In reading this article and others on the DMCA, I have yet to find a case cited where the DMCA actually won. All the cases I've read about are "pending". Does anyone here know of any cases where the DMCA won?
It seems most of the posts here take the side of the "hacker" which isn't surprising given this is Slashdot. But if you go look at his site, he is posting working source for DDos attacks for various games and exploits. Here is one description:
"Half-Life 1.1.1.0 client's "Unknown command" format string bug test 0.1 This is a tool to test a format string bug I have found in the Half-Life client. I have not released an advisory because at the moment I don't know if this bug lets remote code execution or not. Feel free to check it (in the zip file there is also the mail I have sent to vuln-dev that contains some details)"
In this case he's posting source for the exploitation of a bug before HE EVEN KNOWS WHAT THE BUG DOES. This makes me doubt how responsible he is in informing companies of bugs in their products. How about this changelog in the source of his UTDDos attack:
"CHANGELOG:
- Now supports UT2003 servers!!!
- better allocation method (now it's not limited, and the memory used is very very small!)
- big code optimizations
- a lot of bug fixes (libnet name resolution and other little problems)"
Why would these changes be necessary for a proof of concept? Sounds more like he wants anybody to be able to easily compile and use his programs to exploit not just UT servers, but UT2003 servers as well.
I think hackers should have as much restraint as possible in releasing "proof of concept" programs. Because really, what do these programs do? It does exactly what you are afraid people will do with the bug you found, exploit it. When you release that to the public, you are ENSURING that the bug will be exploited. Only in extreme cases should this be used to force a company to fix a bug, because at best the result is a brief period of time in which the bug is exploited widely, before the company fixes it. However, I think there is a serious risk of more harm being done in this period of time than would have ever been done if the proof of concept program had never been released, and the bug taken longer to be fixed or perhaps not fixed at all.
This guy is obviously not using proof of concept programs as a last resort. In fact, check out this comment:
"CD-Key hash changer for UnrealTournament 2003 v2225 for Win32 0.1 practically this proof-of-concept lets you to use a custom cd-key hash. The main idea was to find a cd-key theft bug but fortunally this bug doesn't exist so this tool can be considered only a test just for fun"
He wants people to use it "for fun"? What kind of white hat hacker releases a proof of concept program for "fun"? If I read this right, he was hoping to be able to steal CD keys with this, which he probably would have released as well. That would of been a huge mess, and is what I mean when I say there is serious risk of a concept program doing a lot more harm than good. So, it turns out it only lets you use other people's CD hashes, which you can get just from joining a game. This would allow you to steal someone's CD hash that you didn't like, and then go make a total ass of yourself on a server and get him banned. Sounds "fun" don't you think? Gamespy may not be my favorite company, but this guy give hackers a bad name.
This is slightly off topic, but you seem to know your stuff, and I was wondering if you could explain triple buffering to me. I am pretty sure I understand how it works, but I am not sure I understand why in say, Counter-Strike, your FPS jump in regular intervals from 100 to 72, etc, where triple buffering does not produce this. Obviously there is some sort of timing issues here with double buffering, but why do these numbers come out? In double buffering, is it the time spend flipping that causes this? I know in triple buffering you can be blitting to 1 back buffer while the other is flipped with the front buffer. How does this produce the timing issues though?
I think it depends on what kind of games you are interested in, and what kind of person you are. Consoles are great at fighting games, sports games, and racing games. They're great for people who have friends who want to come over, visit, and play some games with.
For people who are more solitary however, PCs apeal to more. PCs dominate in First Person Shooters and multiplayer. PCs also tend to be the platform of choice for RTS and MMORPG games. They appeal to the person who wants to tinker with their machine, or who wants to tinker with the game. As long as consoles lack mouse and keyboards, they'll never be able to do as well as PCs in First Person Shooters. As for multiplayer, PCs have it for free, while consoles have it as an added cost. RTS games don't do well on consoles, because if you can see the other person's screen the game becomes much less strategic. MMPORG games require many people to play be fun, and so far there just hasn't been enough people using consoles online to make a game like that popular.
So, to answer your question: "Who cares about the high-end graphics card market": hardcore PC gamers. These people want the fastest computers they can get, and are willing to pay for it. But really, you should care about the high-end graphics market too, because this is where the next gen consoles get their cards from.
Now on to two statements you make that I am curious to see you back up with numbers:
"Intel owns the graphics department"
"Most users will probably just stop buying the latest games and wait several hardware revisions before becomming a gamer again, or they will buy a gaming console like everyone else..."
I don't know this for sure, but I would be very surprised if Intel has more market share in graphics cards than Nvidia and ATI. Especially when you consider that all latest consoles are using graphics cards produced by them. Are you just pulling this out of thin air, or do you have some statistics to back this claim up? If you go to Dell, all but their cheapest computer (their $399 one) comes with an Nvidia or ATI card. You can get older Nvidia cards for so cheap these days that the money is worth it. If Intel is forcing Dell to use their chipsets like you say, then why do ATI and Nvidia dominate Dell's computer line? Intel simply doesn't have a viable competitor to ATI and Nvidia in the graphics card department.
