So then what the hell is the point of copy-protecting CD-ripping when you can just get the whole thing off bittorrent.... because someone else loaded it from iTunes and re-encoded it back onto the internet??!?!?!?!?!?!
What the heck is the point of the copy protection system anyway, considering this fact?
I guess the moral of this story is, if you can come up with some fancy crypto security technology you can sell it to companies with too much money and too many PHBs. Even if it doesn't really solve the big issue, it will let them sleep well at night.
WINE can do Winzip perfectly, but it's the games and the ease of use that keep me on windows.
With Windows at least all my hardware is detected. Sure it doesn't perform the greatest under bloated XP, but it works... which is better than it not working at all under linux (and by the time it gets supported it's several years down the track)
Windows installs things really easily. Linux on the other hand can be a total NIGHTMARE when it comes to installation... I must admit that some installs on linux are a dream.... just a shell script does the job. As for having to compile source code for most of the other stuff???? you need to have a good distro or you will spend a whole day compiling something... only to have some library missing or the code breaking and not working for some inexplicable reason. Then Fedora won't let me install the KDE development packages due to some bug there. Heck I just compiled a 2.6.7 kernel today and some modules barfed on install to the point where I had no modules.dep file to mkinitrd with! I still don't understand why!
On security fronts Linux wins HANDS DOWN. Windows forces you to buy stuff from Symantec, when a free IPTABLES script from the net can do the same job on Linux for free. And linux viruses are almost non-existant.
The day when Linux takes over the desktop can't come soon enough... but at the moment its capabilities are pretty limited to being an alternate email/internet/office/server replacement... but not much else.
WINE is getting better but it's still jagged in places. Still pretty unusable for me. It gets some business Windows apps going, but as Linux apps get better to replace them, I hope WINE will eventually be used as a front end just for old windows games.
Sure linux is free.... but that doesn't help someone like me who shelled out on Windows only because Linux and WINE isn't really there yet.
Lets face it.... handheld tech is getting into 3D graphics these days so the battle won't really be won on technical merit - dual screens or no dual screens.
Let's take a history lesson. The Sega Game Gear was better than the early gameboy, but its price and lack of a large range of games put a lot of people off (not to mention that it ate batteries for breakfast!). Even though Nintendo had the less powerful machine, it sold more.
Back to today... I bet Nintendo are going in with a back catalogue of a pile of games for the DS. I have no doubts that the DS will have HUGE pile of games at release... even if they are GBA hacks or emulated re-releases of old NES fare. As for PSP?... I can't see that happening.
Lastly.... hackability of the device. When people can stick public domain games, demos, and other interesting hacks onto their machines (including emulators for old machines) - that machine will SELL.... and more importantly, create a developer base from which MORE games can come out. I just can't see this happening with Sony's overly-protective anti-piracy DMA included mini-disc format. Sorry, but locking down hardware = less developers = less games = high prices = less interest.
The 2.6 kernels have a plethora of goodies as well as being faster than the 2.4 branch.
Better hardware support, Crypto APIs (for IPsec), and in 2.6.4+ we have the beginnings of dm-crypt which is a better method of encrypting entire filesystems.
I'm still yet to find a decent 2.6 distro that is good enough for both production and desktop environments though. Still too many bugs in most of the 2.6 based distros prevents me doing much. My newer hardware goes undetected, soundcard not working, SATA RAID being screwed up, webcam acting weird..... *sigh*
America... the land of the free (hence the intellectual thought police), and the home of brave (hence the amount of security in the US).
What went wrong?
Stragely, some of these gore fest games tend to do really well in Japan. You just to see the kind of sicko stuff the Japanese have in their comic books to see that comic violence is actually quite popular in Japan.
Not real simulated violence... COMIC VIOLENCE.
GTA series and Postal2 did quite well in Japan.
