"Would a complex relationship between Mario and the Princess make the game any better?"
For me, yes, it would.
"Does anyone play Street Fighter for the endings?"
No, but then I don't play Street Fighter at all. On the other hand, Shenmue was just that: Virtua Fighter with a lot of story, and in fact a whole adventure game, in between the fights. Guess what? I liked it.
"Would Contra be any better if the aliens went on rants about why they were trying to take over the world?"
Well, see, there's a difference between a good plot and just some rants out grafted on top of it. More to the point, there are plenty of sci-fi movies about fighting some aliens, which nevertheless have some plot and character development in between the fights. And guess what: that's what we watched them for.
E.g., if Star Trek was _only_ a continuous slug-fest (or phaser fest) between the humans, romulans and klingons, I do believe it would have never gained much of a following, or even a sequel. You may in fact notice that au contraire, the first Star Trek had no combat (or I don't remember any, so it couldn't have been important). And even in the later sequels and series, the focus was on using the brains, and that's how all situations were eventually solved. Even if the ultimate solution involved firing a weapon (e.g., firing the ship's phasers at that greek god's temple in one episode), the key was figuring out _what_ to use, _how_, and _where_, not just sending a lone hero to machingun everything and jump on crates.
Even movies that were somewhat lighter on story and heavier on combat, like Aliens or Stargate, nevertheless did weave it all into a coherent story, and used various storytelling devices (e.g., the suspense of not knowing wth is that parasite on that guy's face going to do) to deliver that story. They didn't start with the hero or heroine with a gun, shooting aliens for 90 minutes straight and then getting a high score table.
"Would giving Little Mac a backstory make you more likely to want to beat Mike Tyson?"
Yes.
"More often than not, complex stories just drag a game down. They force a game into a linear progression and usually just result in a lot of gameplay sacrifices to meet the demands of the story."
No, all you're telling me there is what kinds of games _you_ like. Now I won't tell you that there's something wrong with it (it would be silly to proclaim that there is "right" and "wrong" in a matter of purely personal taste), I _am_ saying that a whole bunch of us have the exact opposite preferences.
A lot of us play a game _for_ the story, as a (semi)interactive movie if you will. The rest of the game exists for us for one sole purpose: to deliver the story. And if the gameplay has to be tweaked to better deliver that story: GOOD! That's just what I'd expect in a heavily story-driven game.
Get this: noone's attacking Nintendo because they're innovating, so I wish that straw-man and persecution complex was put to rest already.
1. They can innovate as much as they like, and kudos to them for innovating. So there. Maybe now we can stop it with the "waah, bad people try to stop inovation" emo act aready. But
2. totally unrelated to that -- in fact _orthogonal_ to that -- an interface can still be good or bad, regardless of whether it's innovative or not.
E.g., the dot-com for example was full of such "innovations" that just didn't work. The more clueless a PHB was, the more he was full of "innovative" ideas to make the web an "experience" and such. Except noone actually wanted to have that experience. (Even those very same PHBs didn't want to personally use the resulting awful site, but had their secretary do it for them.) E.g., see the endless ranting and raving against the RIAA-backed DRM schemes on/. for another example of innovation that a lot of people don't like nevertheless.
In this case, I think this controller sucks. That's all. Again, let's not pull the same "waah, but if you're against it you're against innovation" straw-man, because it's still a straw man. I'm not against innovation, I just don't like this particular item. That's all.
"However, don't hate on Nintendo because they're doing something new and different."
Again, noone's hating them for it. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but maybe it will finally sink in this time.
"If you don't like it, don't buy it."
Yes, very insightful that. And indeed that's what I was planning to do.
"Bottom line: innovation is always a good thing. It's what's driven our economy and fueled growth and technological development more than almost anything else."
No, sorry. That's just half the story. What's driven the economy and develompent wasn't just imagination run amok, but also the reality check of whether the market also wants to buy it or not. Some ideas will be the next great thing, and some will fail, and that's actually a _good_ thing. It's that separating the gold from the sand that's an equally (if not more) important component in that progress.
Either half is worthless without the other. Having just the reality check but not the input for it, yes, isn't going to get us all any further. But also mindlessly folloing any idea, not even trying to discern the good from the bad bad, is even worse.
At any rate, to put this thing to rest already:
A) "innovation" as in the process of coming up with new original stuff, is good. But,
B) any particular "innovation" as in an actual product or idea, can still nevertheless be a bad product or a bad idea.
And all this emo stuff along the lines of "Product X is an innovation, we must support innovation, therefore we all must support Product X" is at best a textbook verbal fallacy. It's based on the ambiguity between the two very different meanings of it.
Well, you just illustrate (sarcasm or not) what's what starts to seriously annoy me about Slashdot's Nintendo fanboy community: that everything has to be turned into a Nintendo-vs-someone thing, and a reason for all true believers to rally in defense of it against the heathen hordes of Sony. And that only pollutes any attempt to have an intelligent conversation.
In this case I don't even see it as Nintendo-vs-Sony, but simply story-driven games versus basically arcade games. Some people like the former, some of us like the latter. And as with any two fundamentally different kind of games, some people like one and hate the other.
It's not even a Nintendo issue as such. It's not like Nintendo are the only ones who made games where you jump around for no obvious reason, other than some generic 'save the stereotypical princess' excuse. And at least I didn't like those either. I used to be a Sega fan, but trust me, Sega's Sonic games didn't do anything for me either.
It only becomes a sort of a Nintendo issue in that Nintendo pretty much doesn't produce seriously story-driven games. So for those of us who are into those, well, Nintendo's lineup doesn't do anything for us. But again, let's not lose sight of what's cause and what's effect. The real cause and issue is simply whether or not they fall in the genres that a given person likes, that's all. Turning it into some Sony-vs-Nintendo conspiracy theory is getting it all wrong.
Basically: I don't shun their games because they're Nintendo, but simply because they're not the kind of games I'm looking for. And I don't buy my PS2 games because they're Sony (actually, in most cases it's Square-Enix or some other third-party), I buy them because they have that complex story and plot which I'm looking for in a game. That's all. It's really that simple.
Different people have different tastes
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Revisiting Sly Cooper
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, for _you_ (and for a lot of other people), the plot and story doesn't matter. In fact, I know a couple of people who are outright opposed to having their time "wasted" with any kind of narrative.
But then for a helluva lot of us, it does matter. Me, I found Mario 64 (and Donkey Kong 64 and various other platformers) to be more boring than watching paint dry. I've had more fun in a RL dentist's chair than jumping around like an idiot for no good reason or purpose in those games.
For _me_ the story and plot are the _main_ attraction in a game. I couldn't care less about score or showing off my l33t reflexes. Why I play is to see what happens next, and it damn well be a good piece of story.
If I have to do some ninja wall jumps, damn right I'll want it to be a part of some story. I'll want some damn good reason why my character is doing that, and I'll want to know what's he/she/it trying to achieve, and why couldn't it be achieved otherwise. (E.g., why can't he take the stairs instead of jumping his way upwards.)
And btw, by "damn good reason", I don't mean "the generic non-descript princess was stolen by generic villain #3, now go save her". Why is my character trying to save the princess anyway? Did he know her? Was he her body-guard maybe? Was he hired by someone to rescue the princess? How did that happen, then? Why did they choose him for that task? E.g., I can understand why someone would hire a well known mercenary or bounty hunter for that, but if it's the palace's plumber, there damn better be a good explanation why's he hired to rescue anyone.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your favourite games are bad as such. But like any game, some people like them, some people don't. I'm just giving you a glimpse into the mind of someone whose tastes are the exact opposite.
Yep, that's how I got started on trying to soundproof my PC too. I first started to be annoyed by noisy computers when I bought a DVD drive and rented a few movies. Whenever two movie characters spoke softly, it would be an ordeal just trying to understand what they're saying, because the white noise was drowning it.
And generally, even when I'm not watching a movie or listening to music, a quiet conversation is 45 dBA. A normal conversation at 1 ft distance is 60 dBA. Doing the same near a 40 dBA PC puts those two at respectively 5 dBA and 20 dBA signal-to-noise ratio, which is crap. (I doubt any of the "so what if it's noisy" gang would even consider buying a 20dBA SNR soundcard, for example.) In fact a quiet conversation becomes outright impossible.
In my silent PC, the CPU fan is a 12 dBA Papst fan, and set to be temperature controlled by the motherboard. So it's very silent. The graphics card is a 9800 Pro Ultimate Edition, so it has no fan at all. And the HDD is the most silent one available now, namely a Samsung 160 GB, _and_ it's packed in a sound-dampening enclosure.
So trust me, the PSU can _easily_ be the noisiest thing in that computer. In fact, with every single "silent" PSU I've tried, short of the fanless Antec Phantom, it actually was the noisiest thing. (The Antec Phantom was silent all right, but overheated and died on a warm summer day.)
At the moment it's running with an 120mm 18dBA Papst fan on the PSU, and that's finally an acceptably almost-silent computer.
(And btw, if your hard drives whine, then you told me you have one of the old noisy non-FDB models. In which you haven't really told me that your PSU is silent, but that your hard drives are louder. So, yeah, in your case then upgrading the HDD would be what gives you the most noise reduction.)
To put things into perspective, 10 dBA would be a completely unobstructed 80mm fan at less than 1000 RPM. (And a _good_ fan at that. El-cheapo ball bearing fans are noisier.) You can easily get PSU fans which are around the 30 dBA mark at full speed. E.g., a "silent" Tagan I bought has 28 dBA ones, but it's two of them, so make that 31 dBA for both.
Again, that's for completely unobstructed fans. When you have a fan blowing against an obstruction (e.g., a heatsink), it will make an extra whoosh or whistle. When you have something obstructing its intake, as is the case with most exhaust fans on PSUs, then it makes even more noise. Spin a 28 dBA fan to full speed when it has a big heatsink obstructing its intake, and it really starts to scream.
