It is not as if the man put on his earbud, turned on his ipod, and suddenly got a loud enough blast that he is now deaf.
You analogy doesn't work because the woman in the coffee suit _was not_ awared of that the coffee was not, nor did she continuously spilled hot coffee onto her body for _three months_. It was a one time thing.
The ipod man, on the other hand, must had at least felt _some_ pain during his n months of usage. It is his own fault for ignoring the warning sign.
Here is my analogy- a man brought a pair of shoes from a store. After he got home, he tried them on, and found that the shoes are too small for him and it hurts when he wears them. He ignores the pain and wears the shoes for three months until his feet become infected and has to be amputated.
StarForce, at least in my experience, is one of the most prevasive and effective way to prevent copy of games- and I have encountered more protections than most people.
Currently I have four legitmate games that are protected by different version (3.x) of StarForce. Let me tell you, they are a major PAIN in the ass to backup. One of them works with Alcohol 120% SF copy scheme + DaemonTools 4.0, two of them (newer) work only when you make images of them using Lite-On dvd drives + seperate IDE controller card, and the latest one refuses to even run no matter what I do. Now I have to carry that game around if I want to play it on my laptop.
As to compability 16bit mode, I can also testify that this is true. The drive just gets slower and slower and eventually, your system become unresponsive. This last about 4 minutes. Either you wait it out, eject the disc, or restart the computer. Thankfully it usually only happens with copied games and scratched discs.
Ways to "defeat" StarForce without hexing the driver-
1. Use Lite-On brand DVD driver to creates the game image. For some unknown reason Lite-On drives have some extra functions in its firmware that enable the drive to copy SF games correctly. (a/ My Samsung/Sony/Pioneer drives never worked b/ I think SF fixed this in the latest version)
2. When you run a SF game, the check program first check to see if you have cd-rom drives connected to your onboard IDE channels. If it does then the program wont let you run the game from SCSI cd-rom drive(All image program ep. daemontool, alcohol uses SCSI instead of IDE).
a. You can use IDE jammers. But beware, they can screw your system up and you may have to restart. Also they do not work with the newer version of SF as the SF driver interfaces directly with the drive/chipset (bypassing the BIOS. That's pretty low and way out of standard practice).
b. You can try to disconnect the CD-rom before you try to play your copied games. If the check program doesn't see a IDE cd-rom, it allows the use of SCSI cd-rom.
c. If all else failed, you can get a cheapo $20 IDE controller card and connect all your cd-rom drive into it. IDE controller card uses emulated SCSI.
This brings us to a very interesting question- what would happen to all those people who have SATA and IDE drives? Some implementation of SATA (Via?) uses emulated SCSI. If the user had another drive connected to a IDE drive, the SATA drive would not work.
Finally, I just have to let this out- StarForce you suck! You "made" my backing up work much more challanging. I hope you burn in hell.
If I remember correctly, someone tried to investigate BC and found that it connect and disconnect its peers to mask its upload/download ratio.
Basically it works like this:
BC connects to a peer and request a chunk. After it finishes downloading the chunk, however, it disconnects itself from that peer and connect other peers.
As you can probably guess, this is not that healthy for the whole community.
Also it does prioritizes other BC cilents first. I did some testing on a couple of pools with file size ranging from 100mb to 5gb that are dominiated by BC (*Chinese torrents wink wink*) with ~100 users. I were the only one using Azureus.
After seeing all the people who started after me finshed before me, I got annoyed. So I jumped from Azureus to BC. BAM from ~3 kb/s to 150 kb/s. The same thing happened in all the pools.
I don't know how this happen, but I have a pretty good idea.
Another thing that worries me is that about 99% of Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kong use BC. Now this is great if they stay within the Asian's torrent pools; but if they ever jump ship to western pools, ops.
One last thing, *speculation* I think BC prioritizes other BC cilents in an effort to establish itself as the dominit cilent. Base on my obersvation Let's say at start there are 30% of BC users, with 70% of various cilents. The people within the 30% will only upload to each other while leeching downloads from the 70%; therefore BC users will get their files much faster than the 70% users. The 70% users will hear this from their friends, and quite logically, begin to use BC also. This is what happened in China btw.
Taiwan and Hong Kong have a similar situation where whenever people talk about online auction, they mean Yahoo Auction. China, on the other hand, is quite uncertain as the Chinese find the idea of "pay first, then wait for shipment" is quite....ridiculous.
