I think we're all beginning to lose sight of the real issue here, which is: what are we going to call ourselves? Erm, and I think it comes down to a choice between "The League Against Salivating Monsters" or, my own personal preference, which is "The Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society."
Erm, one drawback with that -- the abbreviation is "CLITORIS."
I see the site fine. I use Mozilla. I have popups blocked. I also use privoxy to block advertisements. I have a default policy to deny all cookies. I can still see it fine (I suspect it uses some cookie trick).
However, this entire thing is a hack. You can't ever have any assumption be 100% true about clients that may or may not execute code you send them.
The kidneys are internally redundant. You only need a 10% kidney function to contintue to survive. Ditto for Liver and other organs (aside from heart). They take years of abuse via smoking or drinking before they finally start to wear out to the point of causing system collapse.
Yes, there is always the possibility you might be born blind, but most people don't have that genetig defect. They have two eyes which work very well, even if one of them happens to be broken by a random toothpick accident.
Redundancy is always good in a system where uptime is king. That is why so much of nature has organisms based around semi-redundant designs.
The only updates that ever seemed to show up there were IE or Windows Media Player updates. Granted, they've started showing device driver updates and such, but it's still marginal at best.
And their company isn't the first to happen upon this situation.
You always ask your friends about similar situations they may have encountered before you go into some situation. Fools would go ahead and get a lawyer without first discussing it with people who might have had experience with the situation.
Since Square and Enix are merging. I still see the friendlyness of Square and Nintendo to be more money-motivated than anything else.
Mech Assault is ok. It's fun. But I haven't really had the chance to play past the first 5 or so levels. RE0, Metroid Prime, and Metroid Fusion are much more addicting. And everyone has to see Steel Battalion in action when they visit:)
"FWIW, Square is effectively a first-party for Sony and they have the extremely lucrative Final Fantasy franchise. Sony also has GTA and Metal Gear Solid."
Square lost ~120 million on their movie. The result: Tactics Advance, Crystal Chronicles, and more for Nintendo platforms. Not exactly 1st or 2nd party anymore.
Mech Assault is just a Live! game to play. It's not very deep, especially compared to Steel Battalion (which I also own and enjoy).
"Of course, none of these are a big as Mario or Zelda, but they're beginning to lose their shine a bit.
Mario's shines were good, but it was just Mario64++. I think Zelda will be a great hit, though. Especially with the preorder disc in Japan, rumoured to also be coming to North America. 3 games for the price of 1! Nintendo is really pulling out the stops to make up for the N64.
"Also back in the late 1990's many linux users still used pentium 1's and 486's with only 32 or 64 megs of ram! The client/server nature of X was not only inadaquate but it was considered bloated and obsolete."
Yea, just as bloated as on my R3k 25Mhz with 16mb of RAM, right?
Wrong. X11 servers with proper frame buffers ran on stuff wimpier than my Palm Vx with no problems!
XFree86 has always been the problem. That is why so much work went in the 4.x tree towards making the drivers not suck, and why we're starting to see those efforts pay off.
Now it just needs a little more in the basic spec to support more modern windowing features, as well as making everything easier to automate. End users don't want to know about copying dot files with X11 auth permissions, they just want a magic "Roam" button which lets them take their desktop elsewhere in the house.
Unlike the GameGear (which had no decent games), and the Saturn (which was hard to develop for, leading to fewer games), the Dreamcast had a lot of great titles. However, Sony's FUD about the PS2 kept adoption lower than it otherwise would've been. Once the PS2 finally released, people started to buy it because it could do PS1 games and DVD movies, with the expectation that good PS2 games would also come out. My opinion is that no such good games ever did come out. The Dreamcast used a better graphics card that was easier to program for, and produced a better quality image (IMO).
You're right stating that inferior systems can win, assuming they have a larger array of titles available (NES, PSX), but whenever you have the situation where you have competition between alternate platforms, people tend towards the console with the highest quality. I firmly believe that if every game put out was put out for all 3 consoles, everyone would migrate towards the Xbox based on the strength of the Xbox specs over everything else, and the built-in harddrive (no more memory card issues:)). That's why console makers know to try and woo third-party developers with lucrative contracts, so they can get a comparative advantage for their library.
