Posts by BaRRaKID

Apparently there's already someone trying to sell the CC numbers:

http://%7boption%7d

It doesn't really matter if Sony encrypted the CC numbers because they are just 16 digits long, and they almost always start with 4, that means that there are around 800.000.000.000.000 possibilities for a CC number (it's actually much less since the Issuer and Bank identification numbers are much smaller than 9999). Considering that 10 chars long passwords, which using a case sensitive algorithm have something like 80.000.000.000.000.000 (that's 80.000 times more than a CC number) possible combinations, are considered unsafe these days, decrypting CC numbers is a walk in the park.

The question here is if the hacker knows the encrypt algorithm used, and if Sony used a slow or fast algorithm. If they used something like MD5, SHA (which are fast algorithms) then I'm sure that all the numbers will be exposed, if they used a slow algorithm like for example BCrypt than it will be much harder, the difference being that with for example MD5 it takes about 40seconds (using a brute force attack, for CC numbers you can use an Hash table, which is much faster) to decrypt a 6chars long password and with BCrypt it would take around 12years.

Tl;dr: Sony should have never stored the CC numbers.

It's doable with the wait command. The wait command delays the execution of the next task for a given number of frames, so you just have to estimate how many seconds each task will take, then multiply it by your average fps. With some of the commands just adding wait 1 will probably work since no new frames are being drawn.

Quote from ReNo

Yeah it's horribly inefficient like that. My usual process after doing a compile in Source was...- Load map with HDR on

- "buildcubemaps"

- "mat_hdr_level 0"

- "changelevel "

- "buildcubemaps"

- "mat_hdr_level 2"

- "changelevel "

- "changelevel "

I believe you could use "mat_reloadall" or whatever the command is as an alternative to force a refresh of the cubemaps after building them.

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You can probably put those commands in a config file and then just run the config file from the dev console, or create a bind.

I understand that those who worked on this game might be mad, but to be honest this looks more like a marketing stunt than a real leak, there are many signs that suggest this was intentional.

The biggest one is that people who usually leak media do it for money. They work in some place that has early access to the media, and they sell it to a top release group, who then try to profit somehow from it (this can involve blackmailing the creator, selling physical copies on flee markets, re-selling it to private trackers, etc). It's really rare for a leak to show up on the web without passing trough these "official" channels.

In this case the leak didn't came from any well known release groups, the proof being that there are many small groups claiming that they own the leak, and a dozen of repacks (some of them with malware in them, so if you download the game be careful).

Another issue is that the original source of this news seems to be the EA web site. Usually with real leaks, the news show first on web sites connected with the release groups, since in theory the more they publicize the leak the more they will profit from it, and the company that owns the leaked media tries to do damage control instead of publicizing it even more. Since the news showed up on EAs web site,it seems like it was all made by EA in order to try to get more sales (let's be honest here, there wasn't that much media coverage of the game before the leak), and the latest news show that they got what they wanted, pre-orders sky-rocketed since the game leaked.

The timing is also weird since leaks usually happen closer to the release date, when physical copies of the media start being made and are out of the control of the creator, so they are easier to steal. The other option would be someone hacking into Cryteks servers but It's hard to believe that someone would do that steal a unfinished copy of the game, more than a month before the official release to get nothing in return. Hackers don't usually work for free, not on this scale (I'm guess that after what happened with Crytek before they have a fairly secure infrastructure). And if that was the case i expected EA/Crytek to do what Valve did, go after the hacker and get him arrested, which hasn't happened in this case yet (or at least it was not reported yet).

I really think you should reconsider your stance on the page width. Even if your target audience usually use large monitors, these days many people probably use netbooks or smartphones for browsing which have much lower resolutions, and the way it is now it's really frustrating to navigate your site.

That's the thing with web design, there are conventions that people are used to, and when you deviate too much from them you're sacrificing the user experience. Concerning the width, 960px is considered to be the ideal value for a fixed layout these days . If you don't enjoy that then consider changing to a liquid layout. But you probably knew this already, since the initial value for the width on the CSS is 960px, but it was intentionally changed to 1260px leaving a mess of unused style rules behind.

Also since your "content" column is so wide the sentences become too long making them harder too read (remember that people don't really read the content on a web site, they scan it). Another convention you should use here is that a content column width should be of about 2 or 3 alphabets, that means that given your font family and size, write the entire alphabet 3 times and you get the optimal width for your content. That means that no single line of text should have more than 80 characters, yours have around 150 now, which is almost twice the ideal value.

For more info check out Mark Boulton series of articles called Five Simple Steps.

If you're worried about the images size then just use a resize script, there are tons of them on the web and everyone is used to them by now anyway.

I think you should change the lights to something in-between the last two shots. ATM it looks too bright, without any interesting shadows.