My advise: Never do business in China unless 1. you have someone you trust that lives in China 2. You are extremely good at approaching the limits of laws without being illegal. Law doesn't mean much in China....
ANIME EXPLOSION
It's... Profitmón!
From Pokémon to Full Metal Panic, the anime industry is doing everything the rest of show biz isn't: embracing technology, coddling fans--and making a killing.
FORTUNE
Monday, November 28, 2005
By Daniel Roth
It was 2 a.m. when John Ledford heard the banging at his door. Stumbling from bed on that night in the fall of 1999, he threw on a robe over his boxers and opened the door of his Houston apartment to a twentysomething guy with glasses and a face full of freckles. Ledford was about to tell him he had the wrong apartment when the stranger launched into a speech. At that moment, Ledford knew: This visit was no accident. This stranger was an otaku.
Translated literally, the word is Japanese for "your household." But for obscure reasons, otaku morphed in modern Japan to connote a scarily hard-core fan, a nerd obsessed with a hobby to the point of unhealthiness. In the U.S. the otaku's infatuation is focused on anime--the Japanese style of animation that typically features saucer-eyed women and giant mechanical men. American otaku wear the label with pride.
The specimen at Ledford's door was going on about an anime TV show called Neon Genesis Evangelion, a series about humans fighting an alien invasion. He had a problem with the ending. "I don't like the direction you went in and I want you to go back and fix it," he demanded. Ledford explained that he didn't make the show and closed the door. He was rattled by the nocturnal visit--later that morning, leaving for Japan, he called his assistant and told her to find him a new place to live. But he should have known: That's what happens when your customers are wild with desire.
Ledford is CEO of AD Vision, the largest importer and distributor of anime in the country. ADV may not have made Evangelion, but it did get the show into the hands of American otaku. "The hard-core fan base is very rabid," says Ledford. "They will get behind you as a company. You don't have to spend a dollar in marketing; you just have to be friends with them." (With the understanding that any true friendship needs limits--and visiting hours.)
There must be a few studio heads out there who would accept 2 a.m. chats with customers in exchange for a rosier state of business. The numbers in mainstream entertainment are bad: Hollywood box-office receipts are down 7% over last year's middling performance. Home video, which in the past couple of years accounted for about a quarter of the profits on average at the major studios, is losing its shine too. Goldman Sachs forecasts virtually no growth in DVD sales for the major studios in 2006 and an outright decline in sales the year after that. In TV land, prime viewers are fleeing prime time: The networks have seen a 7.4% drop in viewings by 18- to 49-year-olds so far this fall compared with last year. There are plenty of reasons for these declines--fickle tastes, videogames, piracy. But there's also the fact that, frankly, the entertainment industry tends not to show the fans much love. Any business that prices popcorn the way gas stations price gas, encodes software into its CDs that compromises computer security, or persists in building sitcoms around Jim Belushi needs work in staying close to customers.
Yet with anime and its print cousin--the paperback-sized cartoon books called manga--the otaku keep showing up, cash in hand. This tidy little corner of the show-biz universe--a market worth more than $625 million last year at retail in North America, of which AD Vision captured $150 million--makes for a rare example of an entertainment niche that does more than not alienate its customers: It has found ways to keep them buying and buying.
In the process, anime and manga firms have taken on forms very different from Hollywood studios or publishing houses. They more closely resemble the constantly updating startups of Silicon Valley. Their ethos is to get the product out to the right people--whether it's on a DVD or over a
I am not dissing the FireFox team. It is not as if I (or you I would assume) could create a massive program such as FireFox across several OS and different standards alone. Anyone(or company, for that matter) would have trouble trying to maintain the program. But the FF team didn't, and what they did was brilliant. On the other hand this little post is just an outlet of my frustration in general. Take it as a grain of salt.
Anyway I am sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of posts on Mozilla forum that described what I mentioned in the post. You don't need an error message when you see FireFox is taking up 1.2gb of ram and you only have two tags open.
This is sort of ironic that when a IE has a glitch, people blame MS; but when FireFox has a bug, people blame the user;)
And I would like to play Civilization 4 without resorting to Wine:) . And I had heard the same old "MS is falling" since Red Hat 4 point something...are they falling?
