Well, cingular will unlock phones if your account is in good standing (pay your bills on time and had your account for 3 months). So I am willing to bet that the other companies will want to make sure that the phone works with them.
BTW, the feature you are refferign to is Visual Voicemail (it showes you what voicemail msgs you have with out having to call into your voicemail). That is the only thing I see that is network driven. (Visual call waiting is already here on most phones, it will show you the photo you have slelected to the address book entry).
Huh, I didn't know alltel was CDMA (they don't exist in my area AFAIK).
I also didn't know that you were able to swap a sprint phone over to verizon. Knowing that I am not surprissed that both verizon and sprint now use a white list to keep track of ESNs that are from their retailers, they REALLY like locking you in.
This all makes me start to wonder if the US will start to have laws about unlocking cellphones, and what will happen if we do. I know that in other contries providers are generaly either required to provide an unlocking service, or not even alowed to sell locked phones at all. I know cellphone popularity is not nearly what it is in other countries, but it is growing.
I admit that I hate cellphones (despite carying one), but am still morbidly fascinated by them...
However the point is to mug and then sell, thus turning a nice proffit.
Also, remember the cost can be very high, as the cost of mugging someone is the chance of getting caught and going to jail. Obviously getting caught far outweighs the worth of the iPhone, however that cost is tempered down as it is only a possible ending, and the ocst is further adjusted up/down based on the effectiveness of the local police.
On the note of reporting the phone stolen. Cingular does not kill ESNs if a phone is reported lost/stolen. Also, most contries now have laws requireing phones to be unlockable (even with out the laws it is not hard), and thus the blacklist would need to be shared amongst the GSM carriers.
Re:Hiding the iPhone
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yah, the entire iPhone/iPod mugging article was rather stupid.
Honestly, the best way that I can think of to protect iPhone owners from mugging is for the GSM carriers to get to gether and share ESNs of stolen phones, and then simply black list them (this would have to be a group effort as unlocking the phone would get around each network blacklisting phones stolen from their customers).
I know Verizon will blacklist the ESN of a phone that has been reported stolen, and they don't have to share these numbers around, as there are only 2 CDMA carriers that I know of (can you unlock a phone between Sprint/Verizon?).
also, the incentive for the carriers is that with fewer stollen phones, they can sell more handsets.
This has absoloutly no bearing on the **AA's actions.
This is more akin to if unions had the govn't not letting ANYONE exept for union workers do a specific job.
The Weaver one (If a weaver wants to try out a new pattern then need a large commity to ok it) is also not related to the **AA's tactics.
These are all about stiffiling creativity or competition, and the **AA WANTS you to be creative, why? So that they can sign you up, steal your work, and then charge you for the privledge.
I admit I am curious what the packs on steam are going to be like. I know I am not going to buy a boxed copy, but instead I will preorder from steam (you tend to be able to get a few bucks off for preordering through steam). Admitdely I doubt you will be able to buy portal by itself (atleast not for a while).
And if you want to play with the mechanics behind portal, go download the game it is based on Narbacular Drop
Bitter, who said I was bitter? Reread my post, I thought it was GREAT!
And no, I didn't actualy download any of the torrents (real or fake), I am to much of a fanboy to want to pirate their stuff (kinda pathetic aint it?). I only know about the fake torrents because I spend to much time on HL community websites.
As the above posters have all said. There are work arounds for just about anythign you want.
That includes steam.
first up, once you have installed a Steam game you can tell it to make a backup, from wich you can install and play. If you do not want steam to update yourgames you can either tell steam to run in offline mode, or just tell it to not update games.
There are also cracks out there that will let you install and play w/o connecting to Steam, so once Valve goes belly up (or stops supportign their old games), and you didn't make a backup, you just nab the crack from yuor friendly repository of such illicit things.
EP1 is no where near $40 (though I would say that it is still a better deal then some other games I shelled out that kinda cash for...). Can you buy the game via the Steam Store for the US amount ($20)? Hell, at that price I would have a friend buy a box stateside and just send me the CD Key.
