Fair enough.
But you should take it under advisement that Google+ is owned by Google, which has your Google account. And if you misbehave on Google+, Google can and will delete your Google account.
Think about all the things you have on your Google account.
I advise against being stupid on Google+. And if you're not willing to risk it, stick to Facebook.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Flying Car!
Ever since the year 2000 hit, you've probably been wondering where the hell is your flying car.
Here it is. The Terrafugia Transition Roadable Aircraft, cleared for highway use on June 30 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In order to get there, they had to give it some exemptions from regulations other cars have to follow- a lighter windshield, aircraft tires, and the FAA had to give it a weight exemption allowing it to fly 110 pounds heavier than other planes in the 'light sport aircraft' category into which it has been placed.
It's not going to be the greatest car in the world. It's only got 100 horsepower. It will only do 65 MPH on the road and 115 MPH in the air. You'll need 1,700 feet of road in order to take off, plus room to fold out the wings, which will take 30 seconds to do. But hey. Flying car. You wanted a flying car, here's a flying car.
If all goes well, it will be available at the end of 2012 and will run you a mere quarter-million dollars.
Meanwhile, Urban Aeronautics out of Israel is trying to develop a flying car of their own, called the AirMule. It's not ready yet- steering and stability are still kinks that have to be ironed out- but not only do they plan to make it fly, they want to add robot arms to it as well. That, however, is going to keep it off the showroom floor; the robot arms are intended for inspection and maintenance- power lines, bridges, things like that. You won't get to have new and amusing ways to cut off some guy in traffic.
And also, they don't intend to make it a manned vehicle. It's to be operated remotely. Which is a total buzzkill.
You can't get too down, though. One flying car is plenty to be giddy over.
Here it is. The Terrafugia Transition Roadable Aircraft, cleared for highway use on June 30 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In order to get there, they had to give it some exemptions from regulations other cars have to follow- a lighter windshield, aircraft tires, and the FAA had to give it a weight exemption allowing it to fly 110 pounds heavier than other planes in the 'light sport aircraft' category into which it has been placed.
It's not going to be the greatest car in the world. It's only got 100 horsepower. It will only do 65 MPH on the road and 115 MPH in the air. You'll need 1,700 feet of road in order to take off, plus room to fold out the wings, which will take 30 seconds to do. But hey. Flying car. You wanted a flying car, here's a flying car.
If all goes well, it will be available at the end of 2012 and will run you a mere quarter-million dollars.
Meanwhile, Urban Aeronautics out of Israel is trying to develop a flying car of their own, called the AirMule. It's not ready yet- steering and stability are still kinks that have to be ironed out- but not only do they plan to make it fly, they want to add robot arms to it as well. That, however, is going to keep it off the showroom floor; the robot arms are intended for inspection and maintenance- power lines, bridges, things like that. You won't get to have new and amusing ways to cut off some guy in traffic.
And also, they don't intend to make it a manned vehicle. It's to be operated remotely. Which is a total buzzkill.
You can't get too down, though. One flying car is plenty to be giddy over.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Glorious Computers For The People
Yesterday, a report came out that North Korea was going to make three models of computers available for office and home use. Gizmodo, among others, carries some of the details about what North Korean state TV reported. Because it's coming out of North Korea, it's probably best if we skip what they claim- somehow, I doubt learning foreign languages is going to actually be a feature.
It fell to Business Insider to point out the obvious: 'You people are getting your information from North Korean state television? What in blazes is wrong with you morons?' They allow that North Korea might be buying some computers on the cheap from elsewhere and slapping their own label on them, but they're not building their own. (Their assertion that "nobody in North Korea believed that report", though, is woefully underestimating of the sheer level of brainwashing that goes on there.)
Why give the people computers? It's speculation, of course- with North Korea it usually has to be- but maybe they figure that if they supply their own heavily-monitored computers, people might stop trying to bring in cell phones and such from outside. 'Look! We have technology! Why would you want anyone else's?' (Not that it'll actually stop the people who are bringing them in in the first place.)
The Gizmodo readers quickly identified one of the computers in question as a Sylvania laptop running Windows CE, a computer normally available here for $99; one reader pegged the version as 3.1. The fact that it's a laptop makes things interesting, because laptops are portable. More to the point, laptops are smuggle-able. All it's going to take is one refugee that manages to get over the border somehow with a laptop (we'll just leave it at "somehow"), and that laptop could easily find itself in the hands of a Western hacker. Assuming the hacker can bring the hideously-underpowered computer to heel, things would get very interesting from there.
