Google wouldn't even have to put warnings up. At highway onramps around here, it's very clearly stated that pedestrians (and slow farm equipment) are prohibited from getting on the highway.
When caught by the press they tried to fake their way out with a local admission and then where forced to tell more of the truth only when exposed further.
Bzzt. Google came clean about it themselves. The press never found anything. If Google had just silently deleted the data instead of being a "good citizen" and saying they had done it, we wouldn't even know about this right now.
Google clearly learned it's lesson from this. Don't be the good citizen, just shut up and delete the data without saying anything because stupid idiots will always be stupid idiots.
People seem to think doing anything for longer than $VAGUE_TIME per day is 'crazy' or stupid. You'll never get an 'appropriate' time out of them, though.
2 hours is nothing. As stated before, the average TV time for Americans is 4 hours a day. Or to put it this way:
Let's say the guy works 9am to 5pm.
He gets up at 7pm, to catch the morning news and get ready for work. He plays the game @ 8AM for 15 minutes, leaves at 8:15 for work. Total time in game: 15 minutes.
He gets home from work @ 5:30. He plays the game for a half hour to wind down. Total game time: 45 minutes.
He heads out to do ACTIVITY for an hour. Heck, let's give him two hours. He gets home at 8pm. He rests up by playing the game for another 30 minutes. Total time in game: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
It's 8:30. He heads out for dinner with the wife for an hour.
Get home at 9:30. Wife wants to watch a TV show on the TV, so he gets on the computer while talking with her during the show. Show's a half hour. Total game time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
10 o'clock news comes on, kids want to use the computer for homework.
at 10:30, everyone is going to bed. He plays the game for 15 minutes to wind down. Total game time: 2 hours.
So not only is he still getting the full 8 hours of sleep here, but he's still only spending 8% of his entire day with the game! 33% at work. 33% sleeping, and 50% of is still "free" time.
Even if he cuts back to an hour of gaming, that only gets him up to 54% 'free time' for the entire day.
I was on Halo 2 aswell until a couple of days ago. Actually got recorded in the last ranked game of Halo 2.
It's kind of neat how fast the community got friendly with each other. I actually saw teabagging completely stop once it dropped down to about 30-40 people left.
They didn't take any pains.. they automatically blur faces and license plates with an algorithm (it tends to catch non-face and non-license plate type things sometimes)
Well obviously there's going to be DLC content. However, actual changes to the.exe need to be in the patch, and all their additions (hats and so on) need to be able to all fit into the 360's RAM.
No, the reason he asks permission is to be (a) a nice guy, and(b) being a nice guy gives makes the musicians more open to letting him do stuff like use their actual music video sets for the parodies and other cool things.
This. Exactly. They are looking for every excuse they can to NOT put things on windows XP. What will happen though is that they will claim 'new features'...and 2 months down the line some hacker somewhere is going to find out that it's just a string or something somewhere that has to be changed in a DLL and Microsoft will be caught.
No. What part of "XP does not support hardware acceleration on it's desktop" do people not understand?
XP is an ancient OS. It cannot support new technology because it just simply cannot, to put it in layman's terms. The only way to make it support newer and newer stuff is if it was engineered in a way that any component can be removed and replaced (it wasn't) or do a complete rewrite.
Now if you're going to spend time on a rewrite, you might as well make a new OS because a complete re-write is a ton of work that will need to be compensated with money.
The fact that nobody has managed to somehow find any of these secret strings in a DLL in the 3 or so years that DirectX10 has been available would prove this. Yes, they may make some moves to entice people to upgrade - but there are seriously things that cannot be backported to XP, not even by Microsoft. The damn OS came out in 2001. Nobody would be running a Linux from that time on their desktop and nobody would be running a MacOS version from that year, either.
Car black boxes cannot be used to track where you've been. Not only do they not record positional data, they also only record a buffer of about 10-15 seconds. By the time you pull off the highway and get to your house, everything you've done prior in the day (or since you've gotten on the highway) has already been pushed off the stack.