And if you didn't realize that you were making a pun then you should be shot anyway.
as a valve fanboy, I call BS on the theft actualy causing any delays. Also, when ever I tihnk abotu that entire thing, I always laugh at the peopel that tried to download the 15GB torrents of the "HL2 Code" that ended up being hardcore gay porn, the person who put that up is a genious.
Sorry, but fanboy geek poweres let me follow these thing very closely.
TF2, as it was to be was fully scraped a long time ago.
TF2 as it is today is a relatively recent rebirth. a few searches on any of the video websites should give you a bit of gameplay footage.
EP2 was slated for 4th quarter release ('06), however whith Portal and TF2 getting packed in it got delayed (that and the fact that all Valve games get delayed, it is the nature of life). so we actualy DID hit the delay already, and we are now looking at the standard delay creep (where they do not ever give a even slightly hard date, until about a month before, when the game is already good to go). And with this I am realatively sure that we will see it shortly after the end of summer (late summer seems to real to me, so shortly after the end of summer is probably a better bet).
On the note of the Death of TF2. TF2 was originaly slated to be a HL1 game, and it actualy got near compleation, however it very quietly died, and my guess is that was about the time that serious work on HL2 started up, and they decided that TF2 would be a Source game.
yup, Fanboy Geek Powers let me be etaernaly optomistic!
(ye gods, I WANT PORTAL, for those of yuo who don't know why we are all spaztastic about it, do a quick search for the portal videos, and then go download Narbacular Drop from Neuclear Monkey Software)
Wait, I am a valve fanboy, crap! Time to go cry in the corner some more.
In all honesty, I think we already hit the delay, and now we are just waiting for the final release. We will probably hear more precise rumours as the date goes by, then we will hear the giant WHOOOSH as they go flying by, and eventualy we will have out precious HL2:EP2, TF2, and Portal (time to wipe up the drool again), at the very, very end of summer.
I can't wait!
(now all I have to figgure out is why fanboys like me insist on tortouring our selfs...)
The Black Box is only available on PC and includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2. It retails for $39.99.
The Orange Box is available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 and includes Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two, Portal and Team Fortress. It retails for a modest $59.99.
they were better then TPB because they Indexed TPB's trackers as well as all other public trackers.
And THAT is the interesting (and worying) part. They don't even host trackers (last I checked), they just index other trackers! It is kinda like shitting down google because you can find torrents ussing their search engine.
You have no idea howmuch I would love to see an SR MMO.
Or even just a CRPG SR (bassed faithfuly off of the books), prefferably with the ability to heavily modify it, and run games simmilar to NWN online. I would rather see somethign like that then a sequal to the SR games for SNES/Gen. However that is probably all because I just love the PNP SR.
I admit, I am not familiar enough with RSS. However this is a 2.3KB file that is not supposed to change. Why would developers NOT hardcode it into their RSS tools?
No one has brought it up, but my favorite game on that list is probably Giants: Citizen Kabuto. The game play was exelent, each storyline having a very original play style (that counts ALOT to me), the commedy from the natives as well as other friendlys and baddies also made everything always worth checkign out.
If a sequal to Giants came out I would be a very happy camper.
Afterall, psychotic female AIs are obviously awsome.
And yah, SS3 was one of the main ones I was sad they didn't list. I know Bioshock is comming out, and I am eagerly awaiting it. However the change of setting is kinda sad (I loved the universe they had created for the SS games). Hopefuly their baddies will be as awsome as The Many, and more hacking/weapon tinkering/body tinkering and other such wonderful customization options.
well, true, the 10 closest stores do not have it. However if you are willing to make a 2hr (1hr 48min by google maps) drive you can go pick one up. Or you can just have one shipped to your house.
Wow, I admit I havn't been following the PS3 games that closely (not interested in em), so I didn't know the news was that bad! I seriously thought those titles were slated for release this year.
Ah well, as I said, I don't REALLY care that much about the PS3 one way or another. I gues I might like it to tank, so I can pick up a 360 next generation and play ALL the games I skiped this generation.
yes, dead/unconcious bodies have been a player in stealth actions games (Thief, MGS, etc) for a little while now. However these games you rarely had a large number of badies in any one area.