It fell to Business Insider to point out the obvious: 'You people are getting your information from North Korean state television? What in blazes is wrong with you morons?' They allow that North Korea might be buying some computers on the cheap from elsewhere and slapping their own label on them, but they're not building their own. (Their assertion that "nobody in North Korea believed that report", though, is woefully underestimating of the sheer level of brainwashing that goes on there.)
Why give the people computers? It's speculation, of course- with North Korea it usually has to be- but maybe they figure that if they supply their own heavily-monitored computers, people might stop trying to bring in cell phones and such from outside. 'Look! We have technology! Why would you want anyone else's?' (Not that it'll actually stop the people who are bringing them in in the first place.)
The Gizmodo readers quickly identified one of the computers in question as a Sylvania laptop running Windows CE, a computer normally available here for $99; one reader pegged the version as 3.1. The fact that it's a laptop makes things interesting, because laptops are portable. More to the point, laptops are smuggle-able. All it's going to take is one refugee that manages to get over the border somehow with a laptop (we'll just leave it at "somehow"), and that laptop could easily find itself in the hands of a Western hacker. Assuming the hacker can bring the hideously-underpowered computer to heel, things would get very interesting from there.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Do Not Let This Man Near Your Smartphone
So let's recap where we stand on the upgrade-ancient-computer front...
THE INTENT: Buy a webcam. Also, buy computer- as it turns out, an HP carrying 4 GB of RAM- to replace the current computer carrying 256 MB.
THE REALITY:
Hoo boy.
Buy webcam, buy computer. Have brother install computer because I know not what the hell I'm doing. Things go semi-smoothly right up to the point I install the brand-new webcam which should now easily run on the literally-just-out-of-the-box computer. A restart is required to complete installation. I restart. The webcam works fine- though it turns out my voice, long thought to be at about the pitch of Local Newscaster, is actually about at the pitch of Star Wars Basement Dork- and also the Internet no longer connects. Call to Charter tech support ensues. Call ends when, instructed to disconnect the router, I discover that the very first plug out of the router was for the phone I was currently using. Call to HP tech support ensues. An hour and 26 minutes later, I have reformatted my just-out-of-the-box computer and am now stuck at a screen where I'm asked the name and password the computer is registered under. This information has been lost to the mists of time as the person who supplied it has since moved to Colorado and changed his phone number. Many blind guesses ensue. Shockingly, none of them work. A SECOND call to Charter ensues, in which we start by asking for the password. They don't have that. After long-winded bouts of frustrated babbling, I hand the computer off to a member of the family that can sort of speak Tech Supportese. Bouts of alchemy later, a guy is scheduled to come over on Monday, and until then I will have essentially swapped my old, fuddy-duddy 256 MB computer for a spanking-new, freshly reformatted 0 MB computer.
In the meantime, I attempted to throw a pizza in the oven for lunch. By the time I was roused from computer malinstallation long enough to remove the pizza, it had turned roughly the color of Selena Gomez's hair and could be turned upside down without losing its shape or any ingredients. Potential use as a Frisbee was considered.
In the meantime, here are people with brains.
THE INTENT: Buy a webcam. Also, buy computer- as it turns out, an HP carrying 4 GB of RAM- to replace the current computer carrying 256 MB.
THE REALITY:
Hoo boy.
Buy webcam, buy computer. Have brother install computer because I know not what the hell I'm doing. Things go semi-smoothly right up to the point I install the brand-new webcam which should now easily run on the literally-just-out-of-the-box computer. A restart is required to complete installation. I restart. The webcam works fine- though it turns out my voice, long thought to be at about the pitch of Local Newscaster, is actually about at the pitch of Star Wars Basement Dork- and also the Internet no longer connects. Call to Charter tech support ensues. Call ends when, instructed to disconnect the router, I discover that the very first plug out of the router was for the phone I was currently using. Call to HP tech support ensues. An hour and 26 minutes later, I have reformatted my just-out-of-the-box computer and am now stuck at a screen where I'm asked the name and password the computer is registered under. This information has been lost to the mists of time as the person who supplied it has since moved to Colorado and changed his phone number. Many blind guesses ensue. Shockingly, none of them work. A SECOND call to Charter ensues, in which we start by asking for the password. They don't have that. After long-winded bouts of frustrated babbling, I hand the computer off to a member of the family that can sort of speak Tech Supportese. Bouts of alchemy later, a guy is scheduled to come over on Monday, and until then I will have essentially swapped my old, fuddy-duddy 256 MB computer for a spanking-new, freshly reformatted 0 MB computer.