As for your second quote, people have been predicting the death of consoles over PCs, or PCs over consoles for years now. It just isn't going to happen. There will always be people who are drawn to the strengths of a computer, or to the strengths of a console. I don't understand people who feel the alternative choice in a decision must lose in order to justify their decision. When you see games like Counter-Strike that at one point regularly had over 100,000 people playing at any given time, you start to understand the momentum that PCs have behind them. Again, I would like to see you post numbers to support just how much bigger the console market is over the PC market. Because I have a feeling it isn't so huge as you make it out to be, and certainly not "everyone".
One thing you don't see in these reviews is how compatible the cards are. I bought a 9800 Pro and am kicking myself for it ever since. I get better FPS in Half Life mods with my GF2. I've actually reinstalled my GF2 to play Half life, and my $300 dollar card is just sitting on a shelf. Like most problems, not everyone has it, but if X video card has problems with Y game, you may want to factor that into your buying decision. Just go to support forums for the card you are interested in, and if you see a 41 page monster of a thread on problems with the game you want to play like this one for Half Life:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&thre adid=33718666
You might reconsider.
Please get over this. I know that there are "white hat" "hackers" out there who want the meaning of hacker to be something different, but you lost that battle a LONG time ago. Ask anyone on the street these days, and they'll tell you a hacker is someone who maliciously breaks into people's computers. You can't change that, just come up with a different name to call yourself or live with the reaction most people will have when you tell them you are a hacker.
Personally, I think they set themselves up for failure. They pumped their movies full of big questions,and in the end, how were they really going to answer them in a way that satisfied everyone? I think the only "big answer" there is is that there ARE no big answers. There is no secret to the nature of reality, it just IS, and when you die you'll either find the answer to one of those big questions, or you'll never know because you'll be too dead to think about it.
They specifically state that it is naturally occuring, and mention nothing of it being genetically enhanced. I think there are a two possibilities here:
1) That people are being cured, it is just they never know they had cancer.
2) The virus is wiped out long before it reaches cancer cells, which might be why they say they inject it into the cancer.
I think that the expectation of businesses have been raised from simply their financial responsibility to stockholders. Drug companies aren't expected to lose money, but they may be expected to lose money on miricle cures, and make the money back with other drugs. Honestly I find it very difficult to believe that drug companies are having a difficult time turning a profit with the way medical costs are today. Feel free to post evidence to the contrary, but that's the way things seem to me.
It isn't quite that bad, as there are a lot of opportunities for students. There are of course scholarships, as well as student loans. Interest rates are very low right now. For graduate students there are fellowships where the college will pay all your tuition costs if you do research. To make extra money with little time spent you can be a teaching assistant. Or I suppose you can import books and sell them outside your classroom;)
I think the bad news is that the publishers aren't going to sit by and watch this happen. I think the first thing they will do is try to get a law passed or changed to make this illegal. If that doesn't work they'll probably just make a US version and an overseas version of their books, just like the revisions that come out to keep people from using old books, and put pressure on bookstores, universities, and professors to ensure that those books are used in the US. They might even just delay oversea versions so that the US and oversea versions fall out of sync. I wonder what decision professors would make, and just how great the pressure will be from the university for professors to use books sold at the university bookstore.
needed 2/5 sure bets, so that he would only need 1 of the rest to come through for him to be mostly right. Seriously, what possessed him to include Visual Basic 6 and Windows 9x? Whenever a huge company like Microsoft releases an "upgrade" to a successful product you can be damn sure they will do everything they can to kill off the predecessor in order to sell the upgrade. How often does it happen that Microsoft isn't able to pull this off? Almost never, and if the first upgrade fails, they can always release another, and another, and eventually they'll get it right.
I never said the story was always paramount. I did say it has more importance than that given to it in porn movies. Movies are perhaps the best way to look at this sort of thing, as they have been able to create anything one can imagine for some time now. There are some movies that have their strength in the plot, and some that have a lot of action. The really great ones have both. Pure Action movies are much like most every video game is now. However, like movies, it all depends on the kind of game you want to make as to how important the plot is. That said, I personally am tiring of movies that are ONLY action and no story. There will always be a teen to twenties crowd for whom that is still entertaining. But my hope is that games will develop that have good action, but whose main motivator is not the next big gun, monster, or explosion. I want to see games where the motivation to continue through the game is to uncover the next part of the plot. As the gaming demographic matures, I think there will be a lot more demand for more than just pure action games.
Well, it doesn't surprise me that someone from id software would say that, but their time is comming to an end. People won't be satisfied with paper thin plots forever. Either they'll turn to multiplayer only, or they'll demand that single player games have more substance than a porn movie. The things that have up until now distracted people from the plot will soon become old hat. Improvements in graphics will soon become insignificant as we approach photo realism. Soon developers will run out of gimmicks, be they sunflares, shadows, physics, or vehicles. They'll all lose their charm, and the only thing that will remain to impress gamers will be the creativity of the game itself.