Also, the interior lights seem to be on, which doesn't make any sense since it's daylight outside, and there is enough light coming trough the glass ceiling to illuminate the entire room. If you lower, or remove those lights you will probably get more interesting and natural shadows on the corridors which might improve the scene.

I find that for most companies self hosting is the cheaper and most viable option, if you've the resources to do so.

What you should do is first estimate how many users visit you site daily, there are many tools that can do that for you (like google analytics for example). Next you should estimate what's the average size of your website pages, if it's mostly text and images (without heavy graphics, scripts, animations or videos) they should have less than 1Mb in size, which means that your 512K upload speed could easily handle around 3000 daily visits, thats two simultaneous users per minute, which is far less traffic than most companies websites usually have (the company i work for, for example, has around 200 visits per month).

Quote from Jetsetlemming

The two most common cause of HD failures are the hd living out its lifespan and failing (once the warrantee period is up), and power surges. The likelihood of something random happening to damage one hard drive to the point of making its data unrecoverable while not happening to another hard drive inside the same machine is roughly in the "struck by lightning"/"win the lottery"/"Get rich quick for reals" level of odds.Being in an external HD enclosure will give the hard drive far less stress than constant usage, keep it away from dust, and make it immune from the effects of other hardware failure.

The truth is actually the opposite of what you said, the probability of two HD failing simultaneously is really, really low. I've never seen it happen in my experience, neither did my co-workers.

Power surges are really not one of the main causes of HD failure, it's really unusual for it to happen, and you should be using a UPS with surge suppression anyway to protect your other components. The biggest cause of HD failures is in fact dust. If particles of dust get inside the HD drive you will start to get lots of bad sector warnings, and eventually the read/write head will stop working making the HD useless.

And again external hard-drives are not as reliable as you might think, most of the enclosures don't keep dust away from the inside, if you ever open a external hd you will find lots of dust in there, and the fact that people carry them everywhere causes much more physical damage than having a internal HD properly secured inside your computer case. The circuit boards inside external HD also break very easily, but that's because most companies use really cheap components and bad manufacturing processes to build them. Like i said before I've 3 of them sitting in my desk at the moment which are completely dead.

I'm sorry to insist on this but you really shouldn't be misinforming people about proper ways to secure their data. RAID1 arrays are a standard in any system in which data protection is important these days, along with having a (usually) off-site backup server (this only applies to companies), and doing regular backups to an external support to quick fixes.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

RAID is not a backup. It is not file protection. Do not use RAID expecting it to save your shit. Running two drives at once, putting them both through the exact same workload next to each other inside the same computer, attached to the same power supply and motherboard, means that if one has catastrophic failure most likely both will. Take that extra HD and stick it in an external enclosure. Keep it off unless you're actively using it and make backups every time you do something worth backing up.

Sorry but that is simply not true, at all! I don't know where your getting that information from, but having two HDs working simultaneously in a RAID array is being done for at least 20 years, and every motherboard on the market today can easily handle much more than that (I've personally set up a 4 HDD RAID array and it's working flawlessly). They may be connected to the same motherboard but the "circuits" are isolated from each other, if that didn't happened every time one of your hard drives failed you would have to buy a new motherboard as well. The same goes for the PSU, having two HD puts almost no stress on the PSU, if you check for example this PSU calculator http://www.silentmods.com/modding/PSU_W ... lator.html you can see that for example having two DVD drives uses more power than having two hard drives. As for the fail rate of using a RAID array I'll just quote wikipedia:

Quote

RAID 1 failure rateAs a trivial example, consider a RAID 1 with two identical models of a disk drive with a 5% probability that the disk would fail within three years. Provided that the failures are statistically independent, then the probability of both disks failing during the three year lifetime is

P(\mathrm{dual\,failure}) = \left(0.05\right)^2 = 0.0025 = 0.25\,\%.

Thus, the probability of losing all data is 0.25% over a three year period if nothing is done to the array. If the first disk fails and is never replaced, then there is a 5% chance the data will be lost. If only one of the disks fails, no data would be lost. As long as a failed disk is replaced before the second disk fails, the data is safe.

However, since two identical disks are used and since their usage patterns are also identical, their failures cannot be assumed to be independent. Thus, the probability of losing all data, if the first failed disk is not replaced, may be considerably higher than 5%.

As a practical matter, in a well managed system the above is irrelevant because the failed hard drive will not be ignored. It will be replaced. The reliability of the overall system is determined by the probability the remaining drive will continue to operate through the repair period, that is the total time it takes to detect a failure, replace the failed hard drive, and for that drive to be rebuilt. If, for example, it takes one hour to replace the failed drive, the overall system reliability is defined by the probability the remaining drive will operate for one hour without failure.