I'm not sure why you don't see a price cut. Wal-mart (not Wal*mart, as I'm in Canada) has Platinum GameCubes for 195$ CDN. This works out to ~125$ USD. I'm selling my Jet GameCube to get a Platinum one:) (I keep my eye on prices)
"Final Fantasy VII and VIII were better looking on the PC than the PSX. So why didn't they sell as many copies for the PC as they did with the PSX?"
Maybe you've never looked in to it, but PC gaming is very tiny. Because of the troubles of keeping systems updated, patched, and upgraded hardware wise -- in addition to the games -- most people just buy consoles instead. The PC gaming market is about 10-15% of all gaming in general. In addition to that, FF7 required some very specific configurations to work correctly. It often would not run on most PCs because the DX version was newer than what they developed for, or because the 3D card driver didn't conform to a certain behaviour. FF8 was never as popular as FF7 (I bought it for 20$, played it for 5 minutes, and have never touched it since).
"... Sony feels their current market position is good enough that taking such a risk isn't needed." Sony cut the price of the PS2 in Japan by 3000 Yen, even though they've sold the most units there this year (3 million units PS2, 900,000 units GameCube, 250,000 units Xbox). Is that a risk? No, I think they just want to boost console + game sales over the holidays. Ditto for MS, as they are pushing their packages more aggresively since they now have some games to justify the system as a holiday purchase.
Microsoft sales are not "neck and neck" with Nintendo overall. Each region has its own stats. In Australia, for example, both the PS2 and Xbox sold 10,000 units in the last week. The GameCube sold 1,000 units over the same week. However, in Japan, the stats are 30k for the PS2, 16k for the GameCube, and 1,300 for the Xbox. These numbers are again different for North America.
As for MS' situation, I think you're overstating it. It's still too soon to make such judgements. The PS2 is showing its age, and Microsoft has just started to lever their online service. Nintendo, unlike Microsoft and Sony, has a strong history of first-party games that rock (it's how they brought gaming back to life in the early 1980s, and the major flaw of Sony and MS -- no strong game branding exists on those platforms that is first-party).
I have no experience that way:) I've heard that the GameCube situation is similar, with the custom dev kit having a rich library for audio and video. The PL2 used in some games comes from using a separate DK that can be bought from another company (Factor 5's MusyX development tool, as it's know, is what added PL2 to Rogue Leader, and other games).
I just wish Nintendo had enforced PL2 on all games, like Microsoft mandates 5.1 on all Xbox games (which outputs through either DD or DTS modes).
The PS2, while capable of PL2 now thanks to a recent development kit released for it, only has 2 or 3 games out which support it.
But I suspect that they'd be able to get some mini-DVs. They can make mini-CDs for promotional purposes, why not order a run of 10,000 mini-DVDs? The Nintendo smaller size was just to discourage casual piracy.
I don't know about you, but most of the games in the GameCube section at EB are 59$ to 69$, while the Xbox and PS2 sections are 74$ to 79$ for most games. A new PS2 or Xbox is 300$, while the GameCube is 200$. When you consider the 14% tax I pay in my province on purchases, the GameCube really is the least expensive console.
Capcom is really good at aggresively pricing the Resident Evil series on the GameCube. I'm ready to sell all my Dreamcast Resident Evil games to offset costs:)
"The only games I see advertized for Xbox are only for Xbox (which suggests poor third-party support),"
Do you know how exclusive titles work? It sure doesn't sound like you have half a clue.
To drive up sales of the Xbox is why the release them! If a game is just for the Xbox, I know that the development team will have had more time to make it work brilliantly on the Xbox.
Also, if the exclusive game is something I really, really want (like Shenmue 2x, Jet Set Radio Future, etc), I am more likely to buy the Xbox to get the access to those exclusive games. I bought an Xbox for JSRF, for example. Platform exclusive games boost sales a lot (the N64 lived and died only for Mario Party, the Zeldas, and Mario 64 for me).
