There's a 'badblocks' tool on Linux to do the same thing. Tools like mke2fs can use the tool or the output from it to get a list of bad blocks to avoid on the hardware.
Personally, I'd recommend using an encrypted filesystem in the first place so that when you wipe out your hard drive you're wiping essentially random-looking encrypted data. Forensics becomes much more difficult when you're trying to separate randomness from randomness.
Its an issue of abstraction. Moving fingers apart to "open" something is different from "zooming" something.
Its the same as the difference between a scrollbar and a "hand" for dragging. If you use the hand option in Adobe reader or an image editor, clicking and dragging should move the image around, much like on Google maps. If you use a scroll bar, clicking and moving moves the image in the opposite direction of movement. Both are correct.
In the case of zooming with fingers, I agree with the GP -- when I move my fingers together, the screen should zoom out to make the object smaller, and vice-versa.
I had no problems with the controls from the start -- going through the training really helps though, and (as posted earlier), realizing its a dragon and not a jet fighter.
The dragon moves exactly as my controller does, pitching and diving and turning with grace unless I tried to drive it into a wall.
And yes, the graphics are incredible -- the dynamic mesh system is impressive (increasing resolution as you get closer to important objects) as well as the incredible score (music) and pretty good sound effects.
Having a high quality 5.1 sound system helps of course.
The controls are extremely intuitive and excellent considering its a dragon and not a jet. I've had people complain the dragon doesn't fly like a jet. Of course it doesn't, its a dragon. If you treat it like a dragon, it responds appropriately to your expectations.
PS, the game is really quite hard -- very fun, decent plot, excellent dialog and most breathtakingly huge battles I've been in in a game before. The game dynamics (mission-based interactive movie) are actually very good, but I still miss consequence based missions (like the old Wing Commander plot trees).
Anyone who's interested in how the cell is programmed is better off reading Dr Dobb's programming journal and its review of optimizing for the Cell (which they were very impressed with), or IBM's developer guides with code examples on how to use SPUs and their local cache memory. PS, SPUs have local cache and DMA transfer ability -- so you can work on up to 256k of data on your heap at once in the SPU but stream data via DMA to and from main memory constantly if you like. The really interesting bit is splitting up a tough AI or physics problem to use multiple SPUs that inter-communicate with DMA transfers.
They do not even appear to agree. Carmack doesn't pan the PS3 at all, he simply points out that its harder to get at the available power, while also saying its more powerful.
Honestly, I stopped reading at the word "reviews".
I actually own the games -- and have a number of friends who play them as well, despite not owning anything newer than a PS2 themselves, and they're excellent.
Sure there aren't many out right now, but they exist, and some of them are excellent. It hasn't even been a year since release yet, I seem to recall all the 360 people decrying the lack of games for the 360 in the first year too; "sure, PGR is good, but I'm sick of it" type stuff.
PS, if a game isn't worth $60 to you, don't buy _any_ system until the games you want are available used or at discount prices. That doesn't make the PS3 suck or anything, it makes it a new system with a low selection in old and used games.
What exactly is less than fantastic about the sixaxis as a remote?
A) its wireless B) the left and right buttons move the movie back and forward C) the big X you use in games to mean 'okay' does the same in menus D) the big Dpad and analog stick thingies you use to move around in games does the same in BD menus E) the square button brings up the menu while playing the movie E) the triangle button brings up all those on-screen options to do other fancy setup stuff I've almost never done with a remote anyway
Some of us are already playing exclusives that are excellent and waiting for more like Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction which IMHO would be a system seller on its own, but I own all the previous editions as well.
Its hardly relevant. Impersonating another user may be illegal where they are doing business, no matter the reason for doing so. They are not law enforcement, nor are they censors. If they wish to starts censoring based on legality, they're free to do so, but filtering does not entail impersonating others (and would cause them to lose common carrier status).
That's only true for the most part of "last-mile" science. 99% of space research so far has been publicly funded and probably would not have happened in the time frame in question had it not been. However, since most of the work is already done, it is now commercially viable to do research on end-user marketable product like space travel and space hotels.
Most companies don't have the budget to do the kinds of research that is funded by government, and if they did, they'd mostly spend it on immediate results. Look at the fall of PARC for a good example of how you're wrong.
So... why not show the friendly police officer his ID? Who cares if he "legally doesn't have to".
