When the game is released, the classes and creatures will feel a lot like they are described in the rulebooks. After a while, they'll nerf this and boost that until we are left with a game that is D&D in name only.
You'd think that after what, 25 years, the rules would be fairly well tweaked out. But once you move from 5 friends on a table to 5,000,000 on a server, some things will have to change.
I used to spend my summers at Lake Bled. My wife liked the caves in Western Slovenia; my daughter's favorite was the horses. It's directly East of Italy and North of Croatia.
Oh, and when I was in Bosnia, I partied with a bunch of Slovenian soldiers on their Independence Day. I was pretty drunk but I think it was late June or early July...
Damned fine country. You guys got beat pretty bad because of the Euro; I hope that's working out better now.
>>E.g. "the USPTO grants inventor X the exclusive commercial rights to invention Y for N years under such and such conditions, including a clear description of the invention, and fair use for all non-commercial use."
So, if you invented the next big thing, you'd be perfectly OK with MS taking it and releasing it for free?
Grab one of the Via MoBos. They'll have at least one PCI slot, onboard video and NIC, and maybe even sound if you look around.
Then grab a PCI SATA card. It won't need RAID capability, just a ton of SATA ports.
Attach a smallish hard drive to the master onboard PATA port and set a CDROM on the slave on the same channel. Install your SATA card and attach some big-assed SATA drives.
Install Debian to the PATA drive and then remove the CDROM. Disable, in BIOS, everything you won't be using.
Once you are in Debian and everything works, use 'mkraid' to initalize the SATA drives in a RAID5 config. Mount that under/mnt/storage and then use samba to share that across your network.
Some might say that RAID5 will be too slow. But, across a network, chances are the wire will be saturated before the hard drives hit the sustained transfer rate. If you are concerned about performance, throw a Gig-E NIC in there and use RAID0+1 or RAID3.
I'm not sure how well Linux can deal with suspending the hard drives in a RAID controller during inactivity. If the kernel can handle it, use something like 'hdparm' to sleep the drives when they aren't in use.
I second the AMD path. Right now, the 3500+ is the best price/perf for single cores. The X2-3800+ is probably the best for dual cores. If you want to spend more money, then go for it. Single core Venice chips are the best right now; really low power and heat for the performance they give.
Next, pick some RAM. You either want DDR or DDR2. There isn't a big performance gain for DDR2 right now, but that could change in the next 6 months. Get either Kingston or Corsair. If you overclock, look for high speed and low timings. If you don't overclock, get HyperX or XMS memory rated for the 3200 (DDR-400) range.
The MoBo is the heart of your system. To not get PCI-X would be a crime. Grab a board from a reputable company. I like ASUS for stability and MSI or Abit for overclocking and options. Look for sound and Gig-E built in. Get SATA RAID if you swing that way. Even if you don't plan on using RAID, SATA RAID is a standard on most of the nicer boards.
SLI may or may not be a gimick. I think it is. If you don't plan on buying two top-of-the-line GPUs right now, then, chances are you never will.
Look at the MSI Neo4 Platinum for PCI-X and the Neo2 Platinum if you just have to have AGP.
Really, and Socket 939 board with a Nforce4 chipset will do fine.
If you get a dual core chip, make sure you have a way to flash the BIOS before you install the chip. 90% of the boards out there will not boot out of the box with a dual core chip.
If you are a gamer, grab one of the GF7800 cards. Between the GT and GTX boards, you should be able to fit one in your budget.
If you aren't a gamer, look at some special needs. Do you need TV-In? Do you want to do TV-Out? Dual monitors? I picked up a PVR-250 for TV-In and my GF 6600GT does a fine job on dual monitors and will even do Composite/Component/S-Video out to my HDTV with no problems.
On-board sound is fine for 90% of the applications out there. If you game, look at getting some USB headphones. They will have a DAC in the headset and will provide nice, clear sound.
I have a Plantronics USB headset. I also do a lot of Flight Sims. I use the headset to pipe the voice comms from TeamSpeak and then let my external speakers take care of the in-game sounds. It's a real nice setup.