Postal2 was interesting on another level because (apart from being funny and over-the-top) you could actually complete this game on the hardest level without having to kill anyone (hence the creators of that game clearly pointed out that all the violence possible in the game was the responsibility of the players!).
Not sure if Manhunt will be seen as comic violence though though... there is nothing comical about that game.
Maybe we'd see titles like:
"NHL hockey fights 2005"
"Mike Tyson pitfighter 2006"
"Ben Johnson's Superhuman Decathlon"
"Muttiah Muralitharan's no-ball cricket 2005"
I was going to say "Handball Maradonna" would be a good game, but apparently that game was already made on the Commodore 64.
Over in Japan there are loads of billboards with "Vice City Out Now on Playstation 2". I've had that game on PC for ages... but it's only recently got out here.
I don't know about "Manhunt", but from what I hear it's very similar to Eidos' "Hitman" series in the gameplay department.... the only major differences seem to be loads more gore, the ability to throw heads you cut off around to distract people, the ability to fight hand-to hand, and hide in shadows.
Oh, and the scenes where you have to drop fridges on people.
Darik's floppy disk sized mini-Linux-onepurpose-distro is what I use to surgically clean hard disks. Click here
The floppy disk I created is red and I went so far as to draw a skull and crossbones on it, knowing full well what booting this thing does to a PC.
A disk like this is an essential little tool to any geek's arsenal.... alongside Knoppix and tomsrtbt.
The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk. It took 15 hours for me to fully DoD a 40GB drive.
Don't bash people who want the support version. Just in case some teacher can't use the suite, Sun probably has someone take calls (and it co$ts them to take those calls to).
Ok OK.... geeks would never EVER call a support centre (not without wasting a day trying first), which is why they simply cannot understand the need to pay for support...
BUT, the average folk WANT this support everytime they mistakenly save their file in Open Office format and their MSWord buddies can't read it - or they do something silly on the PC which has NOTHING TO DO with Star Office, but they blame Star Office anyway. They have NO TIME to fix it, and they want someone else to do it. To a geek, paying for this boggles the mind, but to the average user it makes perfect sense to PAY for this support AND they are prepared to pay for it. Sun is doing them a favour by offering it.
Believe it or not, that's a business plan with no ??? in the middle. What's also unbelivable is that many businesses use Windows server and still intend to use it.... but we'll save that for "Ripley's believe it or not!"
The business plan to that one works like this...
1. Say you're going to do something
2. Then retract your statement and say that you are in fact, NOT going to do anything
3. Quietly do what you were planning to all along
4. Profit
I saw a program about this on Japanese TV not so long ago.
The main problems with outsourcing animation is that the Koreans and Filipinos doing the animations are going to get better in these industries and create more competition for the Japanese animators themselves later on.
Even though this is the case, from what I've seen from Japanese schoolchildren with no formal art training in comic animation, there's no danger of Japan running out of creative talent.
One game that stood out from the Atari 2600 home brew scene was this 3D maze game called "Skeleton +", which could be best described as something about as close to DOOM as the Atari 2600 was likely to get!
Makes me want to dust off the Commodore 64 classic 3D "Layrinth" game and mod it into a no-frills Doom-like game.
I was taught by a bunch a school kids a really neat trick.
You set the flash on one of these fuji disposable cameras, then quickly hit the camera on the top of your head in a quick-jerk action.
What this does is it sets the flash off inside the camera without taking any film. And if you get it to work, it sure looks pretty funny.......even if it doesn't work you'll look like a dork hitting a camera on your head.
I was going to say the same thing. It' s a total throwback to what nintendo did way back in the early eighties. Nothing really innovative at all that Nintendo hasn't already done!
Donkey Kong and Greenhouse anyone?
I've nearly broken my second Japanese cell phone now. Most of the problems have been the damn things snapping in half from being sat on in my back pocket.
Both phones I have broken are the slab type designs. They get a small bend or crack in the middle and they're goners. The clam-shell designs are clearly better suited to not snapping like a kit-kat.