Look, I just _reinstall_ Windows XP, added 1 gig of ram, and did raid 5 for all harddrives. If these are not enough for FF, I don't know what does. If all else fail I would just post a screenshot...
Look, I know Windows is shit and all, but it IS the most popular PC OS on the planet. If Mozilla Foundation wants to crack into the mainstream market, shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?
Remember, no matter what you might think IE has 10+ years of codes under it's belt, logically the codes are more mature than FF (minus the security holes, of course- but they exist because of all the blatantly added "functions" (read useless/bloated) codes added my MS during the IE4 era).
It is this kind of attitude that has stop common (read computer idiot) people from jumping on the FF band wagon. Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person. And you think why people still stay away from FF.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)? How the hell could you achieve that if you just plug your fingers into your ears and sing LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU.
Disclaimer- I love FireFox, that's why I am using it as my main browser with IE as compatibility checker.
Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.
Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.
Yes I know my case is probably one of the "extreme user" type, but frankly, I am not the only one complaining about this, if the Mozilla bug forum is any indication.
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.
I have to close FireFox once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.
Yes this is a rant, so please, FF developers, do something about that leak that existed for as long as I could remember.
Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper/Magazine - tabloids
Book - bibliographies
Cell phone - "OMG that guy is so stupid!!1!1!!" right next to you on the bus when you are just trying to sleep.
email - "3n1arg3 ur p3n1s!!"
You should just say humans breed worthless content.
Sorry I am not impressed :) .
99% of people who buy a RX-8 buy the car for its speed (and look), not gas consumption rates.
A weird choice to become dual fuel car.
It is not as if the man put on his earbud, turned on his ipod, and suddenly got a loud enough blast that he is now deaf.
You analogy doesn't work because the woman in the coffee suit _was not_ awared of that the coffee was not, nor did she continuously spilled hot coffee onto her body for _three months_. It was a one time thing.
The ipod man, on the other hand, must had at least felt _some_ pain during his n months of usage. It is his own fault for ignoring the warning sign.
Here is my analogy- a man brought a pair of shoes from a store. After he got home, he tried them on, and found that the shoes are too small for him and it hurts when he wears them. He ignores the pain and wears the shoes for three months until his feet become infected and has to be amputated.
Whose fault is it?
StarForce, at least in my experience, is one of the most prevasive and effective way to prevent copy of games- and I have encountered more protections than most people.
They certainly prevent you from backing up your games that's for sure.
Currently I have four legitmate games that are protected by different version (3.x) of StarForce. Let me tell you, they are a major PAIN in the ass to backup. One of them works with Alcohol 120% SF copy scheme + DaemonTools 4.0, two of them (newer) work only when you make images of them using Lite-On dvd drives + seperate IDE controller card, and the latest one refuses to even run no matter what I do. Now I have to carry that game around if I want to play it on my laptop.
As to compability 16bit mode, I can also testify that this is true. The drive just gets slower and slower and eventually, your system become unresponsive. This last about 4 minutes. Either you wait it out, eject the disc, or restart the computer. Thankfully it usually only happens with copied games and scratched discs.
Ways to "defeat" StarForce without hexing the driver- 1. Use Lite-On brand DVD driver to creates the game image. For some unknown reason Lite-On drives have some extra functions in its firmware that enable the drive to copy SF games correctly. (a/ My Samsung/Sony/Pioneer drives never worked b/ I think SF fixed this in the latest version)
2. When you run a SF game, the check program first check to see if you have cd-rom drives connected to your onboard IDE channels. If it does then the program wont let you run the game from SCSI cd-rom drive(All image program ep. daemontool, alcohol uses SCSI instead of IDE).
a. You can use IDE jammers. But beware, they can screw your system up and you may have to restart. Also they do not work with the newer version of SF as the SF driver interfaces directly with the drive/chipset (bypassing the BIOS. That's pretty low and way out of standard practice).
b. You can try to disconnect the CD-rom before you try to play your copied games. If the check program doesn't see a IDE cd-rom, it allows the use of SCSI cd-rom.
c. If all else failed, you can get a cheapo $20 IDE controller card and connect all your cd-rom drive into it. IDE controller card uses emulated SCSI.
This brings us to a very interesting question- what would happen to all those people who have SATA and IDE drives? Some implementation of SATA (Via?) uses emulated SCSI. If the user had another drive connected to a IDE drive, the SATA drive would not work.