And you can reach full speed easier than you think. Most of these "silent" PSUs are happy to give you the dBA number when it's running completely idle and in a cold room. That's what it really means for most of them when you see "less than 20 dBA!!!" on the box: yeah, you'll get that if you don't draw more than 1A out of it, and you have your window open in December. Or rather, even then that would be what their fans would do at 5V if they were completely unobstructed, not what they do when mounted on the PSU. But put it in a power-hungry PC and run it on a hot August day, and you'll see most of them hitting the max RPM within minutes.
Geeze, dude, even skipping over the fact that MS never said 256 MB would be required, do you even understand what Windows uses a video card for?
_How_ is that card going to stay in use while you run a full-screen 3D game? No, really, what UI animations do you think Windows runs in the background while a game has the full screen? Why would it need to keep that RAM allocated? No, seriously.
For that matter, what do you think it uses it for when you're outside a game? Well, 99% of the time for nothing whatsoever, and the other 1% of the time for some fancy UI animation. And that's if it's a REALLY fancy UI.
So a slower graphics card would do... what? Animate those occasional fancy effects at 10 frames per second instead of 60? (And then go back to sitting idle.) Even skipping over the fact that you can turn that fancy stuff off completely, how's that going to force you to get a top graphics card and a 500W PSU?
"And to try to make this post somewhat on-topic, my PowerBook does Quartz 2D Extreme with not only 64MB of VRAM, but also only uses a 65W power supply. And that drives the video display as well."
Right. But you just somehow know that Vista will need 500W for that display card. That's funny, because I thought the RAM wasn't what used a ton of power on VGA cards. I'm pretty sure you could get a 256 MB 9250 or 5200. And here's the fun part: a 5200 doesn't need more power in a PC than it needs in a Mac.
Add a 25W Pentium M (you know, the same one that Apple itself is going to use in its Intel Macs) and it seems to me like you don't end up needing a small nuclear plant, Vista or no Vista.
You know, I'd be more impressed with all this "legal use", if it actually _existed_.
Have you actually _seen_ a home-brewed game developped for the PSP or any other consoles? I didn't think so.
How about for other consoles? The closest I've seen were some "homebrew ROMs" for SNES emulators, being waved around back then as proof of why ROM sites should be legal. Except here's the most amazing thing: it was just some pirated Nintendo games with some of the graphics replaced.
For the PS2, Sony even ported Linux to it. Probably not even because they love OSS or anything, but because it allowed them to declare it as a "computer" in the EU and not pay import taxes on it. Anyway, you could get Linux on it if you wanted to. As open as it gets, right? And it already has (or you can port) all the APIs you're already used to, right? How many people actually used that to actually make a game for the PS2? Because I know of exactly zero homebrew games for it, Linux based or otherwise.
So I hope you'll understand if I'm not particularly impressed with all this "but it's for homebrew games!!!" banner being waved around yet again. For the last 10 years straight, the homebrew scene was just some theoretical possibility being waved around. Yeah, it would theoretically be possible that someone codes this great PSP game on their own and offers it for download for free. Except it never happened, and I see no sign of it getting anywhere _near_ even getting started. It's like saying that having bacteriological weapons in your home could one day save humanity from an alien attack, like in so many movies where the aliens get felled by the Earth's viruses and bacteria: yeah, it _could_ purely theoretically happen, but I hope you can understand if I'm not holding my breath.
In the meantime, it _is_ used for piracy.
So while I'm not saying it should be illegal, I can also understand why Sony would try to prevent it. Between (A) the purely theoretical possibility that the next great thing would come along as a homebrew game, and help sell a gazillion PSPs, and (B) the hard fact that piracy is costing them real money here and now... well, let's just say I can understand very well why someone wouldn't bet the company on A.
And honestly, even as a consumer, I'm not too prone to get mad at Sony for it. The pirates aren't just stealing from some evil faceless corporations, they're directly or indirectly stealing from paying consumers like me. Because it's our money that pays for those games and it's the reason they're developped in the first place.
So basically it's like having a bunch of people dropping by and helping themselves to our coffee at the office: it's not some fight for freedom, it's not resistance against the money-grubbing coffee vendors' empire, etc. It's just plain old freeloading off those of us who bought the coffee in the first place. Wrapping it in any kind of self-righteous speeches still doesn't make it right.
So if Sony actually managed to keep those at bay, eh, kudos to Sony, then. Sure, it's sad that in the process we'll lose the purely theoretical possibility of getting homebrew games for it some day. But seein' as, you know, none actually _exists_ anyway, I hope you'll understand if I'm not that grieved by that "loss".
While people whose work IS their life do exist, they're a lot fewer than you think. Or let me ammend that: even if you love computers and programming dearly, chances are pretty slim that you'll also love your day job at the office. In fact, chances are you'll hate it.
You may love programming, yes. But to start with the part that is own "fault", and not management fault, then chances are you'll want to do challenging and interesting things that interest _you_, not whatever yet-another-buzzword-collection that the marketting guys managed to secure a contract for. Just loving programming doesn't mean you love _any_ programming, just like loving music doesn't mean you indiscriminately love any music from N'Sync and Britney Spears to Bach to Slayer to whatever else. You'll also likely be interested, yes, in learning something _new_, maybe the next new language or maybe a new API, which again in most companies really means going home and learning that rather than sitting at the office doing the same old boring stuff all day long. (Chances are that if the boss demands that you're there 80 hours a week, it's to code for some unrealistic deadline, not to experiment with new languages and techniques just for learning sake.)
But then come the management faults, including lack of appreciation. (They can phrase it any way they will, but anyone who cuts your time estimates in half and demands 80 hour weeks instead is _not_ showing any kind of respect or appreciation.) Or being asked to actively lie to a customer. (I'll go on a limb and guess that if you thought ethics are for losers and a con job is ok if they can't sue you for it, you'd have majored in marketting instead of CS.) Or being actively lied _to_. Or being explicitly asked to do a bad engineering job, e.g., to include a bunch of unneeded buzzwords that aren't even needed, but that marketting wooed the clients with. It's like having to design a car and having some marketting guy tell you to use a steam engine and put a sail instead of a spoiler on the car, because they convinced someone that it'll be so cool and trendy. At any rate, it doesn't say "I trust your expertise", if a marketting guy with zero engineering knowledge or experience can just override that expertise without even asking first. Etc.
So except a lucky few cases who got to code exactly the program they always wanted to code, and got complete control over it, those people who love programming and would do it 16 hours a day... tend to turn into people who'd be a lot happier if 8 of those were at home coding the stuff that interests _them_ personally.
What you are really left with are a bunch of people who only do show business. There's a whole class of people who have exactly one skill: putting up an outstanding show for management. They tend to not be able to code worth crap. (One of them took _two_ _years_ to code a small module that eventually another co-worker re-implemented differently in 6 hours. Literally.) But they'll sit at a computer for 12 hours a day and look all involved, dedicated, and full of initiative... when the boss is around to see them.
Mind you, when I say "full of initiative", I don't mean the kind of initiative that means actually learning to do their job, much less "then learning the NEXT new language". I know people who after half a decade still don't even know the most elementary basics of the language they're paid to program in. Only the shallow show-business kind that makes them look good to the boss, but no more.
So, well, that's IMHO really the kind of people (and the kind of clueless PHB that appreciates that kind of show business) who got the 80 hour weeks going. Not the ones who actually are passionate about their work.
"I love it when men - especially Geeks - are faced with such dilemmas. One can literally see the conflict going on of a) I want toy b) I don't wanna be girly:p heh heh heh."
You're kidding, right? We're talking the same people (and I'm one of them) who'd come in a "Work Sucks" t-shirt to a meeting with a client, or bring some childrens' toys to work and actually play with them, or various other flavours along the same line. Seems to me like at least half the true nerds would just get the cool toy and even bring it to work to show it to everyone, and either
A) not care (or not even realize: a lot of us are Aspergers' syndrome cases) what anyone thinks about it. Or
B) A + actually try to attract attention to it, as a means to make a point how stupid is to judge someone by their choice of clothes and bags. (We geeks are good at getting into such crusades.) Or
C) A or B + thrive on the attention they get. (Just being a smart person doesn't mean one can't also be an attention whore.)
Now, mind you, I like my toys to be a bit more nerdy than just lighting up when opened. Build a solar-powered MP3 (or better yet, Ogg Vorbis) player into that thing, give it an USB connection and at least 1 GB Flash, and I'd get one even if it were pink and heart-shaped.
Frankly, I've seen some very outlandish game setups before. Including a couple which were basically all about intelligent design, with you as the intelligent designer. Ironically they were passed off as evolution, except the animals didn't actually evolve through natural selection: you got to choose what you want to change them into. _You_ picked the design that's fit for the climate or challenges ahead. That's ID any way you want to look at it.
Basically the whole question I'd have, and the only question for that matter, is if a game will have good gameplay. If they manage to make it fun to play, sure, give me a game about medicine or whatever.
I still have Theme Hospital, and it was a fun game. OK, so it wasn't supposed to be educational, but there's nothing to keep one from swapping in some real disease names and cures.
The only real problem I have with educational games is that they usually forget about being a game. They either are more of a homework simulation than anything even vaguely resembling a game, or just have to preach, lecture, or give you an interruption to do some homework in the middle of the game. (E.g., "Genius Unternehmen: Physik", although it did have other plusses, had lots of those interruptions.) I'd like to see one where the "educational" stuff integrates more seamlessly with the game.
