I'm a fan, so I purchased it immediately. However, there's at least one terribly frustrating thing that I'm pretty shocked is there: a rather long, unskippable intro movie that plays every time you start the game. The graphics look great, and so far the writing and humor have been up to my high expectations, but this one thing makes it feel like Jerry and Mike never actually played the retail version before launch. I can't believe they wouldn't have had that fixed. I hope they release a patch to correct this.
This isn't exactly a new problem...in the early days, you could fry a monitor by setting the video card to absurd refresh rates, and you could destroy hard disks by issuing bogus stepping commands to the heads and slamming them into the stops.
No, I'm not a Creative PR Troll. I think Creative really screwed up on this, by messing up their drivers and then with this PR debacle. But it's just not legal to patch and redistribute the drivers. Now, if Daniel_K had either published the exact methods for making the changes, or wrote a program that would automatically patch a copy of the drivers, Creative wouldn't have had a leg to stand on.
While I respect his skills, Daniel_K didn't actually write replacement drivers that did things Creative couldn't...he reverse engineered the existing drivers and patched out the OS level checks, or he swapped parts of code from other drivers into play, to enable features that were specifically disabled by Creative. He then made those modified, repackaged drivers available, which is a big problem for Creative, and the reason why they tried to shut Daniel_K down.
Please note that there are lots of Standard compliant C++ IDEs and compilers for the "most prominent OS" that also support other OSes. The world is not Windows...
The API allows you to put any byte value in it, but programs like RegEdit use input methods that don't. This is probably a legacy of the Pascal/C split in Windows...lots of older or more low-level APIs take Pascal-style strings (leading length byte followed by the characters) as opposed to C-style (arbitrary length sequence of characters terminated by a null byte.)
Rootkit Revealer merely reports that there's a suspicious registry key, and it marks it suspicious because it's got an embedded null that makes it difficult to delete manually without special tools. The key itself is not hidden or disguised in any way, and the software in question doesn't exhibit other rootkit behaviors (no "backdoor", no attempt to disguise or hide presence, etc.)
The Windows registry allows creating keys that have nulls in them, but the standard tools (such as RegEdit) don't have a way of entering a "binary" value for the name of a key, and the selection mechanism doesn't propagate the nulls to the delete code when you try to remove it. That's why the article references some special software that allows these to be deleted.
As far as not being able to delete stuff without going into the registry, that's not strictly true. The registry contains pointers and configuration information, not executable code. The trick to removing something is that in addition to deleting the physical files, you also want to remove the associated registry stuff. That's because if something is running, it may not be possible to kill the process it runs in or delete the code. If something is configured in the registry, it can start at boot time before the user gets control (including in safe mode). So, malware can protect itself from removal by making the registry key impossible to delete under normal circumstances.
The article author seemed to base his conclusion on the fact that the SecureROM software installs a registry key that can't be deleted by normal means. This pops up on the Microsoft Rootkit Revealer (since that's a technique used by rootkits as well.) That's like saying that because rootkits use Windows APIs, any program that uses a Windows API is a rootkit.
As for why it's in the demo, modern copy protection is embedded throughout games. It's too difficult to remove the protection just for a demo that contains so much of the full game engine.
If ever there was a practice that deserved it's own brand new circle in hell, it's playing commercials before movies. I specifically go to movies late just to skip the commercials.
It's not "like an advertisement", it's nothing BUT an advertisement. And it's sure nice to see a company advertising it's products in a funny, entertaining way that also nicely shows off the products' capabilities, without fluff.
He could refer to Disney and use the Disney name without any problem, but the wholesale use of the logo, animation, sound is over the line for fair use.
This little exercise seems to violate the intent of Fair Use pretty much in every way. From the illegal use of the Disney logo (with animation and music) to the repeated and unnecessary use of actual Disney dialog and video, it seems that the creator missed the point entirely.
I never said downloading was illegal in Canada. It's legal because the law assumes people will do it anyway, so EVERYONE is charged, in advance, for blank media and players (just like it was for blank tape in the past.)
This discussion came about because I wondered if the music on the USB keys was licensed for distribution on web sites. We've been discussing the specific case of Canadian law where Canadians are allowed to put files on to shared, accessible resources (although NOT to "distribute" them), and are also allowed to download files (on the basis that they've already paid for the right to do so) and in spite of more restrictive licenses promulgated by the record industry.
This applies only in Canada. So unless the USB keys were left in Canada, or physically transported to Canada and uploaded to servers there, then the files are still not necessarily legal there either. The upload AND download needs to occur inside Canada for it to be legal (as far as I can tell from the article.)