In action games the bodies did have to be quickly removed so that you could make room for the new baddies. recently we have started to see bodies being left about, however I have yet to see MUCH of a point to it. Yah, it is a nice idea for realizim, however in most casses it does not add much realisim (rarely to the bodies interact with the environment), and often they are only good for removing you from the game, in the case of ragdolls where they will controt in ways no human body ever could, even if you liquified the bones. Admitedly this is also wonderfuly amusing (hey, playing with explosives and bodies is ALWAYS fun!)
So yah, they are there, but so what? I have yet to see an instance where they really added much to the game (asside from GPU cycles, and the mentioned stealth games). I can't really see any way of ussing persistand corpses as anything more then a gimick. But then again I am not a game making genious, and thus they probably will be somethign eventualy.
heh, It is nice to see some of our friends in the UK still have a sense of humour. Actualy gettign a console at or around release? hahaha, I laugh!
Gettign games at or around launch? hahaha, I laugh!
(please ignore that the Wii was released around the world with in a few weeks, and that those damn dirty apes in the UK already have Wii Play, where us poor slobs in the USA still don't)
True, OcR is awsome, however most of their stuff is NOT waht is being talked about in TFA. People who have no interest in midi music files will likely also be uninterested in techno/rock remixes of them.
You did mention the best one if you want to get people interested in them, and that is probably Relics of the Chozo, the full album based on Metroid music. It is absoloutly beautiful.
I admit I havn't poked around much at OCR recently (I really should), and there are probably soem new stunners like Relics out there now.
The article is about somethign I had not previously known about. Full symphany productions with only video game music. Sure I have seen the ocasional joke where everyone launches in to the SMB theme, but rarely anything else. And yah, SMB by a symphony is fun, but it isn't really that interesting to non-gamers, where as a live performance of alot of the RPG titles WOULD be interesting.
I seriusly need to get some tickets to one of these performances.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, cingular will unlock phones if your account is in good standing (pay your bills on time and had your account for 3 months). So I am willing to bet that the other companies will want to make sure that the phone works with them.
BTW, the feature you are refferign to is Visual Voicemail (it showes you what voicemail msgs you have with out having to call into your voicemail). That is the only thing I see that is network driven. (Visual call waiting is already here on most phones, it will show you the photo you have slelected to the address book entry).
Huh, I didn't know alltel was CDMA (they don't exist in my area AFAIK).
I also didn't know that you were able to swap a sprint phone over to verizon. Knowing that I am not surprissed that both verizon and sprint now use a white list to keep track of ESNs that are from their retailers, they REALLY like locking you in.
This all makes me start to wonder if the US will start to have laws about unlocking cellphones, and what will happen if we do. I know that in other contries providers are generaly either required to provide an unlocking service, or not even alowed to sell locked phones at all. I know cellphone popularity is not nearly what it is in other countries, but it is growing.
I admit that I hate cellphones (despite carying one), but am still morbidly fascinated by them...
However the point is to mug and then sell, thus turning a nice proffit.
Also, remember the cost can be very high, as the cost of mugging someone is the chance of getting caught and going to jail. Obviously getting caught far outweighs the worth of the iPhone, however that cost is tempered down as it is only a possible ending, and the ocst is further adjusted up/down based on the effectiveness of the local police.
On the note of reporting the phone stolen.
Cingular does not kill ESNs if a phone is reported lost/stolen. Also, most contries now have laws requireing phones to be unlockable (even with out the laws it is not hard), and thus the blacklist would need to be shared amongst the GSM carriers.
Yah, the entire iPhone/iPod mugging article was rather stupid.
Honestly, the best way that I can think of to protect iPhone owners from mugging is for the GSM carriers to get to gether and share ESNs of stolen phones, and then simply black list them (this would have to be a group effort as unlocking the phone would get around each network blacklisting phones stolen from their customers).
I know Verizon will blacklist the ESN of a phone that has been reported stolen, and they don't have to share these numbers around, as there are only 2 CDMA carriers that I know of (can you unlock a phone between Sprint/Verizon?).
also, the incentive for the carriers is that with fewer stollen phones, they can sell more handsets.