In the meantime, I attempted to throw a pizza in the oven for lunch. By the time I was roused from computer malinstallation long enough to remove the pizza, it had turned roughly the color of Selena Gomez's hair and could be turned upside down without losing its shape or any ingredients. Potential use as a Frisbee was considered.
In the meantime, here are people with brains.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Or Perhaps Not!
Apparently, completing installation requires 256 MB of RAM. Apparently, I don't have that at the moment.
Fly-by-night operation around here, folks.
Fly-by-night operation around here, folks.
Words! In Verbal Form!
I have come into possession, via a method known in mysterious circles as "purchasing", of a webcam. Specifically, a Logitech HD Webcam C310H. I got it for the purpose of making the occasional post by, well, webcam. Pop it here, pop it up on Youtube, see what comes of it. As a plus, you'll get to see my beautiful visage.
You'll also see my face. Not quite as nice as the visage, but you work with what you got.
Just one issue: my experience with webcams or any sort of video recording is precisely squat. No clue what I'm doing whatsoever. (That's another reason for getting it; to get some experience doing video stuff.) So at least at the start, expect the video entries (I refuse to use the word 'vlog' because it is the worst word ever) to be pretty technically rough, at least at first.
In fact, what I'm most likely to do is make the first entry a reprint of an earlier entry, basically a 'best of', as most of my energy is going to be placed into learning what exactly it is I need to do to make sure I don't do anything that will land me a Tosh.0 web redemption. Once that's covered, we'll get into making new pieces for video, maybe the odd further 'best of' if I feel like it. For now, though, baby steps.
So just a heads-up on that.
You'll also see my face. Not quite as nice as the visage, but you work with what you got.
Just one issue: my experience with webcams or any sort of video recording is precisely squat. No clue what I'm doing whatsoever. (That's another reason for getting it; to get some experience doing video stuff.) So at least at the start, expect the video entries (I refuse to use the word 'vlog' because it is the worst word ever) to be pretty technically rough, at least at first.
In fact, what I'm most likely to do is make the first entry a reprint of an earlier entry, basically a 'best of', as most of my energy is going to be placed into learning what exactly it is I need to do to make sure I don't do anything that will land me a Tosh.0 web redemption. Once that's covered, we'll get into making new pieces for video, maybe the odd further 'best of' if I feel like it. For now, though, baby steps.
So just a heads-up on that.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Are You Using Internet Explorer 6?
If you are, please stop. That browser is a decade old now and Microsoft, not to mention a whole lot of website developers, would love nothing more than to see people stop using it so they can stop having to support it in their designs, thus saving themselves a whole lot of work.
Right now, Microsoft is showing 12% of the world as still using IE 6. They'd like to get that number under 1%. China by far is the biggest offender, with over a third of users there still on IE 6. Asia as a continent is causing most of the problems, so if you're here from Asia, this may well concern you. Norway and Finland, you're already under 1%; good for you.
If you want to keep using Internet Explorer as a browser, the most recent version is IE 9. Here's where you can download it, though you need to be using Windows 7 or Vista first. If you aren't, here's IE 8.
Right now, Microsoft is showing 12% of the world as still using IE 6. They'd like to get that number under 1%. China by far is the biggest offender, with over a third of users there still on IE 6. Asia as a continent is causing most of the problems, so if you're here from Asia, this may well concern you. Norway and Finland, you're already under 1%; good for you.
If you want to keep using Internet Explorer as a browser, the most recent version is IE 9. Here's where you can download it, though you need to be using Windows 7 or Vista first. If you aren't, here's IE 8.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
We Must Destroy Humanity In Order To Save It
You might have heard that Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, is having its way with Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The first two days of the three-day competition ran through one complete game. In that game, Watson racked up $35,734, as opposed to Rutter's $10,400 and Jennings' $4,800. Today, Day 3, will feature a second and final match.
