Ironically, I've found the best way to deal with this kind of thing is ripping the DVD to my computer and removing all "prohibitied user operations", warnings, and/or advertisements, and then burning to DVD-R.
If a few dedicated people are able to hack/mod their new XBox 360s, I seriously doubt microsoft will be bothered. The question is, Will any monkey with a soldering iron be able to mod their new console and run homebrew software and pirated games?
Having just finished my first xbox mod, I have to say it was staggeringly easy: Solder these pins and these wires here, here, and here. Replace hard drive. Done. I would not have attempted it if it had meant, say, soldering a dozen or so additional wires, desoldering and replacing a chip or two, and maybe dremeling out a section of the case.
All they have to do is make sure that the system is difficult and/or expensive to mod so that only the dedicated few are really doing it.
Mr. Davis continues,"Naturally we can't expect to rake in this additional ad revenue without giving something back to the gamer. We're looking into releasing completely ad-supported versions of several games, either through online distribution, or full retail costs with no subscription rates. I mean, really, gamers simply wouldn't tolerate our pocketing the difference at their expense, would they?" He trailed off.
I can pimp my cab/site without having to somehow turn the trying to turn the conversation in that direction;)
The one I built is a Time Bandits themed gaming cabinet (mame, nintendo emulators, ddr via stepmania, and a handful of arcade control-friendly pc games). I built the cabinet, built (as in assembled) the pc to power it, drilled a control panel for controls. As far as hacks go, enough people are making similar systems now to warrant commercial interest, and most of what's needed has become commercially available (not talking about pre-built control panels etc, but instead things like ready-to-use arcade-friendly keyboard encoders and such).
I can't really take credit for most of what's there, hack-wise. I built a playstation to parallel port adapter for the dance pad, but it's based on somebody's plans for exactly that. My spinner is wired up to a pre-made mouse hack, the joysticks and buttons and coin mechs to an ipac. N64 to USB adapters for external gamepads, a smartstrip to control power to the components (tv, lights, sound). The closest I've come to a real hack was smooshing a bit of metal into the TV's power button so that it would turn on automagically when it received power.
Most of the good pictures are on this page if you'd rather not bother going through the site, otherwise almost every step of the process is chronicled on the site in one way or another.
Garlic bread, hands down. Crisp and crumbly, it's small enough to get between and then underneath the keys, causing a 'crunch crunch crunch' when typing (assuming the key can still be activated).
I find it highly unlikely that the people clicking on singing, dancing flash ads, and buying products because their computers are 'broadcasting an IP address' (i.e. the people to whom the ads are targetted) are the same people that are seeking out these extensions or blocking ads with custom host files. These are not things that will come pre-installed with your dell.
I'm not sure who could be losing money here when most ad referral payments to hosts are based on clicks instead of views.
As others have stated, plastering an otherwise useful/entertaining/whatever site with ads that are actually irritating in and of themselves is the root of the problem.
The beauty of the out-dated pre-rendered CG animation used in Dragon's Lair 3D with the incredible gameplay of the original Dragon's Lair games. Milk it guys, milk it.:P
I built a mid-budget mame cabinet (well mame + some consoles). Used a TV with s-video instead of the higher end arcade monitors, or using a tiny PC monitor, no top of the line PC, but nothing too shabby either. Will be completed at under $800 (just needs artwork now), built from scratch. I could have easily saved at least a couple hundred dollars by converting an arcade cabinet shell instead of building, and I had no spare parts for the PC (which means I may get my geek license revoked).
I decided, as an after-thought, to add console emulation to my MAME cabinet
Initially, I bought a pair of these for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Playstation emulation. They're an inexpensive ($5/ea) playstation 1 controller clone (but in pretty translucent blue, which matched my cabinet nicely) but with much better action/feedback than the original playstation controllers. These worked great for the console emulators, and some MAME games, but there really is no substitute for a joystick and a handful of arcade buttons.
Recently, I decided to add a Nintendo 64 emulator to the cabinet also, but I was unable to find any USB controller that was close enough to the slightly-odd n64 controller to be usable.
I settled on getting a pair of N64 to USB adapters.
At this time, there are basically just 2 available if you're bad at soldering, like me. The Adaptoid($30/ea), which is compatible with just about every n64 controller, and supports such niceties as rumblepads and memory packs, and the Lik Sang one ($12/ea), which features no rumble pad or memory pack support, and only works with the original black, gray, and yellow controllers. I went with the cheap ones:)
The family entertainment center used to be a rat's nest of cords and wires for various consoles.
We now have a much larger piece of furniture (mame arcade cabinet), that runs Atari 2600, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Nintendo 64, in addition to standard mame games, all of which can be played from either 2 Nintendo 64 controllers (very comfortable for everything but mame, imo) or from the actual arcade controls.
Cleaned up the wires nicely, but at a cost of about 42 cubic feet of living room space for the cabinet.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, I've found the best way to deal with this kind of thing is ripping the DVD to my computer and removing all "prohibitied user operations", warnings, and/or advertisements, and then burning to DVD-R.