Not only that, the actual scene data (skidmarks, etc) are much more valuable to accident reconstruction and investigation than the black box. It's only a small bit of data they can use, it can't be the sole one. Especially if for example, the car gets rolled over - even if it happened at 40mph, the free spinning wheels would show that the car suddenly went from 40mph to 80mph..
What the deal is... is that they probably view this as a 'trade secret'. You know how companies are. Actual sales numbers are trade secrets. How many packages they can fit in a truck is a 'trade secret'.
So when internal processes were shown, they reflexively DMCA'd it because it was an internal document.
When the provider stepped over their bounds, MS correctly officially backed off and told the ISP and everyone to restore everything. Because it prevents them getting Streisand'd over what ultimately amounts to a guidelines document. Really not worth persuing trying to keep it off the internet.
It'd be kind of like how I walk down the aisles of the local Wal Marts in the middle of the night (all of Omaha's are open 24 hours) and they have the shelving papers taped to the aisles whenever they change them around. They all have DO NOT PUBLISH in big letters on the top.. even though any other store owner could come by and take a cameraphone picture of it, and technically they could DMCA you if you took a scan and uploaded it... really not worth chasing something that minor, because you can figure out their shelving by just looking at it anyway. You could do the same with MS's privacy policies - just research news stories and see what they've given up over time, and you'll figure out what they do and don't keep.
Bungie has never said the sequels suck. However they are very open about what they did wrong and right in their previous games.
As it stands, Halo 3 is still the best multiplayer experience. Halo 1's multiplayer is a glitchfest with maps that were made by a two man team with a guy that just learned how the extrude tool worked the day before. It is unbalanced and only two of it's maps supported vehicles (so of course, everyone just played those two maps). The maximum amount of Xboxes that can join a LAN is 4 so if you want more than 4 people playing, somebody is gonna have to splitscreen.
Halo 2 was leagues better but it suffered from animation glitches and the ability to escape from maps.
Halo 3 refined the balance of 2 and also fixed all the animation glitches and map escapes. After playing it, there is no reason to ever go back and play Halo 1 multiplayer beyond for a laugh. Single player I play once in a while, but the multiplayer is so bad now it's not even funny.
The removal of dual wielding doesn't even change things that much since people hardly do it in Halo 3 anyway. All it really means is that dual-able weapons will now get a damage buff, like they already did to the Needler (went from dual-capable in 2 to a single weapon in 3)
Reach so far appears to be continuing to build upon Halo 3's multiplayer design and balance. Heck, a Bungie employee is already quoted as saying that the weapons aren't going to be drastically tweaked or anything from their Halo 3 versions.
But then again, I'm probably one of the few people that started with Halo 1 in 2002 and don't worship the broke as hell pistol from 1 (which again, was actually a bug that couldn't be fixed in time for ship).
School officials tend to think themselves as above the law / the law way too many times in my personal experience, not surprised that some decided they would also be the police in these kids homes.
You think this would happen if it was on a PC and for things that allowed dedicated servers?
I'll give you a clue: it wouldn't.
Actually, I can think of quite a few PC games who's online modes stopped working. C&C95, Tiberian Sun, Renegade, many others. Dedicated servers don't mean the game can stay up if the company pulls the plug on the master server. Seeing as how all these games are peer-to-peer, they're actually less vulnerable to shutdowns, since nobody has to buy and run separate server hardware. It doesn't matter who ultimately hosts a game.