I thought about this, but intentional or not, it is STILL cheesy. South Park's animation is crap, which is totally intentional, but it is still crap. Still, in South Park's case they COULD have had great animation if they wanted to (they use the same system Jurassic Park was made with to animate it) but they CHOSE not to. But I kind of wonder what Remedy was aiming for if in fact they could have had a purely original, thoughtful, and non-cheesy script. Usually intentional cheesiness is intended to poke fun at the seriousness of a subject, but that wasn't the case in Max Payne. I'm left thinking that they just didn't have the talent to produce a purely original film noir script, and either the cheesiness was intentional because they didn't even want to try, or they did try, it turned out cheesy, and now they want to call it intentional. So again... it's still cheesy, so who really cares what their intention was? However, I don't fualt them for not having that kind of talent as no one else in the industry does, and it isn't likely given the lure of movies.
God, I forgot the paragraph returns. Try this for easier reading:
Max Payne 2 is, as you would expect of a sequel, much like the original Max Payne. Both games are short by game standards, and Max Payne 2 seems even shorter than its predecessor. That isn't a complaint, merely an observation. Max Payne 2 is a lot of goodness packed into a tight package. It does leave you wishing for more.
Firstly, I am going to skip over AI, graphics, and sound. Any other review of the game can tell you about this, so let it suffice to say that they all come together to produce a great gaming experience. What matters is how the developers use them to suck the gamer into their world.
By video game standards, Max Payne is original, but like so many games it is an imitation of movies, in this case film noir. They get it very close to right, but at times it almost seems as though they try too hard, and after a while the lines start sounding a bit cheesy. I suppose it is silly to expect a game to rise above this, as great writing/acting talent is no doubt drawn to movies themselves, but I'm still holding out in the hope that someone will put together a really great original script for a game. But again, this is a video game, and by those standards Max Payne 2 rises above the rest. I don't know about you, but I am getting a bit tired of the "aliens/monsters invade, it's your job to save the world" plot.
The idea of using comics to tell the story was a stroke of genius, as it is a perfect work around for the incapability of video game characters to act. The technology just isn't there yet, and when games try to tell a story with emotion it is more likely to come off comical than serious, as the stick figures jerk around in an attempt to appear human. Obviously comics aren't great at conveying emotion, but they certainly don't detract from it the way in video game cut scenes tend to. Film noir being the straight faced act that it is allows Max Payne 2 to flow nicely.
The atmosphere of the game is outstanding. The attention to detail put into every level is phenomenal. One wonders if the trend will be for games to become shorter in coming years, as the effort needed to build ever more realistic worlds from scratch becomes greater. There is a mad fun house level in the game that almost makes you cringe as you realize how much effort went into making all the props and setting them all up to move as a fun house does. The cringe comes from the realization that the detail must have cost the game some of its length. Apparently the developers realized this too, as you actually pass through the level twice during the games.
My gripes about the game are few. I think there could have been a little bit better enemy placement, and the difficulty of the game could have been increased to make the game both longer and more challenging. Shooting enemies in bullet time doesn't lose its charm, and with quick save and load being such an easy thing you think they would have made things a bit tougher. There were times where I would take out 2 or 3 people and turn hoping to see one more bad guy, only to find an empty corner. Another thing, I think they should have placed the bad guys in front of more breakable objects. I don't know about you, but I love to see stuff fly apart, and it just didn't happen as often as I wanted. More often they would be standing on some ledge, ready to die and give you yet another display of the physics engine. I personally don't think it is that cool to see the person you shoot instantly go limp and fall like a sack of potatoes. It may be realistic for a rag doll, but it isn't for someone who just got shot. But hey, I guess that is why it is called "rag doll" physics and not "guy who just got shot" physics. If they wanted to show it off I would have rather seen them add slow motion deaths for grenade explosions, of which there were none.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I hope they are able to lay Max Payne to rest however, as I don't think they can really do much else with this. Hopefully their next game will be as fresh as the original Max Payne was.
Max Payne 2 is, as you would expect of a sequel, much like the original Max Payne. Both games are short by game standards, and Max Payne 2 seems even shorter than its predecessor. That isn't a complaint, merely an observation. Max Payne 2 is a lot of goodness packed into a tight package. It does leave you wishing for more.
Firstly, I am going to skip over AI, graphics, and sound. Any other review of the game can tell you about this, so let it suffice to say that they all come together to produce a great gaming experience. What matters is how the developers use them to suck the gamer into their world.
By video game standards, Max Payne is original, but like so many games it is an imitation of movies, in this case film noir. They get it very close to right, but at times it almost seems as though they try too hard, and after a while the lines start sounding a bit cheesy. I suppose it is silly to expect a game to rise above this, as great writing/acting talent is no doubt drawn to movies themselves, but I'm still holding out in the hope that someone will put together a really great original script for a game. But again, this is a video game, and by those standards Max Payne 2 rises above the rest. I don't know about you, but I am getting a bit tired of the "aliens/monsters invade, it's your job to save the world" plot.
