Back quite a few years ago, the recording industry got into hot water for paying radio stations and DJs to air their songs, air them more often, etc. This little scheme was called "payola" and got the attention of the government authorities. It's now illegal. But that doesn't mean it doesn't still happen.
As discussed in this article on the Boing Boing site, payola is still with us. Sony agreed to pay a $10 million settlement for their actions.
Some of the highlights from the article and linked PDF of correspondence used as evidence in the case:
When you consider that the recording industry is complaining about how much it costs to promote music to listeners and radio stations, you have to wonder if all this "payola" is the real problem with the industry and not the file swappers. That seems especially true in light of this article about a British research outfit that shows music file-swappers by more music than their non-infringing peers.
Perhaps the industry needs a new business model where it merely buys advertising to discuss new albums, gets the artists involved in promoting them in areas where they're getting no airplay, and makes it possible for listeners to stream the albums to their computers as an incentive to go out and buy them?
Update on 08/03/05: Sony has now been taken to task for creating a phony reviewer to praise their movies in print and elsewhere. If you've seen one of the movies hyped by the phony person, you're apparently entitled to a $5 refund. See: http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/BAaf?m=780
Back when I began doing OS X administration, I asked myself how I could automatically keep the OS X systems updated without having to login to them remotely each day to run Software Update and without giving end users administrator access to the machines (which is a no-no in our corporate security policy). I found out that Apple makes it pretty easy to do this with the command line, which means it can be setup to run in a cron job.
For instance, to automatically get all the latest required updates from Apple installed on a machine without having to do it manually, you can create a cron task to issue the following command as root:
softwareupdate -q -i -r
This works fine for most users, most of the time. Unfortunately, what if you're a QuickTime Pro user and Apple puts out a QuickTime update marked as "required"? That's right, Software Update will dutifully download the new version and install it over top of the version you're registered for. Unless you have the time and money to call them and buy a new registration code for the new version of QuickTime, your "Pro" features are all locked down again.
This is precisely the situation Apple placed me in as an administrator a while ago. One of our artists' machines was automatically updated to Quicktime 7.0 from 6.5.2 Pro, rendering the "Pro" functionality inactive. Because of the way things work in our corporate environment, it's not a quick or simple process for him to just buy the new registration code. It means a lengthy purchase process that can take weeks, sometimes even months. An artist can't do without QuickTime for that long. But as the Mac Administrator, I couldn't do without the systems getting their security updates for that long. Apple had once again put me in a bind.
Pointing out that while they've confirmed that they can crack the security of Windows systems using a simple USB device, security experts at SPI Dynamics indicated that the design of the USB protocol would enable similar cracks to be created for any operating system that uses USB devices.
The gist of the "attack" is that most USB drivers (including those built into Windows) have been designed for speed rather than security. By exploiting the lack of proper error checking in the driver, a USB device can be created to take control of the machine and perform further actions with a high level of security status (i.e., "system level privileges" like a component of Windows). The experts displayed a USB memory device that was programmed to take control of a system and extract a copy of the most recently used files to the device.
While such an attack requires physical access to the machine you're exploiting, the use of USB networking and wireless networking devices could extend the vulnerability of a machine outside the physical machine.
For more information, read this article on eWeek: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1840141,00.asp
Note: I did not read the printed version of this novel, but listened to the audiobook version, which was unabridged. However, since it's a complete re-creation of the novel, I think this qualifies me for a review of the book and the audiobook since there's not much difference.
Having watched the previous Harry Potter movies (except "Azkaban"), I had a pretty good picture of the world and the characters depicted in them. Although the author does a decent job of filling someone in if they have some understanding of the books' environment, if you were going to read this having never seen the movies or the previous books, chances are you'd be a bit in the dark about a lot of things. I believe this because I heard references made to the "Prisoner of Azkaban" events in the book that I didn't quite understand.
Periodically, I take a look at the search results that led people to my web site. In a recent examination, I saw that several people asked the question "What is the importance of a motherboard?" and sought an answer. For a seasoned technical support person like myself, the answer to that question is quite obvious, but to someone who isn't that familiar with what is inside his or her computer, it's a mystery. Since a number of you obviously want to know the answer to that question, here it is, as much in layman's terms as I can make it.
It was probably the late 1980s when my family and I moved to Western Pennsylvania. During an early trip there to house-hunt, we were staying in an apartment over another family's home. While sleeping on the couch, I had an experience where I believed that I had awakened to find an invisible presence in the room touching me in a "very personal" way. I even had a very clear picture of the door between the apartment and the house downstairs being wide open, though that door was normally kept locked.
