft in order to go on a large smear campaign against them.
Epic could have fought for gamers' rights and developers' rights, this was a missed opportunity that will be a critical battle that everyone just lost.
Software would seem to be the primary problem. The biggest problem is sales numbers, but I'll touch on quality quickly. The PSP games seem are too often remakes and ports of PS2 games; Madden, GTA, etc. It does have some unique games, but unlike the DS these games aren't selling very well.
As far as the game sales numbers go, the PSP is having a terrible time. The best selling PSP game in North America is GTA:LCS at just shy of 1.5 million units, which is behind several DS titles. Additionally a lot of anecdotal evidence suggests that a large fraction of the sales are for PSP firmware hacking, which would seem to back up the fact that no other PSP game is even close to cracking 1 million units yet (according to VGCharts). The situation in Japan is even worse due to both hardware and software problems. Overall the DS is selling much better, which puts the PSP at a significant disadvantage. A PSP game just finally broke 1mil units this year, on a chart overrun with DS titles.
On the whole, the PSP has a much lower attach rate(that is, the number of games sold per console sold) compared to the DS, which is a problem for Sony since they have a greater reliance on software in turning a profit. The primary culprit is that people are not using the PSP as a games machine, and instead are doing other things with it, which is why it's selling so well while simultaneously having a much poorer attach rate. I believe Sony is finally making a profit on each unit they sell(or at least were until they dropped the price), but at the end of the day people hacking their PSPs are causing a massive headache for Sony and their partners. When you consider the higher development cost of PSP games(due to the higher bar on graphics), selling fewer units than DS games while simultaneously costing more to make is squeezing publishers hard and sucking the profitability out of the system.
It's not unlike the Xbox 1 really. It's not doing too poorly, but no one's making a profit on it like they are the DS, and that's leading to a lot of these stories. Unfortunately for Sony it's still a young platform, it's going to be a couple more years before it's ready for retirement, and there's not much left they can do to improve their situation until then.
Unfortunately the hacked firmware pre-dates the DS Lite, so at the very least it would break the backlight settings if not more. This excludes the fact that unlike the DS Fat, the DS Lite is particularly dangerous to flash because bridging the necessary contact pad (to overwrite the first chunk of the firmware) brings a metal object within a millimeter of other components that will short out if touched (the Fat didn't have this problem, the pad was farther away from other electronics).
That's 13 out of 20, and I'm fairly sure other stations should be on that list too. The electronic music stations on that list all likely owe royalties(DI.fm did long before they launched Sky), and I can't tell what stations play a mix of indy(which may or may not be approved) and RIAA music, causing me to miss counting them. It's sufficient to say that the vast majority of popular internet radio stations are required to pay the SoundExchange and would be hurt by this pricing change.
Except they were mediocre ports. The GBA wasn't quite up to SNES standards, mainly because its audio system was much weaker. DKC was as much a music game as a visual game, and the audio certainly suffered under the GBA port.
Yes, it's only a software player. Intervideo will work on better hiding the device key, and release a patch for all the current WinDVD8 owners whose players won't be able to play future disks. Breaking a major hardware player is a big deal, however breaking a software player is fairly trivial in the long-run as long as it can be upgraded.
And the same question for MS SQL(the DB system they use for their backend).
Do we even have enough natural gas for this to work? I thought it was expected to run low about the time petroleum was.
Then realize you're basically accepting that Linux will never make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple consumer desktop market. You may be able to compile the source code, the rest of us either don't know or don't care. Either Linux is going to be a OS for users, or a OS for geeks. It can't be both because geeks will try to escape a OS too user-centric, and users will escape a OS that resembles the inconsistency caused by groups of splintered geeks.
But for better or worse*, this is the way things will go. Creative is living on borrowed time unless they can convince developers to use OpenAL themselves, or they convince FMOD/Miles to put in two paths to support both groups. I don't think they'll be successful without a great deal of bullying.