Thank you.
This has absoloutly no bearing on the **AA's actions.
This is more akin to if unions had the govn't not letting ANYONE exept for union workers do a specific job.
The Weaver one (If a weaver wants to try out a new pattern then need a large commity to ok it) is also not related to the **AA's tactics.
These are all about stiffiling creativity or competition, and the **AA WANTS you to be creative, why? So that they can sign you up, steal your work, and then charge you for the privledge.
I admit I am curious what the packs on steam are going to be like. I know I am not going to buy a boxed copy, but instead I will preorder from steam (you tend to be able to get a few bucks off for preordering through steam). Admitdely I doubt you will be able to buy portal by itself (atleast not for a while).
And if you want to play with the mechanics behind portal, go download the game it is based on Narbacular Drop
Bitter, who said I was bitter? Reread my post, I thought it was GREAT!
And no, I didn't actualy download any of the torrents (real or fake), I am to much of a fanboy to want to pirate their stuff (kinda pathetic aint it?). I only know about the fake torrents because I spend to much time on HL community websites.
As the above posters have all said. There are work arounds for just about anythign you want.
That includes steam.
first up, once you have installed a Steam game you can tell it to make a backup, from wich you can install and play. If you do not want steam to update yourgames you can either tell steam to run in offline mode, or just tell it to not update games.
There are also cracks out there that will let you install and play w/o connecting to Steam, so once Valve goes belly up (or stops supportign their old games), and you didn't make a backup, you just nab the crack from yuor friendly repository of such illicit things.
Ye gods that sucks!
EP1 is no where near $40 (though I would say that it is still a better deal then some other games I shelled out that kinda cash for...). Can you buy the game via the Steam Store for the US amount ($20)? Hell, at that price I would have a friend buy a box stateside and just send me the CD Key.
.....
People who make puns like that should be shot.
And if you didn't realize that you were making a pun then you should be shot anyway.
as a valve fanboy, I call BS on the theft actualy causing any delays. Also, when ever I tihnk abotu that entire thing, I always laugh at the peopel that tried to download the 15GB torrents of the "HL2 Code" that ended up being hardcore gay porn, the person who put that up is a genious.
Sorry, but fanboy geek poweres let me follow these thing very closely.
TF2, as it was to be was fully scraped a long time ago.
TF2 as it is today is a relatively recent rebirth. a few searches on any of the video websites should give you a bit of gameplay footage.
EP2 was slated for 4th quarter release ('06), however whith Portal and TF2 getting packed in it got delayed (that and the fact that all Valve games get delayed, it is the nature of life). so we actualy DID hit the delay already, and we are now looking at the standard delay creep (where they do not ever give a even slightly hard date, until about a month before, when the game is already good to go). And with this I am realatively sure that we will see it shortly after the end of summer (late summer seems to real to me, so shortly after the end of summer is probably a better bet).
On the note of the Death of TF2. TF2 was originaly slated to be a HL1 game, and it actualy got near compleation, however it very quietly died, and my guess is that was about the time that serious work on HL2 started up, and they decided that TF2 would be a Source game.
yup, Fanboy Geek Powers let me be etaernaly optomistic!
(ye gods, I WANT PORTAL, for those of yuo who don't know why we are all spaztastic about it, do a quick search for the portal videos, and then go download Narbacular Drop from Neuclear Monkey Software)
shhhhh
no picking on the Valve fanboys...
Wait, I am a valve fanboy, crap! Time to go cry in the corner some more.
In all honesty, I think we already hit the delay, and now we are just waiting for the final release. We will probably hear more precise rumours as the date goes by, then we will hear the giant WHOOOSH as they go flying by, and eventualy we will have out precious HL2:EP2, TF2, and Portal (time to wipe up the drool again), at the very, very end of summer.
I can't wait!
(now all I have to figgure out is why fanboys like me insist on tortouring our selfs...)
shutting
shutting down....
yah, I should use preview more often.
they were better then TPB because they Indexed TPB's trackers as well as all other public trackers.
