Wikipedia article on 'stingray'
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It might be interesting to note that the Wikipedia article on stingrays has already been locked due to vandalism, only hours after the news hit the Web. Mr Irwin's death has had a much greater impact online than I originally anticipated.
I recently purchased a monitor from Dell. It came in three boxes. One was the monitor itself, the second was a power cord, which, I suppose is semi-justifiable because that will be the part which changes depending on teritory, but the third was a 30-page product manual (printed in 12 languages, of course). It's this kind of lazy packaging that really makes me doubt the thoroughness of Greenpeace's research into Dell's stance on the environment.
The company I work for buys all their PCs from Dell, and the amount of packaging that is unrecyclable that we have to dispose of is just disgusting. Dell might practice some green policies, but they pass a lot of their responsibility for the environment on to their consumers. I'd really like to see fewer plastics and polystyrene used to package their hardware.
Ever since 8 meg lines starting becoming the norm in the UK, broadband companies over here have somehow managed to sidestep the Trade Descriptions Act quite nicely with their advertisement of "unlimited" broadband. Frankly, I'm wondering where the hell the Trading Standards Authority stands in all of this. How can you market a product as "unlimited" when it quite obviously isn't?
MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where, but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver. What more could you want?
NGC, one of Future Publishing's UK games magazines, claimed they had definitive proof from an inside source that the next Zelda would make use of the Revolution controller. Nintendo made a statement in response saying NGC's article was "pure speculation" (Eurogamer article).
When GameDaily's article says we should "... expect to see Zelda: Twilight Princess running on Revolution with the new features discussed a couple weeks ago...", they might as well claim that we should expect to see every other rumour and piece of speculation come true too.
I for one am looking forward to seeing Link ride into town in his new monster truck, weilding an AK47 and smoking a phat spliff.
I'm surprised something like this hasn't come up much sooner. The author of the story makes it sound like it's just Blizzard at fault here, when I'm pretty sure that you'd encounter very similar problems if you tried to play any game requiring some form of online validation, that you bought second-hand. This is exactly the reason why I have avoided buying such games second-hand since CD-keys came about (several years now).
If there do exist mechanisms for restoring a CD-key to an unregistered state, for any game, I'm sure the hassle is not worth the pitiful amount retailers will pay for used games, and I can't expect retailers to check every used game they get for working CD-keys.
I had this exact same problem with a few images I host on my site. Typically from forums that allow avatars to be hosted offsite. I did a bit of a google on the problem of "hot linking", and came up with this:
It's an excellent solution that prevents hot/deep image embedding, but allows for normal anchor links to your pictures. You'll need to be hosting on an apache server and be allowed to use.htaccess files and have mod_rewrite, plus the tiniest amount of php/perl scripting knowledge (php example in link).
Basically, you rewrite any requests for images from offsite with a URL that points to a script. Embedded images will fail, because the browser expects image data when it gets text/html instead. The script simply displays the image, perhaps puts a credit in, and a link back to your site.
This way, you can block most people from stealing your bandwidth by embedding your images in their pages, but not prevent less-harmful linking.
I believe this has something to do with with recent shutdown of the mIRCx IRC network (see: http://www.mircx.com/irc.html).
There are rumours (see: http://kashin-anime.edwardk.info/mircx_downtime.tx t) of a DDoS "botnet" being held on foonet, which may have been responsible for recent IRC network attacks.
This is just speculation however, I'm not sure I should believe that the FBI would take action against the attack of an IRC network with a less-than-wholesome reputation.
To those that think that this will not change anything, I disagree. I'm not fully sure of Free-X's motives, but I do believe this will be seen by many as an easy, cheaper way to mod their XBox. As soon as 13 year-old-proof instructions are released, I can see this exploit really taking off as a method to play unsigned, copied games on the XBox.
That is, of course, if Microsoft don't destroy Free-X through the legal system (this would be a great victory for the EUCD), or as people have already said, release a patch through XBox Live and/or future games.
Wasn't The Matrix: Revisited a "2 Disc set loaded with extras"?
