There are plenty of games that use Securom, so the key might have been there from before you bought and installed Bioshock. If you own Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos, Descent Freespace, Masters of Orion, etc. etc, all sorts of games use securom. This is a non-issue that certain "media" sites and blogging sites have spun into a sensationalist story to drive page hits.
I totally agree, Bioshock is a great game and the developers are really responsive to all the complaints they've been getting. What bothers me is the fact that previous games like Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos used Securom, but no one raised a fuss about it back then, so why all the fuss about Bioshock using securom now?
The thing that annoys me about the "rootkit" whiners is the fact that I never heard anyone complain about the several dozen previous games that used securom.
Here's a partial list of popular titles that used Securom:
Alien Vs Predator 2 Alone In The Dark-The New Nightmare Alpha Centauri Colin McRae Rally 2 Descent Freespace Empire Earth Gothic 2 Half-Life - Blueshift Hitman 2 Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring Masters Of Orion Neverwinter Nights Populous 3: The Beginning Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 Sim City 3000 Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 Tribes 2 Turok 2 Unreal 2 - The Awakening Unreal Tournament Unreal Tournament 2003 patches Warcraft 3: Reign Of Chaos
I don't remember any big stories when any of these games used securom. I'm not saying it's right to use securom, I'm just pointing out how odd it is that people are complaining about Bioshock when I don't remember any of the games listed above making headlines on slashdot or digg when they used securom.
There are dozens of games that install the securom driver, I had it installed on my system (from another game) well before Bioshock was installed on my computer, and yet all the sudden people seem to care when Bioshock is released. It's rather unfortunate, since Bioshock is such a great game and it's getting all this negative press.
I haven't had an issue with Windows XP Pro in several years. It's pretty damn stable, though your results may vary. Nowadays the only time people get blue screens is from bad drivers or defective hardware. Windows XP doesn't just crash on it's own anymore.
When Windows crashes and corrupts important document, I get nothing.
Backup your data at regular intervals? Also, when was the last time Windows crashed on you?
Defective software is easy to replace, defective hardware I have to return it, wait for it to get serviced, etc... I hate when hardware dies on me and I have to return it... That's time taken away from me actually using the hardware. Plus, I'm not a big fan of any 360 games, I prefer Playstation franchises.
I came to the conclusion several years ago that if I boycotted every company that had done something I considered unethical, there would be no companies left to buy goods or services from. Pretty much every company has done something unethical at some point, does that mean we should boycott them all?
I hate most Corporations, but I'm not to the point yet where I renounce all physical possessions, grow my own food and make my own clothing.
There is some anti-rootkit system available that prevents that vast majority of this crap from ever being installed on your systems in the first place. Its called 'not using Microsoft platforms'.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter, but that's simply not true.
Linux and Unix used to be just as vulnerable to rootkits as any Windows sytem, the difference is Windows is much easier to gain root access to install a rootkit. I repeat, Linux and Unix are not immune to rootkits. If you can hack your way into a system, you can install a rootkit.
I would agree with you, but shader model 3.0 has been around since 2004. Even my old Radeon X800 only supports shader model 2.0, and the X800 is couple years newer than your 9800. Bioshock is a cutting edge game, and therefore requires cutting edge hardware.
what ever happened to legacy support?
There has to be some limit to legacy hardware, or do you expect Bioshock to support a 4MB ATI Rage Pro from 1996?
The box simply states DX 9.0C compatible and lists a 6600 as the bare minimum (a 9800 pro is 'better') - no warning, no big red sticker. I'm not alone, my local store has never seen so many returns... the official forums are bombarded.
That's incorrect, the box clearly states under minimum requirements:
"Video Card: DirectX 9.0c compliant video card with 128MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better, excluding ATI X1550)"
Microsoft stands to make more money from Xbox, so they are either intentionally, or unintentionally, doing things which are killing the PC games market.
Which is an extremely stupid and short sighted thing to do, considering the main reason myself and many other people still use Windows is for the games. And I wouldn't touch an xbox 360 with a 10 foot pole, I refuse to buy defective hardware. If Microsoft screws over PC gamers like they are currently doing, I guess I'll just have to use my Wii and PS3 and the few games that do work under linux (Unreal Tournament series and any id software game atleast).
PS. Pretty much every game uses some form of copy protection which installs itself on your system, most big name titles use either securom or starforce.
and no surprise, its again sony - nobody else.