What you might not know is where the money won in the game is ultimately going. Watson, of course, has no use for such human things as money. Perhaps it may know that 'making it rain' doesn't necessarily mean producing liquid water precipitation, but it can't actually perform the act. Therefore, everyone's playing for charity: Rutter and Jennings pledging half their winnings, IBM pledging all of theirs. The winner will get $1 million, second place $300,000, and third place $200,000.
So what charities are getting that money?
Rutter will be donating to the Lancaster County Community Foundation in Pennsylvania, which hands out grants to a variety of projects across the county.
Jennings will be donating to VillageReach. They work to provide healthcare to remote communities in developing nations, as well as improve access to these communities (so as to make it easier to provide healthcare access), with a home office in Seattle and field offices in Mozambique and Malawi. They've been ranked #1 in international charities by reviewer GiveWell, and would almost certainly beat out the top-rated domestic charity as well.
Half of Watson's winnings will be going to World Vision, a general-purpose organization in developing nations, providing emergency relief, building up communities, and so forth. They also advertise a child-sponsorship program, but that aspect came into question when, in 2008, Andrew Geoghegan of Foreign Correspondent, a program on Australia's ABC, visited his sponsor child, Tsehaynesh Delago of Ethiopia, and found that, despite that World Vision had claimed, Delago spoke no English and had only recieved as direct support a pen and a denim jacket.
The other half of Watson's winnings is going to my favorite of the four, World Community Grid. They host a number of large-scale research projects, and ask anyone that happens by to donate their computer downtime. When your computer enters sleep mode, it is then given a small chunk of a research project to work on, and will stop when you start using your computer again for your own selfish, greedy, self-serving purposes. Among the most notable of these projects is Folding@Home, which, if you own a Playstation 3, you might already be familiar with.
If you've got any downtime on hand, you can head over right now, pick out a favorite project- AIDS, cancer, clean water, clean energy, muscular dystrophy, dengue fever- and hook your computer up. Doesn't cost a dime; it's like installing a screensaver.
If none of those projects looks good to you, there's another place, BOINC, that offers up another batch to pick from.
What you might not know is where the money won in the game is ultimately going. Watson, of course, has no use for such human things as money. Perhaps it may know that 'making it rain' doesn't necessarily mean producing liquid water precipitation, but it can't actually perform the act. Therefore, everyone's playing for charity: Rutter and Jennings pledging half their winnings, IBM pledging all of theirs. The winner will get $1 million, second place $300,000, and third place $200,000.
So what charities are getting that money?
Rutter will be donating to the Lancaster County Community Foundation in Pennsylvania, which hands out grants to a variety of projects across the county.
Jennings will be donating to VillageReach. They work to provide healthcare to remote communities in developing nations, as well as improve access to these communities (so as to make it easier to provide healthcare access), with a home office in Seattle and field offices in Mozambique and Malawi. They've been ranked #1 in international charities by reviewer GiveWell, and would almost certainly beat out the top-rated domestic charity as well.
Half of Watson's winnings will be going to World Vision, a general-purpose organization in developing nations, providing emergency relief, building up communities, and so forth. They also advertise a child-sponsorship program, but that aspect came into question when, in 2008, Andrew Geoghegan of Foreign Correspondent, a program on Australia's ABC, visited his sponsor child, Tsehaynesh Delago of Ethiopia, and found that, despite that World Vision had claimed, Delago spoke no English and had only recieved as direct support a pen and a denim jacket.
The other half of Watson's winnings is going to my favorite of the four, World Community Grid. They host a number of large-scale research projects, and ask anyone that happens by to donate their computer downtime. When your computer enters sleep mode, it is then given a small chunk of a research project to work on, and will stop when you start using your computer again for your own selfish, greedy, self-serving purposes. Among the most notable of these projects is Folding@Home, which, if you own a Playstation 3, you might already be familiar with.
If you've got any downtime on hand, you can head over right now, pick out a favorite project- AIDS, cancer, clean water, clean energy, muscular dystrophy, dengue fever- and hook your computer up. Doesn't cost a dime; it's like installing a screensaver.
If none of those projects looks good to you, there's another place, BOINC, that offers up another batch to pick from.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Where Is John Connor? I Require His Genetic Information
A study conducted by the University of Southern California in 2007 attempted to calculate just how much information storage existed in the world at the time. This was done via adding up the information stored on 60 digital and analog media- books, newspapers, computer hard drives, smartphones, magazines, USB drives, CD's, videocassettes, credit card microchips, vinyl long-play records, etc. That study was just released... well, sort of; the full paper is still under embargo at USC.