However, both dedicated and P2P gaming both have the same weakness - if the central master server goes down, you won't be able to find games anymore. There is no difference between me sitting in a lobby waiting for connections in P2P or me sitting in a dedicated server lobby waiting for connections. If people aren't given a way to get to that server, they're both essentially dead. Only games that anyone really cares about get their master servers reverse engineered, or if the developer releases the master server software
I've also seen bad examples of a 'community' taking over a game after it goes down. If anyone remembers Subspace, a top-down shooter for PC? The original company (Sierra, if I remember correctly) shut it off. People found out how to get it to run on their own servers. A couple of years later, these people used their power and consolidated the master server software into their own little group, essentially taking the game -back away- from the community and pushed out the replacement software (called "Continuum"), in short they hijacked the game. After they then proceeded to do crap like delete six year old active accounts because "they wanted the screenname for a friend", I stopped playing.
So in short, quit putting dedicated servers on a magical pedestal. They aren't the end all be all. For a game to continue after it's plug is pulled either requires a community with people in it good enough to reverse engineer the master servers, hope to hell the developer releases the master server, and then hope you don't have jerks go for a power play and 'take over' and turn out to be bigger assholes than the company could ever be. Dedicated servers are just a relic of the old days when it would have not been feasible (especially when graphics were CPU-bound) to run both the server daemon and the game off the same machine, so it was just easier to split them up. Now we have multi-core machines and seperate GPUs. There is no real reason for dedicated servers to exist anymore, because you can replicate all their functionality in a P2P game anyway.
Ultimately though, I suspect the real reason behind the shutdown is that they're probably starting to lose money on supporting original Xboxes. When you call 1-800-4MYXBOX, you still get menu options for OXbox support. Training people to support it is going to cost money and time. If you only have 90 people playing from an OXbox, their subscriptions are not going to support your operations. It really is the last cord they have to cut to completely drop the OXbox. There's also the fact that you cannot actually sign up for new accounts through the original Xbox - you need to use a prepaid code to start your account, you just can't put in a credit card by itself.
It should also be stated that this is not the end of Halo 2 online! There's still Halo 2 Vista, which runs on both Vista and 7. It has both peer-to-peer and dedicated servers (guess which one is the bigger method of playing (hint: peer to peer, due to the dedicated servers usually only running one gametype)). It runs on GFWL so it will work as long as MS wants it to. And if they kill GFWL live, even though H2V has dedicated servers, it'd still become unplayable.
Developers should never be forced to support a game into eternity - in the real world, servers cost money for bandwidth and maintenance.
Bonus content: All of the games affected by this can still be played over the internet with Xbox Connect through their LAN modes.
...and how many terrorists attacks on aircraft have been foiled by the other passengers?
None - Please do not say the fourth 9/11 plane, it did not get to it's target for other reasons, and crashed anyway?
Huh. That's strange. The first three planes, everyone stay seated like they had been accustomed to knowing, since it was always you get hijacked, flown to some nearby country or distant airport, get to sit in the plane for a week until you were rescued.
But for some reason, the flight that went down? Yeah, the passengers were told what happened to the other three, and attacked. It went down due to the passengers attacking.
9/11 worked because of the assumption that you would just be ransomed out. That won't happen again. Nobody has ever been able to stop a bomb - obviously. But no hijackings have occurred on US flights since 9/11 since everyone knows the stakes now. Yes, the door will stop most attempts - because the passengers will be beating the shit out of the hijacker as the pilot takes the plane back to the airport.
Slashdot Mirror
Google wouldn't even have to put warnings up. At highway onramps around here, it's very clearly stated that pedestrians (and slow farm equipment) are prohibited from getting on the highway.
When caught by the press they tried to fake their way out with a local admission and then where forced to tell more of the truth only when exposed further.
Bzzt. Google came clean about it themselves. The press never found anything. If Google had just silently deleted the data instead of being a "good citizen" and saying they had done it, we wouldn't even know about this right now.
Google clearly learned it's lesson from this. Don't be the good citizen, just shut up and delete the data without saying anything because stupid idiots will always be stupid idiots.
Caught? They freely admitted to it. If they hadn't said anything and just quietly deleted it, nobody would have ever known.
Most of us got disconnected by internet connectivity twitches - only a couple people were taken out by locked up hardware.
