romland

Sucky or not, I guess one could argue that Photoshop is a somewhat successful tool, I'd say they are not pretending.

Me too. And yeah, you are most likely right (on both accounts). But I couldn't help but throw in the speculation. :)

Not sure why you were down modded. I'm pretty curious myself.

(fc.exe = filecompare)

Yeah, Ubisoft used a Reloaded crack for Rainbow 6: Vegas 2. :)

Rockstar not only used the crack

If I recall correctly Myth was not just a cracking group (as in ISO release), they did ripping as well. This basically means that you remove some content from the game (or by other means making the game smaller) in order to fit it into whatever space is the current standard.

Unfortunately I can't find a .NFO regarding the release that lists Myth as the cracker... But it makes me wonder if something was ripped here. :)

NB: Only searched here: http://www.nfohump.com/index.php?menu=quicknav&item=sear... -- enter Myth into "Group" field if you are curious about what else they were up to.

Edit This was Myth's farewell note: http://www.defacto2.net/groups/myth/mythbye.nfo which states that they did ripping:

     We believe that the rip scene is one of incredible skill. Not only 
     is there the cracking talent needed to be successful like that of ISO,
     you must have dedicated coders and rippers to fully complete the task. 
     Much time is needed to perfect a rip like that of Neverwinter Nights. 
     (We'll never forget you old friend)

A bit later on in that same paragraph they continue with saying "We see groups throw out games now with stolen cracks...". Now, who would have thought that Rockstar...

That said, I am not 100% convinced that this was actually a stolen crack. I'll wait for Rockstar to confirm or deny this (or if someone actually has the original release and does a full diff). I base this mainly on three things:

1) I could not find any release information stating Myth as the release group of MP2. This does not mean much, however. And it was just a quick search.

2) It could actually be a joke by Rockstar. I mean, imagine you sit there with the task to remove the copy protection of the game, you bounce it with your boss he laughs and nods and you throw in that Myth logo.

3) It's also not completely unlikely that the guy recompiling the game had some connection with Myth once upon a time. Back in the day (teenager, very long ago <sigh>) we were a bunch of people cracking games for the fun and the race and the majority of them actually went on to work in the gaming industry.

So, can anyone do a diff of the binaries? :)

How long before all tweets are in fact bogus links, you think?

This is the immediate thought one gets, I can guarantee you that Twitter considered this. It surprises me that parent was deemed insightful.

Should what parent suggests be announced I expect it would be in place for about six minutes (+/- 5) before we'd see the first Tweet with the actual message in the form of a URL.

  http://example.com/Hi_this_is_a_tweet ...

And as someone else stated, long messages are clearly against Twitter's concept/principles/idea/whatever.

The interesting part about this is that instead of URL shorteners we'd end up with domains that would just act as decoders of the link you clicked on. Good or bad, who knows.

And while we're at it, let's think of the next step: It wouldn't be long before someone implemented a packer/cruncher on these messages to be able to squeeze them into a 140 character limit so that it can fit into an SMS. Then we'd realize that this is a remarkably stupid thing to do and start sending un-shortened links to blog posts again. Profit!

What the heck, flag this. No need to drag more individuals into the gutter over this stupid gadget drama. :/

Neat! I hope we get to hear some details on this in the future! I was impressed with the video, can I ask what kind of machine the demo was recorded on? :)

Edit (on second thought): They are probably using canvas and not other trickery, then yeah, current versions of IE are pretty screwed.

Original post:

Since I am not involved in the project, I can't know for sure. But it is presented at a jQuery conference and, really, the main reason why anyone would use jQuery (or any similar intermediate layer written in JavaScript) is to get around cross-platform issues easily. That said, I'm pretty sure that at this stage it probably does not work in IE but I did not see any functionality in the video that suggests that it would not work in IE with a bit of effort put into it before launch.

It probably performs like a dog, though. :-)

On the flipside (and another cool project): FreeCiv (http://www.freeciv.net/) did not seem to be bothered with getting native IE functionality in place (it requires Chrome Frame).

It's been said before and it will be said again: It's impressive how JavaScript has gone all grown-up on us and what people are creating with it. This is really nifty, a lot of work has gone into it and they have obviously paid attention to detail. Small things like trees not appearing out of nowhere, but with a visual feedback in the form of bouncing when they land and such. I like small touches like that.

The last punch-line of the video with "but does it scale?" did not really impress me, though. I see roughly 30 clients and to be honest, sending off new position of your avatar and a chat of some 60 bytes + headers a couple of times per second does not say anything about scaling. Even if you pass over tiles and map to the clients on-demand.