E.g., just as an idea, a lot of us love to tweak our cars, mechs, etc, in games, or even "design" our own models if the game is about producing them. Except usually it's just a mix-and-match of predefined parts. I'd actually like to see a game where they actually simulate the physics behind those tweaks, and let me play with the exact number of cylinders in the engine, wing shapes and angles, etc. Seems to me like a good opportunity to give people a lot of knowledge of physics (at the very least aerodynamics, mechanics, and thermodynamics) in a fun way. You don't shove it down their throats, you let them learn it by themselves as a side-effect of their tweaking their perfect munchkin vehicle.
I'm not sure how one would do the same for a medicine game, since I'm not a medic, but I'm sure someone else can figure it out.
Well, I never watched Babylon 5, but the points are, I'd think, rather obvious and not very original anyway. It's not even just Orwell or the infamous words of Hermann Goering at the Nuerenberg trial. I think I remember something to that effect written by Mark Twain, well before both. And then, since it all started from "national security" as an excuse to give up liberty, there's Benjamin Franklin's "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." And that's from 1759.
Guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not something new or original. I'm sure one could dig up a similar quote from one of the ancient Greek democracies. It's just that people never learn from history.
The problem isn't "national security" as such, and there's nothing wrong with a community (country-sized or any other size) protecting itself.
The problem is that "national security", "patriotism", ironically even "democracy", are also the first excuses someone reaches for when they want to take your freedom away. No, let me rephrase that: the problem is that the people tend to get stuck on some _words_ instead of their _meaning_.
E.g., people are raised to rant and rave about how they have a right to free speech, but don't actually know what that right means. ("Congress shall make no law...") Most think it means the exact _opposite_: that they're allowed to troll a board or shout obscenities at the neighbour, but the government is still allowed to censor anything. I mean, duh, it's the government, of course they're supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, right? Wrong-
E.g., people are raised on ideas like that patriotism means they must obey and do their duty, but they lose focus of: to whom. Hint: it means to the country, not to one particular party or leader. Sometimes the patriotic thing to do might actually be to disobey a bad leader.
And so on.
So you're left with whole generations which have been raised basically with a Pavlov's dog kind of reflex. You ring the bell, the dog does something by reflex, without thinking. Same here. You say "patriotism", people get a knee-jerk reaction to obey anything. There's a whole bunch of magic words that just trigger a reflex, without much thinking or questioning.
And it should come as no surprise when some people do come along and use them to their own interest. It's like having a big red button that says "push here to get an immediate advantage." Is it any surprise when some people come and push it?
_Some_ games have been moddable to _some_ extent, yes, but not all and typically not by much.
The gaming world doesn't start and end with the HalfLife and NWN engine, you know. Yeah, there the only "problem" was that you needed a C compiler or to learn Bioware's script respectively. But in other games you didn't even get that.
E.g., I was one of the people who whined at the authors of "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400: The Guild" in America) to let us mod the damn thing at all. They never released any tools or specs at all, and all you were left with were a bunch of binary files that noone had any idea how to edit. I would have loved to build my own cities for it, or, add a new profession, but really, noone knew where to even start with it.
E.g., for all the praise The Sims got for being moddable, it happened mostly in spite of EA. To get any scripting at all, some people had to basically reverse engineer it and figure out Maxis's byte codes. Heck, even to figure which part of an object's file are the bytecodes for the script at all.
And in The Sims 2, while EA will cheerfully let you recolour pants and skirts... well, let's just say that not only they still don't offer any support for scripters, but the latest expansion pack ("Nightlife") flags any downloaded script mods as potential problems, and by default disables them all. Now I'll admit that, what with TS2 scripting being mostly a hack, and based on an unstable ever-changing API (each expansion pack changes it), some of those downloads do cause problems. But it would have been damn nice of EA to actually offer proper scripting support and a stable API in the first place, instead of telling the users to not run those hacks.
E.g., even Civ III was only moddable in that you could change the values for the existing units, but not much else. You couldn't actually change the rules, nor script anything, nor even just add a new unit type. I tried it. The game crashed when loading the mod if you did add a unit.
And so on and so forth. Basically "Games have been moddable for some time" is quite the extrapolation. Most devs were happier to let you stumble on your own with a binary file than to help you at all, and some seemed actually pretty opposed (and occasionally even hostile) to our modifying their game. Moving to XML and Python won't just make things easier, it might just make things possible at all for a change.
You are mostly right, but actually both extremes are over-simplified IMHO.
For starters, let me assure you that probably most people who play The Sims know about those mods, since they're linked to right on the game's web site and Maxis itself offered one of its own each week. They might not think about it as "mods" or give them as much thought as, say, CS or TeamFortress get, but virtually everyone has downloaded at least one recoloured bed or dress for their The Sims game.
It can also be pointed out that at least the first two expansion packs were little more than collections of such little mods. Unlike the later ones which did offer new areas and whatnot, "Livin' Large" and "House Party" were nothing more than getting a ton of new objects and skins on a CD. So I'd say it's inaccurate to say that most people don't care about mods, since a helluva lot of us even paid money to EA for just that.
EA also seems to think it's enough of an advantage to at least look moddable, since (A) they released _some_ modding tools for The Sims on the game's site and on the Deluxe and Super-Deluxe releases, (B) one of the hyped things about The Sims 2 was the Body Shop program.
I can tell you that everyone I know that played The Sims 2 has at least colour-swapped a t-shirt or skirt for their Sims. (I don't even have much artistic skills myself, yet I must have recoloured a hundred or so with the Gimp so far. Not works of art by any definition, mind you. But simple stuff like giving the hue an 120 degree twist to make a green formal dress for my elvish family out of the red one, or recolouring the blonde mohawk to a neon blue one for a punk teenager sim, that's simple enough even for a purely coding nerd like yours truly.) And whoever didn't, got pointed at someone or some site that could do it for them.
But as I've said, I still think you're _mostly_ right.
I think it's more like a feeback loop. You're right that the game has to be good to start with, to get enough people bothering with modding it, as opposed to just uninstalling it. (So, yes, there are a ton of mods for Half Life, but none for Daikatana.) But from there it does serve to help the game further.
E.g., HalfLife was a good game and all, but CS did help sell it to even more people.
E.g., in The Sims's case, the mods also helped keep a bunch of us still interested in the game until the next official expansion pack came along. And then helped sell more expansion packs, because some items required a certain expansion pack to work. So you'd go to some site with items for download and see some cool hack, like a gadget that keeps your robot active all the time, sorta like a permanent buttler. And maybe think "cool, this should save my sims a bunch of time." Except it needs the robot from Livin Large, since the hack just keeps reactivating that one. So a lot of people then went and bought that expansion pack.
You are correct, but, well, that's just the thing.
Saying that the cable gets slanted and pulls the counter-weight back to speed is something that's palatable physics.
Their faq on the other hand, and that analogy with the pendulum are, well, too dumbed down to be still called physics. It's the kind of over-simplification that might be good as a metaphor for laymen, but doesn't even touch the real physics involved. Their metaphor that the centrifugal force pushes the counterweight back to it's place breaks down when you think of the physics involved. There is no centrifugal field as such, it's just an effect of the counterweight's rotating, and exists only as long as it spins fast enough. (Well, it exists at any rotation speed, but below a certain point it becomes lower than the gravity.) If the string was tied to a point instead of on a large rotating circle (the equator), that force wouldn't make it stay up to speed. It's the difference between you moving your hand in a circle and keeping it still in my small object on a string example.
Basically all I'm saying is that I wouldn't throw too much of a fuss if people have read that FAQ and still need to ask. The FAQ just didn't really answer the question, IMHO.
As I was saying before, I bought it to play games on it. Sony didn't have to "trick" me into anything. They just had to have the games I want to play. That's all.
Yeah, if all you wanted from a portable console was to run some old emulator on it, the PSP might not be the one for you. But then you know what? Go buy whatever console lets you run those, and quit whining already. Does the GP2X let you run those? Well, good for you, then. Get one of those, then, and give it a rest already.
No, seriously. It's not like we don't already have enough Nintendo fanboys ranting and raving about how the PSP is T3H 3V1L!!!111, stiffles innovation, makes God kill small kittens, etc, and how about all of us who bought one are some servants of the Antichrist. I don't need yet another group telling me that I'm some kind of a tricked victim, just because I wanted to play Lumines, Mercury and the racing games.
Get this: most of us actually knew very well what we were buying. There was no trick, there was no broken promise, nothing of the kind. Sony didn't dangle the carrot of "but you'll be able to run a NES emulator on it" in front of us at any point. They only said there'll be games and UMD movies for it. That's all. And I fail to see how buying one for those counts as being "tricked". Did any of Sony's patches make it no longer play UMD games or movies, or what? Well, wake me up if they ever do that, because only then it will count as being "tricked".
And generally, WTF? I thought we were in the "Games" section, not in the "let's whine about proprietary stuff" section. Did this story get posted in the Linux section too, or what?
Frankly, I own a gaming console, you know, for gaming. You may notice a highlighted word there. Hint, it's: gaming.
I do not buy it to make some political statement about open vs closed software. I buy it to play games on it. If Sony has the games I want to play, and some hypothetical vendor has this super-open GPL-conform Stallman-approved ESR-blessed platform without many games, you can guess whose I'll buy. Hint: it starts with "So" and ends with "ny".
The whole "feeding the hand that bites us" metaphor is emotional and all, but I don't feel bitten at all so far. I gave them some money, I got some games I wanted in return. If anything, I'm "feeding them" to get more games like those in the future. But more pragmatically, I'm not "feeding" anyone. I'm just acting in my own interest as a consumer, and buying the one that's the better product for me right now.
And if DRM is what it takes to get those games, fine by me. I can still plug the cartridge or UMD in and play the game, right? Well then why should I care what technologies went into that UMD or the loader in the BIOS?