Thank God there's people like him in the world and not just people like you. The police have very limited rights, and it should stay that way. Their powers keep creeping up every year with new laws designed to stop "terrorism" or something, so keeping what few limits they have in check are well within your DUTIES as a citizen.
You have rights, stand up for them, or risk losing them. I'm not a pro-gun advocate, but in the old days, they stood up and fought for this type of unlawful activity on the part of law enforcement and brought in civil liberties.
In Quebec, Canada, they're trying to profile the DNA of a good subset of the population and encouraging selective breeding in highschools -- to consider who you're going to breed with to achieve optimal results. In the name of good science, of course.
I'm sure a few of the people working at Auschwitz thought it was good science they were doing too. Its not an excuse.
Defining "optimal" and "sub-optimal" humans should be illegal. I thought sci-fi dealt with this already.
They're different but not orthogonal -- you can have a rootkit that is spyware or just a spyware app with no rootkit, or a rootkit with no spyware. The fact that something is spyware doesn't in other words preclude it from being a rootkit, or vice versa.
He may be talking about the same thing, but without understanding it.
Think of how many people you know call their computer a 'CPU' or a 'Hard Drive'. He's not a technology nut, he's a music nut.
I'd be glad they're only threatening legal action. You wouldn't want them to come do the Shaolin version of a blanket party on you for posting a story about them, would you?
Just think about it -- Shaolin monks gone Mafia -- "I hear you said bad things about us, (beatings) that's not going to happen again, (more beatings) is it?"
So yeah, I DO care about audio quality, and it's precisely why I don't care much about lossy compression... because people need to pay attention to more important things. It just ticks me off when I spend days on a mix, and people seem to care more about what file extensions are.
Click my name and find my recent posts slamming heavy dynamic range compression.
I'm also the guy who complains about poor lens quality on HD video cameras used in the making of some TV shows, because bad source material makes for bad results. That said, the heavy MPEG-2 compression used on my satellite provider means that any high-motion scene is immediately distorted into large barely-moving macroblocks instead.
Compression matters, so does source material, so does mixing and editing. I'm quite excited about the dynamic music mixing system in use for Heavenly Sword personally -- live mixing in less of a cross-fader and more of a progression type system of changing the background music to match circumstances without jarring the user by fading out a significant moment in the previous track.
Thanks for working on good mixes. I really wish more people understood dynamic range as much as I wish people would use real speakers to listen to music.
The DMCA doesn't specify what you can do with anything that belongs to you. You can still destroy it, modify the hardware, replace the software, sell it, lend it, paint it, take it out for lobster, or name it Susan
that's where you're wrong, sorry. Look at your previous comment and you'll understand:
If you want to write your own code to the hardware that ignores whatever bullshit anti-skip flag the industry has created, have at it. You don't have any rights to their software, though. Buying the player doesn't transfer that right.
Actually no, the DMCA prevents me from writing ANY software that could bypass the security systems on DVDs, it doesn't even begin to deal with touching the existing code or modifying someone else's systems. The DMCA makes it illegal to write my own clean-room software with my own clean-room hardware that would read a DVD disc. If I could assemble a PC from parts I engineer myself and install a self-manufactured disc reader in it that could read the tracks off a DVD movie disc, it would STILL be illegal for me to read the data by interpreting my way through the CSS encryption on said disc like MPlayer, VLC and Xine do every time I use them to watch a DVD.
That is, it WOULD be illegal if I were stuck in the USA where the DMCA applies. I happen to be happily Canadian where we have no such draconian corporate protectionist policies.
If it can't be done without technology, it can't be a right. I can't make a perfect copy of an obscure dance CD without tech, so it can't be my right.
... because building a shelter requires technology (minimalist, but still technology -- ask a caveman), it can't be a right? Go talk to someone about the convention on human rights sometime. Legally you have several rights that require technology to implement. You've been drinking the kool-aid obviously.
As another poster pointed out, you've got your genres crossed.
I play Piyotama (PS3), Super Stardust HD (PS3), Go! Puzzle (PS3) and Blast Factor (PS3) all of which fall into the arcade style nearly infinite difficulty gaming described in the above article. Piyotama's another tetris-like game, Go! Puzzle has a tower climbing logic puzzle that is both extremely fun and very difficult, Blast Factor and Super Stardust can both be beaten (btdt), but have progressively more difficult but simple tasks to complete at high speeds requiring excellent reflexes.