The idea of using comics to tell the story was a stroke of genius, as it is a perfect work around for the incapability of video game characters to act. The technology just isn't there yet, and when games try to tell a story with emotion it is more likely to come off comical than serious, as the stick figures jerk around in an attempt to appear human. Obviously comics aren't great at conveying emotion, but they certainly don't detract from it the way in video game cut scenes tend to. Film noir being the straight faced act that it is allows Max Payne 2 to flow nicely.
The atmosphere of the game is outstanding. The attention to detail put into every level is phenomenal. One wonders if the trend will be for games to become shorter in coming years, as the effort needed to build ever more realistic worlds from scratch becomes greater. There is a mad fun house level in the game that almost makes you cringe as you realize how much effort went into making all the props and setting them all up to move as a fun house does. The cringe comes from the realization that the detail must have cost the game some of its length. Apparently the developers realized this too, as you actually pass through the level twice during the games.
My gripes about the game are few. I think there could have been a little bit better enemy placement, and the difficulty of the game could have been increased to make the game both longer and more challenging. Shooting enemies in bullet time doesn't lose its charm, and with quick save and load being such an easy thing you think they would have made things a bit tougher. There were times where I would take out 2 or 3 people and turn hoping to see one more bad guy, only to find an empty corner. Another thing, I think they should have placed the bad guys in front of more breakable objects. I don't know about you, but I love to see stuff fly apart, and it just didn't happen as often as I wanted. More often they would be standing on some ledge, ready to die and give you yet another display of the physics engine. I personally don't think it is that cool to see the person you shoot instantly go limp and fall like a sack of potatoes. It may be realistic for a rag doll, but it isn't for someone who just got shot. But hey, I guess that is why it is called "rag doll" physics and not "guy who just got shot" physics. If they wanted to show it off I would have rather seen them add slow motion deaths for grenade explosions, of which there were none.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I hope they are able to lay Max Payne to rest however, as I don't think they can really do much else with this. Hopefully their next game will be as fresh as the original Max Payne was.
Have you ever tried to get a LIT file to work on your pocketPC? I don't know about you, but I have had HUGE problems getting ebooks I bought and paid for to "activate" on my pocketpc. I've spent many hours trying to get my books to work, and after finding CLIT all the pain of.LIT files has gone away.
Microsoft's copyright protection is a PAIN IN THE BUTT. So there is your "valid use" explanation. But more than that, I believe everyone SHOULD have the god given right to circumvent copyright protection. Copyright protection is, plain and simple, a way to take away your fair use rights. Coupled with the DMCA, it actually makes it illegal (I still have a hard time swallowing it). I understand that copyright protection may have a legitimate goal: to prevent masses of people from breaking copyright law, but when it prevents masses of people from legitimate use it's usefulness is overshadowed by that flaw. Take DVD regions. Why should the DVD makers be able to tell me that where I buy a DVD is where that DVD should be played, just so they can better control global pricing? Why should it be illegal for me to circumvent "protection" of that sort?
Not only that, but why should I not have the right to change, learn from, or do whatever the hell I want with a product I buy? A DVD isn't just a copy, because if I walk out of a store with a DVD I am going to be slapped down for STEALING, not copyright infringement. A DVD is MY property once I buy it, and if I want to mess around with it then that is my business. If you sell me a product with a lock on it, that shouldn't mean I don't have the right to break the lock and take a look inside. What I do afterwards with what I unlocked may be criminal, but nothing up unto that point should.
Personally I love ebooks. I have a pocket PC and I do as much reading as I can on it. The two hurdles I've found are this (other than the price of a pocket pc):
1) The selection is still limited. What's more, is that some books that would really benifit from the ebook format, like textbooks, aren't put into that format at all. I assume this is because the publishers are afraid the books will be copied instead of bought. They're probably right too, because the prices they force students to pay is second to theft. $500 a semester for books is ridiculous.
2) The formats suck. I actually prefer just plain text files when I can get them, since I can use mobipocket on those. Then there are LIT files, which I loath because it is SO HARD to get them to work. You have to get a MS passport, then you have to "activate" your pocket pc, which very often gets confused with your PC, and I've almost never been able to get the damn things to work. I actually had to go out and find a program called CLIT (C-LIT is the nice way to pronouce that) that would remove the copyright protection, just so I could read the ebook I bought from amazon. WTF? PDF is better in that you can get it to work, but it is still a bit slow on my pocketpc, and I don't like the PDF reader nearly as good as mobipocket or even MS's reader.
Consider this: It has been reported by halflife2.net that a pre-release version of the game has been leaked. In other words, a fully functioning version of the game is out there, that was most likely taken at the same time as the source.
Valve may want to take the next 6 months to make the game worth buying even to those with a pre-release version, by adding more content.
The issue here is the invasion of privacy. There are plenty of ways to control bandwidth usage without doing this. My college (Ga Tech) had huge problems with p2p software taking up all available bandwidth. For about two semesters the pings were 1000 even to across the street, and the network was almost unusable because of this. Finally Ga Tech did something smart: they updated the hubs so that they could limit everyone to 60 kb/sec upload on a port by port basis. The vast majority of traffic created by P2P is from uploading. Now everything runs smooth.