You assume too much that all geeks are like this or that, all are on a zealot crusade against the very idea of commercial software, and all bought an XBox or a PSP just to run Linux on it. Which is just false. I for example am a terminal geek all right, but I bought my XBox to actually run XBox games like Fable or Jade Empire. Even those two alone make it well worth every cent MS got from me. I know only two people who've modded their XBox and that was to add some multimedia functionality and IIRC a bigger hard drive, not to run Linux on it.
Basically rest assured that when you read news about someone's uber-l33t port of Linux to some game console, you're really reading about a small minority that gives a damn at all, and mostly just to show that they can do it. It's the geek equivalent of showing that you can tear a phonebook with your bare hands: it's not actually _needed_ (there are easier ways to destroy a phonebook), it's not what everyone buys a phonebook for, and it doesn't make it a better phonebook than it was before being torn. It's just a way to show off. Unlike tearing a phone book with your bare hands, though, pretty much noone else gives a damn about it.
Now lot more people will care about it if it lets them pirate UMD games and play them off the memory card. (That was the main reason people modded their PS1, PS2 and XBox, btw: to be able to play pirated games.) But even then we're talking freeloaders, not people on a holy jihad for the glory of OSS. Rest assured that _all_ they wanted was to let someone else (e.g., the rest of us paying customers whose money keeps those devs in business) pay the tab for their gaming, not to make some "free as in speech" political point.
"Centripetal acceleration" only says it will keep this thing from flying into space, nothing more. Tie a string to a small object and spin it. The centripetal force is the part of the tension in the string pulling the object towards the centre. Centripetal acceleration is the effect of that force that curves the object's trajectory, instead of letting it go in a straight line.
But here's the catch: centripetal force is _strictly_ the component pointing at the centre of the circle. It can't accelerate or decelerate the rotation. The reason you can accelerate that small object on a string is precisely because the string is a little crooked, and it pulls a little forward too, in addition to the centripetal force pointing at the centre.
The apparent force pulling it outward, that they mention there, is called "centrifugal" (runs away from the centre), not "centripetal" (pulls it towards the centre). This one doesn't do anything to keep it from losing angular momentum. Hold your hand still after you've made your object on a string rotate. It's seeming to tug outwards is centrifugal force. Note how the item can slow down due to friction anyway.
And things get even more screwy in a gravity well.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that while I'm sure some actual physicists did some actual calculations for that project, and they probably have a very sound theory of how it regains lost momentum (and how much can it safely lose or gain before that string breaks), that quoted explanation isn't it. It's some handwaving that's as "scientiffic" or "informative" as saying that Santa's reindeers keep it up.
"It's kinda annoying to see every space elevator article attract a swag of ill-informed comments that get modded as insightful."
I feel your pain. I found it slightly annoying too to see your quote of that pseudo-science babble modded as "+5 Informative". No offense, since you're not the one who wrote that, but it's got exactly zero useful information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
I'd imagine that the reason people keep asking is precisely because that handwaving doesn't answer it.
"It's already possible without this MD5 attack. It's called modifying the code to put a trojan or subtle vulnerability in it. You're just proposing a needlessly complicated method of taking advantage of being on the inside."
The difference is that a trojan can be disassembled, or be noticed by a heuristic scan or whatever. If I plant BackOrifice in a library, someone might find it. If BackOrifice is B and I plant some random garbage A in advance, noone will find anything wrong with A. It's just random garbage that doesn't even do anything. It's just there as a placeholder for the real attack.
It's just an extra attack. More complicated, yes, but it's an extra kind of attack nevertheless.
"Your initial posting didn't mention anything about inside jobs, it described the attack entirely as if some outsider could launch this on their own."
The message you were answering, though, did mention an executable made of two parts, and a very detailed description of what's replaced with what. But you didn't read that. You just jumped in to karma-whore with the "but you can't fake H(Q)!!!" thing. Without even understanding what you're talking about.
"Please mod this guys posting down, "people on the inside can trojan executables" is not the slightest bit insightful, nor is it specific to MD5 attacks."
You know what? It's not like I even care about karma or modding. In fact, I'd have only contempt to anyone who'd be scared into submission by such a lame thing. We're talking maths and security, not about enacting your fantasies of being the more popular prom-queen. If you think "right" and "wrong" in security are decided by who can get the mob to silence the other... I rest my case.
Sure, mod me down if that bandages your little ego. In fact, go ahead and add me to your foes list or whatever, so you can get some more ego-masturbation the next time you get mod points. Like I care.
But it nevertheless strikes me as _the_ most lame thing I've read in ages.
You ran out of arguments, didn't you? And you're going for playing prom-queen instead. If you can't make a coherent point, you just have to get someone to silence the bad man who dares disaggree with you. Geesh, dude. Do you even realize how sad that is?
No, the attack works flawlessly if it's seeded in advance. Try reading for a change, instead of just waving around the same tired "but you can't fake H(Q)!!!!111" battle banner.
Any program can be seeded in advance with an A by an insider, so guess what? I'm not starting from H(Q), I'm proposing precisely to start from H(A+Q).
If I'm a disgruntled employee at Blizzard or at Vivendi or at whoever makes InstallShield, I can plant an A in advance in the self-extractor Q1 they use for their patches. Now they make a patch Q2, and pack it in a self-extracting archive. Normally they'd end up with Q1+Q2. Except they're really getting A+Q1+Q2. They make an MD5 sum of that. Guess what? It's H(A+Q1+Q2). That's the sum they'll publish and against which you'll check. If I swap in my B later, guess what I'll have? H(B+Q1+Q2). Guess what? It matches the original MD5 sum perfectly.
You know what's even more fun? Even if I then resign, chances are they won't wipe out all computers and reinstall all libraries and utilities immediately. I can leave such seeds all over the place: in the installer, in the libraries, in a ton of places. Chances are the next few patches will be swappable like that even after I'm not even working there any more.
Now time to exploit it. Let's say their next patch still contains my see A. I download it and swap B instead. How do I get the users to download that? Well, I don't even have to do any social engineering. Blizzard's patcher is based on BitTorrent (and thus on MD5). All I have to do is be one of the nodes that's offering that patch for download. I don't even have to convince the users that it's safe to download from me, because that BitTorrent-based installer will check the MD5 sums and trust me anyway. So out of some 4 million users downloading that patch, a few tens of thousand download my malicious code without even knowing.
That's the problem. It's _not_ as unsafe as "any Joe Random can fake H(Q)", but an insider can plant an A in advance for later use.
And unlike just planting malicious code, which might be found, the seed A here is innocent-looking garbage. Even if someone disassembled it, they wouldn't find any malicious code. Because it's just the random garbage A that serves as a placeholder for the real malicious code. It's there just so later I can swap in the B unnoticed.
No, you don't understand. No, I'm _not_ proposing to start from a Q and H(Q), so you can stop repeating that already.
I'm proposing to start from an A that's been planted in advance, and thus from an A+Q. As long as my "seed" A is in there, I don't flippin' care what Blizzard's Q is there. I can replace my pre-planted A and with my pre-prepared B, and end up... guess what? With exactly a case of A+Q versus B+Q.
E.g., an auto-extracting installer is exactly a case of A1+Q1. You have an installer A1 at the front which Blizzard _didn't_ write, and an archive at the end Q1 which Blizzard did create.
If I control the A1 and have a B1 which hashes to the same value, I can swap it in the above scenario and keep the MD5 sum for the whole file unchanged.
The executable itself, the A1 and B1 above will in turn, yes, be constructed like that. Out of a base installer Q, and two pieces of code A and B.
Basically it's a case of A+Q+Q1 vs B+Q+Q1. Where only the Q1 part is under their control, Q is the actual installer, and A looks benign.
Do you understand _now_? Again, I'm not saying I'm gonna start from scratch with a H(Q) and build a collision from there, I'm saying it's possible for an insider to plant a seed in advance that they can replace later.
The same applies for anything else. I can for example distribute a pre-compiled library where one module is an A+Q case. The Q is the actual library module you wanted to use, and the A is planted there for future use. The moment you link that in your program, it becomes again an A+Q+Q1. Where Q1 is your code. Voila, I can now swap my B in and keep the MD5 sum intact for every single program you compiled with that library.
That's the problem. No, you can't start from scratch, but basically it becomes feasible for one _hell_ of a lot of people to plant such pieces of padding in advance, for future use.
For a start, it still massively enlarges the number of people you must trust.
E.g., do you automatically trust everyone working at Blizzard? How about some disgruntled temp employee at the publisher? Do you trust everyone at the company who made the install program too? Etc.
Due to the whole "if H(A) = H(B), then H(A+Q) = H(A+Q)", they don't even have to convince Blizzard of anything. As long as I control the A and B versions of the self-extractor module, Blizzard's own content is the Q in that equation. It doesn't matter. Automatically _any_ self-extracting patch made with executable A, can have that executable part at the front stripped and replaced with the malicious executable B, and the result will still match the MD5 sum. I don't have to convince them to change their self-installing patch on their site: it will just be automatically compatible with the exploit as it is.
Basically the whole thing has been bumped from "if the hash matches, you're extremely probably getting the same version" to "you have to trust everyone along the whole bloody chain that they didn't silently plant a part they can swap-in later." I don't know about you, but the latter makes me a bit less comfortable.
Then there are a lot of files that people install that aren't from the devs themselves.
E.g., while getting Blizzard to include my modified files might be hard, it probably wouldn't be hard at all to get a site like Vidiot Maps to replace one of their maps with my own more detailed map of an area. They'd probably even thank me for it.
Basically, yes, it does require a lot more effort and preparation than just generating a virus that matches a given MD5 sum from scratch. But you have to trust everyone along the chain that they haven't made that effort. If they did, that illusion that MD5 is safe as houses just becomes a liability.