But a showdown or heart to heart is more likely to happen in the west than it is here.
At least I've seen them happen there from time to time, but never in Japan.
I have seen the first one, but not the sequel "Battle Royale 2"
Freaky movie. On an island where everyone tries to kill each other, it would be too cliche and spoiling of me to tell you what kind of person survives.
The big deal about this board is that Japanese people very rarely vent angrily in public life. In fact, IMHO they generally don't say a heck of a lot at all.
Anyway, considering I work in pretty much an all Japanese office, *occasionally* there will be personal misunderstandings. Back home we'd probably have an argument to clear the air to find out where people stand, so something can be done about it. Over here, for the sake of personal feelings, you can't tell incompetant workers outright that they are doing a shitty job, or somesuch.
Over here, personal disagreements just get sat on and when people have disputes, rather than talk about it to fix it, they just never end up talking to that person again. Or if they do talk, it's under the cover of being insincerely "nice". This is just so the peace is not disturbed.
I guess this is what happens when you adhere to the "If you haven't got anything nice to say, say nothing" approach. You never get to the bottom of anything, and you never find out what other people are really thinking.
It means that Japan is a very safe society (nobody really verbally or physically attacks anyone here).... but all these negative emotions get pent up.
Anyway, one day I noticed that some Japanese co-workers were ignoring me for some reason (which was completely out of character). I tried to ask what the matter was, but they said nothing. Later on I googlesearched my name and found a messageboard post with my name mentioned. It turned out that one of those workers was venting about something I said at work, under a nickname on some private message-board.
Needless to say, this pissed me off... but that's the Japanese for you. They'll never tell you anything to your face, even each other, but 2ch can tell you everything.
Slashdot Mirror
So then what the hell is the point of copy-protecting CD-ripping when you can just get the whole thing off bittorrent.... because someone else loaded it from iTunes and re-encoded it back onto the internet??!?!?!?!?!?!
What the heck is the point of the copy protection system anyway, considering this fact?
I guess the moral of this story is, if you can come up with some fancy crypto security technology you can sell it to companies with too much money and too many PHBs. Even if it doesn't really solve the big issue, it will let them sleep well at night.
I'm pretty sure I'd suck as a saleman.
Contraband..... pretty apt name considering the copy protection on the CD.
You don't need to "make dep" anymore on 2.6 kernels! "make dep" is now "dep" for deprecated.
WINE can do Winzip perfectly, but it's the games and the ease of use that keep me on windows.
With Windows at least all my hardware is detected. Sure it doesn't perform the greatest under bloated XP, but it works... which is better than it not working at all under linux (and by the time it gets supported it's several years down the track)
Windows installs things really easily. Linux on the other hand can be a total NIGHTMARE when it comes to installation... I must admit that some installs on linux are a dream.... just a shell script does the job. As for having to compile source code for most of the other stuff???? you need to have a good distro or you will spend a whole day compiling something... only to have some library missing or the code breaking and not working for some inexplicable reason. Then Fedora won't let me install the KDE development packages due to some bug there. Heck I just compiled a 2.6.7 kernel today and some modules barfed on install to the point where I had no modules.dep file to mkinitrd with! I still don't understand why!
On security fronts Linux wins HANDS DOWN. Windows forces you to buy stuff from Symantec, when a free IPTABLES script from the net can do the same job on Linux for free. And linux viruses are almost non-existant.
The day when Linux takes over the desktop can't come soon enough... but at the moment its capabilities are pretty limited to being an alternate email/internet/office/server replacement... but not much else.
WINE is getting better but it's still jagged in places. Still pretty unusable for me. It gets some business Windows apps going, but as Linux apps get better to replace them, I hope WINE will eventually be used as a front end just for old windows games.
Sure linux is free.... but that doesn't help someone like me who shelled out on Windows only because Linux and WINE isn't really there yet.