Nope, that's just sensationalist bullshit since everyone seems to like hating on Sony lately. Really, you should be blaming 2K Games (the developer) or Take-Two (the publisher), you know, the actual people that decided to implement securom into Bioshock.
Is it time to boycott 2K Games/Take-Two products? Or will consumers turn the other cheek AGAIN? I will NEVER trust a 2K Games/Take-Two product from now on.
Sony's efforts to protect its property ultimately hurt only Sony
For fucks sake, Bioshock isn't Sony property, nor is it a Sony product. Sony didn't make the decision for some company to implement their copy protection scheme, you should be blaming 2k Games (the developer) or Take-Two (the publisher). The only reason people are using words like Sony and rootkit in the same sentence is for sensationalism and page hits. People like to hate on Sony, mainly due to their music CD rootkit, but this isn't a Sony issue, nor is it a rootkit.
Bioshock isn't the first game to implement Securom, not even close, so why do consumers seem to care all the sudden when they didn't give a shit about previous games that used Securom?
Normally I wouldn't feed trolls, but someone had to correct your blatant misinformation.
Solid state drives will be a drop in replacement to regular hard drives, meaning you can just plug them into a PATA or SATA cable (depending on what the drive supports).
A Solid State Drive (aka SSD or Solid State Disk) is a data storage device that uses non-volatile or volatile solid-state memory to store persistent data. They are an alternative to conventional hard disk drives, which have moving parts that usually result in slower memory access times.
While not technically disks, the term Solid State Disk may be used because they are typically used as an alternative for disk drives. They are commonly comprised of NAND flash (non-volatile) or SDRAM (volatile).
There are only a few solid state drives that match or exceed current hard drive performance, and only by a small margin. So I wouldn't worry about saturating a SATA link for a very long time... And I'm talking about SATA I, not SATA II bandwidth...
The main benefit of solid state drives are lower power consumption, less or no noise and faster access times. Bandwidth throughput still could use some improvements in my opinion...
Most decent flash drives come with onboard chips that handle things like wear levelling. These onboard chips also supposedly mimic a regular ATA hard drive so you can continue to use any ol' file system and it will look like a regular hard drive (not sure if this is a good or bad thing).
For flash drives that don't have an onboard chip to handle wear levelling, you'd want to use a filesystem like JFFS2 (assuming you use Linux).
You are correct, flash memory capacity is growing faster than hard drive capacity. My guess is that this is due to the fact that flash technology is still relatively new where as hard drives have been around since the 50s. Hard drive technology is "old tech" where as flash memory (specifically NAND flash) has just recently come into the spotlight.
I did some quick google searching and found articles dated 2005 announcing that flash storage had reached the 2GB mark and hard drives had reached the 500GB mark. Two years later, flash drives are now at the 64GB mark (32x increase from 2005) and hard drives are now at the 1TB mark (2x increase from 2005). I doubt flash drives will be able to stick to that large of a growth in capacity for very long though, they will probably slow down to hard drive growth levels within a couple of years (unless some ground breaking technology comes along).
I'm no where near an expert on the subject though, so I could be wrong.
I was pretty skeptical about the game before I tried the demo, I thought it looked like Doom 3 meets Half-Life 2 meets F.E.A.R, but I was wrong. I really like the 1950s theme mixed with an underwater world. I like the fact that you can loot corpses among other things, it gave the game more of a RPG feel than a straight FPS to me. Of course there's also the plasmids which is a nice touch. Before playing the demo, I thought it was just another over hyped FPS, but I now see what everyone else was talking about.
I was a bit worried about performance before hand, but it ran very well on my year and half old system (AMD X2 3800+, 2 gigs of ram, Radeon X1900XT 256mb). I had it running at 1680x1050 with maximum detail settings and 4xAA/8xAF and I only noticed a brief frame rate slow down at one point near the end of the demo.
The demo was good enough that I plan on buying it tomorrow (PC version of course). I think this is probably the first demo that I've tried all year where I actually want to buy the game instead of just uninstalling the demo and being thoroughly disappointed afterwards.
Warhawk comes with the server code built into the game (so that users can host a game if they want). My guess is the developer saves time and money by not having to write and test a seperate server application to run on a different architecture (most likely a bunch of x86 servers). So it makes sense to just use the server code already built into the game and just host dedicated servers using a bunch of Playstation 3s.
Also, Sony has lots of extra Playstations laying around that they can turn into dedicated servers for a relatively low cost.