Spend some time looking for a nice case. A good case will last through several computers. Maybe look for something BTX/ATX compatible.
Get a gig of memory. 2 gigs is probably overkill.
Get two hard drives. A Raptor for C:\ and a big drive for storage. Get SATA if you can.
Get a good combo CD/DVD-R/RW. SATA is probably overkill, but will keep the insides clean.
Get a nice, big power supply. At least 400 watts; maybe 500. Look for something with a 120mm fan. It'll be quieter than those with 80mm fans.
As for fans, you'll need at least one fan for the case. If you chose wisely, the case will accept a 120mm fan right in front of the hard drive cage. The power supply fan can take care of the exaust in most cases.
When you put the thing together, throw in the RAM, CPU and Heatsink, and video card. After that, boot it to make sure it POSTs.
From there, install your CD/DVD drive and throw in a Memtest86+ CD. Boot and let it run the test for 12 to 24 hours. If you have no errors, boot off a Knoppix DVD and make sure the sound card, NICs, and video card work fine. Play some 3D games in Knoppix just to verify there are no problems.
After that, install your main hard drive and reboot into Knoppix. Format the drive and run a FSCK to test the disk. After that, delete all the partitions and then you can install the OS of your choice.
If you use WinXP, look at using something like NLite to slipstream SP2, all the hotfixes, and the latest drivers for your MoBo.
Another idea along the same lines. Use NLite to get a good basic install of WinXP with SP2 and post-SP2 patches slipstreamed. This can be fully unattended. Personally, I leave the computer name field blank. During the install, the only thing I have to do is partition the hard drive and then fill in the computer name.
Once you have the laptops up and running, log into your domain and allow the Active Directory system to push additional software to the laptops. You can configure AD to push and install MSI packages as soon as they login to the domain. I think all the packages have to be in the MSI format. But I'm not too sure about that.
Have you looked into DRBD? It works kinda like RAID1 over a network. It uses 2 computers to store the database. Another computer acts as a heartbeat server. You'll need 3 NICs in the database servers; one for the connection to the network, one (gig-e preferably) for the connection between servers, and one for the connection to the heartbeat server.
If you are smart, you'll play around with this on a test network or VMWare first. Get it all tweaked out and actually test it by killing a server while in mid-transaction to see if it works for you.
Look at the Soekris boxes. They are low-power and quite powerful. THey are also tiny.
Use laptop hard drives (5400 rpm) in USB enclosures. They will run off of USB power.
Maybe use some of the Maxtor external Network Attached Storage devices. I belive these will allow additional USB devices to be attached and shared.
The only place you will need power is in the computer attached to the TV/entertainment center. You don't want video skipping during playback. With the newer codecs, the CPU is heavily taxed. My 800mhz laptop can play AVIs and MPEGs, but if I open a browser while watching vids, the video will skip really bad.
As far as desktops, look at a powerful central server with smaller VIA-powered clients.
Look at cross-wiring your fans for 5v vice 12v. That'll reduce the power draw.
Get the smallest power supply that will feed that box. No need for a 400w supply with only 150w worth of devices.
Here's what I don't get: who would watch porn on an iPod? First, you need privacy for porn. A group can be interesting; but it's usually just awkward. Next, you need semi-hands free operation. I guess you could prop you iPod agianst something...
I guess if you just have to jack off in the bathroom at work or you can't make it 4 stops on the subway, then go for it. But the other 99.98% of us will just delay our jacking till we get home.
First, your proc. It's a nice proc, but not substantially better than my AMD 3500+. Sure, my proc only clocks at 2.2ghz, but it does more per cycle than the P4 ultra-pipeline archetecture.
Next, your video card. Your 9800 is ancient compared to my 6600GT. I upgraded from your card to mine and noticed a huge jump in gaming performance.
Our systems match on RAM and hard drive; you have a Raptor too, I assume.
Yet, my system rated in the top 9% while yours rated in the top 4%.
Obviously, they are leaning heavily on P4s and ATI.