Do yourself a favour and try some of the above if you like classic arcade games.
In the words of the producer of a certain "So you think you can dance"... you produce audio and you don't care about audio quality? Please quit!
Sure, some people can't tell, others don't care, some people just don't care because ear buds suck so bad. However, a lot of those people aren't in a position to lay out $500 for a video game system or HDTV either, so they're not exactly the market segment in question, are they?
We're talking about serious gamers choosing between a 360 and a PS3. We're not talking about converting the unwashed masses. We're talking about people who would go buy the latest dual-PCIe motherboard to get more fps on their FPS for better aiming. If you don't care about audio quality, feel free to listen to your iPod and play your DS, personally I just watched another great movie in uncompressed PCM with a friend who didn't realize you could get better than Dolby Digital sound.
I own my DVD player, do I not? If I want to fast forward through the commercials on a DVD with MY DVD player, and I change it to allow me to do so, that's my right, is it not? Its MY DVD PLAYER. The content on the DVD may be Copyright someone else, but the DMCA specifies what I can and cannot do with the player, not the disc.
I'm sure it depends on what kind of game you like. There's Lair, Warhawk, Ratchet & Clank, Heavenly Sword and almost 30 other exclusives coming out by March (not sure how many other than those I named are before Christmas).
Capacity is a no-brainer. As games become more expansive and as hi-res textures become the norm, trying to fit onto a DVD will become a big problem for game developers. The Blu-Ray, at least for now, has some head room built in and having a hard drive in every model will become required (I think they've figured this out with the 360).
I have one thing to say in agreement -- uncompressed audio. Uncompressed 7.1 PCM audio is incredible. I watched Blood Diamond on BD with my wife and switched from DD5.1 to uncompressed audio and she asked why we'd been listening to the crappy sound in the first place at all. Yeah, uncompressed audio makes that glorious Dolby Digital and even DTS audio sound like MP3s in comparison to a good CD.
Yes, yes, some of you are deaf... please don't chime in on the discussion. Some people are also colour blind and some have no arms to play games with. Here's a clue, my comment is for those who do enjoy high quality sound... and you're not going to fit an entire game's worth of 7.1 uncompressed PCM audio on a DVD-9 disc unless its a really small game.
As Tony points out in another reply to your post, the 360 is not virtually the same as a PS3, especially as this generation of systems ages. Unless Microsoft is planning (as another poster commented) an Xbox 3.11 in the very near future (and screwing over 360 owners by discontinuing it as a platform), the PS3 will slowly pull ahead as more and more new game creators want the additional space afforded by blu-ray disc storage.
Sure, lots of good games fit on a DVD, God of War is one of them, but a lot of games will have to sacrifice a lot of quality to squeeze onto a 9GB disc as times wears on while developers making games for the PS3 won't have to worry about it.
Right now all Microsoft really has going for it is the lead in overall sales. If the Playstation 3 had nearly as many installed units as the 360, I'm sure a number of developers would target it exclusively instead of developing for both platforms. At the moment its a numbers game -- not releasing a game on the 360 limits your potential sales -- and yet numerous games really are coming out exclusively for the PS3. Really good ones too.
Its strange really, if you're an american its illegal to defeat copy protection software or hardware on your own devices under the DMCA, so congress apparently believes it has the right to restrict usage of your own private property already.
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There's a 'badblocks' tool on Linux to do the same thing. Tools like mke2fs can use the tool or the output from it to get a list of bad blocks to avoid on the hardware.
Personally, I'd recommend using an encrypted filesystem in the first place so that when you wipe out your hard drive you're wiping essentially random-looking encrypted data. Forensics becomes much more difficult when you're trying to separate randomness from randomness.
Its an issue of abstraction. Moving fingers apart to "open" something is different from "zooming" something.
Its the same as the difference between a scrollbar and a "hand" for dragging. If you use the hand option in Adobe reader or an image editor, clicking and dragging should move the image around, much like on Google maps. If you use a scroll bar, clicking and moving moves the image in the opposite direction of movement. Both are correct.
In the case of zooming with fingers, I agree with the GP -- when I move my fingers together, the screen should zoom out to make the object smaller, and vice-versa.
I had no problems with the controls from the start -- going through the training really helps though, and (as posted earlier), realizing its a dragon and not a jet fighter.
The dragon moves exactly as my controller does, pitching and diving and turning with grace unless I tried to drive it into a wall.
