Games can mark data as non-transferrable. i.e. it stays on the local HD and you can't copy it to memory cards. Of course, a mod chip would be able to circumvent that...
So as far Live goes, if there is no activated mod, why does it matter if the Xbox is modded? Since the mod is turned off, the game has to be legit, ergo no piracy and no cheating.
How do you define cheating? What if I use a cheat utility on the game MechAssault and unlock all the advanced mechs before finishing the single player game? Would you consider that a cheat if you go online with those unlocked mechs that, under normal circumstances, you shouldn't be able to play in?
I can think of a bunch of cheats you can do by using a modchip to change a score, variable, or other piece of data on the hard drive and then going online to take advantage of it. What about games that have high score tournaments like Midway Arcade Treasures 2 and Ninja Gaiden? What would be the fun if someone set their score to 999,999,999,999 then went online and reported it to gain first place?
A mod in an XBox is a black box. You know that the behavior of the XBox has been changed, but you don't know how... in that situation, the correct response would be to take all of the XBoxes with unknowns offline, which is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
Of course, this is all beside the point since, when you sign up for XBox Live, you agree to not connect a modded XBox to it. And that's true regardless of whether any of my arguments are correct or not.
Your circle of friends must be fairly narrow. I know several people who most definitely aren't geeks that have modded Xboxen. Haven't asked, but they probably haven't even heard of Slashdot.
Good for you, but that has nothing to do with the point I brought up. I never said that Slashdot readers were the only people who modded XBox"en", I said, in a generalization, that anyway XBox owned by a Slashdot reader was probably already a lost cause for Microsoft.
Oh, and there are no Linux utilities on mine, either.
Ok, but you're missing the forest for the trees with that reply.
I personally think a lot of the complaints about cheating are from those who simply aren't in the league of the people they're playing against.
You still don't get it. With Live that problem is eliminated because you KNOW there is no cheating. That way nobody gets falsely accused, and booted, because they are better at the game then other people. Did it never occur to you that that is EXACTLY the advantage of Live that I'm talking about?
But look, the set of people who both mod XBox"en" and don't pirate video games is very very small. Small enough that Microsoft does not think it's worthwhile to cater to that group. Anybody who is in that group needs to just accept the fact that Microsoft doesn't really care about them. It's not as if this new code on Live is a reversal of policy; Microsoft has always endeavored to keep modified XBoxes off of Live.
You must have reading comprehension problems, because I didn't say anywhere that I was important.
I was responding to the tone of what you wrote, not the words.
There will be others out there who were thinking about getting Live and Halo 2 etc etc who aren't going to bother now.
What, the Slashdot crowd where everyone owns a Gamecube and any XBox you might see is modded and full of Linux utilities?
Normal people don't *care* about news like this. Microsoft markets the XBox towards normal everyday people, not geeks who like to put Linux on their freakin' thermostats. Will they lose sales? Maybe a few hundred, admittedly... but you also have to realize that making XBox Live cheat-free *gains* sales as well. I got it so I could play Counter-Strike in an environment where I don't have to worry about all that crap you get in the PC version.
You don't like it, you won't buy it. Fine. But don't make it sound like some crusade or movement, and remember that there are a ton of people who appreciate what Microsoft is doing with Live.
Let's assume for a moment that XBox games DO have serial codes (they don't.) Let's also assume that XBox customers would be ok entering these serial codes into the XBox with an awkward controller even when none of the other consoles require that (they wouldn't be.) Even if you make those assumptions which would be required for your idea to work... it still doesn't work.
The Live checks serve two purposes: 1) Reduce piracy, 2) Reduce or eliminate cheating. Your idea covers one of those, but doesn't touch on the second. Microsoft is playing it safe by banning all modded XBoxes, since Live has no way of knowing who modded it to just play mp3 files of a fileserver and who modded it to cheat with his copy of pirated HALO 2 in multiplayer. Better safe than sorry, right?