While RAID 1 can be an effective protection against physical disk failure, it does not provide protection against data corruption due to viruses, accidental file changes or deletions, or any other data-specific changes. By design, any such changes will be instantly mirrored to every drive in the array segment. A virus, for example, that damages data on one drive in a RAID 1 array will damage the same data on all other drives in the array at the same time. For this reason systems using RAID 1 to protect against physical drive failure should also have a traditional data backup process in place to allow data restoration to previous points in time. It would seem self-evident that any system critical enough to require disk redundancy also needs the protection of reliable data backups.

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And i never said that RAID was the same as a backup (I even said that you should keep doing regular backups while using a RAID array), but it is in fact, by definition, a method (and a very efficient one) of file protection. And it's funny that you mention external hard drives, because they have a much higher failure rate than internal hard drives tend to have. I've 3 of them sitting in my desk atm which are as useful as brick, luckily we have a 4 HDD RAID1 array

One of smart things to do these days is to buy a small (32 or 64 GB) SSD (Solid-State Drive) where you install the SO and other "heavy" applications, since SSDs are substantially faster than regular HDDs you will get a significant performance boost while runnings the applications installed on them. You then set two 500Mb/1Tb HDDs in a RAID1 array for storage. Using a RAID1 array your files will be saved on both HDDs at the same time (one of the HDDs mirrors the other) so when one of them fails (and they will fail) all your files will be safe in the other HDD. The only downside is that the writing speed decreases when using a RAID1 array, but it's the best way to avoid loosing important files. Off course you should to keep doing regular backups to an external hard drive just in case

As for brands/models, for the SSD I would choose a model from the Kingston SSDNow V Series (they are more reliable), and for the HDD I personally prefer the Western Digital Caviar or Velociraptor series (depends on your budget), but the Samsung Spinpoint series are also a good choice.

And don't buy a cheap motherboard or power supply, buy the best you can from a brand with good reputation (usually Asus motherboards and Corsair PSUs are the best choice). Buying a cheap MB or PSU usually leads to a unstable system and can damage your other components.

Just read that the original announcement was fake, so you're right

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3179684

I've read somewhere that respawn will be showing "something" at E3 as well, so that might be the new IP that everyone wants

I've read on Interlopers that Valve has update HL2 and Ep1 to the Orange Box engine and broke the SDK again, so if you have any new problems is probably due to that.

On the other hand it seems like HL2 and EP1 have new achievements and graphic enhancements, so it's a good excuse to replay both games

http://%7boption%7d

I personally enjoyed TR Legend and TR Underworld a lot. They where actually fun to play, and had a couple of complex puzzles that made me feel smart once a found out how to complete them. Plus the visuals where really nice (and I'm not talking about T&A ). The only bad part, imo, is the shitty aim system, TR without guns and more puzzles would probably be much better.

http://www.torrentfreak.com as several news and opinion posts about this if anyone is interested.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

How does "Snake in soup" lead to

?

Quote

Just switch the words, instead of "Snake Soup" think of "Soup Snake", I tried Super Snake (since there is a game called Snake, there should be one called Super Snake

) but failed, and then i noticed that it looked more like a cobra (thanks G.I.Joe) than a snake.

The funny part is that after googling the name i remembered that I used to play that game a lot when i was a kid on my "family system" console.

I suck at remembering video game titles. but strangely i managed to get all the 56 by just guessing :megaman:

Quote from Jetsetlemming

The most baffling for me though is the one of the cobra in a bowl of soup. I don't have the slightest clue on that one after my guess of "snake eater" (mgs3, and some variations on that) were all wrong. "snake soup"? "Cobra soup"? "Eat snake"? Nope. There's also a bill gates looking guy with a star on his shirt, and a tron looking dude throwing a frisbee who is neither "tron" nor "ricochet" (nor megaman, though I admit that's kinda a stretch ), no clue on those either.

What's this site it's from all about? ARG?

Quote

stargate, discs of tron (thought it was megaman too but then I noticed that the arrow was pointing at the "discs" and not the character and that it was one the "tron part" of the picture),and the one with the snake is Super Cobra.

Quote from Psy

Those shadows remind me of GTA4. They look awful.

I've seen other shots from this area an the shadows don't look like that at all, it's probably due to the image compression or something like that.

I think you should desaturate the blue from the roof a bit, it looks too strong as it is now.

Also the house bricks look a bit glossy in some places, might be because of the normal map, you should maybe soften it a bit.

Quote from Izuno

World Series of Poker Texas Hold'em is my favorite poker game on the iPhone. This is the official WSOP version. Got my bankroll up to $25 million when i stopped playing. I got it for $4.99 and played it a ton. If you have WSOP fantasies of winning it all, this is another great game for trips to the toilet!

Got that one too, by far the best mobile poker game.