1) Roughly what percent of your music collection is unauthorized files from P2P like Kazaa, FTP, etc.?
About 1%... I'm very much against unauthorized music sharing, but I must admit there are about 5-6 unauthorized songs (mostly video game tunes) that I keep around. 'Course, those CDs are no longer available to buy anyway... not that it makes unauthorized distribution okay, but that's how I rationalize it:)
2) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
Roughly 20% to 25%. Mostly iTunes, but also some purchases from Magnatune.
3) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
0%
4) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
75% to 80%. I still definitely prefer to buy physical CDs (although I tend to order them online). I like to listen to my music in my car, and my car's CD player doesn't do well with burned music.
5) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
In a forum thread, Derek Smart mentioned plans for *mouse control* in flights, and *planet side missions* (As in, get out of your space fighter and run around on foot).
If those are his "revolutionary" ideas for the Freespace universe, then I fear that he doesn't understand what makes a space combat sim truly enjoyable. At the very least, someone should force him to play all the way through the previous game, and maybe Descent 3, using a really good joystick...
Rolling, banking, afterburning all over the place, laser fire screaming past you, dodging homing missiles left and right, huge beam weapons slicing capital ships apart in the background... THAT's a space combat sim. Not running around on a planet somewhere collecting goo. Not constantly picking your mouse up because you ran out of mouse pad.
The thing that hurts replayability the most for me is that, after the 1st time through a game, I usually know where most, if not all, the enemies/items/etc... are going to appear. There are no surprises any more!
I don't think random level generation is needed. Just look at how popular multiplayer is - those people are playing on the same levels over and over again. It's the unexpected that keeps bringing them back. With human opponents, you never know when or where you're going to run into somebody, OR what they're going to do. You must constantly use your head to do well.
Random enemy placement (especially right behind the player:) ) may extend the life of a game by a bit. Also, it might be helpful to give more variety to the tactics that enemies use. Thus, the players won't know for sure that "okay, that brown guy is going to run at me for 3 seconds and then break left, so it's safe for me to take careful aim now."
All you really need is a little bit of a surprise here and there to keep the adrenaline flowing...
I always enjoyed the old Robot programming games. There was one called C Robots, where different programs would fight in an arena. The challenging part was devising algorithms to scan for targets, take evasive action, and fire at the enemy - all while conserving CPU cycles.
Another plus (IMO) of Planets 4 is the scripting engine. You can create virtually any scenario you can dream of, and there are already several 3rd party programs to assist in script and map creation.
Over at Drewhead's hosting site, we've had a huge variety of games... Epic team games on huge custom maps - "Resource allocation" type games, where players get a fixed number of points to build their own starting equipment / fleet - "Flagship" type games, where the goal is to hunt down the enemy's flagship... I just finished hosting one game where the goal was to mine a huge amount of a certain mineral.
Point is, the rules allow a wide variety of game types.
Once the game goes gold, Tim will likely release DLLs and such to allow 3rd party programmers to write their own add-ons, making the game even more customizable.
This tool seems to require that you already have your key stored in a file somewhere. This code just uses that key along with.NET's built-in cryptographic services to decrypt the data and write it back to the file.
Seems like getting your hands on the key in the first place would be the hard part...
For those that would like to see some great TA games - more than just newbie vs. newbie on an all metal map - you might want to check out the excellent fan-created Demo Recorder. Then, you'll probably want to download some TA game recordings.
I didn't see any mention of having to calibrate the device or ask control questions. Are they really claiming to be able to extract all that information from so little input?
Just thinking about the example question, "Do you plan on hijacking this plane?"... Everyone is going to answer "Yes". One word. One syllable, even. Can they really take a bunch of single-syllable responses, from people with such diverse backgrounds as you would find at an international airport, and determine who's lying?
If the device DOES have to be calibrated for a particular individual, then that drastically reduces its usefulness.
I haven't experienced anything like the DVD audio problem you describe. But then again, I only have 2 DVD Audio disks and I don't listen to either of them very often.
I have experienced one obnoxious DVD-Audio problem... if I have my Creative Speaker Settings set to 5.1 (and I do have 5.1 speaker) then it comes out sounding like it's just stereo. The rear speakers don't get used at all. But if I set it to 4.1 then everything is fine. Strange.