Lets face it.... handheld tech is getting into 3D graphics these days so the battle won't really be won on technical merit - dual screens or no dual screens.
Let's take a history lesson. The Sega Game Gear was better than the early gameboy, but its price and lack of a large range of games put a lot of people off (not to mention that it ate batteries for breakfast!). Even though Nintendo had the less powerful machine, it sold more.
Back to today... I bet Nintendo are going in with a back catalogue of a pile of games for the DS. I have no doubts that the DS will have HUGE pile of games at release... even if they are GBA hacks or emulated re-releases of old NES fare. As for PSP?... I can't see that happening.
Lastly.... hackability of the device. When people can stick public domain games, demos, and other interesting hacks onto their machines (including emulators for old machines) - that machine will SELL.... and more importantly, create a developer base from which MORE games can come out. I just can't see this happening with Sony's overly-protective anti-piracy DMA included mini-disc format. Sorry, but locking down hardware = less developers = less games = high prices = less interest.
"They're seeing that people don't know who they are, and if they don't know who they are, they're not buying from them,"
I'm in the same boat. I just made a 2.6.6 kernel today too and now I feel ripped off.
The 2.6 kernels have a plethora of goodies as well as being faster than the 2.4 branch. Better hardware support, Crypto APIs (for IPsec), and in 2.6.4+ we have the beginnings of dm-crypt which is a better method of encrypting entire filesystems. I'm still yet to find a decent 2.6 distro that is good enough for both production and desktop environments though. Still too many bugs in most of the 2.6 based distros prevents me doing much. My newer hardware goes undetected, soundcard not working, SATA RAID being screwed up, webcam acting weird..... *sigh*
America... the land of the free (hence the intellectual thought police), and the home of brave (hence the amount of security in the US). What went wrong?
Stragely, some of these gore fest games tend to do really well in Japan. You just to see the kind of sicko stuff the Japanese have in their comic books to see that comic violence is actually quite popular in Japan. Not real simulated violence... COMIC VIOLENCE. GTA series and Postal2 did quite well in Japan. Postal2 was interesting on another level because (apart from being funny and over-the-top) you could actually complete this game on the hardest level without having to kill anyone (hence the creators of that game clearly pointed out that all the violence possible in the game was the responsibility of the players!). Not sure if Manhunt will be seen as comic violence though though... there is nothing comical about that game.
Maybe we'd see titles like: "NHL hockey fights 2005" "Mike Tyson pitfighter 2006" "Ben Johnson's Superhuman Decathlon" "Muttiah Muralitharan's no-ball cricket 2005" I was going to say "Handball Maradonna" would be a good game, but apparently that game was already made on the Commodore 64.
Over in Japan there are loads of billboards with "Vice City Out Now on Playstation 2".
I've had that game on PC for ages... but it's only recently got out here.
I don't know about "Manhunt", but from what I hear it's very similar to Eidos' "Hitman" series in the gameplay department.... the only major differences seem to be loads more gore, the ability to throw heads you cut off around to distract people, the ability to fight hand-to hand, and hide in shadows.
Oh, and the scenes where you have to drop fridges on people.
There is no team. It's just David.
There is no Dana... only Zuul.
(ok, old Ghostbusters joke... and I'm a day late)
Click here
The floppy disk I created is red and I went so far as to draw a skull and crossbones on it, knowing full well what booting this thing does to a PC. A disk like this is an essential little tool to any geek's arsenal.... alongside Knoppix and tomsrtbt.
The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk. It took 15 hours for me to fully DoD a 40GB drive.
I wasn't attacking you. Just directing my attention for people who don't get the concept of support yet. Let's start again!......
Don't bash people who want the support version. Just in case some teacher can't use the suite, Sun probably has someone take calls (and it co$ts them to take those calls to).
Ok OK.... geeks would never EVER call a support centre (not without wasting a day trying first), which is why they simply cannot understand the need to pay for support...