I too would like to know if this release is any different. The title "special edit" suggests to me that perhaps there are some extended scenes in this one.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be interesting to note that the Wikipedia article on stingrays has already been locked due to vandalism, only hours after the news hit the Web. Mr Irwin's death has had a much greater impact online than I originally anticipated.
I recently purchased a monitor from Dell. It came in three boxes. One was the monitor itself, the second was a power cord, which, I suppose is semi-justifiable because that will be the part which changes depending on teritory, but the third was a 30-page product manual (printed in 12 languages, of course). It's this kind of lazy packaging that really makes me doubt the thoroughness of Greenpeace's research into Dell's stance on the environment.
The company I work for buys all their PCs from Dell, and the amount of packaging that is unrecyclable that we have to dispose of is just disgusting. Dell might practice some green policies, but they pass a lot of their responsibility for the environment on to their consumers. I'd really like to see fewer plastics and polystyrene used to package their hardware.
Ever since 8 meg lines starting becoming the norm in the UK, broadband companies over here have somehow managed to sidestep the Trade Descriptions Act quite nicely with their advertisement of "unlimited" broadband. Frankly, I'm wondering where the hell the Trading Standards Authority stands in all of this. How can you market a product as "unlimited" when it quite obviously isn't?
MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where, but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver. What more could you want?
NGC, one of Future Publishing's UK games magazines, claimed they had definitive proof from an inside source that the next Zelda would make use of the Revolution controller. Nintendo made a statement in response saying NGC's article was "pure speculation" (Eurogamer article).
When GameDaily's article says we should "... expect to see Zelda: Twilight Princess running on Revolution with the new features discussed a couple weeks ago...", they might as well claim that we should expect to see every other rumour and piece of speculation come true too.
I for one am looking forward to seeing Link ride into town in his new monster truck, weilding an AK47 and smoking a phat spliff.
I'm surprised something like this hasn't come up much sooner. The author of the story makes it sound like it's just Blizzard at fault here, when I'm pretty sure that you'd encounter very similar problems if you tried to play any game requiring some form of online validation, that you bought second-hand. This is exactly the reason why I have avoided buying such games second-hand since CD-keys came about (several years now).
If there do exist mechanisms for restoring a CD-key to an unregistered state, for any game, I'm sure the hassle is not worth the pitiful amount retailers will pay for used games, and I can't expect retailers to check every used game they get for working CD-keys.
I had this exact same problem with a few images I host on my site. Typically from forums that allow avatars to be hosted offsite. I did a bit of a google on the problem of "hot linking", and came up with this:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/
It's an excellent solution that prevents hot/deep image embedding, but allows for normal anchor links to your pictures. You'll need to be hosting on an apache server and be allowed to use .htaccess files and have mod_rewrite, plus the tiniest amount of php/perl scripting knowledge (php example in link).
Basically, you rewrite any requests for images from offsite with a URL that points to a script. Embedded images will fail, because the browser expects image data when it gets text/html instead. The script simply displays the image, perhaps puts a credit in, and a link back to your site.
This way, you can block most people from stealing your bandwidth by embedding your images in their pages, but not prevent less-harmful linking.
I believe this has something to do with with recent shutdown of the mIRCx IRC network (see: http://www.mircx.com/irc.html). There are rumours (see: http://kashin-anime.edwardk.info/mircx_downtime.tx t) of a DDoS "botnet" being held on foonet, which may have been responsible for recent IRC network attacks.
This is just speculation however, I'm not sure I should believe that the FBI would take action against the attack of an IRC network with a less-than-wholesome reputation.
To those that think that this will not change anything, I disagree. I'm not fully sure of Free-X's motives, but I do believe this will be seen by many as an easy, cheaper way to mod their XBox. As soon as 13 year-old-proof instructions are released, I can see this exploit really taking off as a method to play unsigned, copied games on the XBox. That is, of course, if Microsoft don't destroy Free-X through the legal system (this would be a great victory for the EUCD), or as people have already said, release a patch through XBox Live and/or future games.
Wasn't The Matrix: Revisited a "2 Disc set loaded with extras"?
I too would like to know if this release is any different. The title "special edit" suggests to me that perhaps there are some extended scenes in this one.