The amount, as of 2007, turned out to be 295 exabytes of data, only 6% of which was analog. (Not that analog is going away; over the course of the study, which looked at the period since 1986, paper-based capacity, for example, went from 8.7 to 19.4 petabytes.) How big is that? As CNET puts it, "An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is about what you'd get in a desktop PC hard drive these days." So about 295 million current desktop PC's... as of 2007. Another statistic showed that storage capacity was growing by 23% per year.
Some other numbers:
*Broadcast information in 2007 amounted to 1.9 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.
*To do, by hand, all the computing that the world's general-purpose computers do in one second would take you from here to the Big Bang. 2,200 times over.
*Every day, if you're average, you take in the equivalent of 174 newspapers, and spit out six back.
*Digital capacity overtook analog in 2002.
*All of the stored information amounts to under 1% of the information stored in a single human being's DNA. Of course, given the previous statistic, you shouldn't get too smug about it. Plus, you and the world aren't adding very much information on a net basis. That remains something of a constant. The computers are gaining ground, and momentum, every day.
The man who led the study, Martin Hilbert, shows some rather esoteric statistics involving homing pigeons and grains of sand, but you get the idea.
The next question that Hilbert wants to look at: how much of this information is actually of use. "What's the value of watching a silly cat video versus reading an overpriced book?"
The amount, as of 2007, turned out to be 295 exabytes of data, only 6% of which was analog. (Not that analog is going away; over the course of the study, which looked at the period since 1986, paper-based capacity, for example, went from 8.7 to 19.4 petabytes.) How big is that? As CNET puts it, "An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is about what you'd get in a desktop PC hard drive these days." So about 295 million current desktop PC's... as of 2007. Another statistic showed that storage capacity was growing by 23% per year.
Some other numbers:
*Broadcast information in 2007 amounted to 1.9 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.
*To do, by hand, all the computing that the world's general-purpose computers do in one second would take you from here to the Big Bang. 2,200 times over.
*Every day, if you're average, you take in the equivalent of 174 newspapers, and spit out six back.
*Digital capacity overtook analog in 2002.
*All of the stored information amounts to under 1% of the information stored in a single human being's DNA. Of course, given the previous statistic, you shouldn't get too smug about it. Plus, you and the world aren't adding very much information on a net basis. That remains something of a constant. The computers are gaining ground, and momentum, every day.
The man who led the study, Martin Hilbert, shows some rather esoteric statistics involving homing pigeons and grains of sand, but you get the idea.
The next question that Hilbert wants to look at: how much of this information is actually of use. "What's the value of watching a silly cat video versus reading an overpriced book?"
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Duke Nukem Forever Releases On May 3
If you're not a gamer, it is almost impossible to express the significance of this news in the videogame world. But let us try.
The average lifespan of a videogame console is roughly five years. In this time, oountless games are developed for these consoles, most in far less time. Sports games, for example, are commonly on an annual development cycle. Developers experiment with the new hardware, come up with ways to use the hardware, push it to its limits, and eventually find those limits, all within those five years, through the development of game after game after game. If a game actually takes five years to develop, it's seen as a torturously slow process, usually rife with speculation on whether the game will be made at all.
Duke Nukem Forever's development cycle is 13 years. It was first announced in 1997. That means that, over the course of its development, it has had to technologically revamp itself completely, twice, to account for two new console generations, as well as 13 years of advancement in personal computers. It is getting cheered not for the content of the game (about as raunchy and violent as you'd expect a product with roots firmly in the 90's to be), or through any belief that the game will be good. There's been next to no discussion of that. It is getting cheered simply for being a completed product that will be available in stores. It's like a last-place finisher at a marathon who got beat by a bunch of people that decided on a whim to run the route three hours after it started.
In Duke Nukem Forever's case, the marathoner was found laying drunk on the curbside at the 18-mile mark, loaded into a taxi, and driven to the finish line. Original publisher 3D Realms originally planned to release it in the summer of 1998, and then spent the next decade-plus goofing off and having Nerf gun battles. Occasionally, every few years, the slightest, smallest, most pathetically puny piece of content would be released to the public that only served to underscore just how little was actually going on and provide even more comedy fodder.