British Red Dwarf shows all the time on local PBS stations. Well, the last time I had access to PBS (still haven't gotten around to buying a new TV).
In fact, there's a large amount of British sitcoms and comedy shows on our PBS channel.
I remember watching "Are You Being Served?" as a kid here in Nebraska a lot and liking it. Came on every weekday.
People seem to think doing anything for longer than $VAGUE_TIME per day is 'crazy' or stupid. You'll never get an 'appropriate' time out of them, though.
2 hours is nothing. As stated before, the average TV time for Americans is 4 hours a day. Or to put it this way:
Let's say the guy works 9am to 5pm.
He gets up at 7pm, to catch the morning news and get ready for work. He plays the game @ 8AM for 15 minutes, leaves at 8:15 for work. Total time in game: 15 minutes.
He gets home from work @ 5:30. He plays the game for a half hour to wind down. Total game time: 45 minutes.
He heads out to do ACTIVITY for an hour. Heck, let's give him two hours. He gets home at 8pm. He rests up by playing the game for another 30 minutes. Total time in game: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
It's 8:30. He heads out for dinner with the wife for an hour.
Get home at 9:30. Wife wants to watch a TV show on the TV, so he gets on the computer while talking with her during the show. Show's a half hour. Total game time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
10 o'clock news comes on, kids want to use the computer for homework.
at 10:30, everyone is going to bed. He plays the game for 15 minutes to wind down. Total game time: 2 hours.
So not only is he still getting the full 8 hours of sleep here, but he's still only spending 8% of his entire day with the game! 33% at work. 33% sleeping, and 50% of is still "free" time.
Even if he cuts back to an hour of gaming, that only gets him up to 54% 'free time' for the entire day.
Most? You mean Seropian? Like, one guy? Two of the three founders are still there.
I was on Halo 2 aswell until a couple of days ago. Actually got recorded in the last ranked game of Halo 2.
It's kind of neat how fast the community got friendly with each other. I actually saw teabagging completely stop once it dropped down to about 30-40 people left.
They didn't take any pains.. they automatically blur faces and license plates with an algorithm (it tends to catch non-face and non-license plate type things sometimes)
Well obviously there's going to be DLC content. However, actual changes to the .exe need to be in the patch, and all their additions (hats and so on) need to be able to all fit into the 360's RAM.
Yes. All the content they've added (new models, game modes, and so on) would be impossible to just push out as a patch for the 360.
No, it's an issue of patch size. You are limited to somewhere around 4MB for a patch on the 360 (it can of course, decompress into something bigger)
No, the reason he asks permission is to be (a) a nice guy, and(b) being a nice guy gives makes the musicians more open to letting him do stuff like use their actual music video sets for the parodies and other cool things.
He only does that because he's a nice guy though. Legally he could put any of his parodies on his CDs if he wanted to.
I think you confused "games that can use hardware acceleration" and "the actual OS shell/desktop can be graphics accelerated from the ground up".
XP handles your desktop compositing entirely in the CPU. Win 7 can handle it entirely in your GPU, leaving the CPU to do better things.
This. Exactly. They are looking for every excuse they can to NOT put things on windows XP. What will happen though is that they will claim 'new features'...and 2 months down the line some hacker somewhere is going to find out that it's just a string or something somewhere that has to be changed in a DLL and Microsoft will be caught.
No. What part of "XP does not support hardware acceleration on it's desktop" do people not understand?
XP is an ancient OS. It cannot support new technology because it just simply cannot, to put it in layman's terms. The only way to make it support newer and newer stuff is if it was engineered in a way that any component can be removed and replaced (it wasn't) or do a complete rewrite.
Now if you're going to spend time on a rewrite, you might as well make a new OS because a complete re-write is a ton of work that will need to be compensated with money.
The fact that nobody has managed to somehow find any of these secret strings in a DLL in the 3 or so years that DirectX10 has been available would prove this. Yes, they may make some moves to entice people to upgrade - but there are seriously things that cannot be backported to XP, not even by Microsoft. The damn OS came out in 2001. Nobody would be running a Linux from that time on their desktop and nobody would be running a MacOS version from that year, either.
