Exactly how is DRM intended to "to make things simpler for the consumer", when the very purpose of DRM is to prevent the consumer from doing things he/she paid good money to be allowed to do?
Yes! The strafe jumping bug/feature was so cherished by the Quake 3 community that when iD patched Quake 3 to fix it, the community went ape-shit forcing iD to patch the game again to reintroduce the bug!
I agree with your sentiment, but I assure you that the message-makers at MS are not going to go to so much trouble as to actually stuff the supply-chain with unused copies of Vista so they can make their outlandish claims. We are geeks... we work with facts... marketers are marketers... they work with perceived facts.
A VP of Marketing I used to work with used to routinely falsify the number of users of our software in order to appear more attractive to potential customers and potential investors.
A sit down in a year-end sales & marketing meeting would typically sound like this:
[VP of Marketing] : Ok, we've got 48,000 paid users right now, but if we look at how many potential renewals we have in the queue right now, we are looking at over 63,000 users. And if you consider the fact that each of those users is eligible for our referral program, then we are talking about over 89,000 potential users. Our sales goals for this year indicate that we are going to get an additional 20,000 users, so we can go forward and tell people that we currently have 109,000 users. Wait... 109,000 sounds too low... make that 119,000.
I feel like carrying on, but I think my point is made.
#324253, a cross site XSS exploit which nobody responsible for the code seems to care about. #45375, a request to make tooltips not cut off at an arbritrary length, which they refuse to fix in Firefox apparently out of spite. #18574 - The MNG bug... you really have to see this farce with your own eyes. Especially the bit where the asshole in charge of the image code stated that the MNG DLL has to fit within his deliberately impossible to reach size requirements before he'd even consider re-adding it.
I have been waiting for this day for many, many years. Now I can shove a virtual rocket down the throats of everyone who's ever claimed that in an FPS game, they could beat a keyboard & mouse player with a joystick. That might be worth the price of admission right there.
There's no doubt that the growing amount of ewaste is a huge problem, but if we're going to charge the consumer for the fee, then there should be stiff penalties for companies like Epson and HP that put kill-switches into their printers to cause them to fail prematurely.
I do believe it is time for you to exit this thread. It seems like you don't know enough about slot machines to add anything meaningful to this conversation.
When a player puts their money in a slot machine, they are forming a contract. The fraud occurs because the chance of winning is vastly different than a reasonable person would concluded based on their observation of the physical machine. The true odds are not disclosed to the player, and as the near-miss mechanism illustrates, active measures are taken to further trick the player into thinking they have a better chance of winning than they actually have.
It's also inappropriate for you to "call BS" - as I mentioned in another reply: If you visit one of the two casinos in Manitoba and visit the "Responsible Gaming Center", they will disclose to you that this is how their machines are set to operate - that certain symbols on the reels CANNOT EVER hit the payline since they aren't mapped to the virtual reels.
Note: I am not claiming that a particular payout cannot be obtained; the subtlety is that 2 jackpot symbols may be on a reel, while only 1 of them can actually hit the pay line.
Awesome - That is great clarification on the inner workings. I used 24 simply for illustrative purposes.
Interesting to note that I'm in Manitoba, Canada, and the "Responsible Gaming Center" in our Casinos will disclose that there are certain symbols on the physical reel that are not hittable. Time to look into our legislation on the subject...
I've been developing casino-type games for over 12 years, so I know how they work. This is not at all surprising since slot machines are entirely based on fraud and conning you into believing and 'feeling' like you have a chance of winning - this is just another step in that direction.
The most sinister devices employed by the slot machines are the most fraudulent. I am referring virtual reel mapping and the near miss system. Here's how they work:
Virtual reel mapping works like this: You think that a reel has 24 symbols (12 symbols, 12 blank spots) and conclude that your chances of obtaining any particular combination is 24^3. Not so. What happens is that the slot spins 3 virtual reels, each one consisting of 32 symbols. Positions on the virtual reel are mapped to positions on the physical reel, but guess what, the virtual reels have 8 extra symbols, and they're all mapped to blank spots on the physical reels! This significantly reduces your chances of obtaining a winning combination.
The near-miss system works like this: Considering the virtual reel mapping mechanism described above, the near miss principal works on the basis that the extra 8 blank spots on the virtual wheel are mapped to locations on the physical reel RIGHT NEXT TO the jackpot symbols. That's why you'll see "7 BLANK 7" and "7 7 BLANK" with frightening regularity.