Finally, I just have to let this out- StarForce you suck! You "made" my backing up work much more challanging. I hope you burn in hell.
If I remember correctly, someone tried to investigate BC and found that it connect and disconnect its peers to mask its upload/download ratio.
Basically it works like this:
BC connects to a peer and request a chunk. After it finishes downloading the chunk, however, it disconnects itself from that peer and connect other peers.
As you can probably guess, this is not that healthy for the whole community.
Also it does prioritizes other BC cilents first. I did some testing on a couple of pools with file size ranging from 100mb to 5gb that are dominiated by BC (*Chinese torrents wink wink*) with ~100 users. I were the only one using Azureus.
After seeing all the people who started after me finshed before me, I got annoyed. So I jumped from Azureus to BC. BAM from ~3 kb/s to 150 kb/s. The same thing happened in all the pools.
I don't know how this happen, but I have a pretty good idea.
Another thing that worries me is that about 99% of Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kong use BC. Now this is great if they stay within the Asian's torrent pools; but if they ever jump ship to western pools, ops.
One last thing, *speculation* I think BC prioritizes other BC cilents in an effort to establish itself as the dominit cilent.
Base on my obersvation
Let's say at start there are 30% of BC users, with 70% of various cilents. The people within the 30% will only upload to each other while leeching downloads from the 70%; therefore BC users will get their files much faster than the 70% users. The 70% users will hear this from their friends, and quite logically, begin to use BC also.
This is what happened in China btw.
Shame that BC has the best GUI for all cilent.
Taiwan and Hong Kong have a similar situation where whenever people talk about online auction, they mean Yahoo Auction. China, on the other hand, is quite uncertain as the Chinese find the idea of "pay first, then wait for shipment" is quite....ridiculous.
My advise: Never do business in China unless 1. you have someone you trust that lives in China 2. You are extremely good at approaching the limits of laws without being illegal.
Law doesn't mean much in China....
Only if you have an Apple logo tattoo on your arse.
They have other issues with it (setting up printing) but nothing I can't fix.
And here you said it- Nothing _you_ can't fix. However about the rest of the 99% population?
Binary drivers? App installation with different arguements? Device configuration that doesn't require a kernel compilation?
I do not want to go through the pain of reconfiguring every single text file just to install a damn printer/wlan/scanner/etc. cards.
That and the pride of fixing everything; but come on, you need at least IQ120 and above to solve most problem.
At least with windows I can just pop a cd (or download the binary dirver), install it, and expects it to work 99% of the time.
Holy...look at that test dummy and his posture.
I feel for him.
the communist regime has committed its resources to crushing web sites that challenge government authority.
/.ter gets imtimated by the size of the male porn star's penis.
So, its government authority is being challanged by internet porn? I thought only
Does this mark the end of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit?
No. It marks the beginning of someone taking responsibility for spreading false information.
If you RTFA, you will notice that the said article was submitted in 2000.
Crap, forgot to preview http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,11345 96,00.html
ANIME EXPLOSION It's... Profitmón! From Pokémon to Full Metal Panic, the anime industry is doing everything the rest of show biz isn't: embracing technology, coddling fans--and making a killing. FORTUNE Monday, November 28, 2005 By Daniel Roth It was 2 a.m. when John Ledford heard the banging at his door. Stumbling from bed on that night in the fall of 1999, he threw on a robe over his boxers and opened the door of his Houston apartment to a twentysomething guy with glasses and a face full of freckles. Ledford was about to tell him he had the wrong apartment when the stranger launched into a speech. At that moment, Ledford knew: This visit was no accident. This stranger was an otaku. Translated literally, the word is Japanese for "your household." But for obscure reasons, otaku morphed in modern Japan to connote a scarily hard-core fan, a nerd obsessed with a hobby to the point of unhealthiness. In the U.S. the otaku's infatuation is focused on anime--the Japanese style of animation that typically features saucer-eyed women and giant mechanical men. American otaku wear the label with pride. The specimen at Ledford's door was going on about an anime TV show called Neon Genesis Evangelion, a series about humans fighting an alien invasion. He had a problem with the ending. "I don't like the direction you went in and I want you to go back and fix it," he demanded. Ledford explained that he didn't make the show and closed the door. He was rattled by the nocturnal visit--later that morning, leaving for Japan, he called his assistant and told her to find him a new place to live. But he should have known: That's what happens when your customers are wild with desire. Ledford is CEO of AD Vision, the largest importer and distributor of anime in the country. ADV may not have made Evangelion, but it did get the show into the hands of