Car black boxes cannot be used to track where you've been. Not only do they not record positional data, they also only record a buffer of about 10-15 seconds. By the time you pull off the highway and get to your house, everything you've done prior in the day (or since you've gotten on the highway) has already been pushed off the stack.
Not only that, the actual scene data (skidmarks, etc) are much more valuable to accident reconstruction and investigation than the black box. It's only a small bit of data they can use, it can't be the sole one. Especially if for example, the car gets rolled over - even if it happened at 40mph, the free spinning wheels would show that the car suddenly went from 40mph to 80mph..
For existing press people to start teaching training classes on how to approach the scene, safety, etc
What the deal is... is that they probably view this as a 'trade secret'. You know how companies are. Actual sales numbers are trade secrets. How many packages they can fit in a truck is a 'trade secret'.
So when internal processes were shown, they reflexively DMCA'd it because it was an internal document.
When the provider stepped over their bounds, MS correctly officially backed off and told the ISP and everyone to restore everything. Because it prevents them getting Streisand'd over what ultimately amounts to a guidelines document. Really not worth persuing trying to keep it off the internet.
It'd be kind of like how I walk down the aisles of the local Wal Marts in the middle of the night (all of Omaha's are open 24 hours) and they have the shelving papers taped to the aisles whenever they change them around. They all have DO NOT PUBLISH in big letters on the top.. even though any other store owner could come by and take a cameraphone picture of it, and technically they could DMCA you if you took a scan and uploaded it... really not worth chasing something that minor, because you can figure out their shelving by just looking at it anyway. You could do the same with MS's privacy policies - just research news stories and see what they've given up over time, and you'll figure out what they do and don't keep.
Slight bump in graphics? .. have you actually looked at screenshots of Halo 1, 2, 3, and Reach side by side?
Halo 1 didn't even support bump maps on bipeds, only scenery!
3 is leagues ahead of 2, obviously because it's on much better hardware.
Reach has more polygons in the Assault Rifle first person model than an entire Marine had in Halo 3 due to improvements to their engine.
Bungie has never said the sequels suck. However they are very open about what they did wrong and right in their previous games.
As it stands, Halo 3 is still the best multiplayer experience. Halo 1's multiplayer is a glitchfest with maps that were made by a two man team with a guy that just learned how the extrude tool worked the day before. It is unbalanced and only two of it's maps supported vehicles (so of course, everyone just played those two maps). The maximum amount of Xboxes that can join a LAN is 4 so if you want more than 4 people playing, somebody is gonna have to splitscreen.
Halo 2 was leagues better but it suffered from animation glitches and the ability to escape from maps.
Halo 3 refined the balance of 2 and also fixed all the animation glitches and map escapes. After playing it, there is no reason to ever go back and play Halo 1 multiplayer beyond for a laugh. Single player I play once in a while, but the multiplayer is so bad now it's not even funny.
The removal of dual wielding doesn't even change things that much since people hardly do it in Halo 3 anyway. All it really means is that dual-able weapons will now get a damage buff, like they already did to the Needler (went from dual-capable in 2 to a single weapon in 3)
Reach so far appears to be continuing to build upon Halo 3's multiplayer design and balance. Heck, a Bungie employee is already quoted as saying that the weapons aren't going to be drastically tweaked or anything from their Halo 3 versions.
But then again, I'm probably one of the few people that started with Halo 1 in 2002 and don't worship the broke as hell pistol from 1 (which again, was actually a bug that couldn't be fixed in time for ship).
School officials tend to think themselves as above the law / the law way too many times in my personal experience, not surprised that some decided they would also be the police in these kids homes.
I hope they lose this suit. Hard.
I imagine that was more related to not wanting to give any company a free ad inside the ad :P
You think this would happen if it was on a PC and for things that allowed dedicated servers? I'll give you a clue: it wouldn't.