Speaking of the Audigy 2, perhaps someone with a little more audio experience can answer this for me:
I built a new PC a couple months ago and stuck a Creative Audigy 2 in it. I've also got a good set of 5.1 speakers. Yet when I turn the volume up to moderately high levels, I can hear an obnoxious buzzing sound whenever I scroll a web page or something... even when there's no music playing in the background. What causes that, and how might I fix it?
I'll be the first to praise Descent's great AI, but I honestly don't think it's adaptive at all. Doing a search yielded no pages that indicated an adaptive AI. I even found an interview with one of the developers, and although AI was discussed briefly, no mention was made of adaptability.
The Descent robots were definitely smart - they could find you ANYWHERE in a level, could call for reinforcements, and some knew how to sneak up behind you when you weren't looking. But they didn't adapt to your playing style or learn from their mistakes. There were five difficulty levels: Trainee, Rookie, Hotshot, Ace, Insane. From what I can remember, the bots were just a little bit better at dodging on the higher difficulty levels (and did more damage, too).
I wrote a program that does exactly that, just out of curiosity. The modified images were saved in PNG format to preserve all of the data.
The problem with this approach is file size. I should have realized even before I started that adding information to the least significant bits was going to kill the compression ratio. Even in images that were significantly large/noisy beforehand (photographs) in PNG format, they increased in size once I embedded a decent sized message.
For example, I took a 320x240 photograph (230k of data, uncompressed) and saved it as PNG. File size was about 160k. I then added about 7k of text to the image using a process similar to the one you described. Resaved as PNG. The file is now 200k!
Adding any sort of informational content to an image is going to make it harder to compress, and huge files are suspicious - especially when a JPG would take only 10 percent of the file size.
Detecting stegonography is sortof like looking for a needle in a haystack. One on hand, if the haystack is too small then the needle is easy to find. On the other hand, if your neighbor has a 30-meter high haystack in his backyard, you KNOW something's up, even if you can't find the needle.
If we were talking about a screenshot or something then I would definitely agree with you. Images like that have very low background noise - you'd expect to see tons of white pixels, for example, with no variation in color at all.
But a photograph? The least significant bits of a picture must surely be fairly random. Although I haven't actually tested this, I would expect to see about a 50/50 ratio of 1s and 0s in the least significant bits of any photograph taken with a digital camera.
How could that that work reliably?
Lets say I take a text message, then encrypt it (as all hidden messages should be). At this point, the encrypted bits of the message should closely resemble random noise - assuming the encryption scheme we used was good enough.
Now I take the encrypted bits of the message (which already look a lot like random noise) and hide them inside the least significant bits of a bitmap file. Lets assume that I'm using a half-decent steganography tool here, and it distributes the bits of the message throughout the image in a psueudo-random fashion.
So now we've got a stream of encrypted bits, which more or less resembles a stream of psueodo-random numbers. And we've sprinkled these bits all over the place inside the image, so they don't even appear together or in order.
How does one go about detecting that there's a message in there, reliably? What distinguishes the [pseudo]randomly-distributed [psuedo]random-bits of the encrypted message from the background noise of the image?
(I am assuming, of course, that the message we're trying to hide is relatively small - at most, 1 bit per byte in the image is modified. Much more than that is like trying to hide a tractor trailer behind a go-kart)
Shortly after the Star Wars Battlefront announcement, Rebel forces captured several dozen systems as Imperial troops deserted their assigned posts to camp AT-AT respawn points.
Right now, I can walk into a drug store and buy a wide variety of products - cold medicines, pain killers, etc... - and be reasonbly sure that they're not going to kill me. The FDA does a pretty good job of keeping harmful stuff from getting onto the shelf.
If we "legalize" drugs, who is going to keep harmful side effects in check? Is it just another section in the store - the "this might kill you or make you hallucinate" ailse? What's to keep nefarious individuals from sticking some cocaine in a pretty box and selling it as "the best pain killer you've ever had!" And you thought Rush was addicted to pain killers BEFORE...
Theoretically you could make Starcraft completely uncheatable.
Actually, most RTS games are even more prone to cheating than FPS games are. At least FPS games are client/server, meaning that there IS an all-powerful server that decides once and for all what is going on in the game, and what information to send to each client.
RTS games, if I'm not mistaken, lean much more towards the peer-to-peer model. There's simply too much information ( hundreds of units! ) to hand back & forth over a network connection. Consequently, each client runs its own simulation going of the entire game - the network traffic just serves the purpose of keeping everybody's simulations synchronized.