As for multiplatform games, if I have the choice between a game which runs on the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox, I know that the Xbox one will look better than the PS2 or GameCube version, but that it won't have any of the features of the Xbox taken advantage of. It's a bit of a mixed bag that way, but you'd still be foolish to buy the PS2 or GameCube version over the Xbox version (unless you like jaggy-ass graphics, or prefer to limit yourself in terms on online play).
"and they've now resorted to the marketing gimmick of giving away free games with the console."
Maybe you live in a cave, and have no impression of time. But this is the Giftmas shopping season. Sony's not making any deals, but Microsoft has put out its value added package, and Nintendo has cut the price on its GameCube again in order to drive lucrative sales. The largest percentage of console sales happen in the next 4 weeks, and they're looking to load up their consumer base. It's not a gimmick, it's plain sense!
"They just don't have the first- and second-party support to keep their heads above water."
Do you even know what that means? First-party would be Microsoft itself. How is the (potential) failure of the Xbox going to harm them, when they make the licence fee + 3rd-party fee on each Microsof game they sell? Second-party would be someone like Rare, who has a deal which lets them get a little lower licence cost for making Xbox games, because they will only produce Xbox games ever (which is helped since Microsoft owns the majority of the company). Maybe you are thinking of third-party (unaffiliated developer) titles. Third-parties like Sega are sure as hell keeping the Xbox going, with many great sequels to Dreamcast titles that sold millions of copies being kept Xbox exclusive (they get a better licence negotiation this way).
You seem like you have no idea how the console indurstry works. Hopefully this clears things up for you. If you don't like Microsoft, just say it. Don't make up stuff about how the industry works inside your mind, when it's way out of tough with reality.
"The obvious difference - murder is illegal and sending emails (even unsolicited) are not. "
That's what I'm saying, it should be illegal!
Phoning someone and harrasing them is as illegal as walking up to someone and assaulting them. It's a social problem, one which would be well addressed by some intelligent legislation.
Since people are innocent until proven guilty, the probability that someone would sue their granny saying that their emails were harrasing is low. On the other hand, it is probably easy to prove that Nigerian spam or penis enlargement emails sent to little Rebecca are harrasment and inapropriate!
The other possible solution is economic. Charge a fee for email from people you don't know. Unfortunately, that requires a whole bunch of infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. That's why I think that a law is the optimal solution.
There's always a bit of a lag as law catches up to society. Sure, some people are duped by email, but some people would also like to burn black people on giant crosses for the crime of being born with a certain skin colour.
We have laws against the burning of people based on skin colour, why aren't there laws stopping spammers yet? Just because you can do something, even to the point of making money at it, it does not mean that it is ethical or moral to do!
First it's "hardly a challenge to a reasonably competent programmer.," then it's "a sophisticated attack, but not an impossible one." Excuse my while I throw an InconsistencyException about your argument!
I really, really doubt the login service uses UDP, unless they've put something on top that will manually do retransmission and acknowledgemeng. The Xbox Live! service does require that TCP port 3074 be used on the Xbox, so I'm guessing they just went the way of using TCP.
"Forging my source address is as simple as turning off SNAT on my router. Choosing a different forged address, or using many of them, is slightly more complex, and may require creating custom-formatted IP packets, but it's hardly a challenge to a reasonably competent programmer."
Ok, go ahead and do it. Do you know how TCP works? I can't send you ACK packets if my system can't route to your faked 1918 address. The routing issue is a lot bigger than you are trying to make it out to be. Everything needs to be routed, and there is no guarantee of a symmetrical round-trip route!
But, if you're so confident, feel free to write a program which will send TRULY ANONYMOUS EMAIL by connecting to machines and sending mail directly to the user (since the address is spoofed, you won't be implicated!).
What's that? Not receiving any ACKs for your SYNs? Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
At C$44, it's priced to own ;) 1, 2, and 3 all in one teeny, tiny cartridge.
At least with cleartext, people who care about security, but might not know how secure something is, will turn on encryption via SSL or SSH.
With WEP, people may think that since it isn't sent in the clear, they don't have to go and encrypt their IP traffic which is going over it.
I think we're all beginning to lose sight of the real issue here, which is: what are we going to call ourselves? Erm, and I think it comes down to a choice between "The League Against Salivating Monsters" or, my own personal preference, which is "The Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society."