Slashdot Mirror
"Would a complex relationship between Mario and the Princess make the game any better?"
For me, yes, it would.
"Does anyone play Street Fighter for the endings?"
No, but then I don't play Street Fighter at all. On the other hand, Shenmue was just that: Virtua Fighter with a lot of story, and in fact a whole adventure game, in between the fights. Guess what? I liked it.
"Would Contra be any better if the aliens went on rants about why they were trying to take over the world?"
Well, see, there's a difference between a good plot and just some rants out grafted on top of it. More to the point, there are plenty of sci-fi movies about fighting some aliens, which nevertheless have some plot and character development in between the fights. And guess what: that's what we watched them for.
E.g., if Star Trek was _only_ a continuous slug-fest (or phaser fest) between the humans, romulans and klingons, I do believe it would have never gained much of a following, or even a sequel. You may in fact notice that au contraire, the first Star Trek had no combat (or I don't remember any, so it couldn't have been important). And even in the later sequels and series, the focus was on using the brains, and that's how all situations were eventually solved. Even if the ultimate solution involved firing a weapon (e.g., firing the ship's phasers at that greek god's temple in one episode), the key was figuring out _what_ to use, _how_, and _where_, not just sending a lone hero to machingun everything and jump on crates.
Even movies that were somewhat lighter on story and heavier on combat, like Aliens or Stargate, nevertheless did weave it all into a coherent story, and used various storytelling devices (e.g., the suspense of not knowing wth is that parasite on that guy's face going to do) to deliver that story. They didn't start with the hero or heroine with a gun, shooting aliens for 90 minutes straight and then getting a high score table.
"Would giving Little Mac a backstory make you more likely to want to beat Mike Tyson?"
Yes.
"More often than not, complex stories just drag a game down. They force a game into a linear progression and usually just result in a lot of gameplay sacrifices to meet the demands of the story."
No, all you're telling me there is what kinds of games _you_ like. Now I won't tell you that there's something wrong with it (it would be silly to proclaim that there is "right" and "wrong" in a matter of purely personal taste), I _am_ saying that a whole bunch of us have the exact opposite preferences.
A lot of us play a game _for_ the story, as a (semi)interactive movie if you will. The rest of the game exists for us for one sole purpose: to deliver the story. And if the gameplay has to be tweaked to better deliver that story: GOOD! That's just what I'd expect in a heavily story-driven game.
Get this: noone's attacking Nintendo because they're innovating, so I wish that straw-man and persecution complex was put to rest already.
/. for another example of innovation that a lot of people don't like nevertheless.
1. They can innovate as much as they like, and kudos to them for innovating. So there. Maybe now we can stop it with the "waah, bad people try to stop inovation" emo act aready. But
2. totally unrelated to that -- in fact _orthogonal_ to that -- an interface can still be good or bad, regardless of whether it's innovative or not.
E.g., the dot-com for example was full of such "innovations" that just didn't work. The more clueless a PHB was, the more he was full of "innovative" ideas to make the web an "experience" and such. Except noone actually wanted to have that experience. (Even those very same PHBs didn't want to personally use the resulting awful site, but had their secretary do it for them.) E.g., see the endless ranting and raving against the RIAA-backed DRM schemes on
In this case, I think this controller sucks. That's all. Again, let's not pull the same "waah, but if you're against it you're against innovation" straw-man, because it's still a straw man. I'm not against innovation, I just don't like this particular item. That's all.
"However, don't hate on Nintendo because they're doing something new and different."
Again, noone's hating them for it. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but maybe it will finally sink in this time.
"If you don't like it, don't buy it."
Yes, very insightful that. And indeed that's what I was planning to do.
"Bottom line: innovation is always a good thing. It's what's driven our economy and fueled growth and technological development more than almost anything else."
No, sorry. That's just half the story. What's driven the economy and develompent wasn't just imagination run amok, but also the reality check of whether the market also wants to buy it or not. Some ideas will be the next great thing, and some will fail, and that's actually a _good_ thing. It's that separating the gold from the sand that's an equally (if not more) important component in that progress.
Either half is worthless without the other. Having just the reality check but not the input for it, yes, isn't going to get us all any further. But also mindlessly folloing any idea, not even trying to discern the good from the bad bad, is even worse.
At any rate, to put this thing to rest already:
A) "innovation" as in the process of coming up with new original stuff, is good. But,
B) any particular "innovation" as in an actual product or idea, can still nevertheless be a bad product or a bad idea.
And all this emo stuff along the lines of "Product X is an innovation, we must support innovation, therefore we all must support Product X" is at best a textbook verbal fallacy. It's based on the ambiguity between the two very different meanings of it.
Well, you just illustrate (sarcasm or not) what's what starts to seriously annoy me about Slashdot's Nintendo fanboy community: that everything has to be turned into a Nintendo-vs-someone thing, and a reason for all true believers to rally in defense of it against the heathen hordes of Sony. And that only pollutes any attempt to have an intelligent conversation.
In this case I don't even see it as Nintendo-vs-Sony, but simply story-driven games versus basically arcade games. Some people like the former, some of us like the latter. And as with any two fundamentally different kind of games, some people like one and hate the other.
It's not even a Nintendo issue as such. It's not like Nintendo are the only ones who made games where you jump around for no obvious reason, other than some generic 'save the stereotypical princess' excuse. And at least I didn't like those either. I used to be a Sega fan, but trust me, Sega's Sonic games didn't do anything for me either.
It only becomes a sort of a Nintendo issue in that Nintendo pretty much doesn't produce seriously story-driven games. So for those of us who are into those, well, Nintendo's lineup doesn't do anything for us. But again, let's not lose sight of what's cause and what's effect. The real cause and issue is simply whether or not they fall in the genres that a given person likes, that's all. Turning it into some Sony-vs-Nintendo conspiracy theory is getting it all wrong.
Basically: I don't shun their games because they're Nintendo, but simply because they're not the kind of games I'm looking for. And I don't buy my PS2 games because they're Sony (actually, in most cases it's Square-Enix or some other third-party), I buy them because they have that complex story and plot which I'm looking for in a game. That's all. It's really that simple.
Yes, for _you_ (and for a lot of other people), the plot and story doesn't matter. In fact, I know a couple of people who are outright opposed to having their time "wasted" with any kind of narrative.
But then for a helluva lot of us, it does matter. Me, I found Mario 64 (and Donkey Kong 64 and various other platformers) to be more boring than watching paint dry. I've had more fun in a RL dentist's chair than jumping around like an idiot for no good reason or purpose in those games.
For _me_ the story and plot are the _main_ attraction in a game. I couldn't care less about score or showing off my l33t reflexes. Why I play is to see what happens next, and it damn well be a good piece of story.
If I have to do some ninja wall jumps, damn right I'll want it to be a part of some story. I'll want some damn good reason why my character is doing that, and I'll want to know what's he/she/it trying to achieve, and why couldn't it be achieved otherwise. (E.g., why can't he take the stairs instead of jumping his way upwards.)
And btw, by "damn good reason", I don't mean "the generic non-descript princess was stolen by generic villain #3, now go save her". Why is my character trying to save the princess anyway? Did he know her? Was he her body-guard maybe? Was he hired by someone to rescue the princess? How did that happen, then? Why did they choose him for that task? E.g., I can understand why someone would hire a well known mercenary or bounty hunter for that, but if it's the palace's plumber, there damn better be a good explanation why's he hired to rescue anyone.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your favourite games are bad as such. But like any game, some people like them, some people don't. I'm just giving you a glimpse into the mind of someone whose tastes are the exact opposite.
Yep, that's how I got started on trying to soundproof my PC too. I first started to be annoyed by noisy computers when I bought a DVD drive and rented a few movies. Whenever two movie characters spoke softly, it would be an ordeal just trying to understand what they're saying, because the white noise was drowning it.
And generally, even when I'm not watching a movie or listening to music, a quiet conversation is 45 dBA. A normal conversation at 1 ft distance is 60 dBA. Doing the same near a 40 dBA PC puts those two at respectively 5 dBA and 20 dBA signal-to-noise ratio, which is crap. (I doubt any of the "so what if it's noisy" gang would even consider buying a 20dBA SNR soundcard, for example.) In fact a quiet conversation becomes outright impossible.
In my silent PC, the CPU fan is a 12 dBA Papst fan, and set to be temperature controlled by the motherboard. So it's very silent. The graphics card is a 9800 Pro Ultimate Edition, so it has no fan at all. And the HDD is the most silent one available now, namely a Samsung 160 GB, _and_ it's packed in a sound-dampening enclosure.
So trust me, the PSU can _easily_ be the noisiest thing in that computer. In fact, with every single "silent" PSU I've tried, short of the fanless Antec Phantom, it actually was the noisiest thing. (The Antec Phantom was silent all right, but overheated and died on a warm summer day.)
At the moment it's running with an 120mm 18dBA Papst fan on the PSU, and that's finally an acceptably almost-silent computer.
(And btw, if your hard drives whine, then you told me you have one of the old noisy non-FDB models. In which you haven't really told me that your PSU is silent, but that your hard drives are louder. So, yeah, in your case then upgrading the HDD would be what gives you the most noise reduction.)
To put things into perspective, 10 dBA would be a completely unobstructed 80mm fan at less than 1000 RPM. (And a _good_ fan at that. El-cheapo ball bearing fans are noisier.) You can easily get PSU fans which are around the 30 dBA mark at full speed. E.g., a "silent" Tagan I bought has 28 dBA ones, but it's two of them, so make that 31 dBA for both.
Again, that's for completely unobstructed fans. When you have a fan blowing against an obstruction (e.g., a heatsink), it will make an extra whoosh or whistle. When you have something obstructing its intake, as is the case with most exhaust fans on PSUs, then it makes even more noise. Spin a 28 dBA fan to full speed when it has a big heatsink obstructing its intake, and it really starts to scream.