American otaku. "The hard-core fan base is very rabid," says Ledford. "They will get behind you as a company. You don't have to spend a dollar in marketing; you just have to be friends with them." (With the understanding that any true friendship needs limits--and visiting hours.) There must be a few studio heads out there who would accept 2 a.m. chats with customers in exchange for a rosier state of business. The numbers in mainstream entertainment are bad: Hollywood box-office receipts are down 7% over last year's middling performance. Home video, which in the past couple of years accounted for about a quarter of the profits on average at the major studios, is losing its shine too. Goldman Sachs forecasts virtually no growth in DVD sales for the major studios in 2006 and an outright decline in sales the year after that. In TV land, prime viewers are fleeing prime time: The networks have seen a 7.4% drop in viewings by 18- to 49-year-olds so far this fall compared with last year. There are plenty of reasons for these declines--fickle tastes, videogames, piracy. But there's also the fact that, frankly, the entertainment industry tends not to show the fans much love. Any business that prices popcorn the way gas stations price gas, encodes software into its CDs that compromises computer security, or persists in building sitcoms around Jim Belushi needs work in staying close to customers. Yet with anime and its print cousin--the paperback-sized cartoon books called manga--the otaku keep showing up, cash in hand. This tidy little corner of the show-biz universe--a market worth more than $625 million last year at retail in North America, of which AD Vision captured $150 million--makes for a rare example of an entertainment niche that does more than not alienate its customers: It has found ways to keep them buying and buying. In the process, anime and manga firms have taken on forms very different from Hollywood studios or publishing houses. They more closely resemble the constantly updating startups of Silicon Valley. Their ethos is to get the product out to the right people--whether it's on a DVD or over a
I am not dissing the FireFox team. It is not as if I (or you I would assume) could create a massive program such as FireFox across several OS and different standards alone. Anyone(or company, for that matter) would have trouble trying to maintain the program. But the FF team didn't, and what they did was brilliant. On the other hand this little post is just an outlet of my frustration in general. Take it as a grain of salt.
;)
:) . And I had heard the same old "MS is falling" since Red Hat 4 point something...are they falling?
Anyway I am sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of posts on Mozilla forum that described what I mentioned in the post. You don't need an error message when you see FireFox is taking up 1.2gb of ram and you only have two tags open.
This is sort of ironic that when a IE has a glitch, people blame MS; but when FireFox has a bug, people blame the user
And I would like to play Civilization 4 without resorting to Wine
Look, I just _reinstall_ Windows XP, added 1 gig of ram, and did raid 5 for all harddrives. If these are not enough for FF, I don't know what does. If all else fail I would just post a screenshot...
I meant to say once per _week_, slippy fingers.
Look, I know Windows is shit and all, but it IS the most popular PC OS on the planet. If Mozilla Foundation wants to crack into the mainstream market, shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?
/. people heard of it ;) .
Remember, no matter what you might think IE has 10+ years of codes under it's belt, logically the codes are more mature than FF (minus the security holes, of course- but they exist because of all the blatantly added "functions" (read useless/bloated) codes added my MS during the IE4 era).
It is this kind of attitude that has stop common (read computer idiot) people from jumping on the FF band wagon. Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person.
And you think why people still stay away from FF.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)? How the hell could you achieve that if you just plug your fingers into your ears and sing LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU.
Sheesh.
Manner,
Disclaimer- I love FireFox, that's why I am using it as my main browser with IE as compatibility checker.
Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.
Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.
Yes I know my case is probably one of the "extreme user" type, but frankly, I am not the only one complaining about this, if the Mozilla bug forum is any indication.
I would probably get flame for saying this.
IE is more stable than FireFox.
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.
I have to close FireFox once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.
Yes this is a rant, so please, FF developers, do something about that leak that existed for as long as I could remember.
*Burn karma burn baby*
PS. Image/flash processing mostly.
I agree.
Even on my Athlon64 3200+, the game is jerky at best; whenever I move the character, the CPU usage shoots up to 100%.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Are you vigilant?
this....
Disclaimer: In case those lawyers from Sony is not being work to death right now from all those demage lawsuit- I am joking.
Yah, because US would never have anything that has rape as the central theme.
US is the king of sexual abstinence.