They need the anti piracy schemes to be able to tell if it has been pirated. Most anti piracy schemes have a weak point or two at which it is easiest to crack. One approach of detecting piracy is to check if the code at that points has been changed. Other method's often adjust certain memory locations from with the anti piracy code. So if the anti piracy code has been disabled these memory locations will not be filled with the right values and the rest of the game can check on this.

There are two reasons to do this crippling instead of refusing to start up. It makes the game into a kind of demo and the crackers often don't notice they have missed something because the game starts normally and seems to run normally. If they put enough of those tricks into the game it will a certain that there is considerable time between the release of the game and the release of a full working crack.

Of course the problems with connecting and disconnecting could easily be solved by having a special notification delivered to the phone whenever something of interrest is available. If they did this the same way incoming calls are send to the phone there wouldn't be this problem and the phone could stay in it's low power standby mode until some notification comes in. Which is exactly what the notification system of the iPhone does.

My response was mainly to your remark: And no OS's I've tried are very good at dpi scaling either. Personally I prefer OSX to.

Try linux with a gnome desktop (Ubuntu for instance) it's DPI setting works perfectly and has for years.

But that was mostly because otherwise the letters would be to small. Ofcourse you could increase the point size of your fonts or dpi of the screen but as many applications on windows didn't (and many still don't) handle that very well decreasing the screen resolution was often the best option.

The speed of light is dependant on the material. In a vacuum it's about 3.0E5 km/s but in fibre optics which have an index of refraction of approx 1.5 it's only 2.0E5 km/s. Traveling 1.0m through fibreoptics costs 5.0ns (nanoseconds). at a bus speed of 1 GHz that is an additional latency of 10 clock ticks (5 each way for a round trip). My verdict is keep things as close as possible.

Maybe you should make that, please keep your SQL, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and HTML seperate.

I was using floppies a ZIP -drive and CD-R(W) and ofcourse networks. So I didn't need floppies a lot and when I did need them I had enough that I could reuse. Backup's went to CD-R sometimes I transfered large files using CD-RW and at school we also had a couple of ZIP drives so most of my school work was on a zip disk. Actually I am guessing the last floppies I bought would probably be in 1997. (That's not counting any driver floppies I may have gotten with hardware). My first USB drive i got in 2001 with my ASUS Notebook which didn't have a floppy drive. It was a whopping 16MB and it still works!

If you read the article (no i'm not new here) you would know that the claim of demo boxes was made by neweggs supplier and that newegg rejected that story. Ofcourse the summary here on slashdot changed that into newegg rejecting the story of fake cpu's all together.

Among graphics specialists it has been well known it is not linear. However many people think it is linear because most of the time you can get away with it. But if you make a grid of black and white pixels and a square of pixels with a value of 127 you can easily see there is a significant difference where you wouldn't expect one.

Actually a good scaling algorithm should perform a lowpass filter when downscaling. This is similar to downsampling of digital audio where you do need to filter out frequencies above half the sampling rate. Leafing these higher frequencies in would cause noise because they can not be faithfully represented in a lower resolution file.

Actually it is good to use a particular gamma for storing an image because the human eye is not linear. If a gamma of 1 was used to steps at the black end would be to large and at the white end to small (when using 8-bits per channel).

We are not using a gamma of 2.2 because the old CRT's did the CRT's had a gamma of 2.2 because it was determined that would work well.