If you are unable to provide a breath sample, the officer can (in certain situations) obtain a warrant to have a qualified medical practitioner take a blood sample for analysis. It is an offence for a driver to refuse, without a reasonable excuse, to provide a breath or blood sample.
(emphasis mine)
The charge of Refusing to Provide a Breath Sample without a lawful excuse is a Criminal Charge against the Criminal Code of Canada. The charge of Refusing a Breath Test has the same penalty as if the driver blew into the breathalyzer and failed the test or blew over the legal limit of.08 milligrams.
Demos, trailers, updates and add-ons are stored on the PS3 hard drive. You can also store your own movies, music or pictures on it, though the movies and music are limited to certain codecs and the pictures to certain formats. Also, if you want to install Linux, you'll need to use the hard drive...
Slashdot Mirror
I vote for Urinating Unicorn.
There are plenty of games that use Securom, so the key might have been there from before you bought and installed Bioshock. If you own Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos, Descent Freespace, Masters of Orion, etc. etc, all sorts of games use securom. This is a non-issue that certain "media" sites and blogging sites have spun into a sensationalist story to drive page hits.
I totally agree, Bioshock is a great game and the developers are really responsive to all the complaints they've been getting. What bothers me is the fact that previous games like Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos used Securom, but no one raised a fuss about it back then, so why all the fuss about Bioshock using securom now?
c id=20394511
See my previous post for a partial list of Securom titles: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=281623&
The thing that annoys me about the "rootkit" whiners is the fact that I never heard anyone complain about the several dozen previous games that used securom.
h tml
Here's a list of games that use various copy protection schemes: http://www.gameburnworld.com/protectedgameslist.s
Here's a partial list of popular titles that used Securom:
Alien Vs Predator 2
Alone In The Dark-The New Nightmare
Alpha Centauri
Colin McRae Rally 2
Descent Freespace
Empire Earth
Gothic 2
Half-Life - Blueshift
Hitman 2
Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring
Masters Of Orion
Neverwinter Nights
Populous 3: The Beginning
Roller Coaster Tycoon 2
Sim City 3000
Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3
Tribes 2
Turok 2
Unreal 2 - The Awakening
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament 2003 patches
Warcraft 3: Reign Of Chaos
I don't remember any big stories when any of these games used securom. I'm not saying it's right to use securom, I'm just pointing out how odd it is that people are complaining about Bioshock when I don't remember any of the games listed above making headlines on slashdot or digg when they used securom.
There are dozens of games that install the securom driver, I had it installed on my system (from another game) well before Bioshock was installed on my computer, and yet all the sudden people seem to care when Bioshock is released. It's rather unfortunate, since Bioshock is such a great game and it's getting all this negative press.
That's what I'd do if I had a lady friend, but who am I kidding, this is slashdot.
Backup your data at regular intervals? Also, when was the last time Windows crashed on you?
Defective software is easy to replace, defective hardware I have to return it, wait for it to get serviced, etc... I hate when hardware dies on me and I have to return it... That's time taken away from me actually using the hardware. Plus, I'm not a big fan of any 360 games, I prefer Playstation franchises.
I came to the conclusion several years ago that if I boycotted every company that had done something I considered unethical, there would be no companies left to buy goods or services from. Pretty much every company has done something unethical at some point, does that mean we should boycott them all?
I hate most Corporations, but I'm not to the point yet where I renounce all physical possessions, grow my own food and make my own clothing.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter, but that's simply not true.
Linux and Unix used to be just as vulnerable to rootkits as any Windows sytem, the difference is Windows is much easier to gain root access to install a rootkit. I repeat, Linux and Unix are not immune to rootkits. If you can hack your way into a system, you can install a rootkit.
For instance, the famous lrk4 (Linux Root Kit 4): http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/faqs/lr
From the wikipedia entry on Rootkits:
That's incorrect, the box clearly states under minimum requirements:
"Video Card: DirectX 9.0c compliant video card with 128MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better, excluding ATI X1550)"
Sony + Rootkit + Sensationalism = Page hits
PS. Pretty much every game uses some form of copy protection which installs itself on your system, most big name titles use either securom or starforce.Nope, that's just sensationalist bullshit since everyone seems to like hating on Sony lately. Really, you should be blaming 2K Games (the developer) or Take-Two (the publisher), you know, the actual people that decided to implement securom into Bioshock.