Thus a hacked RTS client would be like the ultimate wallhack... it would allow you to see exactly what everyone else in the game is up to. So much for strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
About 1%... I'm very much against unauthorized music sharing, but I must admit there are about 5-6 unauthorized songs (mostly video game tunes) that I keep around. 'Course, those CDs are no longer available to buy anyway... not that it makes unauthorized distribution okay, but that's how I rationalize it :)
2) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
Roughly 20% to 25%. Mostly iTunes, but also some purchases from Magnatune.
3) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
0%
4) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
75% to 80%. I still definitely prefer to buy physical CDs (although I tend to order them online). I like to listen to my music in my car, and my car's CD player doesn't do well with burned music.
5) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
0%
Eek.... who would want to trust their data to a file system so complex that even Microsoft can't finish it after multiple years of development?
If those are his "revolutionary" ideas for the Freespace universe, then I fear that he doesn't understand what makes a space combat sim truly enjoyable. At the very least, someone should force him to play all the way through the previous game, and maybe Descent 3, using a really good joystick...
Rolling, banking, afterburning all over the place, laser fire screaming past you, dodging homing missiles left and right, huge beam weapons slicing capital ships apart in the background... THAT's a space combat sim. Not running around on a planet somewhere collecting goo. Not constantly picking your mouse up because you ran out of mouse pad.
I don't think random level generation is needed. Just look at how popular multiplayer is - those people are playing on the same levels over and over again. It's the unexpected that keeps bringing them back. With human opponents, you never know when or where you're going to run into somebody, OR what they're going to do. You must constantly use your head to do well.
Random enemy placement (especially right behind the player :) ) may extend the life of a game by a bit. Also, it might be helpful to give more variety to the tactics that enemies use. Thus, the players won't know for sure that "okay, that brown guy is going to run at me for 3 seconds and then break left, so it's safe for me to take careful aim now."
All you really need is a little bit of a surprise here and there to keep the adrenaline flowing...
I always enjoyed the old Robot programming games. There was one called C Robots, where different programs would fight in an arena. The challenging part was devising algorithms to scan for targets, take evasive action, and fire at the enemy - all while conserving CPU cycles.
Another plus (IMO) of Planets 4 is the scripting engine. You can create virtually any scenario you can dream of, and there are already several 3rd party programs to assist in script and map creation.
Over at Drewhead's hosting site, we've had a huge variety of games... Epic team games on huge custom maps - "Resource allocation" type games, where players get a fixed number of points to build their own starting equipment / fleet - "Flagship" type games, where the goal is to hunt down the enemy's flagship... I just finished hosting one game where the goal was to mine a huge amount of a certain mineral.
Point is, the rules allow a wide variety of game types.
Once the game goes gold, Tim will likely release DLLs and such to allow 3rd party programmers to write their own add-ons, making the game even more customizable.
This tool seems to require that you already have your key stored in a file somewhere. This code just uses that key along with .NET's built-in cryptographic services to decrypt the data and write it back to the file.
Seems like getting your hands on the key in the first place would be the hard part...
Was your new boss telling you how to "Make $$$ Online At Home"?
On my 2.8 GHz machine, the demo took a full minute to load.
Microsoft has had technology for sending code over networks for years, as evidenced by the recent MSBlast worm :)
Yet another OS we have to stick in our testing matrix. Sigh...
For those that would like to see some great TA games - more than just newbie vs. newbie on an all metal map - you might want to check out the excellent fan-created Demo Recorder. Then, you'll probably want to download some TA game recordings.
I didn't see any mention of having to calibrate the device or ask control questions. Are they really claiming to be able to extract all that information from so little input?
Just thinking about the example question, "Do you plan on hijacking this plane?"... Everyone is going to answer "Yes". One word. One syllable, even. Can they really take a bunch of single-syllable responses, from people with such diverse backgrounds as you would find at an international airport, and determine who's lying?
If the device DOES have to be calibrated for a particular individual, then that drastically reduces its usefulness.
I haven't experienced anything like the DVD audio problem you describe. But then again, I only have 2 DVD Audio disks and I don't listen to either of them very often.
I have experienced one obnoxious DVD-Audio problem... if I have my Creative Speaker Settings set to 5.1 (and I do have 5.1 speaker) then it comes out sounding like it's just stereo. The rear speakers don't get used at all. But if I set it to 4.1 then everything is fine. Strange.