Erm, one drawback with that -- the abbreviation is "CLITORIS."
(I love Red Dwarf)
I see the site fine. I use Mozilla. I have popups blocked. I also use privoxy to block advertisements. I have a default policy to deny all cookies. I can still see it fine (I suspect it uses some cookie trick).
However, this entire thing is a hack. You can't ever have any assumption be 100% true about clients that may or may not execute code you send them.
The kidneys are internally redundant. You only need a 10% kidney function to contintue to survive. Ditto for Liver and other organs (aside from heart). They take years of abuse via smoking or drinking before they finally start to wear out to the point of causing system collapse.
Yes, there is always the possibility you might be born blind, but most people don't have that genetig defect. They have two eyes which work very well, even if one of them happens to be broken by a random toothpick accident.
Redundancy is always good in a system where uptime is king. That is why so much of nature has organisms based around semi-redundant designs.
The only updates that ever seemed to show up there were IE or Windows Media Player updates. Granted, they've started showing device driver updates and such, but it's still marginal at best.
And their company isn't the first to happen upon this situation.
You always ask your friends about similar situations they may have encountered before you go into some situation. Fools would go ahead and get a lawyer without first discussing it with people who might have had experience with the situation.
Java, C# both follow the same order of operations.
When you are casting like that, you will lose information.
Since Square and Enix are merging. I still see the friendlyness of Square and Nintendo to be more money-motivated than anything else.
:)
Mech Assault is ok. It's fun. But I haven't really had the chance to play past the first 5 or so levels. RE0, Metroid Prime, and Metroid Fusion are much more addicting. And everyone has to see Steel Battalion in action when they visit
This is a famous troll piece from forever ago, often echoed on Adequacy (when it was around) and also shown on kuro5hin a lot.
Yes.
"FWIW, Square is effectively a first-party for Sony and they have the extremely lucrative Final Fantasy franchise. Sony also has GTA and Metal Gear Solid."
Square lost ~120 million on their movie. The result: Tactics Advance, Crystal Chronicles, and more for Nintendo platforms. Not exactly 1st or 2nd party anymore.
Mech Assault is just a Live! game to play. It's not very deep, especially compared to Steel Battalion (which I also own and enjoy).
"Of course, none of these are a big as Mario or Zelda, but they're beginning to lose their shine a bit.
Mario's shines were good, but it was just Mario64++. I think Zelda will be a great hit, though. Especially with the preorder disc in Japan, rumoured to also be coming to North America. 3 games for the price of 1! Nintendo is really pulling out the stops to make up for the N64.
"Also back in the late 1990's many linux users still used pentium 1's and 486's with only 32 or 64 megs of ram! The client/server nature of X was not only inadaquate but it was considered bloated and obsolete."
Yea, just as bloated as on my R3k 25Mhz with 16mb of RAM, right?
Wrong. X11 servers with proper frame buffers ran on stuff wimpier than my Palm Vx with no problems!
XFree86 has always been the problem. That is why so much work went in the 4.x tree towards making the drivers not suck, and why we're starting to see those efforts pay off.
Now it just needs a little more in the basic spec to support more modern windowing features, as well as making everything easier to automate. End users don't want to know about copying dot files with X11 auth permissions, they just want a magic "Roam" button which lets them take their desktop elsewhere in the house.
Unlike the GameGear (which had no decent games), and the Saturn (which was hard to develop for, leading to fewer games), the Dreamcast had a lot of great titles. However, Sony's FUD about the PS2 kept adoption lower than it otherwise would've been. Once the PS2 finally released, people started to buy it because it could do PS1 games and DVD movies, with the expectation that good PS2 games would also come out. My opinion is that no such good games ever did come out. The Dreamcast used a better graphics card that was easier to program for, and produced a better quality image (IMO).
:)). That's why console makers know to try and woo third-party developers with lucrative contracts, so they can get a comparative advantage for their library.