* Worse, IMHO. I use cans for gaming and good head related transfer functions(required for 3D audio over headphones) are not done in software due to the heavy performance hit. There's still a distinct advantage to using hardware here(the X-Fi in particular)
While undoubtedly devs cheat in all sorts of MMOs, I'd initially hesitate in comparing EVE to any of those MMOs. EVE isn't a PvE game it's a PvP game, and that makes a huge difference in the significance of cheating. Since WoW is the popular game here at Slashdot, I'll use the following analogy to set up this difference:
The EVE universe is Azeroth, and the high-end zones and their dungeons are what would be 0.0(no security) space in EVE. One can't own a high-end zone in WoW under normal PvE rules, all land is open to all players. This is not the case in EVE, 0.0 is designed to be owned and consequently limited to certain parties; in effect you can have your own high-end zone with your own dungeons that no one else can run.
As for why this makes a difference in cheating, cheating in WoW would mean someone gets rich and gets some unbelievably good gear; it knocks you further down the list of cool people and makes the stuff you have worth less, but that's about it. The devs cheating in EVE however can result in one faction controlling more and more pieces of 0.0 space, and the losers from this get kicked out. Unlike the WoW player who can still continue going to high-end zones and running dungeons, the EVE player has lost actual game content, they can't go to the 0.0 space they once held, and the finite amount of 0.0 space in the game means it's unlikely they'll be able to take anyone else's either. Meanwhile the faction that just kicked them out is now even richer, and will go on to take over yet another piece of 0.0 space using their combination of legal and ill-gotten resources.
Cheating sucks for everyone(except the cheater) without a doubt. But this is to my knowledge the first example of significant cheating in an actual massive PvP MMO. It will set a precedent for everyone else, and the results of it will have put the EVE players through a lot more suckage than cheating in most other MMOs would.
Just as a little bit more information on when WMS is sending back anything: Vista actually has a pre-installed database of games through the built-in system compatibility database; known games are identified via executable and the database applies a fix called "GameUX" to them. GameUX is what's triggering WMS to pull stuff up via the internet and to add the game to the Games Explorer. Presumably this could be entirely pre-loaded in to Vista, but I'd imagine MS went for the WMS approach to save space and deal with the fact that ratings change.
If they're not protected, who is?
It isn't as if XM was stretching the rules to fit their case, this situation is exactly what the law is about: individuals recording music off of the radio.
If the keys are being extracted out of software players, then that's not going to be a problem. Cyberlink/Intervideo will just release a point-upgrade with a new obfuscation scheme and new keys. Owners will just need to update their player(or better yet, it'll update itself), and things will continue on as normal. If you want to "break" AACS, the key from a popular hardware player needs to be extracted. Software players will only get you so far as the developers will get better and better at hiding the keys.
OpenAL bypasses this limitation, but anything that uses DirectSound3D(which is most older games and some modern games) now gets neutered on systems with high-end audio cards. Of course this mainly screws over Creative since EAX3+ is a closed spec anyhow(and you won't find much love for that), but since no one is or will be working on a competing standard anyhow, it's just going to make things harder for everyone since it breaks the only modern standard.
The graphical changes due to DX10 won't cause much trouble, MS has thought this through both forwards and back, but there are going to be a lot of angry EAX users once Vista comes out.
I can't see how this is a good thing. The hedonistic style of E3 was the whole problem with the expo; it was sucking up money and manpower so that increasing numbers of members of the public could gawk at CGI trailers and scantly-clad women. Getting rid of E3 for something that's more focused on game development, purchasing, and tighter press controls was supposed to free up those previous wasted resources and put them to better use. If someone is just recreating E3, how has anything improved?
"Ship it now, fix it later" -EA to DICE about Battlefield 2
Considering it's only a month between seasons, it may very well only be an hour.
Threewave released a CTF mod for Quake back in the day, it was more or less the first time CTF became a popular FPS game option. Threewave didn't invent CTF, but they are largely responsible for making it a staple of the FPS.