And yes, the graphics are incredible -- the dynamic mesh system is impressive (increasing resolution as you get closer to important objects) as well as the incredible score (music) and pretty good sound effects.
Having a high quality 5.1 sound system helps of course.
The controls are extremely intuitive and excellent considering its a dragon and not a jet. I've had people complain the dragon doesn't fly like a jet. Of course it doesn't, its a dragon. If you treat it like a dragon, it responds appropriately to your expectations.
PS, the game is really quite hard -- very fun, decent plot, excellent dialog and most breathtakingly huge battles I've been in in a game before. The game dynamics (mission-based interactive movie) are actually very good, but I still miss consequence based missions (like the old Wing Commander plot trees).
Anyone who's interested in how the cell is programmed is better off reading Dr Dobb's programming journal and its review of optimizing for the Cell (which they were very impressed with), or IBM's developer guides with code examples on how to use SPUs and their local cache memory. PS, SPUs have local cache and DMA transfer ability -- so you can work on up to 256k of data on your heap at once in the SPU but stream data via DMA to and from main memory constantly if you like. The really interesting bit is splitting up a tough AI or physics problem to use multiple SPUs that inter-communicate with DMA transfers.
They do not even appear to agree. Carmack doesn't pan the PS3 at all, he simply points out that its harder to get at the available power, while also saying its more powerful.
Honestly, I stopped reading at the word "reviews".
I actually own the games -- and have a number of friends who play them as well, despite not owning anything newer than a PS2 themselves, and they're excellent.
Sure there aren't many out right now, but they exist, and some of them are excellent. It hasn't even been a year since release yet, I seem to recall all the 360 people decrying the lack of games for the 360 in the first year too; "sure, PGR is good, but I'm sick of it" type stuff.
PS, if a game isn't worth $60 to you, don't buy _any_ system until the games you want are available used or at discount prices. That doesn't make the PS3 suck or anything, it makes it a new system with a low selection in old and used games.
What exactly is less than fantastic about the sixaxis as a remote?
A) its wireless
B) the left and right buttons move the movie back and forward
C) the big X you use in games to mean 'okay' does the same in menus
D) the big Dpad and analog stick thingies you use to move around in games does the same in BD menus
E) the square button brings up the menu while playing the movie
E) the triangle button brings up all those on-screen options to do other fancy setup stuff I've almost never done with a remote anyway
Some of us are already playing exclusives that are excellent and waiting for more like Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction which IMHO would be a system seller on its own, but I own all the previous editions as well.
Its hardly relevant. Impersonating another user may be illegal where they are doing business, no matter the reason for doing so. They are not law enforcement, nor are they censors. If they wish to starts censoring based on legality, they're free to do so, but filtering does not entail impersonating others (and would cause them to lose common carrier status).
That's only true for the most part of "last-mile" science. 99% of space research so far has been publicly funded and probably would not have happened in the time frame in question had it not been. However, since most of the work is already done, it is now commercially viable to do research on end-user marketable product like space travel and space hotels.
Most companies don't have the budget to do the kinds of research that is funded by government, and if they did, they'd mostly spend it on immediate results. Look at the fall of PARC for a good example of how you're wrong.
Thank God there's people like him in the world and not just people like you. The police have very limited rights, and it should stay that way. Their powers keep creeping up every year with new laws designed to stop "terrorism" or something, so keeping what few limits they have in check are well within your DUTIES as a citizen.
You have rights, stand up for them, or risk losing them. I'm not a pro-gun advocate, but in the old days, they stood up and fought for this type of unlawful activity on the part of law enforcement and brought in civil liberties.
In Quebec, Canada, they're trying to profile the DNA of a good subset of the population and encouraging selective breeding in highschools -- to consider who you're going to breed with to achieve optimal results. In the name of good science, of course.
I'm sure a few of the people working at Auschwitz thought it was good science they were doing too. Its not an excuse.
Defining "optimal" and "sub-optimal" humans should be illegal. I thought sci-fi dealt with this already.
They're different but not orthogonal -- you can have a rootkit that is spyware or just a spyware app with no rootkit, or a rootkit with no spyware. The fact that something is spyware doesn't in other words preclude it from being a rootkit, or vice versa.
He may be talking about the same thing, but without understanding it.
Think of how many people you know call their computer a 'CPU' or a 'Hard Drive'. He's not a technology nut, he's a music nut.
