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Piracy

Seller of Counterfeit Video Games Gets 30 Months 165

Posted by Soulskill from the more-than-he-could-chew dept.
wiredmikey writes "The FBI reported this week that Qiang 'Michael' Bi, of Powell, Ohio was sentenced to 30 months in prison for selling more than 35,000 illegally copied computer games over the Internet between 2005 and 2009. According to a statement of facts read during Bi's plea hearing, agents executed a search warrant at Bi's house and found multiple CD duplicators and more than 1,000 printed counterfeit CDs. Some of the CDs were still in the duplicator. During their investigation, agents learned that Bi would buy a single copy of a game, illegally duplicate it and sell the copies on eBay.com and Amazon.com. He also set up a website for customers to download the games they bought. Bi accepted payment through eBay and PayPal accounts in his name and in others' names."
Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Posted by Soulskill from the five-button-discount dept.
Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.

Comment Re:1 Do for being a user (Score 4, Insightful) 246

by jombeewoof (#34656798) Attached to: 10 Dos and Don'ts To Make Sysadmins' Lives Easier

I disagree,

take any person of reasonable intelligence and place them in an unfamiliar settting. They become retarded.
The fact that they have been in front of that unfamiliar device for 20 years means they just don't care.

Give me a user who cares to familiarize them-self with the system and 6 months, I'll give you a half decent sysadmin. At least better than half of the paper certified MCSE's I've had the pleasure to work with.

Comment Re:Google misses the point entirely... (Score 1) 410

by jombeewoof (#34518308) Attached to: Chrome OS Doesn't Trust Apps Or Users

on the other hand "I" don't give a rats ass about your data, I want to be sure that YOUR machine isn't compromised and/or infected and sending me spam. That's all I care about, YOU NOT SENDING ME SPAM.
If you're smart enough to handle a computer that isn't an infected bot then all is well and good. If you're not, please either get off the net or use an appliance like this to limit the amount of damage you can do to me and my networks.

I think this new netbook or whatever they're marketing it as will server a very under-fulfilled market. Will I buy one, probably not unless it's a gift to my parents. Do I think it's a good idea, yea I think I do.
Image

Kentucky Announces Creationism Theme Park 648

Posted by samzenpus from the ride-the-dinosaur dept.
riverat1 writes "On December first, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced that a creationism theme park is expected to open in 2014. Park developers are seeking state tourism development incentives and could receive up to $37.5 million over a 10-year period. Gov. Steve Beshear said he does not believe the incentives would violate the principle of church-state separation because the 14-year-old tax incentives law wasn’t approved for the purpose of benefiting the Ark Encounter. The park will have a 500 foot replica of the Ark with live animals on it and a Tower of Babel explaining how races and languages developed. The park will be turned over to Answers in Genesis after it is built. They are a non-profit organization which may allow them to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion."

Comment Re:Why so discriminating? (Score 1) 1036

by jombeewoof (#32755482) Attached to: Google To Add Pay To Cover a Tax For Gays

The benefit is to reduce the tax burden on married gay couples. There is no burden for single people or straight married couples.

Single person == Contributions to health insurance are not taxed.
Single Person w/Children == Contributions to health insurance are not taxed.
Married Straight Couple == Contributions to health insurance are not taxed.

Married/Cohabitating Gay Couple == Contributions to health insurance are taxed.
Unmarried straight couple == Contributions to health insurance not taxed.

Unmarried straight couples can... get married to avoid this tax. Gay couples can not.
Before my wife and I were married she was on my insurance as a domestic partner and I did pay the tax.
When we got married, I no longer had to pay the tax.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Code Review of Doom For the iPhone 161

Posted by Soulskill from the old-dogs-new-tricks dept.
Developer Fabien Sanglard has written a code review for id Software's iPhone port of Doom. It's an interesting look into how the original 1993 game (which he also reviewed to understand its rendering process) was adapted to a modern platform. "Just like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was rendering a screenframe pixel per pixel. The only way to do this on iPhone with an acceptable framerate would be to use CoreSurface/CoreSurface.h framework. But it is unfortunately restricted and using it would prevent distribution on the AppStore. The only solution is to use OpenGL, but this comes with a few challenges: Doom was faking 3D with a 2D map. OpenGL needs real 3D vertices. More than 3D vertices, OpenGL needs data to be sent as triangles (among other things because they are easy to rasterize). But Doom sectors were made of arbitrary forms. Doom 1993's perspective was also faked, it was actually closer to an orthogonal projection than a perspective projection. Doom was using VGA palette indexing to perform special effect (red for damage, silver for invulnerable...)."

Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 303

by jombeewoof (#30943354) Attached to: FCC's Net Neutrality Plan Blocks BitTorrent

I manage hundreds of networks all over the country and Bit Torrent absolutely negatively affects network performance like no other application or protocol.
  If I have 1 person at a property running a bit torrent client, I know for a fact that I'll have a dozen calls from other "legitimate" users of the network.

If the protocol was written to be less of a bandwidth hog, it wouldn't have nearly the bad reputation it does. What we need is a better peer to peer protocol. Bit torrent is great if I'm at home, but if you use it on any of my networks I'm going to block your mac address and you don't get to play internet anymore. I don't care if the bits you're downloading are legit, hacked, copywritten or even a linux ISO. If it kills my network performance it is my obligation to get rid of it.

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