I'm sure that your single lost sale will, single-handedly, convince Microsoft that this policy is a mistake and that they will immediately retract the code and let XBox Live be a free-for-all with whatever hardware hacks you can muster.
Criminy. You're not as important as you think you are.
I like this because it prevents cheating. Period. I don't care about people modding their XBox to, say, play MP3s from a streaming server, but there's no way for Microsoft to tell the difference between that and somebody cheating. So they play it safe. It happens to reduce piracy at the same time. Good for them, and for me.
I've been playing it with the excellent x2vga adaptor (http://x2vga.com) and I haven't seen any problems. I could try it on my actual HDTV, I guess, but that would take a lot of cable plugging and unplugging and I'm pretty lazy.
HALO is popular? I hate it. I think it's boring. Millions of people watch network TV? All the shows are crap. Thousands go to a Britney Spears concert? She sounds like a banshee. 90% of the people use Windows? God I hate Windows, it crashes all the time.
See how it works? Now that you know the prime directive you can mentally discard all the messages that fit this mold and find the *real* conversation in the thread hidden underneath... good luck!
Now let's try to fill this discussion up with better comments than "HALO 2 *does* suck," ok? We can make the world a better place.
Re:Dont hate me. I still dont get it.
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot prime directive:
If it's mainstream, we hate it.
HALO is popular? I hate it. I think it's boring. Millions of people watch network TV? All the shows are crap. Thousands go to a Britney Spears concert? She sounds like a banshee. 90% of the people use Windows? God I hate Windows, it crashes all the time.
See how it works? Now that you know the prime directive you can mentally discard all the messages that fit this mold and find the *real* conversation in the thread hidden underneath... good luck!
... but only IE on Windows. The MacOS version of IE is, although dated now, still a very solid and compliant browser and there's no reason that a MacOS 8-9 user shouldn't be using it. (Especially since Firefox, as far as I know, doesn't support Classic MacOS and Mozilla dropped support of it a few versions back.)
Blizzard is poised to win big with this game. They've had HUGE success with Warcraft, an extensive fanbase, and the MMO really does immerse you
If the playerbase is anything even SLIGHTLY resembling the Battle.net community, I don't see how it could possibly even come close to being immersive.
That is, unless you consider a minotaur saying things like "WTB 4SjO 5000gp ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^" immersive. Uh. Yeah. I'll skip MMORPGs until they make one that doesn't attract complete morons... probably hopeless, but until then I have RP MUDs to occupy my time. (And yeah, the RP MUDs are actually immersive. With no budget and a thousandth the bandwidth. Go figure.)
Name a game in the current console generation (or a relatively modern PC game) that has voices but not subtitles. Seriously. I've yet to see any, ever.
Let me plug a MUD I do work on and have played for the last 7 years. (The MUD is about 8 years old. Everything is mature except the combat system, but it's an RP-based MUD so combat is not a high priority.)
See the website at esmud.com. We're very newbie-friendly but, as I said above, VERY RP-based... if you are not interested in role-playing a character, you will not find much on ES to interest you.
I'm not a Hawaiian and I like spam. I eat it with eggs for breakfast all the time. Thankfully, the world doesn't have to bow down to whatever your food preference is and I'm free to eat whatever I want.
I hate comments like this because they always get posted, and they always get moderated up, and I don't understand it because they DO NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION.
The question was not "what should I use for trip planning?" The question was "what trip planning software is available for Linux?" The parent answers the first question, but doesn't even start to consider the actual question posted.
The parent is -1 off-topic, somebody moderate him that way.
Godzilla 2000 had no baby Godzillas in it. Godzilla 2000 was all "suit-imation" as far as I'm aware with a good amount of CGI for the UFO and the first metallic alien creature.
