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PC Games (Games)

Valve Apologizes For 12,000 Erroneous Anti-Cheating Bans 202

Posted by Soulskill from the making-it-right dept.
Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.
PC Games (Games)

Activision Wants Consoles To Be Replaced By PCs 344

Posted by Soulskill from the oppose-on-principle dept.
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from thegamersblog: "We live in a world where we have multiple platforms for gaming: PC, PS3, 360, Wii, etc. Each platform has varying amounts of power when it comes to playing games. Activision, one of the leading cross-platform publishers, wishes to move away from the 'walled gardens' set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. ... [Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick’s solution is to turn to the PC, where it can set its own model for pricing — not unlike what Blizzard has done with World of Warcraft and Battle.net. Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."

Comment Re:Seems reasonable (Score 1) 505

by Fembot (#31076178) Attached to: Call For Scientific Research Code To Be Released

I'm rather inclined to agree with your analysis here, but my reasons for not publishing the full source code to my work (other than the bits which are generally applicable) is twofold:

1) I'm willing to share my code with anyone who's interested. I actually rather like talking to people who are sufficiently interested in emailing me though - this can foster collaborations and both parties gain from a discussion of interests
2) Some chunks of my code make the whole lot totally undistributable. I use implementations of algorithms from books which state "you may not distribute electronic copies of this code". I don't have the time or inclination to work around this myself, it doesn't win publications. I have however structured my source tree such that it's easy enough for me to distribute the remainder and someone with relevant background can find replacements.

Most of the datasets I use are *huge* and again I'm willing to share with anyone, but they need to be serious enough about it to contact me first.

Finally there's things in my code which aren't broken per say, but are massive hacks designed to shortcut some of the original design in order to meet some crazy deadline I forgot all about. Rather embarrassing really if I've not had time/inclination to fix it.

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