And you can reach full speed easier than you think. Most of these "silent" PSUs are happy to give you the dBA number when it's running completely idle and in a cold room. That's what it really means for most of them when you see "less than 20 dBA!!!" on the box: yeah, you'll get that if you don't draw more than 1A out of it, and you have your window open in December. Or rather, even then that would be what their fans would do at 5V if they were completely unobstructed, not what they do when mounted on the PSU. But put it in a power-hungry PC and run it on a hot August day, and you'll see most of them hitting the max RPM within minutes.
Geeze, dude, even skipping over the fact that MS never said 256 MB would be required, do you even understand what Windows uses a video card for?
_How_ is that card going to stay in use while you run a full-screen 3D game? No, really, what UI animations do you think Windows runs in the background while a game has the full screen? Why would it need to keep that RAM allocated? No, seriously.
For that matter, what do you think it uses it for when you're outside a game? Well, 99% of the time for nothing whatsoever, and the other 1% of the time for some fancy UI animation. And that's if it's a REALLY fancy UI.
So a slower graphics card would do... what? Animate those occasional fancy effects at 10 frames per second instead of 60? (And then go back to sitting idle.) Even skipping over the fact that you can turn that fancy stuff off completely, how's that going to force you to get a top graphics card and a 500W PSU?
So, please.
"And to try to make this post somewhat on-topic, my PowerBook does Quartz 2D Extreme with not only 64MB of VRAM, but also only uses a 65W power supply. And that drives the video display as well."
Right. But you just somehow know that Vista will need 500W for that display card. That's funny, because I thought the RAM wasn't what used a ton of power on VGA cards. I'm pretty sure you could get a 256 MB 9250 or 5200. And here's the fun part: a 5200 doesn't need more power in a PC than it needs in a Mac.
Add a 25W Pentium M (you know, the same one that Apple itself is going to use in its Intel Macs) and it seems to me like you don't end up needing a small nuclear plant, Vista or no Vista.
You know, I'd be more impressed with all this "legal use", if it actually _existed_.
Have you actually _seen_ a home-brewed game developped for the PSP or any other consoles? I didn't think so.
How about for other consoles? The closest I've seen were some "homebrew ROMs" for SNES emulators, being waved around back then as proof of why ROM sites should be legal. Except here's the most amazing thing: it was just some pirated Nintendo games with some of the graphics replaced.
For the PS2, Sony even ported Linux to it. Probably not even because they love OSS or anything, but because it allowed them to declare it as a "computer" in the EU and not pay import taxes on it. Anyway, you could get Linux on it if you wanted to. As open as it gets, right? And it already has (or you can port) all the APIs you're already used to, right? How many people actually used that to actually make a game for the PS2? Because I know of exactly zero homebrew games for it, Linux based or otherwise.
So I hope you'll understand if I'm not particularly impressed with all this "but it's for homebrew games!!!" banner being waved around yet again. For the last 10 years straight, the homebrew scene was just some theoretical possibility being waved around. Yeah, it would theoretically be possible that someone codes this great PSP game on their own and offers it for download for free. Except it never happened, and I see no sign of it getting anywhere _near_ even getting started. It's like saying that having bacteriological weapons in your home could one day save humanity from an alien attack, like in so many movies where the aliens get felled by the Earth's viruses and bacteria: yeah, it _could_ purely theoretically happen, but I hope you can understand if I'm not holding my breath.
In the meantime, it _is_ used for piracy.
So while I'm not saying it should be illegal, I can also understand why Sony would try to prevent it. Between (A) the purely theoretical possibility that the next great thing would come along as a homebrew game, and help sell a gazillion PSPs, and (B) the hard fact that piracy is costing them real money here and now... well, let's just say I can understand very well why someone wouldn't bet the company on A.
And honestly, even as a consumer, I'm not too prone to get mad at Sony for it. The pirates aren't just stealing from some evil faceless corporations, they're directly or indirectly stealing from paying consumers like me. Because it's our money that pays for those games and it's the reason they're developped in the first place.
So basically it's like having a bunch of people dropping by and helping themselves to our coffee at the office: it's not some fight for freedom, it's not resistance against the money-grubbing coffee vendors' empire, etc. It's just plain old freeloading off those of us who bought the coffee in the first place. Wrapping it in any kind of self-righteous speeches still doesn't make it right.
So if Sony actually managed to keep those at bay, eh, kudos to Sony, then. Sure, it's sad that in the process we'll lose the purely theoretical possibility of getting homebrew games for it some day. But seein' as, you know, none actually _exists_ anyway, I hope you'll understand if I'm not that grieved by that "loss".
While people whose work IS their life do exist, they're a lot fewer than you think. Or let me ammend that: even if you love computers and programming dearly, chances are pretty slim that you'll also love your day job at the office. In fact, chances are you'll hate it.
You may love programming, yes. But to start with the part that is own "fault", and not management fault, then chances are you'll want to do challenging and interesting things that interest _you_, not whatever yet-another-buzzword-collection that the marketting guys managed to secure a contract for. Just loving programming doesn't mean you love _any_ programming, just like loving music doesn't mean you indiscriminately love any music from N'Sync and Britney Spears to Bach to Slayer to whatever else. You'll also likely be interested, yes, in learning something _new_, maybe the next new language or maybe a new API, which again in most companies really means going home and learning that rather than sitting at the office doing the same old boring stuff all day long. (Chances are that if the boss demands that you're there 80 hours a week, it's to code for some unrealistic deadline, not to experiment with new languages and techniques just for learning sake.)
But then come the management faults, including lack of appreciation. (They can phrase it any way they will, but anyone who cuts your time estimates in half and demands 80 hour weeks instead is _not_ showing any kind of respect or appreciation.) Or being asked to actively lie to a customer. (I'll go on a limb and guess that if you thought ethics are for losers and a con job is ok if they can't sue you for it, you'd have majored in marketting instead of CS.) Or being actively lied _to_. Or being explicitly asked to do a bad engineering job, e.g., to include a bunch of unneeded buzzwords that aren't even needed, but that marketting wooed the clients with. It's like having to design a car and having some marketting guy tell you to use a steam engine and put a sail instead of a spoiler on the car, because they convinced someone that it'll be so cool and trendy. At any rate, it doesn't say "I trust your expertise", if a marketting guy with zero engineering knowledge or experience can just override that expertise without even asking first. Etc.
So except a lucky few cases who got to code exactly the program they always wanted to code, and got complete control over it, those people who love programming and would do it 16 hours a day... tend to turn into people who'd be a lot happier if 8 of those were at home coding the stuff that interests _them_ personally.
What you are really left with are a bunch of people who only do show business. There's a whole class of people who have exactly one skill: putting up an outstanding show for management. They tend to not be able to code worth crap. (One of them took _two_ _years_ to code a small module that eventually another co-worker re-implemented differently in 6 hours. Literally.) But they'll sit at a computer for 12 hours a day and look all involved, dedicated, and full of initiative... when the boss is around to see them.
Mind you, when I say "full of initiative", I don't mean the kind of initiative that means actually learning to do their job, much less "then learning the NEXT new language". I know people who after half a decade still don't even know the most elementary basics of the language they're paid to program in. Only the shallow show-business kind that makes them look good to the boss, but no more.
So, well, that's IMHO really the kind of people (and the kind of clueless PHB that appreciates that kind of show business) who got the 80 hour weeks going. Not the ones who actually are passionate about their work.
"I love it when men - especially Geeks - are faced with such dilemmas. One can literally see the conflict going on of :p heh heh heh."
a) I want toy
b) I don't wanna be girly
You're kidding, right? We're talking the same people (and I'm one of them) who'd come in a "Work Sucks" t-shirt to a meeting with a client, or bring some childrens' toys to work and actually play with them, or various other flavours along the same line. Seems to me like at least half the true nerds would just get the cool toy and even bring it to work to show it to everyone, and either
A) not care (or not even realize: a lot of us are Aspergers' syndrome cases) what anyone thinks about it. Or
B) A + actually try to attract attention to it, as a means to make a point how stupid is to judge someone by their choice of clothes and bags. (We geeks are good at getting into such crusades.) Or
C) A or B + thrive on the attention they get. (Just being a smart person doesn't mean one can't also be an attention whore.)
Now, mind you, I like my toys to be a bit more nerdy than just lighting up when opened. Build a solar-powered MP3 (or better yet, Ogg Vorbis) player into that thing, give it an USB connection and at least 1 GB Flash, and I'd get one even if it were pink and heart-shaped.
Frankly, I've seen some very outlandish game setups before. Including a couple which were basically all about intelligent design, with you as the intelligent designer. Ironically they were passed off as evolution, except the animals didn't actually evolve through natural selection: you got to choose what you want to change them into. _You_ picked the design that's fit for the climate or challenges ahead. That's ID any way you want to look at it.
Basically the whole question I'd have, and the only question for that matter, is if a game will have good gameplay. If they manage to make it fun to play, sure, give me a game about medicine or whatever.
I still have Theme Hospital, and it was a fun game. OK, so it wasn't supposed to be educational, but there's nothing to keep one from swapping in some real disease names and cures.
The only real problem I have with educational games is that they usually forget about being a game. They either are more of a homework simulation than anything even vaguely resembling a game, or just have to preach, lecture, or give you an interruption to do some homework in the middle of the game. (E.g., "Genius Unternehmen: Physik", although it did have other plusses, had lots of those interruptions.) I'd like to see one where the "educational" stuff integrates more seamlessly with the game.