You're probably thinking of Sony's horrible "Godzilla" movie with Matthew Broderick and those moronic French secret service guys. I always assumed the technology behind that movie was the same as used in Jurassic Park, but now that you mention it there were some shots that had a LOT of the baby 'zillas moving around at the same time that would be hard to accomplish without some sort of motion software.
See, the grandparent posted a very thoughtful argument and obviously spend a lot of time researching and discussing to come up with his position on the election.
The parent post, on the other hand, is just full of the same BS we've been hearing all along.
Speaking of "progressives" acting the opposite of their namesake, what's with the isolationism when it comes to Iraq? Saddam can mass-murder 600,000 Iraqis and Kurds in a decade, but the instant that the US Army loses the smallest fraction of this, they're all crying "pull out! Pull out!" Since when were Iraqi lives less important than American lives? Death is death, people, and anything we can do to lessen that is good.
You guys should be cheering ON the RIAA for going after illegal filesharers and not going after the P2P networks anymore so you can still use them for your Linux.iso files or whatever the hell people use P2P for other than piracy.
But instead, the Slashdot mentality is that copyright infringement is nothing wrong and that people who do it are heros fighting against The Man (the RIAA.)
Why is this? I think it's because most Slashdotters are the ones out there stealing music and movies and they are trying to justify their actions to themselves. I can't think of another theory, unless they advocate following *no* IP laws whatsoever... but that would kill their precious GPL license as well.
(It's doubly ridiculous with DVD movies, considering how affordable they are. I just bought The Day After Tomorrow, a movie that just came out a couple of months ago, for $12 brand new. And I get a widescreen presentation, I get tons of special features, and it even came in a neato holographic box. The VHS tape back in the day would cost $20 and absolutely no value-added in pan-and-scan.)
Slashdot Mirror
Games can mark data as non-transferrable. i.e. it stays on the local HD and you can't copy it to memory cards. Of course, a mod chip would be able to circumvent that...
So as far Live goes, if there is no activated mod, why does it matter if the Xbox is modded? Since the mod is turned off, the game has to be legit, ergo no piracy and no cheating.
How do you define cheating? What if I use a cheat utility on the game MechAssault and unlock all the advanced mechs before finishing the single player game? Would you consider that a cheat if you go online with those unlocked mechs that, under normal circumstances, you shouldn't be able to play in?
I can think of a bunch of cheats you can do by using a modchip to change a score, variable, or other piece of data on the hard drive and then going online to take advantage of it. What about games that have high score tournaments like Midway Arcade Treasures 2 and Ninja Gaiden? What would be the fun if someone set their score to 999,999,999,999 then went online and reported it to gain first place?
A mod in an XBox is a black box. You know that the behavior of the XBox has been changed, but you don't know how... in that situation, the correct response would be to take all of the XBoxes with unknowns offline, which is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
Of course, this is all beside the point since, when you sign up for XBox Live, you agree to not connect a modded XBox to it. And that's true regardless of whether any of my arguments are correct or not.
Your circle of friends must be fairly narrow. I know several people who most definitely aren't geeks that have modded Xboxen. Haven't asked, but they probably haven't even heard of Slashdot.
Good for you, but that has nothing to do with the point I brought up. I never said that Slashdot readers were the only people who modded XBox"en", I said, in a generalization, that anyway XBox owned by a Slashdot reader was probably already a lost cause for Microsoft.
Oh, and there are no Linux utilities on mine, either.
Ok, but you're missing the forest for the trees with that reply.
I personally think a lot of the complaints about cheating are from those who simply aren't in the league of the people they're playing against.
You still don't get it. With Live that problem is eliminated because you KNOW there is no cheating. That way nobody gets falsely accused, and booted, because they are better at the game then other people. Did it never occur to you that that is EXACTLY the advantage of Live that I'm talking about?
But look, the set of people who both mod XBox"en" and don't pirate video games is very very small. Small enough that Microsoft does not think it's worthwhile to cater to that group. Anybody who is in that group needs to just accept the fact that Microsoft doesn't really care about them. It's not as if this new code on Live is a reversal of policy; Microsoft has always endeavored to keep modified XBoxes off of Live.