In September 2010, 3D Realms ceased to exist. Another developer, Gearbox, took over the license and, unlike 3D Realms, decided they'd actually like to ship a product. On May 3, fingers crossed, we'll finally have one.
The average lifespan of a videogame console is roughly five years. In this time, oountless games are developed for these consoles, most in far less time. Sports games, for example, are commonly on an annual development cycle. Developers experiment with the new hardware, come up with ways to use the hardware, push it to its limits, and eventually find those limits, all within those five years, through the development of game after game after game. If a game actually takes five years to develop, it's seen as a torturously slow process, usually rife with speculation on whether the game will be made at all.
Duke Nukem Forever's development cycle is 13 years. It was first announced in 1997. That means that, over the course of its development, it has had to technologically revamp itself completely, twice, to account for two new console generations, as well as 13 years of advancement in personal computers. It is getting cheered not for the content of the game (about as raunchy and violent as you'd expect a product with roots firmly in the 90's to be), or through any belief that the game will be good. There's been next to no discussion of that. It is getting cheered simply for being a completed product that will be available in stores. It's like a last-place finisher at a marathon who got beat by a bunch of people that decided on a whim to run the route three hours after it started.
In Duke Nukem Forever's case, the marathoner was found laying drunk on the curbside at the 18-mile mark, loaded into a taxi, and driven to the finish line. Original publisher 3D Realms originally planned to release it in the summer of 1998, and then spent the next decade-plus goofing off and having Nerf gun battles. Occasionally, every few years, the slightest, smallest, most pathetically puny piece of content would be released to the public that only served to underscore just how little was actually going on and provide even more comedy fodder.
In September 2010, 3D Realms ceased to exist. Another developer, Gearbox, took over the license and, unlike 3D Realms, decided they'd actually like to ship a product. On May 3, fingers crossed, we'll finally have one.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Yaaarrrrr!
I am a lifelong gamer. I've been playing video games dating back to the Atari 2600- games like Combat, Bowling, Baseball, Kaboom!.
So why haven't I done a pure videogame piece since I started the blog back in February?
Specifically, let's do the topic of copy protection. As you know, modern games are encoded in pretty sophisticated manners. If you've got an inauthentic copy, the game simply won't run.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. In reality, pirated copies of any game worth playing are still floating around out there. Someone dedicated enough and with enough skill and time on their hands will- WILL- eventually pull it off; the aim is largely to slow them down long enough for it not to be worth the trouble. But before the advent of 'game won't run' protection, game developers had to come up with a variety of other methods of thwarting pirates.
These are people that came up with plumbers growing by eating mushrooms and shooting fireballs from flowers in order to save princesses from giant turtles. They have been rather creative over the years, and they do still revel in pirate frustration to this day.
*Old Carmen Sandiego games would come bundled with a copy of that year's World Almanac or, alternatively, a Fodor's guide. In order to advance in the game, every so often the game would ask you to copy some text out of the almanac provided. The intention was to get kids interested in using almanacs. In practice, hope you kept the almanac and didn't update it to a newer year with newer text, because if you did, you're screwed.
This was a very common tactic: allowing a pirate to play PART of the game, then stopping them cold at some point along the way.
*Startropics for the NES, at one point, asked you to dip a map in some water to reveal a code. The map came with the manual... which caused some problems if you didn't get a manual with the game. (This was remedied when Startropics was released for the Wii Virtual Console; the whole thing is placed in the game itself.)
*In Chrono Trigger, for the SNES and later DS, you are asked at many times during the game to travel in time. This requires entering a time vortex. If you are playing a legitimate copy, the game will let you back out of the vortex. (The DS pirates cracked this within hours, so quickly that it prompted a fan club to give out 3,000 copies of the game soundtrack- widely thought of as one of the best game soundtracks of all time- out to actual customers, two of which were autographed by the composer.)
*Starflight I and II, space-exploration RPG's, asked you to input a value based on some code words given to you any time you wanted to leave base. Screw the code up once, it'll ask you to try again. Screw the code up twice, and you'll get to leave base, but six game days later, the Space Police will arrive and accuse you of software theft. (Game developers will often call players out directly about this sort of thing, in the game itself. They kind of have to, lest rumors spread about 'random' crashes and bugs that lower the reputation of legitimate copies and depress sales.) Screw the code up a third time, and the police blow you up.