And here's the kicker: There are jackpot symbols on the physical reels that aren't mapped to the virtual reel. Which means that there are symbols on the physical reels that will NEVER EVER show up on the pay line. If that isn't outright fraud, I don't know what is.
If one puts on their cynic hat to appreciate slots from a purely human-psychology point of view, one can truly appreciate how masterfully crafted the whole set-up is. It disgusting and magnificent at the same time.
I'm no MS apologist, but I wanted to point this out. It's important to note that most laptops ship with OEM-Modified versions of Windows that include a lot (A LOT!) cruft which slows down the machine. So you may not be seeing a true reflection of Vista's performance on that hardware.
For example, my new Acer came with so much shit pre-installed that it was practically unusable - the hard drive wouldn't stop rattling log enough to even do a simple defrag, and it took over 90 seconds to boot and shut down. Upon installing a clean version of XP, the lappy was at least 6x faster.
My method doesn't actually remove 1 billion pounds, rather it prevents that 1 billion from being released. I cannot talk about all the details until the patent is filed, but let's just say it involves Rush Limbaugh and a really large cork.
Oh man your comment really bothers me. If you are relying on a PHP function to ensure user submitted data is trustworthy then you don't have PHP to blame if something goes Ka-blam due to a malicious user. I don't care what language you're coding in... if you trust user-submitted data without putting it through multiple rigorous tests, then you have nobody to blame but your naive self.
I await the day when Linux is so ubiquitous that lusers like you are waving your dicks about how many Windows b0xen you have in your netw0rk.
STFU. We've heard it before.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly how is DRM intended to "to make things simpler for the consumer", when the very purpose of DRM is to prevent the consumer from doing things he/she paid good money to be allowed to do?
Why wouldn't this be a good idea?
Yes! The strafe jumping bug/feature was so cherished by the Quake 3 community that when iD patched Quake 3 to fix it, the community went ape-shit forcing iD to patch the game again to reintroduce the bug!
This is the only related link that I could find.
I agree with your sentiment, but I assure you that the message-makers at MS are not going to go to so much trouble as to actually stuff the supply-chain with unused copies of Vista so they can make their outlandish claims. We are geeks... we work with facts... marketers are marketers... they work with perceived facts.
A VP of Marketing I used to work with used to routinely falsify the number of users of our software in order to appear more attractive to potential customers and potential investors.
A sit down in a year-end sales & marketing meeting would typically sound like this:
[VP of Marketing] : Ok, we've got 48,000 paid users right now, but if we look at how many potential renewals we have in the queue right now, we are looking at over 63,000 users. And if you consider the fact that each of those users is eligible for our referral program, then we are talking about over 89,000 potential users. Our sales goals for this year indicate that we are going to get an additional 20,000 users, so we can go forward and tell people that we currently have 109,000 users. Wait... 109,000 sounds too low... make that 119,000.
I feel like carrying on, but I think my point is made.
Instead of gleefully throwing them away, could you please send them to me so I can sell them on eBay?
Thanks.
How hard would it have been to include the URLs?
#324253, a cross site XSS exploit which nobody responsible for the code seems to care about.
#45375, a request to make tooltips not cut off at an arbritrary length, which they refuse to fix in Firefox apparently out of spite.
#18574 - The MNG bug... you really have to see this farce with your own eyes. Especially the bit where the asshole in charge of the image code stated that the MNG DLL has to fit within his deliberately impossible to reach size requirements before he'd even consider re-adding it.
Point: "I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value."
Counter-point: GOOG
I have been waiting for this day for many, many years. Now I can shove a virtual rocket down the throats of everyone who's ever claimed that in an FPS game, they could beat a keyboard & mouse player with a joystick. That might be worth the price of admission right there.
50 bucks to the first person who is actually and genuinely surprised by this.
Why do I only seem to get mod points on Friday evenings when poop like this populates the home page? I give up.
- They are (U)nidentified;
- They are (O)bjects;
- They (F)ly.
Who wouldn't agree that people frequently see flying things that they can't identify? Only CRAZY people wouldn't agree.There's no doubt that the growing amount of ewaste is a huge problem, but if we're going to charge the consumer for the fee, then there should be stiff penalties for companies like Epson and HP that put kill-switches into their printers to cause them to fail prematurely.
HP killswitch.