Slashdot Mirror
In reading this article and others on the DMCA, I have yet to find a case cited where the DMCA actually won. All the cases I've read about are "pending". Does anyone here know of any cases where the DMCA won?
"Half-Life 1.1.1.0 client's "Unknown command" format string bug test 0.1 This is a tool to test a format string bug I have found in the Half-Life client. I have not released an advisory because at the moment I don't know if this bug lets remote code execution or not. Feel free to check it (in the zip file there is also the mail I have sent to vuln-dev that contains some details)"
In this case he's posting source for the exploitation of a bug before HE EVEN KNOWS WHAT THE BUG DOES. This makes me doubt how responsible he is in informing companies of bugs in their products. How about this changelog in the source of his UTDDos attack:
"CHANGELOG: - Now supports UT2003 servers!!! - better allocation method (now it's not limited, and the memory used is very very small!) - big code optimizations - a lot of bug fixes (libnet name resolution and other little problems)"
Why would these changes be necessary for a proof of concept? Sounds more like he wants anybody to be able to easily compile and use his programs to exploit not just UT servers, but UT2003 servers as well.
I think hackers should have as much restraint as possible in releasing "proof of concept" programs. Because really, what do these programs do? It does exactly what you are afraid people will do with the bug you found, exploit it. When you release that to the public, you are ENSURING that the bug will be exploited. Only in extreme cases should this be used to force a company to fix a bug, because at best the result is a brief period of time in which the bug is exploited widely, before the company fixes it. However, I think there is a serious risk of more harm being done in this period of time than would have ever been done if the proof of concept program had never been released, and the bug taken longer to be fixed or perhaps not fixed at all.
This guy is obviously not using proof of concept programs as a last resort. In fact, check out this comment:
"CD-Key hash changer for UnrealTournament 2003 v2225 for Win32 0.1 practically this proof-of-concept lets you to use a custom cd-key hash. The main idea was to find a cd-key theft bug but fortunally this bug doesn't exist so this tool can be considered only a test just for fun"
He wants people to use it "for fun"? What kind of white hat hacker releases a proof of concept program for "fun"? If I read this right, he was hoping to be able to steal CD keys with this, which he probably would have released as well. That would of been a huge mess, and is what I mean when I say there is serious risk of a concept program doing a lot more harm than good. So, it turns out it only lets you use other people's CD hashes, which you can get just from joining a game. This would allow you to steal someone's CD hash that you didn't like, and then go make a total ass of yourself on a server and get him banned. Sounds "fun" don't you think? Gamespy may not be my favorite company, but this guy give hackers a bad name.
This is slightly off topic, but you seem to know your stuff, and I was wondering if you could explain triple buffering to me. I am pretty sure I understand how it works, but I am not sure I understand why in say, Counter-Strike, your FPS jump in regular intervals from 100 to 72, etc, where triple buffering does not produce this. Obviously there is some sort of timing issues here with double buffering, but why do these numbers come out? In double buffering, is it the time spend flipping that causes this? I know in triple buffering you can be blitting to 1 back buffer while the other is flipped with the front buffer. How does this produce the timing issues though?
For people who are more solitary however, PCs apeal to more. PCs dominate in First Person Shooters and multiplayer. PCs also tend to be the platform of choice for RTS and MMORPG games. They appeal to the person who wants to tinker with their machine, or who wants to tinker with the game. As long as consoles lack mouse and keyboards, they'll never be able to do as well as PCs in First Person Shooters. As for multiplayer, PCs have it for free, while consoles have it as an added cost. RTS games don't do well on consoles, because if you can see the other person's screen the game becomes much less strategic. MMPORG games require many people to play be fun, and so far there just hasn't been enough people using consoles online to make a game like that popular.
So, to answer your question: "Who cares about the high-end graphics card market": hardcore PC gamers. These people want the fastest computers they can get, and are willing to pay for it. But really, you should care about the high-end graphics market too, because this is where the next gen consoles get their cards from.
Now on to two statements you make that I am curious to see you back up with numbers: "Intel owns the graphics department" "Most users will probably just stop buying the latest games and wait several hardware revisions before becomming a gamer again, or they will buy a gaming console like everyone else..."
I don't know this for sure, but I would be very surprised if Intel has more market share in graphics cards than Nvidia and ATI. Especially when you consider that all latest consoles are using graphics cards produced by them. Are you just pulling this out of thin air, or do you have some statistics to back this claim up? If you go to Dell, all but their cheapest computer (their $399 one) comes with an Nvidia or ATI card. You can get older Nvidia cards for so cheap these days that the money is worth it. If Intel is forcing Dell to use their chipsets like you say, then why do ATI and Nvidia dominate Dell's computer line? Intel simply doesn't have a viable competitor to ATI and Nvidia in the graphics card department.