And THAT is the interesting (and worying) part. They don't even host trackers (last I checked), they just index other trackers! It is kinda like shitting down google because you can find torrents ussing their search engine.
Example: Need For Speed search
You have no idea howmuch I would love to see an SR MMO.
Or even just a CRPG SR (bassed faithfuly off of the books), prefferably with the ability to heavily modify it, and run games simmilar to NWN online. I would rather see somethign like that then a sequal to the SR games for SNES/Gen. However that is probably all because I just love the PNP SR.
I admit, I am not familiar enough with RSS. However this is a 2.3KB file that is not supposed to change. Why would developers NOT hardcode it into their RSS tools?
No one has brought it up, but my favorite game on that list is probably Giants: Citizen Kabuto. The game play was exelent, each storyline having a very original play style (that counts ALOT to me), the commedy from the natives as well as other friendlys and baddies also made everything always worth checkign out.
If a sequal to Giants came out I would be a very happy camper.
Dosbox WILL get tyrian upand runnign on win2K *I can't say anythign for other OSes), and it really is not that hard.
:D
And yah, Tyrian is awsome. Admitedly I think I spent more time blowing up my friends with the tank game (destruct) that was also included
That and a sever lack of SHODAN.
Afterall, psychotic female AIs are obviously awsome.
And yah, SS3 was one of the main ones I was sad they didn't list. I know Bioshock is comming out, and I am eagerly awaiting it. However the change of setting is kinda sad (I loved the universe they had created for the SS games). Hopefuly their baddies will be as awsome as The Many, and more hacking/weapon tinkering/body tinkering and other such wonderful customization options.
well, true, the 10 closest stores do not have it. However if you are willing to make a 2hr (1hr 48min by google maps) drive you can go pick one up. Or you can just have one shipped to your house.
Wow, I admit I havn't been following the PS3 games that closely (not interested in em), so I didn't know the news was that bad! I seriously thought those titles were slated for release this year.
Ah well, as I said, I don't REALLY care that much about the PS3 one way or another. I gues I might like it to tank, so I can pick up a 360 next generation and play ALL the games I skiped this generation.
yes, dead/unconcious bodies have been a player in stealth actions games (Thief, MGS, etc) for a little while now. However these games you rarely had a large number of badies in any one area.
In action games the bodies did have to be quickly removed so that you could make room for the new baddies. recently we have started to see bodies being left about, however I have yet to see MUCH of a point to it. Yah, it is a nice idea for realizim, however in most casses it does not add much realisim (rarely to the bodies interact with the environment), and often they are only good for removing you from the game, in the case of ragdolls where they will controt in ways no human body ever could, even if you liquified the bones. Admitedly this is also wonderfuly amusing (hey, playing with explosives and bodies is ALWAYS fun!)
So yah, they are there, but so what? I have yet to see an instance where they really added much to the game (asside from GPU cycles, and the mentioned stealth games). I can't really see any way of ussing persistand corpses as anything more then a gimick. But then again I am not a game making genious, and thus they probably will be somethign eventualy.
heh, It is nice to see some of our friends in the UK still have a sense of humour. Actualy gettign a console at or around release?
hahaha, I laugh!
Gettign games at or around launch?
hahaha, I laugh!
(please ignore that the Wii was released around the world with in a few weeks, and that those damn dirty apes in the UK already have Wii Play, where us poor slobs in the USA still don't)
True, OcR is awsome, however most of their stuff is NOT waht is being talked about in TFA. People who have no interest in midi music files will likely also be uninterested in techno/rock remixes of them.
You did mention the best one if you want to get people interested in them, and that is probably Relics of the Chozo, the full album based on Metroid music. It is absoloutly beautiful.
I admit I havn't poked around much at OCR recently (I really should), and there are probably soem new stunners like Relics out there now.
The article is about somethign I had not previously known about. Full symphany productions with only video game music. Sure I have seen the ocasional joke where everyone launches in to the SMB theme, but rarely anything else. And yah, SMB by a symphony is fun, but it isn't really that interesting to non-gamers, where as a live performance of alot of the RPG titles WOULD be interesting.
I seriusly need to get some tickets to one of these performances.