You must have reading comprehension problems, because I didn't say anywhere that I was important.
I was responding to the tone of what you wrote, not the words.
There will be others out there who were thinking about getting Live and Halo 2 etc etc who aren't going to bother now.
What, the Slashdot crowd where everyone owns a Gamecube and any XBox you might see is modded and full of Linux utilities?
Normal people don't *care* about news like this. Microsoft markets the XBox towards normal everyday people, not geeks who like to put Linux on their freakin' thermostats. Will they lose sales? Maybe a few hundred, admittedly... but you also have to realize that making XBox Live cheat-free *gains* sales as well. I got it so I could play Counter-Strike in an environment where I don't have to worry about all that crap you get in the PC version.
You don't like it, you won't buy it. Fine. But don't make it sound like some crusade or movement, and remember that there are a ton of people who appreciate what Microsoft is doing with Live.
Let's assume for a moment that XBox games DO have serial codes (they don't.) Let's also assume that XBox customers would be ok entering these serial codes into the XBox with an awkward controller even when none of the other consoles require that (they wouldn't be.) Even if you make those assumptions which would be required for your idea to work... it still doesn't work.
The Live checks serve two purposes: 1) Reduce piracy, 2) Reduce or eliminate cheating. Your idea covers one of those, but doesn't touch on the second. Microsoft is playing it safe by banning all modded XBoxes, since Live has no way of knowing who modded it to just play mp3 files of a fileserver and who modded it to cheat with his copy of pirated HALO 2 in multiplayer. Better safe than sorry, right?
I'm sure that your single lost sale will, single-handedly, convince Microsoft that this policy is a mistake and that they will immediately retract the code and let XBox Live be a free-for-all with whatever hardware hacks you can muster.
Criminy. You're not as important as you think you are.
I like this because it prevents cheating. Period. I don't care about people modding their XBox to, say, play MP3s from a streaming server, but there's no way for Microsoft to tell the difference between that and somebody cheating. So they play it safe. It happens to reduce piracy at the same time. Good for them, and for me.
I've been playing it with the excellent x2vga adaptor (http://x2vga.com) and I haven't seen any problems. I could try it on my actual HDTV, I guess, but that would take a lot of cable plugging and unplugging and I'm pretty lazy.
Good point. Well, it's a work in progress, I guess...
The Slashdot prime directive is:
If it's mainstream, we hate it.
HALO is popular? I hate it. I think it's boring. Millions of people watch network TV? All the shows are crap. Thousands go to a Britney Spears concert? She sounds like a banshee. 90% of the people use Windows? God I hate Windows, it crashes all the time.
See how it works? Now that you know the prime directive you can mentally discard all the messages that fit this mold and find the *real* conversation in the thread hidden underneath... good luck!
Now let's try to fill this discussion up with better comments than "HALO 2 *does* suck," ok? We can make the world a better place.
Slashdot prime directive:
If it's mainstream, we hate it.
HALO is popular? I hate it. I think it's boring. Millions of people watch network TV? All the shows are crap. Thousands go to a Britney Spears concert? She sounds like a banshee. 90% of the people use Windows? God I hate Windows, it crashes all the time.
See how it works? Now that you know the prime directive you can mentally discard all the messages that fit this mold and find the *real* conversation in the thread hidden underneath... good luck!
... but only IE on Windows. The MacOS version of IE is, although dated now, still a very solid and compliant browser and there's no reason that a MacOS 8-9 user shouldn't be using it. (Especially since Firefox, as far as I know, doesn't support Classic MacOS and Mozilla dropped support of it a few versions back.)
Blizzard is poised to win big with this game. They've had HUGE success with Warcraft, an extensive fanbase, and the MMO really does immerse you
If the playerbase is anything even SLIGHTLY resembling the Battle.net community, I don't see how it could possibly even come close to being immersive.