As for your second quote, people have been predicting the death of consoles over PCs, or PCs over consoles for years now. It just isn't going to happen. There will always be people who are drawn to the strengths of a computer, or to the strengths of a console. I don't understand people who feel the alternative choice in a decision must lose in order to justify their decision. When you see games like Counter-Strike that at one point regularly had over 100,000 people playing at any given time, you start to understand the momentum that PCs have behind them. Again, I would like to see you post numbers to support just how much bigger the console market is over the PC market. Because I have a feeling it isn't so huge as you make it out to be, and certainly not "everyone".
One thing you don't see in these reviews is how compatible the cards are. I bought a 9800 Pro and am kicking myself for it ever since. I get better FPS in Half Life mods with my GF2. I've actually reinstalled my GF2 to play Half life, and my $300 dollar card is just sitting on a shelf. Like most problems, not everyone has it, but if X video card has problems with Y game, you may want to factor that into your buying decision. Just go to support forums for the card you are interested in, and if you see a 41 page monster of a thread on problems with the game you want to play like this one for Half Life: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&thre adid=33718666
You might reconsider.
Please get over this. I know that there are "white hat" "hackers" out there who want the meaning of hacker to be something different, but you lost that battle a LONG time ago. Ask anyone on the street these days, and they'll tell you a hacker is someone who maliciously breaks into people's computers. You can't change that, just come up with a different name to call yourself or live with the reaction most people will have when you tell them you are a hacker.
Personally, I think they set themselves up for failure. They pumped their movies full of big questions,and in the end, how were they really going to answer them in a way that satisfied everyone? I think the only "big answer" there is is that there ARE no big answers. There is no secret to the nature of reality, it just IS, and when you die you'll either find the answer to one of those big questions, or you'll never know because you'll be too dead to think about it.
They specifically state that it is naturally occuring, and mention nothing of it being genetically enhanced. I think there are a two possibilities here: 1) That people are being cured, it is just they never know they had cancer. 2) The virus is wiped out long before it reaches cancer cells, which might be why they say they inject it into the cancer.
I think that the expectation of businesses have been raised from simply their financial responsibility to stockholders. Drug companies aren't expected to lose money, but they may be expected to lose money on miricle cures, and make the money back with other drugs. Honestly I find it very difficult to believe that drug companies are having a difficult time turning a profit with the way medical costs are today. Feel free to post evidence to the contrary, but that's the way things seem to me.
I'm not a microsoft apologist, I just hate seeing otherwise intelligent threads waste time beating a dead horse just for popularity's sake.
How Ironic. I got modded down as "Offtopic" for complaining about someone being offtopic. Come on guys, lets see you get me into the negatives!
Secret to getting a high mod on slashdot: just bash windows, no matter how little it has to do with the topic at hand.
It isn't quite that bad, as there are a lot of opportunities for students. There are of course scholarships, as well as student loans. Interest rates are very low right now. For graduate students there are fellowships where the college will pay all your tuition costs if you do research. To make extra money with little time spent you can be a teaching assistant. Or I suppose you can import books and sell them outside your classroom ;)
I think the bad news is that the publishers aren't going to sit by and watch this happen. I think the first thing they will do is try to get a law passed or changed to make this illegal. If that doesn't work they'll probably just make a US version and an overseas version of their books, just like the revisions that come out to keep people from using old books, and put pressure on bookstores, universities, and professors to ensure that those books are used in the US. They might even just delay oversea versions so that the US and oversea versions fall out of sync. I wonder what decision professors would make, and just how great the pressure will be from the university for professors to use books sold at the university bookstore.
Oh and I really do know how to spell author, but I swear IE autouncorrected it for me!
needed 2/5 sure bets, so that he would only need 1 of the rest to come through for him to be mostly right. Seriously, what possessed him to include Visual Basic 6 and Windows 9x? Whenever a huge company like Microsoft releases an "upgrade" to a successful product you can be damn sure they will do everything they can to kill off the predecessor in order to sell the upgrade. How often does it happen that Microsoft isn't able to pull this off? Almost never, and if the first upgrade fails, they can always release another, and another, and eventually they'll get it right.
I never said the story was always paramount. I did say it has more importance than that given to it in porn movies. Movies are perhaps the best way to look at this sort of thing, as they have been able to create anything one can imagine for some time now. There are some movies that have their strength in the plot, and some that have a lot of action. The really great ones have both. Pure Action movies are much like most every video game is now. However, like movies, it all depends on the kind of game you want to make as to how important the plot is. That said, I personally am tiring of movies that are ONLY action and no story. There will always be a teen to twenties crowd for whom that is still entertaining. But my hope is that games will develop that have good action, but whose main motivator is not the next big gun, monster, or explosion. I want to see games where the motivation to continue through the game is to uncover the next part of the plot. As the gaming demographic matures, I think there will be a lot more demand for more than just pure action games.
Well, it doesn't surprise me that someone from id software would say that, but their time is comming to an end. People won't be satisfied with paper thin plots forever. Either they'll turn to multiplayer only, or they'll demand that single player games have more substance than a porn movie. The things that have up until now distracted people from the plot will soon become old hat. Improvements in graphics will soon become insignificant as we approach photo realism. Soon developers will run out of gimmicks, be they sunflares, shadows, physics, or vehicles. They'll all lose their charm, and the only thing that will remain to impress gamers will be the creativity of the game itself.