Epson killswitch.
I do believe it is time for you to exit this thread. It seems like you don't know enough about slot machines to add anything meaningful to this conversation.
When a player puts their money in a slot machine, they are forming a contract. The fraud occurs because the chance of winning is vastly different than a reasonable person would concluded based on their observation of the physical machine. The true odds are not disclosed to the player, and as the near-miss mechanism illustrates, active measures are taken to further trick the player into thinking they have a better chance of winning than they actually have.
It's also inappropriate for you to "call BS" - as I mentioned in another reply: If you visit one of the two casinos in Manitoba and visit the "Responsible Gaming Center", they will disclose to you that this is how their machines are set to operate - that certain symbols on the reels CANNOT EVER hit the payline since they aren't mapped to the virtual reels.
Note: I am not claiming that a particular payout cannot be obtained; the subtlety is that 2 jackpot symbols may be on a reel, while only 1 of them can actually hit the pay line.
Awesome - That is great clarification on the inner workings. I used 24 simply for illustrative purposes.
Interesting to note that I'm in Manitoba, Canada, and the "Responsible Gaming Center" in our Casinos will disclose that there are certain symbols on the physical reel that are not hittable. Time to look into our legislation on the subject...
I've been developing casino-type games for over 12 years, so I know how they work. This is not at all surprising since slot machines are entirely based on fraud and conning you into believing and 'feeling' like you have a chance of winning - this is just another step in that direction.
The most sinister devices employed by the slot machines are the most fraudulent. I am referring virtual reel mapping and the near miss system. Here's how they work:
Virtual reel mapping works like this: You think that a reel has 24 symbols (12 symbols, 12 blank spots) and conclude that your chances of obtaining any particular combination is 24^3. Not so. What happens is that the slot spins 3 virtual reels, each one consisting of 32 symbols. Positions on the virtual reel are mapped to positions on the physical reel, but guess what, the virtual reels have 8 extra symbols, and they're all mapped to blank spots on the physical reels! This significantly reduces your chances of obtaining a winning combination.
The near-miss system works like this: Considering the virtual reel mapping mechanism described above, the near miss principal works on the basis that the extra 8 blank spots on the virtual wheel are mapped to locations on the physical reel RIGHT NEXT TO the jackpot symbols. That's why you'll see "7 BLANK 7" and "7 7 BLANK" with frightening regularity.
And here's the kicker: There are jackpot symbols on the physical reels that aren't mapped to the virtual reel. Which means that there are symbols on the physical reels that will NEVER EVER show up on the pay line. If that isn't outright fraud, I don't know what is.
If one puts on their cynic hat to appreciate slots from a purely human-psychology point of view, one can truly appreciate how masterfully crafted the whole set-up is. It disgusting and magnificent at the same time.
The MS finger print reader only works in IE. Let the flaming begin :)
...because StarForce isn't on that list.
I'm no MS apologist, but I wanted to point this out. It's important to note that most laptops ship with OEM-Modified versions of Windows that include a lot (A LOT!) cruft which slows down the machine. So you may not be seeing a true reflection of Vista's performance on that hardware.
For example, my new Acer came with so much shit pre-installed that it was practically unusable - the hard drive wouldn't stop rattling log enough to even do a simple defrag, and it took over 90 seconds to boot and shut down. Upon installing a clean version of XP, the lappy was at least 6x faster.
My method doesn't actually remove 1 billion pounds, rather it prevents that 1 billion from being released. I cannot talk about all the details until the patent is filed, but let's just say it involves Rush Limbaugh and a really large cork.
Oh man your comment really bothers me. If you are relying on a PHP function to ensure user submitted data is trustworthy then you don't have PHP to blame if something goes Ka-blam due to a malicious user. I don't care what language you're coding in... if you trust user-submitted data without putting it through multiple rigorous tests, then you have nobody to blame but your naive self.
I await the day when Linux is so ubiquitous that lusers like you are waving your dicks about how many Windows b0xen you have in your netw0rk. STFU. We've heard it before.
You can pin down a key using the cap of a ball point pen. Press down the key, then wedge the clip part between the keys.
Used to use this trick to pick 'impossible' locks in Ultima 4. Set it up, go have a snack, and come back to an opened door.
...and the castle I made out of LEGO when I was 8 cannot be disassembled thanks to the protections afforded it under the Historical Buildings Act.
Real link to story