Actually, I can think of quite a few PC games who's online modes stopped working. C&C95, Tiberian Sun, Renegade, many others. Dedicated servers don't mean the game can stay up if the company pulls the plug on the master server. Seeing as how all these games are peer-to-peer, they're actually less vulnerable to shutdowns, since nobody has to buy and run separate server hardware. It doesn't matter who ultimately hosts a game.
However, both dedicated and P2P gaming both have the same weakness - if the central master server goes down, you won't be able to find games anymore. There is no difference between me sitting in a lobby waiting for connections in P2P or me sitting in a dedicated server lobby waiting for connections. If people aren't given a way to get to that server, they're both essentially dead. Only games that anyone really cares about get their master servers reverse engineered, or if the developer releases the master server software
I've also seen bad examples of a 'community' taking over a game after it goes down. If anyone remembers Subspace, a top-down shooter for PC? The original company (Sierra, if I remember correctly) shut it off. People found out how to get it to run on their own servers. A couple of years later, these people used their power and consolidated the master server software into their own little group, essentially taking the game -back away- from the community and pushed out the replacement software (called "Continuum"), in short they hijacked the game. After they then proceeded to do crap like delete six year old active accounts because "they wanted the screenname for a friend", I stopped playing.
So in short, quit putting dedicated servers on a magical pedestal. They aren't the end all be all. For a game to continue after it's plug is pulled either requires a community with people in it good enough to reverse engineer the master servers, hope to hell the developer releases the master server, and then hope you don't have jerks go for a power play and 'take over' and turn out to be bigger assholes than the company could ever be. Dedicated servers are just a relic of the old days when it would have not been feasible (especially when graphics were CPU-bound) to run both the server daemon and the game off the same machine, so it was just easier to split them up. Now we have multi-core machines and seperate GPUs. There is no real reason for dedicated servers to exist anymore, because you can replicate all their functionality in a P2P game anyway.
Ultimately though, I suspect the real reason behind the shutdown is that they're probably starting to lose money on supporting original Xboxes. When you call 1-800-4MYXBOX, you still get menu options for OXbox support. Training people to support it is going to cost money and time. If you only have 90 people playing from an OXbox, their subscriptions are not going to support your operations. It really is the last cord they have to cut to completely drop the OXbox. There's also the fact that you cannot actually sign up for new accounts through the original Xbox - you need to use a prepaid code to start your account, you just can't put in a credit card by itself.
It should also be stated that this is not the end of Halo 2 online! There's still Halo 2 Vista, which runs on both Vista and 7. It has both peer-to-peer and dedicated servers (guess which one is the bigger method of playing (hint: peer to peer, due to the dedicated servers usually only running one gametype)). It runs on GFWL so it will work as long as MS wants it to. And if they kill GFWL live, even though H2V has dedicated servers, it'd still become unplayable.
Developers should never be forced to support a game into eternity - in the real world, servers cost money for bandwidth and maintenance.
Bonus content: All of the games affected by this can still be played over the internet with Xbox Connect through their LAN modes.
...and how many terrorists attacks on aircraft have been foiled by the other passengers?
None - Please do not say the fourth 9/11 plane, it did not get to it's target for other reasons, and crashed anyway?
Huh. That's strange. The first three planes, everyone stay seated like they had been accustomed to knowing, since it was always you get hijacked, flown to some nearby country or distant airport, get to sit in the plane for a week until you were rescued.
But for some reason, the flight that went down? Yeah, the passengers were told what happened to the other three, and attacked. It went down due to the passengers attacking.
9/11 worked because of the assumption that you would just be ransomed out. That won't happen again. Nobody has ever been able to stop a bomb - obviously. But no hijackings have occurred on US flights since 9/11 since everyone knows the stakes now. Yes, the door will stop most attempts - because the passengers will be beating the shit out of the hijacker as the pilot takes the plane back to the airport.