I thought about this, but intentional or not, it is STILL cheesy. South Park's animation is crap, which is totally intentional, but it is still crap. Still, in South Park's case they COULD have had great animation if they wanted to (they use the same system Jurassic Park was made with to animate it) but they CHOSE not to. But I kind of wonder what Remedy was aiming for if in fact they could have had a purely original, thoughtful, and non-cheesy script. Usually intentional cheesiness is intended to poke fun at the seriousness of a subject, but that wasn't the case in Max Payne. I'm left thinking that they just didn't have the talent to produce a purely original film noir script, and either the cheesiness was intentional because they didn't even want to try, or they did try, it turned out cheesy, and now they want to call it intentional. So again... it's still cheesy, so who really cares what their intention was? However, I don't fualt them for not having that kind of talent as no one else in the industry does, and it isn't likely given the lure of movies.
Max Payne 2 is, as you would expect of a sequel, much like the original Max Payne. Both games are short by game standards, and Max Payne 2 seems even shorter than its predecessor. That isn't a complaint, merely an observation. Max Payne 2 is a lot of goodness packed into a tight package. It does leave you wishing for more.
Firstly, I am going to skip over AI, graphics, and sound. Any other review of the game can tell you about this, so let it suffice to say that they all come together to produce a great gaming experience. What matters is how the developers use them to suck the gamer into their world.
By video game standards, Max Payne is original, but like so many games it is an imitation of movies, in this case film noir. They get it very close to right, but at times it almost seems as though they try too hard, and after a while the lines start sounding a bit cheesy. I suppose it is silly to expect a game to rise above this, as great writing/acting talent is no doubt drawn to movies themselves, but I'm still holding out in the hope that someone will put together a really great original script for a game. But again, this is a video game, and by those standards Max Payne 2 rises above the rest. I don't know about you, but I am getting a bit tired of the "aliens/monsters invade, it's your job to save the world" plot.
The idea of using comics to tell the story was a stroke of genius, as it is a perfect work around for the incapability of video game characters to act. The technology just isn't there yet, and when games try to tell a story with emotion it is more likely to come off comical than serious, as the stick figures jerk around in an attempt to appear human. Obviously comics aren't great at conveying emotion, but they certainly don't detract from it the way in video game cut scenes tend to. Film noir being the straight faced act that it is allows Max Payne 2 to flow nicely.
The atmosphere of the game is outstanding. The attention to detail put into every level is phenomenal. One wonders if the trend will be for games to become shorter in coming years, as the effort needed to build ever more realistic worlds from scratch becomes greater. There is a mad fun house level in the game that almost makes you cringe as you realize how much effort went into making all the props and setting them all up to move as a fun house does. The cringe comes from the realization that the detail must have cost the game some of its length. Apparently the developers realized this too, as you actually pass through the level twice during the games.
My gripes about the game are few. I think there could have been a little bit better enemy placement, and the difficulty of the game could have been increased to make the game both longer and more challenging. Shooting enemies in bullet time doesn't lose its charm, and with quick save and load being such an easy thing you think they would have made things a bit tougher. There were times where I would take out 2 or 3 people and turn hoping to see one more bad guy, only to find an empty corner. Another thing, I think they should have placed the bad guys in front of more breakable objects. I don't know about you, but I love to see stuff fly apart, and it just didn't happen as often as I wanted. More often they would be standing on some ledge, ready to die and give you yet another display of the physics engine. I personally don't think it is that cool to see the person you shoot instantly go limp and fall like a sack of potatoes. It may be realistic for a rag doll, but it isn't for someone who just got shot. But hey, I guess that is why it is called "rag doll" physics and not "guy who just got shot" physics. If they wanted to show it off I would have rather seen them add slow motion deaths for grenade explosions, of which there were none.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I hope they are able to lay Max Payne to rest however, as I don't think they can really do much else with this. Hopefully their next game will be as fresh as the original Max Payne was.