I seem to recall some controversy about how response is measured. Some numbers are reported as the time it takes to go from black to white and back to black. Some are reporting just from black to white or white to black. And some are reporting the time it takes to go from one gradient of gray to another gradient.
>>By the way, if you are in the DC area, you owe it to yourself to stop by the National Archives and see the Constitution.
Yeah. I wish a lot more people in DC would read the Constitution more often.
There is a "read the laws" movement going around. The core point is that at the beginning of every year, the lawmakers should have to read, word for word, every law on the books. I think the point is to get rid of dumb laws.
A good starting point would be to have lawmakers read the Constitution at the start of each term. Maybe then, we can stop tying up the Supreme Court with lawsuits over laws that should have never passed.
Oh, and another thing: If your name is on the "voted for" side of a law that was overturned by the SC, you should be able to be held accountable for any losses incured while the law was being enforced.
The first step it to document and baseline the systems.
For baselining, I'd enable SNMP for all the managed devices. Then use something like MRTG with RRD Tool and chart every port for every switch for week or so.
While that's happening in the background, start mapping your LAN. Use something like Visio on a laptop and start visiting switches and routers. Confirm the connections between all the routers and switches. Then use good labels (no, not scotch tape and paper) to document those connections with FROM: and TO: information.
FROM:bldg1024 rm201 sw3 p4 TO: blgd2048 rm906 sw17 p33
Now, labeling to and from may seem dumb at first. But the first time you unplug something to move it and then forget where it was suposed to go, you'll thank me.
Once everything is labeled and documented, you can go back you your MRTG graphs and start analyzing the data.
Look at your core switches. Which ports have the highest graphs? Look at your documentation and see what switch is connected to that port. On that switch, which port is highest? Wash, rinse, repeat.
Once you have the access-device that is concentrating all the bad data, set up a clone port and then use a packet sniffer (I use Sniffer Pro) to figure out what the bad data is.
Anyway, after you "shave off the peaks", you can re-baseline the system and start agian. Onc traffic is semi-reasonable, then it's time for hardware analasys.
Using MRTG, look at the CPU, memory, and other nifty stats from the switches and routers themselves. Target devices in need of an upgrade. One word of caution: Cisco switches always have high CPU and memory usage. Just because a device shows 85%CPU does not mean it's working hard. Look at a switch with nothing connected to see what I mean.
I think a more useful chart would set price points and then find the best proc within those points.
What is the best proc for $100? $200? $500? $1000?
If he'd spent 15 minutes thinking about this before he started, he would have realised that lower-priced CPUs would rate higher. Reminds me of how my grandpa used to tell me that the WW2 PT boat had more firepower than a battleship based on firepower to displacement ratio.
Paint actually does a lot of what I want. I can hit Printscreen, open Paint, and then paste the image into a new file. After that, I can crop and then save as a bitmap ot jpeg.
If they'd add some decent red-eye reduction in there, I'd never need PhotoShop.
What kind of idiot are you? Have you actually seen porn since the mid-1970s? Kids do not need to see things like Juggs. I shouldn't have to explain why a fat woman is squirting milk into some dude's cereal. Kids shouldn't see things like Hustler where girls are pissing on each other or a girl is taking it in the ass and in the mouth at the same time.
That shit is not normal. To let anyone be tainted by such perversions at an early age should be a criminal offense.
I don't care if my kids see a boobie or two. Even a muff shot every now and agian is ok. But when a girl has her feet behind her head and her boyfriends is playing gynocologist with his fingers, that shit should be kept behing lock and key untill someone asks for it by name.
First off, I can't remember the last time I for game information from a publisher's site. Does anyone seriuosly go to Activision.com to look up the features of Big Mutha Truka 2005? No thanks. I read off-site previews and reviews. Something like mediareviews, 1up, or gamerankings always has enough information on the games I find interesting.
Second, these guys are only hurting themselves. Let's say 10% of gamers actually go to a publisher's site to get something. How many will actually have a CC? How many will be willing to put that number in? I think not many. The traffic to what is, in effect, an advertisement will fall. And with the adverts not getting clicks, the game sales will fall sharply.