BUT, the average folk WANT this support everytime they mistakenly save their file in Open Office format and their MSWord buddies can't read it - or they do something silly on the PC which has NOTHING TO DO with Star Office, but they blame Star Office anyway. They have NO TIME to fix it, and they want someone else to do it.
To a geek, paying for this boggles the mind, but to the average user it makes perfect sense to PAY for this support AND they are prepared to pay for it. Sun is doing them a favour by offering it.
Believe it or not, that's a business plan with no ??? in the middle.
What's also unbelivable is that many businesses use Windows server and still intend to use it.... but we'll save that for "Ripley's believe it or not!"
The business plan to that one works like this... 1. Say you're going to do something 2. Then retract your statement and say that you are in fact, NOT going to do anything 3. Quietly do what you were planning to all along 4. Profit
I saw a program about this on Japanese TV not so long ago.
The main problems with outsourcing animation is that the Koreans and Filipinos doing the animations are going to get better in these industries and create more competition for the Japanese animators themselves later on.
Even though this is the case, from what I've seen from Japanese schoolchildren with no formal art training in comic animation, there's no danger of Japan running out of creative talent.
One game that stood out from the Atari 2600 home brew scene was this 3D maze game called "Skeleton +", which could be best described as something about as close to DOOM as the Atari 2600 was likely to get!
Makes me want to dust off the Commodore 64 classic 3D "Layrinth" game and mod it into a no-frills Doom-like game.
I was taught by a bunch a school kids a really neat trick.
....even if it doesn't work you'll look like a dork hitting a camera on your head.
You set the flash on one of these fuji disposable cameras, then quickly hit the camera on the top of your head in a quick-jerk action.
What this does is it sets the flash off inside the camera without taking any film. And if you get it to work, it sure looks pretty funny...
I was going to say the same thing. It' s a total throwback to what nintendo did way back in the early eighties. Nothing really innovative at all that Nintendo hasn't already done! Donkey Kong and Greenhouse anyone?
I've nearly broken my second Japanese cell phone now. Most of the problems have been the damn things snapping in half from being sat on in my back pocket.
Both phones I have broken are the slab type designs. They get a small bend or crack in the middle and they're goners.
The clam-shell designs are clearly better suited to not snapping like a kit-kat.
But a showdown or heart to heart is more likely to happen in the west than it is here. At least I've seen them happen there from time to time, but never in Japan.
I have seen the first one, but not the sequel "Battle Royale 2"
Freaky movie. On an island where everyone tries to kill each other, it would be too cliche and spoiling of me to tell you what kind of person survives.
Oh shit, now I've done it...
The big deal about this board is that Japanese people very rarely vent angrily in public life. In fact, IMHO they generally don't say a heck of a lot at all.
Anyway, considering I work in pretty much an all Japanese office, *occasionally* there will be personal misunderstandings. Back home we'd probably have an argument to clear the air to find out where people stand, so something can be done about it. Over here, for the sake of personal feelings, you can't tell incompetant workers outright that they are doing a shitty job, or somesuch.
Over here, personal disagreements just get sat on and when people have disputes, rather than talk about it to fix it, they just never end up talking to that person again. Or if they do talk, it's under the cover of being insincerely "nice". This is just so the peace is not disturbed.
I guess this is what happens when you adhere to the "If you haven't got anything nice to say, say nothing" approach. You never get to the bottom of anything, and you never find out what other people are really thinking.
It means that Japan is a very safe society (nobody really verbally or physically attacks anyone here).... but all these negative emotions get pent up.
Anyway, one day I noticed that some Japanese co-workers were ignoring me for some reason (which was completely out of character). I tried to ask what the matter was, but they said nothing.
Later on I googlesearched my name and found a messageboard post with my name mentioned. It turned out that one of those workers was venting about something I said at work, under a nickname on some private message-board.
Needless to say, this pissed me off... but that's the Japanese for you. They'll never tell you anything to your face, even each other, but 2ch can tell you everything.