E.g., just as an idea, a lot of us love to tweak our cars, mechs, etc, in games, or even "design" our own models if the game is about producing them. Except usually it's just a mix-and-match of predefined parts. I'd actually like to see a game where they actually simulate the physics behind those tweaks, and let me play with the exact number of cylinders in the engine, wing shapes and angles, etc. Seems to me like a good opportunity to give people a lot of knowledge of physics (at the very least aerodynamics, mechanics, and thermodynamics) in a fun way. You don't shove it down their throats, you let them learn it by themselves as a side-effect of their tweaking their perfect munchkin vehicle.
I'm not sure how one would do the same for a medicine game, since I'm not a medic, but I'm sure someone else can figure it out.
Well, I never watched Babylon 5, but the points are, I'd think, rather obvious and not very original anyway. It's not even just Orwell or the infamous words of Hermann Goering at the Nuerenberg trial. I think I remember something to that effect written by Mark Twain, well before both. And then, since it all started from "national security" as an excuse to give up liberty, there's Benjamin Franklin's "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." And that's from 1759.
Guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not something new or original. I'm sure one could dig up a similar quote from one of the ancient Greek democracies. It's just that people never learn from history.
The problem isn't "national security" as such, and there's nothing wrong with a community (country-sized or any other size) protecting itself.
The problem is that "national security", "patriotism", ironically even "democracy", are also the first excuses someone reaches for when they want to take your freedom away. No, let me rephrase that: the problem is that the people tend to get stuck on some _words_ instead of their _meaning_.
E.g., people are raised to rant and rave about how they have a right to free speech, but don't actually know what that right means. ("Congress shall make no law...") Most think it means the exact _opposite_: that they're allowed to troll a board or shout obscenities at the neighbour, but the government is still allowed to censor anything. I mean, duh, it's the government, of course they're supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, right? Wrong-
E.g., people are raised on ideas like that patriotism means they must obey and do their duty, but they lose focus of: to whom. Hint: it means to the country, not to one particular party or leader. Sometimes the patriotic thing to do might actually be to disobey a bad leader.
And so on.
So you're left with whole generations which have been raised basically with a Pavlov's dog kind of reflex. You ring the bell, the dog does something by reflex, without thinking. Same here. You say "patriotism", people get a knee-jerk reaction to obey anything. There's a whole bunch of magic words that just trigger a reflex, without much thinking or questioning.
And it should come as no surprise when some people do come along and use them to their own interest. It's like having a big red button that says "push here to get an immediate advantage." Is it any surprise when some people come and push it?
_Some_ games have been moddable to _some_ extent, yes, but not all and typically not by much.
The gaming world doesn't start and end with the HalfLife and NWN engine, you know. Yeah, there the only "problem" was that you needed a C compiler or to learn Bioware's script respectively. But in other games you didn't even get that.
E.g., I was one of the people who whined at the authors of "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400: The Guild" in America) to let us mod the damn thing at all. They never released any tools or specs at all, and all you were left with were a bunch of binary files that noone had any idea how to edit. I would have loved to build my own cities for it, or, add a new profession, but really, noone knew where to even start with it.
E.g., for all the praise The Sims got for being moddable, it happened mostly in spite of EA. To get any scripting at all, some people had to basically reverse engineer it and figure out Maxis's byte codes. Heck, even to figure which part of an object's file are the bytecodes for the script at all.
And in The Sims 2, while EA will cheerfully let you recolour pants and skirts... well, let's just say that not only they still don't offer any support for scripters, but the latest expansion pack ("Nightlife") flags any downloaded script mods as potential problems, and by default disables them all. Now I'll admit that, what with TS2 scripting being mostly a hack, and based on an unstable ever-changing API (each expansion pack changes it), some of those downloads do cause problems. But it would have been damn nice of EA to actually offer proper scripting support and a stable API in the first place, instead of telling the users to not run those hacks.
E.g., even Civ III was only moddable in that you could change the values for the existing units, but not much else. You couldn't actually change the rules, nor script anything, nor even just add a new unit type. I tried it. The game crashed when loading the mod if you did add a unit.
And so on and so forth. Basically "Games have been moddable for some time" is quite the extrapolation. Most devs were happier to let you stumble on your own with a binary file than to help you at all, and some seemed actually pretty opposed (and occasionally even hostile) to our modifying their game. Moving to XML and Python won't just make things easier, it might just make things possible at all for a change.
You are mostly right, but actually both extremes are over-simplified IMHO.
For starters, let me assure you that probably most people who play The Sims know about those mods, since they're linked to right on the game's web site and Maxis itself offered one of its own each week. They might not think about it as "mods" or give them as much thought as, say, CS or TeamFortress get, but virtually everyone has downloaded at least one recoloured bed or dress for their The Sims game.
It can also be pointed out that at least the first two expansion packs were little more than collections of such little mods. Unlike the later ones which did offer new areas and whatnot, "Livin' Large" and "House Party" were nothing more than getting a ton of new objects and skins on a CD. So I'd say it's inaccurate to say that most people don't care about mods, since a helluva lot of us even paid money to EA for just that.
EA also seems to think it's enough of an advantage to at least look moddable, since (A) they released _some_ modding tools for The Sims on the game's site and on the Deluxe and Super-Deluxe releases, (B) one of the hyped things about The Sims 2 was the Body Shop program.
I can tell you that everyone I know that played The Sims 2 has at least colour-swapped a t-shirt or skirt for their Sims. (I don't even have much artistic skills myself, yet I must have recoloured a hundred or so with the Gimp so far. Not works of art by any definition, mind you. But simple stuff like giving the hue an 120 degree twist to make a green formal dress for my elvish family out of the red one, or recolouring the blonde mohawk to a neon blue one for a punk teenager sim, that's simple enough even for a purely coding nerd like yours truly.) And whoever didn't, got pointed at someone or some site that could do it for them.
But as I've said, I still think you're _mostly_ right.
I think it's more like a feeback loop. You're right that the game has to be good to start with, to get enough people bothering with modding it, as opposed to just uninstalling it. (So, yes, there are a ton of mods for Half Life, but none for Daikatana.) But from there it does serve to help the game further.
E.g., HalfLife was a good game and all, but CS did help sell it to even more people.
E.g., in The Sims's case, the mods also helped keep a bunch of us still interested in the game until the next official expansion pack came along. And then helped sell more expansion packs, because some items required a certain expansion pack to work. So you'd go to some site with items for download and see some cool hack, like a gadget that keeps your robot active all the time, sorta like a permanent buttler. And maybe think "cool, this should save my sims a bunch of time." Except it needs the robot from Livin Large, since the hack just keeps reactivating that one. So a lot of people then went and bought that expansion pack.
You are correct, but, well, that's just the thing.
Saying that the cable gets slanted and pulls the counter-weight back to speed is something that's palatable physics.
Their faq on the other hand, and that analogy with the pendulum are, well, too dumbed down to be still called physics. It's the kind of over-simplification that might be good as a metaphor for laymen, but doesn't even touch the real physics involved. Their metaphor that the centrifugal force pushes the counterweight back to it's place breaks down when you think of the physics involved. There is no centrifugal field as such, it's just an effect of the counterweight's rotating, and exists only as long as it spins fast enough. (Well, it exists at any rotation speed, but below a certain point it becomes lower than the gravity.) If the string was tied to a point instead of on a large rotating circle (the equator), that force wouldn't make it stay up to speed. It's the difference between you moving your hand in a circle and keeping it still in my small object on a string example.
Basically all I'm saying is that I wouldn't throw too much of a fuss if people have read that FAQ and still need to ask. The FAQ just didn't really answer the question, IMHO.
As I was saying before, I bought it to play games on it. Sony didn't have to "trick" me into anything. They just had to have the games I want to play. That's all.
Yeah, if all you wanted from a portable console was to run some old emulator on it, the PSP might not be the one for you. But then you know what? Go buy whatever console lets you run those, and quit whining already. Does the GP2X let you run those? Well, good for you, then. Get one of those, then, and give it a rest already.
No, seriously. It's not like we don't already have enough Nintendo fanboys ranting and raving about how the PSP is T3H 3V1L!!!111, stiffles innovation, makes God kill small kittens, etc, and how about all of us who bought one are some servants of the Antichrist. I don't need yet another group telling me that I'm some kind of a tricked victim, just because I wanted to play Lumines, Mercury and the racing games.
Get this: most of us actually knew very well what we were buying. There was no trick, there was no broken promise, nothing of the kind. Sony didn't dangle the carrot of "but you'll be able to run a NES emulator on it" in front of us at any point. They only said there'll be games and UMD movies for it. That's all. And I fail to see how buying one for those counts as being "tricked". Did any of Sony's patches make it no longer play UMD games or movies, or what? Well, wake me up if they ever do that, because only then it will count as being "tricked".
And generally, WTF? I thought we were in the "Games" section, not in the "let's whine about proprietary stuff" section. Did this story get posted in the Linux section too, or what?
Frankly, I own a gaming console, you know, for gaming. You may notice a highlighted word there. Hint, it's: gaming.
I do not buy it to make some political statement about open vs closed software. I buy it to play games on it. If Sony has the games I want to play, and some hypothetical vendor has this super-open GPL-conform Stallman-approved ESR-blessed platform without many games, you can guess whose I'll buy. Hint: it starts with "So" and ends with "ny".
The whole "feeding the hand that bites us" metaphor is emotional and all, but I don't feel bitten at all so far. I gave them some money, I got some games I wanted in return. If anything, I'm "feeding them" to get more games like those in the future. But more pragmatically, I'm not "feeding" anyone. I'm just acting in my own interest as a consumer, and buying the one that's the better product for me right now.
And if DRM is what it takes to get those games, fine by me. I can still plug the cartridge or UMD in and play the game, right? Well then why should I care what technologies went into that UMD or the loader in the BIOS?