Finally, let's say they have an exclusive demo or make you register to get updates. Well, the demo will be out on eMule and ISOHunt within a few days. If not, the full game will be out no later than 2 weeks after the release. And if people can't access a demo, sales will fall and piracy will rise. Updates and patches will end up mirrored by tons of fan sites; they are rarely hosted back at the publisher's site anyway.
Look, I really understand that game publishers are scared. After all, they are in a position where screenshots and in-game videos will get you sued while Tubgirl and Rocco float around unmolested. It really is sick when selling a game to a kid will result in a bigger fine than selling him porn or alcohol. The pubs are scared. But taking this first step is really going to hurt them in the eyes of the precious few consumers that actually try and read their sites.
Re:IP will give these no advantage at all.
on
TCP/IP Speakers
·
· Score: 1
For your first point, I think power over ethernet could help solve that problem. Of course, your ultimate goal is to have fully wireless speakers, so PoE is just a stopgap.
Your second problen can be solved by accurate network timing. Instead of sending the sound when it is needed, send it a second before it's needed with a time stamp of when that sound should be released. Have the speakers timesync to the milisecond-level with the receiver.
Paper trail won't help when the first sign of trouble is your keycard failing to work at the door. Too many people have relied on e-mail only to find it erased on Monday morning.
My point was that there is no such thing as Christian Bibilical Law. It does not exist. There are exactly two commandments laid out by Jesus: Love God and love your neghbor. That's it!
So why do fundies wanna bring up Jewish laws when it comes to buttfucking?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what I see happening:
When the game is released, the classes and creatures will feel a lot like they are described in the rulebooks. After a while, they'll nerf this and boost that until we are left with a game that is D&D in name only.
You'd think that after what, 25 years, the rules would be fairly well tweaked out. But once you move from 5 friends on a table to 5,000,000 on a server, some things will have to change.
I used to spend my summers at Lake Bled. My wife liked the caves in Western Slovenia; my daughter's favorite was the horses. It's directly East of Italy and North of Croatia.
Oh, and when I was in Bosnia, I partied with a bunch of Slovenian soldiers on their Independence Day. I was pretty drunk but I think it was late June or early July...
Damned fine country. You guys got beat pretty bad because of the Euro; I hope that's working out better now.
>>E.g. "the USPTO grants inventor X the exclusive commercial rights to invention Y for N years under such and such conditions, including a clear description of the invention, and fair use for all non-commercial use."
So, if you invented the next big thing, you'd be perfectly OK with MS taking it and releasing it for free?
According to a recent book, the Oort Cloud is only theory. No one to date has actually prooved its existance.
Grab one of the Via MoBos. They'll have at least one PCI slot, onboard video and NIC, and maybe even sound if you look around.
/mnt/storage and then use samba to share that across your network.
Then grab a PCI SATA card. It won't need RAID capability, just a ton of SATA ports.
Attach a smallish hard drive to the master onboard PATA port and set a CDROM on the slave on the same channel. Install your SATA card and attach some big-assed SATA drives.
Install Debian to the PATA drive and then remove the CDROM. Disable, in BIOS, everything you won't be using.
Once you are in Debian and everything works, use 'mkraid' to initalize the SATA drives in a RAID5 config. Mount that under
Some might say that RAID5 will be too slow. But, across a network, chances are the wire will be saturated before the hard drives hit the sustained transfer rate. If you are concerned about performance, throw a Gig-E NIC in there and use RAID0+1 or RAID3.
I'm not sure how well Linux can deal with suspending the hard drives in a RAID controller during inactivity. If the kernel can handle it, use something like 'hdparm' to sleep the drives when they aren't in use.
Good luck, man...
I second the AMD path. Right now, the 3500+ is the best price/perf for single cores. The X2-3800+ is probably the best for dual cores. If you want to spend more money, then go for it. Single core Venice chips are the best right now; really low power and heat for the performance they give.
