11.29.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:02 am by
For those of you that might have been thinking about building your own arcade machine the process just got that much easier. There is now a PC interface kit to support all the buttons and joysticks you could want (or, at least 2 joysticks and 20 buttons).
With the X-Arcade™ Build Your Own Arcade Kit, you’ll be able to inject the classic, nostalgic arcade experience in your home instantly and effortlessly. Imagine having your own arcade machine setup in under an hour. (arcade wood not included) Just connect these electronics to your arcade machine joysticks/buttons or any electronic source for instant play!
Now if somebody offered pre-cut paneling and lexans, I’d be set. 
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11.27.04
Posted in forum archive at 3:24 pm by
Everyone’s favorite Napster replacement, long thought to be a bastion of spyware, this week was declared public enemy #1.
CA gave Kazaa a high “clot factor,” its measure of how much a program slows a machine by adding unnecessary registry entries and directories. However, classifying a popular application like Kazaa as spyware is a delicate matter, and CA admits this creates difficulties in attaching labels.
“Kazaa does something useful,” said Simon Perry, vice president of security strategy for CA. “I’m not going to say that it doesn’t. But turn that around–you’re allowing millions of strangers onto your machine. (Kazaa) is No. 1 because of the amount if copies it’s got out there.”
The company said that any other peer-to-peer file exchange programs, such as Blubster, Gnucleus and WinMX, could also degrade network performance and consume storage space because they are bundled with adware or spyware.
Just another reason you should move on from Kazaa if you’re still using it.
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Posted in forum archive at 3:20 pm by
Lycos is now offering a screensaver that will do near Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on computers used to send spam. Meanwhile network clutter for everyone goes up. 
The program – titled Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the Mac OS – sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes overloaded and slow.
The servers targeted by the screensaver have been manually selected from various sources, including Spamcop, and verified to be spam advertising sites, Lycos claims. Several tests are performed to make sure that no server stops working. Flooding a server with requests so that the server is unable to respond to the volume of requests made – a process known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack – is considered to be illegal.
So, in other words, it bombs the server with traffic to within an inch of its life and then lets up – because that would be going to far. Sheesh.
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Posted in miscellaneous at 1:28 pm by
Just to show that propoganda cuts both ways comes a comic via 1961 warning about ‘godless communism’. It was even approved by J. Edgar Hoover! Incredible!
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11.26.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:09 pm by
I happen to see that those who live in the Park City, Utah area will have the chance to enjoy their own little game competition January 21-28.
10 developers will be invited to showcase their games at the 2005 Slamdance Film festival in Park City, Jan. 21 to 28. There will be a Jury Award and an Audience Award, each worth $5000 in cash and prizes presented at the end of the festival.
The BIG C is also pleased to announce that our panel of judges will consist of representatives from Activision Value Publishing, Penny Arcade and NCsoft.
NEW PRIZE!
Demos of the top ten games will be put on a CD-Rom and distributed through a major national vendor. Demo CD-Roms will include developer information and directions on how to buy the game, further allowing our winners mass exposure and entry to the professional game world.
I just happen to know that swt happened to, at one time, call this area home and might be interested. Two things:
1) Do you think they would accept a game like Tendrils for consideration given its use of sprites and music from other games?
2) Do you think you’d have time to meet the extended Dec 10 deadline if you had to swap out the sprites for something else?
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Posted in forum archive at 3:10 pm by
Half-Life 2 is a great game. A co-worker got it the Tuesday it came out and let me watch over his shoulder for the beginning hour or so (so long productivity!). It looks amazing, even on lesser machines, but perhaps its too good – people are getting motion sickness trying to play.
Hundreds of buyers of “Half-Life 2,” the hotly anticipated shooting game released last week, are reporting in developer Valve Software’s user forums that they feel queasy and often develop a bad headache after playing the game for as little as an hour.
Can anyone here back this up? Seen it in person? Taking airflight pills before playing?
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11.24.04
Posted in forum archive at 4:16 pm by
An article about just how bad (if not ponderouse) current copyright structure is for the creation of new items.
I’m reasonably sure, indeed almost certain, that the members of Radiohead who actually wrote the songs I cited in my book would’ve happily allowed me to quote from them free of charge. But this was simply not an option. Instead, the enormous corporate apparatus of big-time music and big-time publishing churned out a standard-issue license agreement, and I footed the bill. My intentions as a writer – i.e. to use the song’s lyrics to help reinforce an argument that’s quite consistent with Radiohead’s own stated beliefs – was irrelevant. That I as a person kind of knew the guys in the band – also irrelevant. That the members of Radiohead as people surely didn’t need the money, would most likely have wished me well in my work, and are avowedly anti-corporate and thus probably opposed to the usurious rates I was charged to quote from their songs – also irrelevant.
This is what’s so ass-backwards about the way copyright is (over)protected in our culture. And this is but one of a million stories about the “business” of music that reveals the size of the lie when the corporate side of music claims to be the defender of the rights and interests of musicians. $350.00 US. Sheesh.
A great read.
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Posted in forum archive at 4:11 pm by
The Phantom game console, the source of much speculation is in dire straights.
A new regulatory filing from Florida-based firm Infinium Labs has revealed that the company needs to find fresh funding of around $11.5 million if it is to launch its Phantom game service next year as planned.
The company, which has delayed the launch of the Phantom Game Service and its associated Phantom console until Q2 2005 from its originally planned November 2004 launch, currently has only $20,991 cash on hand.
Not good. And here bringing on top talent made them seem like they could have been a contender.
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11.23.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:14 am by
Queen + Classic Hip Hop. Questionably the greatest mash-up ever and a clear salvo in the copyright war. I’ve been jamming on this collection since last week and it is incredible. Get it while you can.
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Posted in forum archive at 11:12 am by
Beware karaoke fans! The legal teams in dark helicopters are coming for you! It’s coming from Japan – I give it 6 months to hit here stateside:
A JASRAC official came by in person to explain: “The bands you hire have likely played covers of songs by other composers. We want you to pay the copyright fees on those songs.”
“How many cover songs does this account for?” asked Kasugai.
“We don’t know how many copyrighted songs were played here,” the official replied. “So we are not charging for each of them. Instead, we are charging on a monthly basis.”
…
He received a letter from JASRAC in summer 2003 along with an invoice for a monthly charge of 28,350 yen in copyright fees, covering the entire time his bar has been open since 1997. It totaled a whopping 2.32 million yen (around $22k US).
Yikes. Makes holiday caroling and family sing alongs suddenly suspect.
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