Max Payne 2 is, as you would expect of a sequel, much like the original Max Payne. Both games are short by game standards, and Max Payne 2 seems even shorter than its predecessor. That isn't a complaint, merely an observation. Max Payne 2 is a lot of goodness packed into a tight package. It does leave you wishing for more. Firstly, I am going to skip over AI, graphics, and sound. Any other review of the game can tell you about this, so let it suffice to say that they all come together to produce a great gaming experience. What matters is how the developers use them to suck the gamer into their world. By video game standards, Max Payne is original, but like so many games it is an imitation of movies, in this case film noir. They get it very close to right, but at times it almost seems as though they try too hard, and after a while the lines start sounding a bit cheesy. I suppose it is silly to expect a game to rise above this, as great writing/acting talent is no doubt drawn to movies themselves, but I'm still holding out in the hope that someone will put together a really great original script for a game. But again, this is a video game, and by those standards Max Payne 2 rises above the rest. I don't know about you, but I am getting a bit tired of the "aliens/monsters invade, it's your job to save the world" plot. The idea of using comics to tell the story was a stroke of genius, as it is a perfect work around for the incapability of video game characters to act. The technology just isn't there yet, and when games try to tell a story with emotion it is more likely to come off comical than serious, as the stick figures jerk around in an attempt to appear human. Obviously comics aren't great at conveying emotion, but they certainly don't detract from it the way in video game cut scenes tend to. Film noir being the straight faced act that it is allows Max Payne 2 to flow nicely. The atmosphere of the game is outstanding. The attention to detail put into every level is phenomenal. One wonders if the trend will be for games to become shorter in coming years, as the effort needed to build ever more realistic worlds from scratch becomes greater. There is a mad fun house level in the game that almost makes you cringe as you realize how much effort went into making all the props and setting them all up to move as a fun house does. The cringe comes from the realization that the detail must have cost the game some of its length. Apparently the developers realized this too, as you actually pass through the level twice during the games. My gripes about the game are few. I think there could have been a little bit better enemy placement, and the difficulty of the game could have been increased to make the game both longer and more challenging. Shooting enemies in bullet time doesn't lose its charm, and with quick save and load being such an easy thing you think they would have made things a bit tougher. There were times where I would take out 2 or 3 people and turn hoping to see one more bad guy, only to find an empty corner. Another thing, I think they should have placed the bad guys in front of more breakable objects. I don't know about you, but I love to see stuff fly apart, and it just didn't happen as often as I wanted. More often they would be standing on some ledge, ready to die and give you yet another display of the physics engine. I personally don't think it is that cool to see the person you shoot instantly go limp and fall like a sack of potatoes. It may be realistic for a rag doll, but it isn't for someone who just got shot. But hey, I guess that is why it is called "rag doll" physics and not "guy who just got shot" physics. If they wanted to show it off I would have rather seen them add slow motion deaths for grenade explosions, of which there were none. All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I hope they are able to lay Max Payne to rest however, as I don't think they can really do much else with this. Hopefully their next game will be as fresh as the original Max Payne was.
Microsoft's copyright protection is a PAIN IN THE BUTT. So there is your "valid use" explanation. But more than that, I believe everyone SHOULD have the god given right to circumvent copyright protection. Copyright protection is, plain and simple, a way to take away your fair use rights. Coupled with the DMCA, it actually makes it illegal (I still have a hard time swallowing it). I understand that copyright protection may have a legitimate goal: to prevent masses of people from breaking copyright law, but when it prevents masses of people from legitimate use it's usefulness is overshadowed by that flaw. Take DVD regions. Why should the DVD makers be able to tell me that where I buy a DVD is where that DVD should be played, just so they can better control global pricing? Why should it be illegal for me to circumvent "protection" of that sort?
Not only that, but why should I not have the right to change, learn from, or do whatever the hell I want with a product I buy? A DVD isn't just a copy, because if I walk out of a store with a DVD I am going to be slapped down for STEALING, not copyright infringement. A DVD is MY property once I buy it, and if I want to mess around with it then that is my business. If you sell me a product with a lock on it, that shouldn't mean I don't have the right to break the lock and take a look inside. What I do afterwards with what I unlocked may be criminal, but nothing up unto that point should.
Personally I love ebooks. I have a pocket PC and I do as much reading as I can on it. The two hurdles I've found are this (other than the price of a pocket pc): 1) The selection is still limited. What's more, is that some books that would really benifit from the ebook format, like textbooks, aren't put into that format at all. I assume this is because the publishers are afraid the books will be copied instead of bought. They're probably right too, because the prices they force students to pay is second to theft. $500 a semester for books is ridiculous. 2) The formats suck. I actually prefer just plain text files when I can get them, since I can use mobipocket on those. Then there are LIT files, which I loath because it is SO HARD to get them to work. You have to get a MS passport, then you have to "activate" your pocket pc, which very often gets confused with your PC, and I've almost never been able to get the damn things to work. I actually had to go out and find a program called CLIT (C-LIT is the nice way to pronouce that) that would remove the copyright protection, just so I could read the ebook I bought from amazon. WTF? PDF is better in that you can get it to work, but it is still a bit slow on my pocketpc, and I don't like the PDF reader nearly as good as mobipocket or even MS's reader.
Consider this: It has been reported by halflife2.net that a pre-release version of the game has been leaked. In other words, a fully functioning version of the game is out there, that was most likely taken at the same time as the source. Valve may want to take the next 6 months to make the game worth buying even to those with a pre-release version, by adding more content.
The issue here is the invasion of privacy. There are plenty of ways to control bandwidth usage without doing this. My college (Ga Tech) had huge problems with p2p software taking up all available bandwidth. For about two semesters the pings were 1000 even to across the street, and the network was almost unusable because of this. Finally Ga Tech did something smart: they updated the hubs so that they could limit everyone to 60 kb/sec upload on a port by port basis. The vast majority of traffic created by P2P is from uploading. Now everything runs smooth.