Next, pick some RAM. You either want DDR or DDR2. There isn't a big performance gain for DDR2 right now, but that could change in the next 6 months. Get either Kingston or Corsair. If you overclock, look for high speed and low timings. If you don't overclock, get HyperX or XMS memory rated for the 3200 (DDR-400) range.
The MoBo is the heart of your system. To not get PCI-X would be a crime. Grab a board from a reputable company. I like ASUS for stability and MSI or Abit for overclocking and options. Look for sound and Gig-E built in. Get SATA RAID if you swing that way. Even if you don't plan on using RAID, SATA RAID is a standard on most of the nicer boards.
SLI may or may not be a gimick. I think it is. If you don't plan on buying two top-of-the-line GPUs right now, then, chances are you never will.
Look at the MSI Neo4 Platinum for PCI-X and the Neo2 Platinum if you just have to have AGP.
Really, and Socket 939 board with a Nforce4 chipset will do fine.
If you get a dual core chip, make sure you have a way to flash the BIOS before you install the chip. 90% of the boards out there will not boot out of the box with a dual core chip.
If you are a gamer, grab one of the GF7800 cards. Between the GT and GTX boards, you should be able to fit one in your budget.
If you aren't a gamer, look at some special needs. Do you need TV-In? Do you want to do TV-Out? Dual monitors? I picked up a PVR-250 for TV-In and my GF 6600GT does a fine job on dual monitors and will even do Composite/Component/S-Video out to my HDTV with no problems.
On-board sound is fine for 90% of the applications out there. If you game, look at getting some USB headphones. They will have a DAC in the headset and will provide nice, clear sound.
I have a Plantronics USB headset. I also do a lot of Flight Sims. I use the headset to pipe the voice comms from TeamSpeak and then let my external speakers take care of the in-game sounds. It's a real nice setup.
Spend some time looking for a nice case. A good case will last through several computers. Maybe look for something BTX/ATX compatible.
Get a gig of memory. 2 gigs is probably overkill.
Get two hard drives. A Raptor for C:\ and a big drive for storage. Get SATA if you can.
Get a good combo CD/DVD-R/RW. SATA is probably overkill, but will keep the insides clean.
Get a nice, big power supply. At least 400 watts; maybe 500. Look for something with a 120mm fan. It'll be quieter than those with 80mm fans.
As for fans, you'll need at least one fan for the case. If you chose wisely, the case will accept a 120mm fan right in front of the hard drive cage. The power supply fan can take care of the exaust in most cases.
When you put the thing together, throw in the RAM, CPU and Heatsink, and video card. After that, boot it to make sure it POSTs.
From there, install your CD/DVD drive and throw in a Memtest86+ CD. Boot and let it run the test for 12 to 24 hours. If you have no errors, boot off a Knoppix DVD and make sure the sound card, NICs, and video card work fine. Play some 3D games in Knoppix just to verify there are no problems.
After that, install your main hard drive and reboot into Knoppix. Format the drive and run a FSCK to test the disk. After that, delete all the partitions and then you can install the OS of your choice.
If you use WinXP, look at using something like NLite to slipstream SP2, all the hotfixes, and the latest drivers for your MoBo.
Good luck.
Another idea along the same lines. Use NLite to get a good basic install of WinXP with SP2 and post-SP2 patches slipstreamed. This can be fully unattended. Personally, I leave the computer name field blank. During the install, the only thing I have to do is partition the hard drive and then fill in the computer name.
http://www.nliteos.com/
Once you have the laptops up and running, log into your domain and allow the Active Directory system to push additional software to the laptops. You can configure AD to push and install MSI packages as soon as they login to the domain. I think all the packages have to be in the MSI format. But I'm not too sure about that.
Have you looked into DRBD? It works kinda like RAID1 over a network. It uses 2 computers to store the database. Another computer acts as a heartbeat server. You'll need 3 NICs in the database servers; one for the connection to the network, one (gig-e preferably) for the connection between servers, and one for the connection to the heartbeat server.
http://www.drbd.org/
If you are smart, you'll play around with this on a test network or VMWare first. Get it all tweaked out and actually test it by killing a server while in mid-transaction to see if it works for you.