*King's Quest IV does this.
*Some recent games, starting with Operation Flashpoint, use a system called FADE, in which when piracy is detected, the quality of gameplay slowly degrades over time. Here's FADE doing its job on ARMA 2.
*At one point in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman needs to glide with his cape. If you have pirated the game, you will find this to be quite impossible. When one gamer showed up in the game's official forums to ask about it, first he was outed as a pirate by another forumer- the game was only released in demo mode, and the pirate asked about a room full of poison gas which the demo did not contain- and then the administrator popped up to state:
"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.
It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
*Earthbound for the SNES was the most brutal of all. When the game detected pirating- and sometimes it would detect it on legitimate cartridges that had simply been worn down from excessive play- it would take three levels of copy protection. First it would spawn a whole lot more enemies than usual. Second, it would make those enemies much tougher than usual. And just in case some player decided to regard this as a challenge and press on, third, not only would the game would freeze during the final boss fight, but when the player reset, they would find all their save files had been deleted.
The link for Earthbond provides a code in case you have an emulator or Game Genie and wish to try it out yourself. Why you would do such a thing is your business.
So why haven't I done a pure videogame piece since I started the blog back in February?
Specifically, let's do the topic of copy protection. As you know, modern games are encoded in pretty sophisticated manners. If you've got an inauthentic copy, the game simply won't run.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. In reality, pirated copies of any game worth playing are still floating around out there. Someone dedicated enough and with enough skill and time on their hands will- WILL- eventually pull it off; the aim is largely to slow them down long enough for it not to be worth the trouble. But before the advent of 'game won't run' protection, game developers had to come up with a variety of other methods of thwarting pirates.
These are people that came up with plumbers growing by eating mushrooms and shooting fireballs from flowers in order to save princesses from giant turtles. They have been rather creative over the years, and they do still revel in pirate frustration to this day.
*Old Carmen Sandiego games would come bundled with a copy of that year's World Almanac or, alternatively, a Fodor's guide. In order to advance in the game, every so often the game would ask you to copy some text out of the almanac provided. The intention was to get kids interested in using almanacs. In practice, hope you kept the almanac and didn't update it to a newer year with newer text, because if you did, you're screwed.
This was a very common tactic: allowing a pirate to play PART of the game, then stopping them cold at some point along the way.
*Startropics for the NES, at one point, asked you to dip a map in some water to reveal a code. The map came with the manual... which caused some problems if you didn't get a manual with the game. (This was remedied when Startropics was released for the Wii Virtual Console; the whole thing is placed in the game itself.)
*In Chrono Trigger, for the SNES and later DS, you are asked at many times during the game to travel in time. This requires entering a time vortex. If you are playing a legitimate copy, the game will let you back out of the vortex. (The DS pirates cracked this within hours, so quickly that it prompted a fan club to give out 3,000 copies of the game soundtrack- widely thought of as one of the best game soundtracks of all time- out to actual customers, two of which were autographed by the composer.)
*Starflight I and II, space-exploration RPG's, asked you to input a value based on some code words given to you any time you wanted to leave base. Screw the code up once, it'll ask you to try again. Screw the code up twice, and you'll get to leave base, but six game days later, the Space Police will arrive and accuse you of software theft. (Game developers will often call players out directly about this sort of thing, in the game itself. They kind of have to, lest rumors spread about 'random' crashes and bugs that lower the reputation of legitimate copies and depress sales.) Screw the code up a third time, and the police blow you up.
*King's Quest IV does this.
*Some recent games, starting with Operation Flashpoint, use a system called FADE, in which when piracy is detected, the quality of gameplay slowly degrades over time. Here's FADE doing its job on ARMA 2.
*At one point in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman needs to glide with his cape. If you have pirated the game, you will find this to be quite impossible. When one gamer showed up in the game's official forums to ask about it, first he was outed as a pirate by another forumer- the game was only released in demo mode, and the pirate asked about a room full of poison gas which the demo did not contain- and then the administrator popped up to state:
"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.
It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
*Earthbound for the SNES was the most brutal of all. When the game detected pirating- and sometimes it would detect it on legitimate cartridges that had simply been worn down from excessive play- it would take three levels of copy protection. First it would spawn a whole lot more enemies than usual. Second, it would make those enemies much tougher than usual. And just in case some player decided to regard this as a challenge and press on, third, not only would the game would freeze during the final boss fight, but when the player reset, they would find all their save files had been deleted.