You assume too much that all geeks are like this or that, all are on a zealot crusade against the very idea of commercial software, and all bought an XBox or a PSP just to run Linux on it. Which is just false. I for example am a terminal geek all right, but I bought my XBox to actually run XBox games like Fable or Jade Empire. Even those two alone make it well worth every cent MS got from me. I know only two people who've modded their XBox and that was to add some multimedia functionality and IIRC a bigger hard drive, not to run Linux on it.
Basically rest assured that when you read news about someone's uber-l33t port of Linux to some game console, you're really reading about a small minority that gives a damn at all, and mostly just to show that they can do it. It's the geek equivalent of showing that you can tear a phonebook with your bare hands: it's not actually _needed_ (there are easier ways to destroy a phonebook), it's not what everyone buys a phonebook for, and it doesn't make it a better phonebook than it was before being torn. It's just a way to show off. Unlike tearing a phone book with your bare hands, though, pretty much noone else gives a damn about it.
Now lot more people will care about it if it lets them pirate UMD games and play them off the memory card. (That was the main reason people modded their PS1, PS2 and XBox, btw: to be able to play pirated games.) But even then we're talking freeloaders, not people on a holy jihad for the glory of OSS. Rest assured that _all_ they wanted was to let someone else (e.g., the rest of us paying customers whose money keeps those devs in business) pay the tab for their gaming, not to make some "free as in speech" political point.
"Centripetal acceleration" only says it will keep this thing from flying into space, nothing more. Tie a string to a small object and spin it. The centripetal force is the part of the tension in the string pulling the object towards the centre. Centripetal acceleration is the effect of that force that curves the object's trajectory, instead of letting it go in a straight line.
But here's the catch: centripetal force is _strictly_ the component pointing at the centre of the circle. It can't accelerate or decelerate the rotation. The reason you can accelerate that small object on a string is precisely because the string is a little crooked, and it pulls a little forward too, in addition to the centripetal force pointing at the centre.
The apparent force pulling it outward, that they mention there, is called "centrifugal" (runs away from the centre), not "centripetal" (pulls it towards the centre). This one doesn't do anything to keep it from losing angular momentum. Hold your hand still after you've made your object on a string rotate. It's seeming to tug outwards is centrifugal force. Note how the item can slow down due to friction anyway.
And things get even more screwy in a gravity well.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that while I'm sure some actual physicists did some actual calculations for that project, and they probably have a very sound theory of how it regains lost momentum (and how much can it safely lose or gain before that string breaks), that quoted explanation isn't it. It's some handwaving that's as "scientiffic" or "informative" as saying that Santa's reindeers keep it up.
"It's kinda annoying to see every space elevator article attract a swag of ill-informed comments that get modded as insightful."
I feel your pain. I found it slightly annoying too to see your quote of that pseudo-science babble modded as "+5 Informative". No offense, since you're not the one who wrote that, but it's got exactly zero useful information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
I'd imagine that the reason people keep asking is precisely because that handwaving doesn't answer it.
"It's already possible without this MD5 attack. It's called modifying the code to put a trojan or subtle vulnerability in it. You're just proposing a needlessly complicated method of taking advantage of being on the inside."
The difference is that a trojan can be disassembled, or be noticed by a heuristic scan or whatever. If I plant BackOrifice in a library, someone might find it. If BackOrifice is B and I plant some random garbage A in advance, noone will find anything wrong with A. It's just random garbage that doesn't even do anything. It's just there as a placeholder for the real attack.
It's just an extra attack. More complicated, yes, but it's an extra kind of attack nevertheless.
"Your initial posting didn't mention anything about inside jobs, it described the attack entirely as if some outsider could launch this on their own."
The message you were answering, though, did mention an executable made of two parts, and a very detailed description of what's replaced with what. But you didn't read that. You just jumped in to karma-whore with the "but you can't fake H(Q)!!!" thing. Without even understanding what you're talking about.
"Please mod this guys posting down, "people on the inside can trojan executables" is not the slightest bit insightful, nor is it specific to MD5 attacks."
You know what? It's not like I even care about karma or modding. In fact, I'd have only contempt to anyone who'd be scared into submission by such a lame thing. We're talking maths and security, not about enacting your fantasies of being the more popular prom-queen. If you think "right" and "wrong" in security are decided by who can get the mob to silence the other... I rest my case.
Sure, mod me down if that bandages your little ego. In fact, go ahead and add me to your foes list or whatever, so you can get some more ego-masturbation the next time you get mod points. Like I care.
But it nevertheless strikes me as _the_ most lame thing I've read in ages.
You ran out of arguments, didn't you? And you're going for playing prom-queen instead. If you can't make a coherent point, you just have to get someone to silence the bad man who dares disaggree with you. Geesh, dude. Do you even realize how sad that is?
No, the attack works flawlessly if it's seeded in advance. Try reading for a change, instead of just waving around the same tired "but you can't fake H(Q)!!!!111" battle banner.
Any program can be seeded in advance with an A by an insider, so guess what? I'm not starting from H(Q), I'm proposing precisely to start from H(A+Q).
If I'm a disgruntled employee at Blizzard or at Vivendi or at whoever makes InstallShield, I can plant an A in advance in the self-extractor Q1 they use for their patches. Now they make a patch Q2, and pack it in a self-extracting archive. Normally they'd end up with Q1+Q2. Except they're really getting A+Q1+Q2. They make an MD5 sum of that. Guess what? It's H(A+Q1+Q2). That's the sum they'll publish and against which you'll check. If I swap in my B later, guess what I'll have? H(B+Q1+Q2). Guess what? It matches the original MD5 sum perfectly.
You know what's even more fun? Even if I then resign, chances are they won't wipe out all computers and reinstall all libraries and utilities immediately. I can leave such seeds all over the place: in the installer, in the libraries, in a ton of places. Chances are the next few patches will be swappable like that even after I'm not even working there any more.
Now time to exploit it. Let's say their next patch still contains my see A. I download it and swap B instead. How do I get the users to download that? Well, I don't even have to do any social engineering. Blizzard's patcher is based on BitTorrent (and thus on MD5). All I have to do is be one of the nodes that's offering that patch for download. I don't even have to convince the users that it's safe to download from me, because that BitTorrent-based installer will check the MD5 sums and trust me anyway. So out of some 4 million users downloading that patch, a few tens of thousand download my malicious code without even knowing.
That's the problem. It's _not_ as unsafe as "any Joe Random can fake H(Q)", but an insider can plant an A in advance for later use.
And unlike just planting malicious code, which might be found, the seed A here is innocent-looking garbage. Even if someone disassembled it, they wouldn't find any malicious code. Because it's just the random garbage A that serves as a placeholder for the real malicious code. It's there just so later I can swap in the B unnoticed.
No, you don't understand. No, I'm _not_ proposing to start from a Q and H(Q), so you can stop repeating that already.
I'm proposing to start from an A that's been planted in advance, and thus from an A+Q. As long as my "seed" A is in there, I don't flippin' care what Blizzard's Q is there. I can replace my pre-planted A and with my pre-prepared B, and end up... guess what? With exactly a case of A+Q versus B+Q.
E.g., an auto-extracting installer is exactly a case of A1+Q1. You have an installer A1 at the front which Blizzard _didn't_ write, and an archive at the end Q1 which Blizzard did create.
If I control the A1 and have a B1 which hashes to the same value, I can swap it in the above scenario and keep the MD5 sum for the whole file unchanged.
The executable itself, the A1 and B1 above will in turn, yes, be constructed like that. Out of a base installer Q, and two pieces of code A and B.
Basically it's a case of A+Q+Q1 vs B+Q+Q1. Where only the Q1 part is under their control, Q is the actual installer, and A looks benign.
Do you understand _now_? Again, I'm not saying I'm gonna start from scratch with a H(Q) and build a collision from there, I'm saying it's possible for an insider to plant a seed in advance that they can replace later.
The same applies for anything else. I can for example distribute a pre-compiled library where one module is an A+Q case. The Q is the actual library module you wanted to use, and the A is planted there for future use. The moment you link that in your program, it becomes again an A+Q+Q1. Where Q1 is your code. Voila, I can now swap my B in and keep the MD5 sum intact for every single program you compiled with that library.
That's the problem. No, you can't start from scratch, but basically it becomes feasible for one _hell_ of a lot of people to plant such pieces of padding in advance, for future use.
For a start, it still massively enlarges the number of people you must trust.
E.g., do you automatically trust everyone working at Blizzard? How about some disgruntled temp employee at the publisher? Do you trust everyone at the company who made the install program too? Etc.
Due to the whole "if H(A) = H(B), then H(A+Q) = H(A+Q)", they don't even have to convince Blizzard of anything. As long as I control the A and B versions of the self-extractor module, Blizzard's own content is the Q in that equation. It doesn't matter. Automatically _any_ self-extracting patch made with executable A, can have that executable part at the front stripped and replaced with the malicious executable B, and the result will still match the MD5 sum. I don't have to convince them to change their self-installing patch on their site: it will just be automatically compatible with the exploit as it is.
Basically the whole thing has been bumped from "if the hash matches, you're extremely probably getting the same version" to "you have to trust everyone along the whole bloody chain that they didn't silently plant a part they can swap-in later." I don't know about you, but the latter makes me a bit less comfortable.
Then there are a lot of files that people install that aren't from the devs themselves.
E.g., while getting Blizzard to include my modified files might be hard, it probably wouldn't be hard at all to get a site like Vidiot Maps to replace one of their maps with my own more detailed map of an area. They'd probably even thank me for it.
Basically, yes, it does require a lot more effort and preparation than just generating a virus that matches a given MD5 sum from scratch. But you have to trust everyone along the chain that they haven't made that effort. If they did, that illusion that MD5 is safe as houses just becomes a liability.