If a few dedicated people are able to hack/mod their new XBox 360s, I seriously doubt microsoft will be bothered. The question is, Will any monkey with a soldering iron be able to mod their new console and run homebrew software and pirated games? Having just finished my first xbox mod, I have to say it was staggeringly easy: Solder these pins and these wires here, here, and here. Replace hard drive. Done. I would not have attempted it if it had meant, say, soldering a dozen or so additional wires, desoldering and replacing a chip or two, and maybe dremeling out a section of the case. All they have to do is make sure that the system is difficult and/or expensive to mod so that only the dedicated few are really doing it.
Mr. Davis continues,"Naturally we can't expect to rake in this additional ad revenue without giving something back to the gamer. We're looking into releasing completely ad-supported versions of several games, either through online distribution, or full retail costs with no subscription rates. I mean, really, gamers simply wouldn't tolerate our pocketing the difference at their expense, would they?" He trailed off.
The fact that a browser can display broken css is nice, but isn't displaying proper CSS properly a bit more important?
I can pimp my cab/site without having to somehow turn the trying to turn the conversation in that direction ;)
The one I built is a Time Bandits themed gaming cabinet (mame, nintendo emulators, ddr via stepmania, and a handful of arcade control-friendly pc games). I built the cabinet, built (as in assembled) the pc to power it, drilled a control panel for controls. As far as hacks go, enough people are making similar systems now to warrant commercial interest, and most of what's needed has become commercially available (not talking about pre-built control panels etc, but instead things like ready-to-use arcade-friendly keyboard encoders and such).
I can't really take credit for most of what's there, hack-wise. I built a playstation to parallel port adapter for the dance pad, but it's based on somebody's plans for exactly that. My spinner is wired up to a pre-made mouse hack, the joysticks and buttons and coin mechs to an ipac. N64 to USB adapters for external gamepads, a smartstrip to control power to the components (tv, lights, sound). The closest I've come to a real hack was smooshing a bit of metal into the TV's power button so that it would turn on automagically when it received power.
Most of the good pictures are on this page if you'd rather not bother going through the site, otherwise almost every step of the process is chronicled on the site in one way or another.
Garlic bread, hands down. Crisp and crumbly, it's small enough to get between and then underneath the keys, causing a 'crunch crunch crunch' when typing (assuming the key can still be activated).
In a black and white game? Nothing :)
I find it highly unlikely that the people clicking on singing, dancing flash ads, and buying products because their computers are 'broadcasting an IP address' (i.e. the people to whom the ads are targetted) are the same people that are seeking out these extensions or blocking ads with custom host files. These are not things that will come pre-installed with your dell. I'm not sure who could be losing money here when most ad referral payments to hosts are based on clicks instead of views. As others have stated, plastering an otherwise useful/entertaining/whatever site with ads that are actually irritating in and of themselves is the root of the problem.
Yeah, but I think they've made it clear they don't want your business anyway :)
The beauty of the out-dated pre-rendered CG animation used in Dragon's Lair 3D with the incredible gameplay of the original Dragon's Lair games. Milk it guys, milk it. :P
I built a mid-budget mame cabinet (well mame + some consoles). Used a TV with s-video instead of the higher end arcade monitors, or using a tiny PC monitor, no top of the line PC, but nothing too shabby either. Will be completed at under $800 (just needs artwork now), built from scratch. I could have easily saved at least a couple hundred dollars by converting an arcade cabinet shell instead of building, and I had no spare parts for the PC (which means I may get my geek license revoked).
Initially, I bought a pair of these for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Playstation emulation. They're an inexpensive ($5/ea) playstation 1 controller clone (but in pretty translucent blue, which matched my cabinet nicely) but with much better action/feedback than the original playstation controllers. These worked great for the console emulators, and some MAME games, but there really is no substitute for a joystick and a handful of arcade buttons.
Recently, I decided to add a Nintendo 64 emulator to the cabinet also, but I was unable to find any USB controller that was close enough to the slightly-odd n64 controller to be usable. I settled on getting a pair of N64 to USB adapters.
At this time, there are basically just 2 available if you're bad at soldering, like me. The Adaptoid($30/ea), which is compatible with just about every n64 controller, and supports such niceties as rumblepads and memory packs, and the Lik Sang one ($12/ea), which features no rumble pad or memory pack support, and only works with the original black, gray, and yellow controllers. I went with the cheap ones :)
The family entertainment center used to be a rat's nest of cords and wires for various consoles. We now have a much larger piece of furniture (mame arcade cabinet), that runs Atari 2600, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Nintendo 64, in addition to standard mame games, all of which can be played from either 2 Nintendo 64 controllers (very comfortable for everything but mame, imo) or from the actual arcade controls. Cleaned up the wires nicely, but at a cost of about 42 cubic feet of living room space for the cabinet. :)
Atari 2600 Video Computer System.