For fucks sake, Bioshock isn't Sony property, nor is it a Sony product. Sony didn't make the decision for some company to implement their copy protection scheme, you should be blaming 2k Games (the developer) or Take-Two (the publisher). The only reason people are using words like Sony and rootkit in the same sentence is for sensationalism and page hits. People like to hate on Sony, mainly due to their music CD rootkit, but this isn't a Sony issue, nor is it a rootkit.
Bioshock isn't the first game to implement Securom, not even close, so why do consumers seem to care all the sudden when they didn't give a shit about previous games that used Securom?
Normally I wouldn't feed trolls, but someone had to correct your blatant misinformation.
Solid state drives will be a drop in replacement to regular hard drives, meaning you can just plug them into a PATA or SATA cable (depending on what the drive supports).
There are only a few solid state drives that match or exceed current hard drive performance, and only by a small margin. So I wouldn't worry about saturating a SATA link for a very long time... And I'm talking about SATA I, not SATA II bandwidth...
The main benefit of solid state drives are lower power consumption, less or no noise and faster access times. Bandwidth throughput still could use some improvements in my opinion...
Most decent flash drives come with onboard chips that handle things like wear levelling. These onboard chips also supposedly mimic a regular ATA hard drive so you can continue to use any ol' file system and it will look like a regular hard drive (not sure if this is a good or bad thing).
For flash drives that don't have an onboard chip to handle wear levelling, you'd want to use a filesystem like JFFS2 (assuming you use Linux).
You are correct, flash memory capacity is growing faster than hard drive capacity. My guess is that this is due to the fact that flash technology is still relatively new where as hard drives have been around since the 50s. Hard drive technology is "old tech" where as flash memory (specifically NAND flash) has just recently come into the spotlight.
I did some quick google searching and found articles dated 2005 announcing that flash storage had reached the 2GB mark and hard drives had reached the 500GB mark. Two years later, flash drives are now at the 64GB mark (32x increase from 2005) and hard drives are now at the 1TB mark (2x increase from 2005). I doubt flash drives will be able to stick to that large of a growth in capacity for very long though, they will probably slow down to hard drive growth levels within a couple of years (unless some ground breaking technology comes along).
I'm no where near an expert on the subject though, so I could be wrong.
I was pretty skeptical about the game before I tried the demo, I thought it looked like Doom 3 meets Half-Life 2 meets F.E.A.R, but I was wrong. I really like the 1950s theme mixed with an underwater world. I like the fact that you can loot corpses among other things, it gave the game more of a RPG feel than a straight FPS to me. Of course there's also the plasmids which is a nice touch. Before playing the demo, I thought it was just another over hyped FPS, but I now see what everyone else was talking about.
I was a bit worried about performance before hand, but it ran very well on my year and half old system (AMD X2 3800+, 2 gigs of ram, Radeon X1900XT 256mb). I had it running at 1680x1050 with maximum detail settings and 4xAA/8xAF and I only noticed a brief frame rate slow down at one point near the end of the demo.
The demo was good enough that I plan on buying it tomorrow (PC version of course). I think this is probably the first demo that I've tried all year where I actually want to buy the game instead of just uninstalling the demo and being thoroughly disappointed afterwards.
Warhawk comes with the server code built into the game (so that users can host a game if they want). My guess is the developer saves time and money by not having to write and test a seperate server application to run on a different architecture (most likely a bunch of x86 servers). So it makes sense to just use the server code already built into the game and just host dedicated servers using a bunch of Playstation 3s.
Also, Sony has lots of extra Playstations laying around that they can turn into dedicated servers for a relatively low cost.
http://www.tc.gc.ca/roadsafety/tp/tp1535/law.htm (emphasis mine)
http://vgchartz.com/weekly.php
Weekly Sales:
July 23rd - 29th:
PS3 - 112,877
360 - 56,384
July 16th - 22nd:
PS3 - 89,242
360 - 54,350
July 9th - 15th:
PS3 - 91,632
360 - 57,023
July 2nd - 8th:
PS3 - 60,836
360 - 59,931
Not quite 113%, but PS3 sales near the end of July are nearly double what they were at the start of July (The price drop was on the 9th).
Demos, trailers, updates and add-ons are stored on the PS3 hard drive. You can also store your own movies, music or pictures on it, though the movies and music are limited to certain codecs and the pictures to certain formats. Also, if you want to install Linux, you'll need to use the hard drive...