In the same decision, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $25 on iPod-like MP3 players, putting the devices in the same category as audio tapes and blank CDs. The money collected from levies on "recording mediums" goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. Manufacturers are responsible for paying the fees and often pass the cost on to consumers. So, the reason expressed here is that it's because of the assumption of losses that the blank media and devices will permit.
On the upload side, the ruling is that just because you put a file where people can get at it, doesn't mean you're "distributing" it:
"The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to distribution," Finckenstein wrote. "Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying." If you do go ahead and "distribute" it, you're still liable to be in trouble.
Ottawa's Geist said this appeared to make uploading itself legal as well, since a peer-to-peer user--like a library--would be entitled to assume that the person on the other side of the connection was acting legally, since downloading was also legal in Canada. The rationale here is that only people who are legally entitled to download the file will do so. Canadians have essentially paid in advance for the piracy.
I agree that the Canadian blank media and MP3 player levies are reprehensible.
As I clearly stated, Canadians get a free pass on this issue:
The regulators cited a long-standing rule in Canada, in which most copying for personal use was allowed. To repay artists and record labels for revenue lost by this activity, the government imposes a fee on blank tapes, CDs and even hard disk-based MP3 players such as Apple Computer's iPod, and distributes that revenue to copyright holders. You conveniently left this part out: Basically, Canadians have already paid in advance for piracy. So, my comment about it being ok to download if you're legally entitled to still stands.
Ottawa's Geist said this appeared to make uploading itself legal as well, since a peer-to-peer user--like a library--would be entitled to assume that the person on the other side of the connection was acting legally, since downloading was also legal in Canada. Again, Canadian rules specifically allow that, on the assumption that people will be pirates, so they've been charged in advance for it. How many other countries have rules like this?
The article is also poorly worded. The act of putting a file in a directory(or uploading to a shred server) where others can get at it is not a crime. The act of downloading it is a different matter entirely.
You're missing the point. Interscope's ownership isn't really pertinent. The point is that the distance between any one label's marketing arm and the RIAA's legal hounds is pretty vast. UMG is still just one group in the RIAA mess. I'd be more inclined to think that the membership charter for the RIAA member companies grants the RIAA wide powers to pursue purported copyright violations.
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I'm a fan, so I purchased it immediately. However, there's at least one terribly frustrating thing that I'm pretty shocked is there: a rather long, unskippable intro movie that plays every time you start the game. The graphics look great, and so far the writing and humor have been up to my high expectations, but this one thing makes it feel like Jerry and Mike never actually played the retail version before launch. I can't believe they wouldn't have had that fixed. I hope they release a patch to correct this.
This isn't exactly a new problem...in the early days, you could fry a monitor by setting the video card to absurd refresh rates, and you could destroy hard disks by issuing bogus stepping commands to the heads and slamming them into the stops.
No, I'm not a Creative PR Troll. I think Creative really screwed up on this, by messing up their drivers and then with this PR debacle. But it's just not legal to patch and redistribute the drivers. Now, if Daniel_K had either published the exact methods for making the changes, or wrote a program that would automatically patch a copy of the drivers, Creative wouldn't have had a leg to stand on.
While I respect his skills, Daniel_K didn't actually write replacement drivers that did things Creative couldn't...he reverse engineered the existing drivers and patched out the OS level checks, or he swapped parts of code from other drivers into play, to enable features that were specifically disabled by Creative. He then made those modified, repackaged drivers available, which is a big problem for Creative, and the reason why they tried to shut Daniel_K down.
Please note that there are lots of Standard compliant C++ IDEs and compilers for the "most prominent OS" that also support other OSes. The world is not Windows...
Let's hope they get the Windows footprint down to zero!
I agree that the OLPC stuff is an excellent cause, worthy of the attentions of a talented porting guru like the esteemed Mr. Gordon.
Personal observation: You're the most famous person who's ever replied to one of my posts!
The man's a porting machine, from the old Loki days up to a lot of the current Linux compatible titles. http://www.icculus.org/~icculus/
The API allows you to put any byte value in it, but programs like RegEdit use input methods that don't. This is probably a legacy of the Pascal/C split in Windows...lots of older or more low-level APIs take Pascal-style strings (leading length byte followed by the characters) as opposed to C-style (arbitrary length sequence of characters terminated by a null byte.)
Rootkit Revealer merely reports that there's a suspicious registry key, and it marks it suspicious because it's got an embedded null that makes it difficult to delete manually without special tools. The key itself is not hidden or disguised in any way, and the software in question doesn't exhibit other rootkit behaviors (no "backdoor", no attempt to disguise or hide presence, etc.)