I'd be glad they're only threatening legal action. You wouldn't want them to come do the Shaolin version of a blanket party on you for posting a story about them, would you?
Just think about it -- Shaolin monks gone Mafia -- "I hear you said bad things about us, (beatings) that's not going to happen again, (more beatings) is it?"
I'm also the guy who complains about poor lens quality on HD video cameras used in the making of some TV shows, because bad source material makes for bad results. That said, the heavy MPEG-2 compression used on my satellite provider means that any high-motion scene is immediately distorted into large barely-moving macroblocks instead.
Compression matters, so does source material, so does mixing and editing. I'm quite excited about the dynamic music mixing system in use for Heavenly Sword personally -- live mixing in less of a cross-fader and more of a progression type system of changing the background music to match circumstances without jarring the user by fading out a significant moment in the previous track.
Thanks for working on good mixes. I really wish more people understood dynamic range as much as I wish people would use real speakers to listen to music.
That is, it WOULD be illegal if I were stuck in the USA where the DMCA applies. I happen to be happily Canadian where we have no such draconian corporate protectionist policies.
As another poster pointed out, you've got your genres crossed.
I play Piyotama (PS3), Super Stardust HD (PS3), Go! Puzzle (PS3) and Blast Factor (PS3) all of which fall into the arcade style nearly infinite difficulty gaming described in the above article. Piyotama's another tetris-like game, Go! Puzzle has a tower climbing logic puzzle that is both extremely fun and very difficult, Blast Factor and Super Stardust can both be beaten (btdt), but have progressively more difficult but simple tasks to complete at high speeds requiring excellent reflexes.
Do yourself a favour and try some of the above if you like classic arcade games.
In the words of the producer of a certain "So you think you can dance" ... you produce audio and you don't care about audio quality? Please quit!
Sure, some people can't tell, others don't care, some people just don't care because ear buds suck so bad. However, a lot of those people aren't in a position to lay out $500 for a video game system or HDTV either, so they're not exactly the market segment in question, are they?
We're talking about serious gamers choosing between a 360 and a PS3. We're not talking about converting the unwashed masses. We're talking about people who would go buy the latest dual-PCIe motherboard to get more fps on their FPS for better aiming. If you don't care about audio quality, feel free to listen to your iPod and play your DS, personally I just watched another great movie in uncompressed PCM with a friend who didn't realize you could get better than Dolby Digital sound.
I own my DVD player, do I not? If I want to fast forward through the commercials on a DVD with MY DVD player, and I change it to allow me to do so, that's my right, is it not? Its MY DVD PLAYER. The content on the DVD may be Copyright someone else, but the DMCA specifies what I can and cannot do with the player, not the disc.
I'm sure it depends on what kind of game you like. There's Lair, Warhawk, Ratchet & Clank, Heavenly Sword and almost 30 other exclusives coming out by March (not sure how many other than those I named are before Christmas).
I have one thing to say in agreement -- uncompressed audio. Uncompressed 7.1 PCM audio is incredible. I watched Blood Diamond on BD with my wife and switched from DD5.1 to uncompressed audio and she asked why we'd been listening to the crappy sound in the first place at all. Yeah, uncompressed audio makes that glorious Dolby Digital and even DTS audio sound like MP3s in comparison to a good CD.
Yes, yes, some of you are deaf
As Tony points out in another reply to your post, the 360 is not virtually the same as a PS3, especially as this generation of systems ages. Unless Microsoft is planning (as another poster commented) an Xbox 3.11 in the very near future (and screwing over 360 owners by discontinuing it as a platform), the PS3 will slowly pull ahead as more and more new game creators want the additional space afforded by blu-ray disc storage.
Sure, lots of good games fit on a DVD, God of War is one of them, but a lot of games will have to sacrifice a lot of quality to squeeze onto a 9GB disc as times wears on while developers making games for the PS3 won't have to worry about it.
Right now all Microsoft really has going for it is the lead in overall sales. If the Playstation 3 had nearly as many installed units as the 360, I'm sure a number of developers would target it exclusively instead of developing for both platforms. At the moment its a numbers game -- not releasing a game on the 360 limits your potential sales -- and yet numerous games really are coming out exclusively for the PS3. Really good ones too.
Its strange really, if you're an american its illegal to defeat copy protection software or hardware on your own devices under the DMCA, so congress apparently believes it has the right to restrict usage of your own private property already.