:) (I keep my eye on prices)
You're right stating that inferior systems can win, assuming they have a larger array of titles available (NES, PSX), but whenever you have the situation where you have competition between alternate platforms, people tend towards the console with the highest quality. I firmly believe that if every game put out was put out for all 3 consoles, everyone would migrate towards the Xbox based on the strength of the Xbox specs over everything else, and the built-in harddrive (no more memory card issues
I'm not sure why you don't see a price cut. Wal-mart (not Wal*mart, as I'm in Canada) has Platinum GameCubes for 195$ CDN. This works out to ~125$ USD. I'm selling my Jet GameCube to get a Platinum one
"Final Fantasy VII and VIII were better looking on the PC than the PSX. So why didn't they sell as many copies for the PC as they did with the PSX?"
Maybe you've never looked in to it, but PC gaming is very tiny. Because of the troubles of keeping systems updated, patched, and upgraded hardware wise -- in addition to the games -- most people just buy consoles instead. The PC gaming market is about 10-15% of all gaming in general. In addition to that, FF7 required some very specific configurations to work correctly. It often would not run on most PCs because the DX version was newer than what they developed for, or because the 3D card driver didn't conform to a certain behaviour. FF8 was never as popular as FF7 (I bought it for 20$, played it for 5 minutes, and have never touched it since).
"... Sony feels their current market position is good enough that taking such a risk isn't needed."
Sony cut the price of the PS2 in Japan by 3000 Yen, even though they've sold the most units there this year (3 million units PS2, 900,000 units GameCube, 250,000 units Xbox). Is that a risk? No, I think they just want to boost console + game sales over the holidays. Ditto for MS, as they are pushing their packages more aggresively since they now have some games to justify the system as a holiday purchase.
Microsoft sales are not "neck and neck" with Nintendo overall. Each region has its own stats. In Australia, for example, both the PS2 and Xbox sold 10,000 units in the last week. The GameCube sold 1,000 units over the same week. However, in Japan, the stats are 30k for the PS2, 16k for the GameCube, and 1,300 for the Xbox. These numbers are again different for North America.
As for MS' situation, I think you're overstating it. It's still too soon to make such judgements. The PS2 is showing its age, and Microsoft has just started to lever their online service. Nintendo, unlike Microsoft and Sony, has a strong history of first-party games that rock (it's how they brought gaming back to life in the early 1980s, and the major flaw of Sony and MS -- no strong game branding exists on those platforms that is first-party).
I have no experience that way :) I've heard that the GameCube situation is similar, with the custom dev kit having a rich library for audio and video. The PL2 used in some games comes from using a separate DK that can be bought from another company (Factor 5's MusyX development tool, as it's know, is what added PL2 to Rogue Leader, and other games).
I just wish Nintendo had enforced PL2 on all games, like Microsoft mandates 5.1 on all Xbox games (which outputs through either DD or DTS modes).
The PS2, while capable of PL2 now thanks to a recent development kit released for it, only has 2 or 3 games out which support it.
But I suspect that they'd be able to get some mini-DVs. They can make mini-CDs for promotional purposes, why not order a run of 10,000 mini-DVDs? The Nintendo smaller size was just to discourage casual piracy.
I don't know about you, but most of the games in the GameCube section at EB are 59$ to 69$, while the Xbox and PS2 sections are 74$ to 79$ for most games. A new PS2 or Xbox is 300$, while the GameCube is 200$. When you consider the 14% tax I pay in my province on purchases, the GameCube really is the least expensive console.
:)
Capcom is really good at aggresively pricing the Resident Evil series on the GameCube. I'm ready to sell all my Dreamcast Resident Evil games to offset costs
But moding a GameCube to be all region is less than the pre-done bundle they offer.
The gamebackups themselves are illegal because there is no method they use to verify if someone owns a copy or not.
"The only games I see advertized for Xbox are only for Xbox (which suggests poor third-party support),"
Do you know how exclusive titles work? It sure doesn't sound like you have half a clue.
To drive up sales of the Xbox is why the release them! If a game is just for the Xbox, I know that the development team will have had more time to make it work brilliantly on the Xbox.
Also, if the exclusive game is something I really, really want (like Shenmue 2x, Jet Set Radio Future, etc), I am more likely to buy the Xbox to get the access to those exclusive games. I bought an Xbox for JSRF, for example. Platform exclusive games boost sales a lot (the N64 lived and died only for Mario Party, the Zeldas, and Mario 64 for me).