That is, unless you consider a minotaur saying things like "WTB 4SjO 5000gp ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^" immersive. Uh. Yeah. I'll skip MMORPGs until they make one that doesn't attract complete morons... probably hopeless, but until then I have RP MUDs to occupy my time. (And yeah, the RP MUDs are actually immersive. With no budget and a thousandth the bandwidth. Go figure.)
Psst, Tribes 3 has been out for a week now. Maybe two.
Maybe he didn't think that some bored Slashdotter would pick apart every damn word he typed. But what do I know...
Yes, but apparently using Mozilla also makes you into a holier-than-thou asshole when posting on discussion boards.
Name a game in the current console generation (or a relatively modern PC game) that has voices but not subtitles. Seriously. I've yet to see any, ever.
Let me plug a MUD I do work on and have played for the last 7 years. (The MUD is about 8 years old. Everything is mature except the combat system, but it's an RP-based MUD so combat is not a high priority.)
See the website at esmud.com. We're very newbie-friendly but, as I said above, VERY RP-based... if you are not interested in role-playing a character, you will not find much on ES to interest you.
Holy crap, I'd pay like $250 to see that!
I'm not a Hawaiian and I like spam. I eat it with eggs for breakfast all the time. Thankfully, the world doesn't have to bow down to whatever your food preference is and I'm free to eat whatever I want.
I hate comments like this because they always get posted, and they always get moderated up, and I don't understand it because they DO NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION.
The question was not "what should I use for trip planning?" The question was "what trip planning software is available for Linux?" The parent answers the first question, but doesn't even start to consider the actual question posted.
The parent is -1 off-topic, somebody moderate him that way.
And I suppose that it's impossible that MUD gameplay can be designed either, huh?
Thanks for telling me I've been wasting the last 7 years.
What a stupid question.
Godzilla 2000 had no baby Godzillas in it. Godzilla 2000 was all "suit-imation" as far as I'm aware with a good amount of CGI for the UFO and the first metallic alien creature.
You're probably thinking of Sony's horrible "Godzilla" movie with Matthew Broderick and those moronic French secret service guys. I always assumed the technology behind that movie was the same as used in Jurassic Park, but now that you mention it there were some shots that had a LOT of the baby 'zillas moving around at the same time that would be hard to accomplish without some sort of motion software.
See, the grandparent posted a very thoughtful argument and obviously spend a lot of time researching and discussing to come up with his position on the election.
The parent post, on the other hand, is just full of the same BS we've been hearing all along.
Speaking of "progressives" acting the opposite of their namesake, what's with the isolationism when it comes to Iraq? Saddam can mass-murder 600,000 Iraqis and Kurds in a decade, but the instant that the US Army loses the smallest fraction of this, they're all crying "pull out! Pull out!" Since when were Iraqi lives less important than American lives? Death is death, people, and anything we can do to lessen that is good.
Amen.
.iso files or whatever the hell people use P2P for other than piracy.
Man, the Slashdot crowd here just doesn't get it.
You guys should be cheering ON the RIAA for going after illegal filesharers and not going after the P2P networks anymore so you can still use them for your Linux
But instead, the Slashdot mentality is that copyright infringement is nothing wrong and that people who do it are heros fighting against The Man (the RIAA.)
Why is this? I think it's because most Slashdotters are the ones out there stealing music and movies and they are trying to justify their actions to themselves. I can't think of another theory, unless they advocate following *no* IP laws whatsoever... but that would kill their precious GPL license as well.
(It's doubly ridiculous with DVD movies, considering how affordable they are. I just bought The Day After Tomorrow, a movie that just came out a couple of months ago, for $12 brand new. And I get a widescreen presentation, I get tons of special features, and it even came in a neato holographic box. The VHS tape back in the day would cost $20 and absolutely no value-added in pan-and-scan.)