The Windows registry allows creating keys that have nulls in them, but the standard tools (such as RegEdit) don't have a way of entering a "binary" value for the name of a key, and the selection mechanism doesn't propagate the nulls to the delete code when you try to remove it. That's why the article references some special software that allows these to be deleted.
As far as not being able to delete stuff without going into the registry, that's not strictly true. The registry contains pointers and configuration information, not executable code. The trick to removing something is that in addition to deleting the physical files, you also want to remove the associated registry stuff. That's because if something is running, it may not be possible to kill the process it runs in or delete the code. If something is configured in the registry, it can start at boot time before the user gets control (including in safe mode). So, malware can protect itself from removal by making the registry key impossible to delete under normal circumstances.
The article author seemed to base his conclusion on the fact that the SecureROM software installs a registry key that can't be deleted by normal means. This pops up on the Microsoft Rootkit Revealer (since that's a technique used by rootkits as well.) That's like saying that because rootkits use Windows APIs, any program that uses a Windows API is a rootkit.
As for why it's in the demo, modern copy protection is embedded throughout games. It's too difficult to remove the protection just for a demo that contains so much of the full game engine.
Europe is Sony's beta test facility.
Croteam's Serious engine and Monolith's LithTech seemed to be giving them a run for their money for a while...how's their technology stacking up?
Which means that the people who aren't criminals wind up paying the $60 to subsidize your activities. Thanks.
If ever there was a practice that deserved it's own brand new circle in hell, it's playing commercials before movies. I specifically go to movies late just to skip the commercials.
It's not "like an advertisement", it's nothing BUT an advertisement. And it's sure nice to see a company advertising it's products in a funny, entertaining way that also nicely shows off the products' capabilities, without fluff.
Just how many AO titles are produced each year? And is there anywhere that lists all the AO games?
He could refer to Disney and use the Disney name without any problem, but the wholesale use of the logo, animation, sound is over the line for fair use.
This little exercise seems to violate the intent of Fair Use pretty much in every way. From the illegal use of the Disney logo (with animation and music) to the repeated and unnecessary use of actual Disney dialog and video, it seems that the creator missed the point entirely.
How is this anything but a sales pitch for Nintendo and Microsoft? How is it "news", even by slashdot's normally loose definition?
I never said downloading was illegal in Canada. It's legal because the law assumes people will do it anyway, so EVERYONE is charged, in advance, for blank media and players (just like it was for blank tape in the past.)
This discussion came about because I wondered if the music on the USB keys was licensed for distribution on web sites. We've been discussing the specific case of Canadian law where Canadians are allowed to put files on to shared, accessible resources (although NOT to "distribute" them), and are also allowed to download files (on the basis that they've already paid for the right to do so) and in spite of more restrictive licenses promulgated by the record industry.
This applies only in Canada. So unless the USB keys were left in Canada, or physically transported to Canada and uploaded to servers there, then the files are still not necessarily legal there either. The upload AND download needs to occur inside Canada for it to be legal (as far as I can tell from the article.)
In the same decision, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $25 on iPod-like MP3 players, putting the devices in the same category as audio tapes and blank CDs. The money collected from levies on "recording mediums" goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. Manufacturers are responsible for paying the fees and often pass the cost on to consumers. So, the reason expressed here is that it's because of the assumption of losses that the blank media and devices will permit.
On the upload side, the ruling is that just because you put a file where people can get at it, doesn't mean you're "distributing" it: "The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to distribution," Finckenstein wrote. "Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying." If you do go ahead and "distribute" it, you're still liable to be in trouble. Ottawa's Geist said this appeared to make uploading itself legal as well, since a peer-to-peer user--like a library--would be entitled to assume that the person on the other side of the connection was acting legally, since downloading was also legal in Canada. The rationale here is that only people who are legally entitled to download the file will do so. Canadians have essentially paid in advance for the piracy.
I agree that the Canadian blank media and MP3 player levies are reprehensible.
The article is also poorly worded. The act of putting a file in a directory(or uploading to a shred server) where others can get at it is not a crime. The act of downloading it is a different matter entirely.
You're missing the point. Interscope's ownership isn't really pertinent. The point is that the distance between any one label's marketing arm and the RIAA's legal hounds is pretty vast. UMG is still just one group in the RIAA mess. I'd be more inclined to think that the membership charter for the RIAA member companies grants the RIAA wide powers to pursue purported copyright violations.