As for multiplatform games, if I have the choice between a game which runs on the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox, I know that the Xbox one will look better than the PS2 or GameCube version, but that it won't have any of the features of the Xbox taken advantage of. It's a bit of a mixed bag that way, but you'd still be foolish to buy the PS2 or GameCube version over the Xbox version (unless you like jaggy-ass graphics, or prefer to limit yourself in terms on online play).
"and they've now resorted to the marketing gimmick of giving away free games with the console."
Maybe you live in a cave, and have no impression of time. But this is the Giftmas shopping season. Sony's not making any deals, but Microsoft has put out its value added package, and Nintendo has cut the price on its GameCube again in order to drive lucrative sales. The largest percentage of console sales happen in the next 4 weeks, and they're looking to load up their consumer base. It's not a gimmick, it's plain sense!
"They just don't have the first- and second-party support to keep their heads above water."
Do you even know what that means? First-party would be Microsoft itself. How is the (potential) failure of the Xbox going to harm them, when they make the licence fee + 3rd-party fee on each Microsof game they sell? Second-party would be someone like Rare, who has a deal which lets them get a little lower licence cost for making Xbox games, because they will only produce Xbox games ever (which is helped since Microsoft owns the majority of the company). Maybe you are thinking of third-party (unaffiliated developer) titles. Third-parties like Sega are sure as hell keeping the Xbox going, with many great sequels to Dreamcast titles that sold millions of copies being kept Xbox exclusive (they get a better licence negotiation this way).
You seem like you have no idea how the console indurstry works. Hopefully this clears things up for you. If you don't like Microsoft, just say it. Don't make up stuff about how the industry works inside your mind, when it's way out of tough with reality.
". (is 100mb/s fast enough to shove video+5.1 audio to the Xbox?)"
Yes, it is. By a lot. DVD-1x drives are what movie players use, with video and 5.1 audio, and they are significantly slower than 100mb/s.
"The obvious difference - murder is illegal and sending emails (even unsolicited) are not. "
That's what I'm saying, it should be illegal!
Phoning someone and harrasing them is as illegal as walking up to someone and assaulting them. It's a social problem, one which would be well addressed by some intelligent legislation.
Since people are innocent until proven guilty, the probability that someone would sue their granny saying that their emails were harrasing is low. On the other hand, it is probably easy to prove that Nigerian spam or penis enlargement emails sent to little Rebecca are harrasment and inapropriate!
The other possible solution is economic. Charge a fee for email from people you don't know. Unfortunately, that requires a whole bunch of infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. That's why I think that a law is the optimal solution.
There's always a bit of a lag as law catches up to society. Sure, some people are duped by email, but some people would also like to burn black people on giant crosses for the crime of being born with a certain skin colour.
We have laws against the burning of people based on skin colour, why aren't there laws stopping spammers yet? Just because you can do something, even to the point of making money at it, it does not mean that it is ethical or moral to do!
You're getting wishy-washy.
First it's "hardly a challenge to a reasonably competent programmer.," then it's "a sophisticated attack, but not an impossible one." Excuse my while I throw an InconsistencyException about your argument!
I really, really doubt the login service uses UDP, unless they've put something on top that will manually do retransmission and acknowledgemeng. The Xbox Live! service does require that TCP port 3074 be used on the Xbox, so I'm guessing they just went the way of using TCP.
"Forging my source address is as simple as turning off SNAT on my router. Choosing a different forged address, or using many of them, is slightly more complex, and may require creating custom-formatted IP packets, but it's hardly a challenge to a reasonably competent programmer."
Ok, go ahead and do it. Do you know how TCP works? I can't send you ACK packets if my system can't route to your faked 1918 address. The routing issue is a lot bigger than you are trying to make it out to be. Everything needs to be routed, and there is no guarantee of a symmetrical round-trip route!
But, if you're so confident, feel free to write a program which will send TRULY ANONYMOUS EMAIL by connecting to machines and sending mail directly to the user (since the address is spoofed, you won't be implicated!).
What's that? Not receiving any ACKs for your SYNs? Oh well.