A lot of work goes into the server in a game like this (more than most people think) due to the fact that you want the server to make all the decisions and calculations of what is going on in the world (to know state and to prevent cheating). Add to that verification of all data to see if what you just received from a client is reasonable.

I have always had a huge interest in multiplayer roleplaying games (massive or not), it goes back to before I started playing MUDs in the beginning/mid 90's. One thing these guys might want to investigate to use for the server-side code is a project called DGD (Dworkin's Generic Driver). It was originally written for MUDs, but its capabilities stretch way beyond that since a server really only serve bits and bytes (graphics not needed). It was always open-source but under a rather restrictive "not for commercial use" license, and there were few companies that could afford buying it. (edit: But it is since a few months back FOSS (AFL)).

The project: http://dgd-osr.sourceforge.net/

I'd love to see this project being used for something like this and I have been tempted beyond belief to start something like this myself.

I am not affiliated with the project in any way except that I've been writing LPC on and off for some 15 years. The project is not very good at selling itself, but rest assured that the codebase is very stable.

Warning to other clickers: It pegged a core and made browser (FF3.6) pretty unresponsive.

Nifty none the less.

I picked up the HTC Desire a few weeks back and I have never been happier with a phone, I would sincerely recommend it. It runs Android 2.1 out of the box.

http://www.htc.com/www/product/desire/overview.html

I have to say, though, it actually looks better in real than it does on the pictures, if looks is anything you care about. Not sure how HTC botched the pictures, can't really put my finger on it.

...and down it went (I did not mod you down, by the way :)

It's getting a bit boring to say it, but Google is not a search company. They provide search to sell ads (doesn't matter how they started out), so while I agree with the threat conclusion, I doubt Facebook will create the next general purpose search engine.

Oh wow. That made me laugh as it caught me a bit by surprise since I expected yet another security blog.

Nice find and nice tip, I must say. :)

So, in the same spirit...

Why nobody uses DNS: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/np.html#DNS

gasp Gimme my Amiga pointer!

One misbehaving iPad is enough to piss two people off.

On the competition page it does say

When do you think Opera Mini will be approved by Apple?

I read it as she was being sued for that amount, not that it was the annual fee. I'd guess the extra dollars would be administrative fees etc etc.

I have to side with Est, my intuition tells me that it is inverted. I can see why people would want to -say- that up should increase the number, but my initial reaction when landing on the page was that it was inverted.

Make it configurable if it isn't. :)

It scares me to think that I now days open, without blinking, some JPG that would eat up all the memory available in that poor Amiga.

But, ah...

  lea bbye,a0
  move.l (a0),$80
  trap #0
  rts

(to take it back on-topic)

Sigh, another iPad story?

Look, I really hate to go into some meta-crap here, but really, you are just looking silly now. You yourself even said in this very thread:

I knew that moisture could be a problem. I'd never heard of heat before.

I'm sure you'll now come up with some way of saying that a problem does not constitute a complaint, that moisture is a problem but heat isn't or that it's only a problem on the iPhone, not the iPad ...

I wasn't even saying that it was a problem in the first place, I was jumping at your comment that it could not possibly be seen as a negative thing.

Full disclosure: I have pre-ordered one (Europe).

Seems you're going strong, though! Hang in there! :)

fuel: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/04/03/ipad-sun-rethink/

Oh, please.

From your submission history I see that you like Apple... but not seeing that this could be seen as a negative thing is a bit over the top, don't you think?

or (5) Find prior art.

One thing to note, though: I'd be careful posting claims like this with an alias that can be traced back to you. Should you go ahead, you have now admitted that you knowingly infringed on the patent. Some claim that this is an issue of the past, some not. I am not a lawyer.

Glad to be of assistance. :)

It's on the "Todo Some Day" list to make my version of it talk SyncML which would enable it to synchronize with existing mobile apps out there. I never considered porting the UI, but maybe that's an idea, it is really suitable for cellphones.

Hmm...

I made a post about it some time ago on here, and at that point the poster asked for the opposite (not too simple).

You can find it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108498

I have since added a few minor details, but largely it's the same. I still feel a bit bad for ripping off their design, but heck, it was just up my alley. But in all honesty, it sounds like http://teuxdeux.com/ out of the box would be just your thing. Personally I wanted to be able to have it stored "locally" where I had full control.

And to answer your question: I use what is outlined above and it works really well for me. The only drawback, perhaps, is that my "To do Some day" list has gotten pretty big. Everything I can't do right now but find interesting, or every little idea end up in that container. Not sure if that's entirely bad, though.