Look at the Soekris boxes. They are low-power and quite powerful. THey are also tiny.
Use laptop hard drives (5400 rpm) in USB enclosures. They will run off of USB power.
Maybe use some of the Maxtor external Network Attached Storage devices. I belive these will allow additional USB devices to be attached and shared.
The only place you will need power is in the computer attached to the TV/entertainment center. You don't want video skipping during playback. With the newer codecs, the CPU is heavily taxed. My 800mhz laptop can play AVIs and MPEGs, but if I open a browser while watching vids, the video will skip really bad.
As far as desktops, look at a powerful central server with smaller VIA-powered clients.
Look at cross-wiring your fans for 5v vice 12v. That'll reduce the power draw.
Get the smallest power supply that will feed that box. No need for a 400w supply with only 150w worth of devices.
If anyone is interested, the store is out the East Exit of the Shibuia station. There is a ton of stuff to do out there other than the 360 store.
http://www.tokyoessentials.com/shibuya.html
While I can't point out any real data, I'd be willing to bet that just about every mas has jacked off. Most probably do it at least once a week.
Here's what I don't get: who would watch porn on an iPod? First, you need privacy for porn. A group can be interesting; but it's usually just awkward. Next, you need semi-hands free operation. I guess you could prop you iPod agianst something...
I guess if you just have to jack off in the bathroom at work or you can't make it 4 stops on the subway, then go for it. But the other 99.98% of us will just delay our jacking till we get home.
Makes no sense. I have a better proc and a better GPU and still rate lower.
They have to be favoring ATI over Nvidia
I smell something fishy...
First, your proc. It's a nice proc, but not substantially better than my AMD 3500+. Sure, my proc only clocks at 2.2ghz, but it does more per cycle than the P4 ultra-pipeline archetecture.
Next, your video card. Your 9800 is ancient compared to my 6600GT. I upgraded from your card to mine and noticed a huge jump in gaming performance.
Our systems match on RAM and hard drive; you have a Raptor too, I assume.
Yet, my system rated in the top 9% while yours rated in the top 4%.
Obviously, they are leaning heavily on P4s and ATI.
I seem to recall some controversy about how response is measured. Some numbers are reported as the time it takes to go from black to white and back to black. Some are reporting just from black to white or white to black. And some are reporting the time it takes to go from one gradient of gray to another gradient.
Buyer beware.
>>By the way, if you are in the DC area, you owe it to yourself to stop by the National Archives and see the Constitution.
Yeah. I wish a lot more people in DC would read the Constitution more often.
There is a "read the laws" movement going around. The core point is that at the beginning of every year, the lawmakers should have to read, word for word, every law on the books. I think the point is to get rid of dumb laws.
A good starting point would be to have lawmakers read the Constitution at the start of each term. Maybe then, we can stop tying up the Supreme Court with lawsuits over laws that should have never passed.
Oh, and another thing: If your name is on the "voted for" side of a law that was overturned by the SC, you should be able to be held accountable for any losses incured while the law was being enforced.
The first step it to document and baseline the systems.
For baselining, I'd enable SNMP for all the managed devices. Then use something like MRTG with RRD Tool and chart every port for every switch for week or so.
While that's happening in the background, start mapping your LAN. Use something like Visio on a laptop and start visiting switches and routers. Confirm the connections between all the routers and switches. Then use good labels (no, not scotch tape and paper) to document those connections with FROM: and TO: information.
FROM:bldg1024 rm201 sw3 p4
TO: blgd2048 rm906 sw17 p33
Now, labeling to and from may seem dumb at first. But the first time you unplug something to move it and then forget where it was suposed to go, you'll thank me.
Once everything is labeled and documented, you can go back you your MRTG graphs and start analyzing the data.
Look at your core switches. Which ports have the highest graphs? Look at your documentation and see what switch is connected to that port. On that switch, which port is highest? Wash, rinse, repeat.