Speaking of the Audigy 2, perhaps someone with a little more audio experience can answer this for me:
I built a new PC a couple months ago and stuck a Creative Audigy 2 in it. I've also got a good set of 5.1 speakers. Yet when I turn the volume up to moderately high levels, I can hear an obnoxious buzzing sound whenever I scroll a web page or something... even when there's no music playing in the background. What causes that, and how might I fix it?
I'll be the first to praise Descent's great AI, but I honestly don't think it's adaptive at all. Doing a search yielded no pages that indicated an adaptive AI. I even found an interview with one of the developers, and although AI was discussed briefly, no mention was made of adaptability.
The Descent robots were definitely smart - they could find you ANYWHERE in a level, could call for reinforcements, and some knew how to sneak up behind you when you weren't looking. But they didn't adapt to your playing style or learn from their mistakes. There were five difficulty levels: Trainee, Rookie, Hotshot, Ace, Insane. From what I can remember, the bots were just a little bit better at dodging on the higher difficulty levels (and did more damage, too).
Perhaps I'm an uncultured dolt, but these "poems" look like someone just took a bunch of bad prose and randomly inserted carriage returns.
No rhyme. No rhythm. And definitely no music.
I wrote a program that does exactly that, just out of curiosity. The modified images were saved in PNG format to preserve all of the data.
The problem with this approach is file size. I should have realized even before I started that adding information to the least significant bits was going to kill the compression ratio. Even in images that were significantly large/noisy beforehand (photographs) in PNG format, they increased in size once I embedded a decent sized message.
For example, I took a 320x240 photograph (230k of data, uncompressed) and saved it as PNG. File size was about 160k. I then added about 7k of text to the image using a process similar to the one you described. Resaved as PNG. The file is now 200k!
Adding any sort of informational content to an image is going to make it harder to compress, and huge files are suspicious - especially when a JPG would take only 10 percent of the file size.
Detecting stegonography is sortof like looking for a needle in a haystack. One on hand, if the haystack is too small then the needle is easy to find. On the other hand, if your neighbor has a 30-meter high haystack in his backyard, you KNOW something's up, even if you can't find the needle.
But a photograph? The least significant bits of a picture must surely be fairly random. Although I haven't actually tested this, I would expect to see about a 50/50 ratio of 1s and 0s in the least significant bits of any photograph taken with a digital camera.
Now I take the encrypted bits of the message (which already look a lot like random noise) and hide them inside the least significant bits of a bitmap file. Lets assume that I'm using a half-decent steganography tool here, and it distributes the bits of the message throughout the image in a psueudo-random fashion.
So now we've got a stream of encrypted bits, which more or less resembles a stream of psueodo-random numbers. And we've sprinkled these bits all over the place inside the image, so they don't even appear together or in order.
How does one go about detecting that there's a message in there, reliably? What distinguishes the [pseudo]randomly-distributed [psuedo]random-bits of the encrypted message from the background noise of the image?
(I am assuming, of course, that the message we're trying to hide is relatively small - at most, 1 bit per byte in the image is modified. Much more than that is like trying to hide a tractor trailer behind a go-kart)
Shortly after the Star Wars Battlefront announcement, Rebel forces captured several dozen systems as Imperial troops deserted their assigned posts to camp AT-AT respawn points.
Right now, I can walk into a drug store and buy a wide variety of products - cold medicines, pain killers, etc... - and be reasonbly sure that they're not going to kill me. The FDA does a pretty good job of keeping harmful stuff from getting onto the shelf.
If we "legalize" drugs, who is going to keep harmful side effects in check? Is it just another section in the store - the "this might kill you or make you hallucinate" ailse? What's to keep nefarious individuals from sticking some cocaine in a pretty box and selling it as "the best pain killer you've ever had!" And you thought Rush was addicted to pain killers BEFORE...
Actually, most RTS games are even more prone to cheating than FPS games are. At least FPS games are client/server, meaning that there IS an all-powerful server that decides once and for all what is going on in the game, and what information to send to each client.
RTS games, if I'm not mistaken, lean much more towards the peer-to-peer model. There's simply too much information ( hundreds of units! ) to hand back & forth over a network connection. Consequently, each client runs its own simulation going of the entire game - the network traffic just serves the purpose of keeping everybody's simulations synchronized.
Thus a hacked RTS client would be like the ultimate wallhack... it would allow you to see exactly what everyone else in the game is up to. So much for strategy.