The link for Earthbond provides a code in case you have an emulator or Game Genie and wish to try it out yourself. Why you would do such a thing is your business.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Random Alphabet Generator
Look down at your keyboard. Go on. I'll wait. You'll most likely see a format of letters going:
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM
It's completely random. There's a reason for that. C.L. Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, knew he didn't have a machine that could keep up with fast typers. In 1860's Milwaukee, you didn't have that kind of technology yet. Typewriters jam when people hit too many keys too fast. (We had a typewriter in my house during my childhood that nobody used. It was primarily used to see how many keys you could stick at once.) Sholes knew this; an earlier model had gone straight alphabetical, and had all manner of jams on his hands.
Thus, the QWERTY format was created for the sole purpose of jam prevention. If it slowed down typers, oh well. Jams slow them down more.
It's not the only attempt to arrange a keyboard, though.
In 1932, Auguat Dvorak of Washington State University made this letter layout:
PYFGCRL
AOEUIDHTNS
QJKXBMWVZ
It served two purposes: first, all the vowels are next to each other on the left side- so as to encourage a kind of cadence between vowels and consonants- and second, the middle row is king. The Dvorak board does about 70% of the work in the middle row, as opposed to 40% in the QWERTY board.
Another shot was taken with the Colemak board, again trying to maximize the middle row:
QWFPGJLUY
ARSTDHNEIO
ZXCVBKM
Many other attempts have been made, though mostly only swapping a few keys from the QWERTY format, or to accomodate some other language.
And- because jamming is no longer an issue- some places have made straight alphabetical keyboards. But neither they, nor any other English-language keyboard, is in wide use.
Why? The QWERTY board came in the 1860's. Dvorak, the major competitor, wasn't until 1932. That's 70 years or so of people getting used to QWERTY, which became the major issue with every subsequent keyboard. It's muscle memory. Ultimately, the exact order of the alphabet serves no functional purpose and isn't in the ABCDEFG order for any purpose even approaching rationality. You can put the letters in any random order you want and it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is whatever order people know and remember. If they remember ABCDEFG in one place and QWERTY in another place, so be it.
QWERTY, in fact, has an advantage on ABCDEFG: it used to have a point.
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM
It's completely random. There's a reason for that. C.L. Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, knew he didn't have a machine that could keep up with fast typers. In 1860's Milwaukee, you didn't have that kind of technology yet. Typewriters jam when people hit too many keys too fast. (We had a typewriter in my house during my childhood that nobody used. It was primarily used to see how many keys you could stick at once.) Sholes knew this; an earlier model had gone straight alphabetical, and had all manner of jams on his hands.
Thus, the QWERTY format was created for the sole purpose of jam prevention. If it slowed down typers, oh well. Jams slow them down more.
It's not the only attempt to arrange a keyboard, though.
In 1932, Auguat Dvorak of Washington State University made this letter layout:
PYFGCRL
AOEUIDHTNS
QJKXBMWVZ
It served two purposes: first, all the vowels are next to each other on the left side- so as to encourage a kind of cadence between vowels and consonants- and second, the middle row is king. The Dvorak board does about 70% of the work in the middle row, as opposed to 40% in the QWERTY board.
Another shot was taken with the Colemak board, again trying to maximize the middle row:
QWFPGJLUY
ARSTDHNEIO
ZXCVBKM
Many other attempts have been made, though mostly only swapping a few keys from the QWERTY format, or to accomodate some other language.
And- because jamming is no longer an issue- some places have made straight alphabetical keyboards. But neither they, nor any other English-language keyboard, is in wide use.
Why? The QWERTY board came in the 1860's. Dvorak, the major competitor, wasn't until 1932. That's 70 years or so of people getting used to QWERTY, which became the major issue with every subsequent keyboard. It's muscle memory. Ultimately, the exact order of the alphabet serves no functional purpose and isn't in the ABCDEFG order for any purpose even approaching rationality. You can put the letters in any random order you want and it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is whatever order people know and remember. If they remember ABCDEFG in one place and QWERTY in another place, so be it.
QWERTY, in fact, has an advantage on ABCDEFG: it used to have a point.
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