Once you have the access-device that is concentrating all the bad data, set up a clone port and then use a packet sniffer (I use Sniffer Pro) to figure out what the bad data is.
Anyway, after you "shave off the peaks", you can re-baseline the system and start agian. Onc traffic is semi-reasonable, then it's time for hardware analasys.
Using MRTG, look at the CPU, memory, and other nifty stats from the switches and routers themselves. Target devices in need of an upgrade. One word of caution: Cisco switches always have high CPU and memory usage. Just because a device shows 85%CPU does not mean it's working hard. Look at a switch with nothing connected to see what I mean.
1. baseline
2. document
3. analyze
4. fix
5. upgrade
6. re-baseline
7. re-document
I think a more useful chart would set price points and then find the best proc within those points.
What is the best proc for $100? $200? $500? $1000?
If he'd spent 15 minutes thinking about this before he started, he would have realised that lower-priced CPUs would rate higher. Reminds me of how my grandpa used to tell me that the WW2 PT boat had more firepower than a battleship based on firepower to displacement ratio.
Paint actually does a lot of what I want. I can hit Printscreen, open Paint, and then paste the image into a new file. After that, I can crop and then save as a bitmap ot jpeg.
If they'd add some decent red-eye reduction in there, I'd never need PhotoShop.
What kind of idiot are you? Have you actually seen porn since the mid-1970s? Kids do not need to see things like Juggs. I shouldn't have to explain why a fat woman is squirting milk into some dude's cereal. Kids shouldn't see things like Hustler where girls are pissing on each other or a girl is taking it in the ass and in the mouth at the same time.
That shit is not normal. To let anyone be tainted by such perversions at an early age should be a criminal offense.
I don't care if my kids see a boobie or two. Even a muff shot every now and agian is ok. But when a girl has her feet behind her head and her boyfriends is playing gynocologist with his fingers, that shit should be kept behing lock and key untill someone asks for it by name.
First off, I can't remember the last time I for game information from a publisher's site. Does anyone seriuosly go to Activision.com to look up the features of Big Mutha Truka 2005? No thanks. I read off-site previews and reviews. Something like mediareviews, 1up, or gamerankings always has enough information on the games I find interesting.
Second, these guys are only hurting themselves. Let's say 10% of gamers actually go to a publisher's site to get something. How many will actually have a CC? How many will be willing to put that number in? I think not many. The traffic to what is, in effect, an advertisement will fall. And with the adverts not getting clicks, the game sales will fall sharply.
Finally, let's say they have an exclusive demo or make you register to get updates. Well, the demo will be out on eMule and ISOHunt within a few days. If not, the full game will be out no later than 2 weeks after the release. And if people can't access a demo, sales will fall and piracy will rise. Updates and patches will end up mirrored by tons of fan sites; they are rarely hosted back at the publisher's site anyway.
Look, I really understand that game publishers are scared. After all, they are in a position where screenshots and in-game videos will get you sued while Tubgirl and Rocco float around unmolested. It really is sick when selling a game to a kid will result in a bigger fine than selling him porn or alcohol. The pubs are scared. But taking this first step is really going to hurt them in the eyes of the precious few consumers that actually try and read their sites.
For your first point, I think power over ethernet could help solve that problem. Of course, your ultimate goal is to have fully wireless speakers, so PoE is just a stopgap.
Your second problen can be solved by accurate network timing. Instead of sending the sound when it is needed, send it a second before it's needed with a time stamp of when that sound should be released. Have the speakers timesync to the milisecond-level with the receiver.
$160M for a satellite? For $10M, I'll go down to Antartica every few years and let them know how the melting is coming.
Hell, if they throw in another $5M or so, I'll take a torch and make damn sure they get the results they are expecting.
Paper trail won't help when the first sign of trouble is your keycard failing to work at the door. Too many people have relied on e-mail only to find it erased on Monday morning.
My point was that there is no such thing as Christian Bibilical Law. It does not exist. There are exactly two commandments laid out by Jesus: Love God and love your neghbor. That's it!
So why do fundies wanna bring up Jewish laws when it comes to buttfucking?