Some time later, when we had moved into our new house, I had a much more disconcerting "visitation". In that situation, I woke up during the night, unable to move. Above me in the air I could see what appeared to be a gray cloud-like entity, which tried to force itself into my body. When I fought it, I found that I couldn't breathe, speak, or move. The best I could manage was a sort of choking sound. This sound woke up my younger brother in the next bed. I didn't tell him what happened to me. The next morning, he told me a story almost identical to my own - a gray cloud-like apparation choking him and keeping him from moving. I was convinced that the two of us had seen a ghost. Then I read this article.
Apparently this phenomenon is rather common. It's called "Sleep Paralysis" and the article mentioned above describes it this way:
Sleep paralysis embodies a universal, biologically based explanation for pervasive beliefs in spirits and supernatural beings, even in the United States, Hufford argues. The experience thrusts mentally healthy people into a bizarre, alternative world that they frequently find difficult to chalk up to a temporary brain glitch.
In fact, the article describes two stories nearly identical to my own. First, one similar to my experience in the apartment:
Hufford retreated one December day to his rented, off-campus room and fell into a deep sleep. An hour later, he awoke with a start to the sound of the bedroom door creaking open?the same door he had locked and bolted before going to bed...
This description is also very similar to my second experience:
"The first time I experienced this, I saw a shadow of a moving figure, arms outstretched, and I was absolutely sure it was supernatural and evil." ...Yet another person reported periodically waking with a start just after falling asleep, sensing an ominous presence nearby. The tale continues: "Then, something comes over me and smothers me, as if with a pillow. I fight but I can't move. I try to scream. I wake up gasping for air."
As the article says later on:
Even the most rational people who experience sleep paralysis often find it difficult to write off their nighttime ordeals as unreal..."I suspect that millions of people in the United States are walking around never having told anybody about having these terrifying experiences," Hufford says.
I can't argue with him. The experiences I had were extremely vivid and realistic, corroborated in one case by the fact that my choking sounds awakened someone sleeping nearby. It's something I only very rarely talked about because I figured most people would think I was nuts for thinking I'd been attacked by (for lack of a better description) a ghost in the night...
I'm something of a video packrat. When I moved into the house with my wife, I had something like 200-300 VHS tapes and probably 100 DVDs. Naturally, I'm not terribly interested in lugging around that many VHS tapes forever, especially considering that they don't last forever anyway. So I started capturing the video into my computer and using Sonic DVDIt to produce my own DVDs of the content (typically old sci-fi shows I recorded in the late 80's or 90's). One of the problems I ran into pretty early on is that often my discs were too big for DVD-R, the medium I chose to write this video collection to. While DVDIt would happily compress the video to a smaller size for me, it's monumentally slow in doing that. I began looking for another option. DVD2One turned out to be it. This review will tell you what I think of the software.
If you spend much time on the Internet, sooner or later you're going to run into this issue... You find a very interesting audio stream that you just can't listen to right now. For example, if you're a sports fan it might be an online broadcast of a game that's important to your team. If you're a gamer it might be an interview with a favorite developer. Whatever the reason, you find yourself wishing that you could somehow "record" that streaming audio webcast so that you could listen to it later on.
Unfortunately, systems like Windows Media Player and Real's RealOne player are designed to prevent just that sort of recording. There's no "save" feature in the player to capture these streams and no option (usually) to download them later. What's a listener to do? Get High Criteria's Total Recorder, (reviewed here) that's what...
For a while now, I've been a member of Real's Rhapsody music service. I've got several months worth of experience with it under my belt, and figured it was time to share that experience in a review. Here it is...
Like any UNIX based operating system, OS X has a pretty versatile command line. You can do quite a lot with it. For example, I've written scripts that backup an OS X system to a server. Using the SSH capability, I can connect to a Macintosh in another building and run that script, causing the machine to run a backup any time I need it to. Sometimes, as a system administrator, I need to deal with programs that are hanging on the user's Mac and causing problems. Fortunately, I can kill a program like that without ever having to leave my desk. Here's how...
First, you have to have already setup an environment where you can remotely connect to the other Macintosh via the command line. If you haven't done that, or don't know how, here's all it takes:
Now, to connect to a computer setup as above, do the following:
Let's assume that a user has called us to tell us that Internet Explorer seems to be locked up on their Macintosh. We'd like to terminate Internet Explorer for them so that they can save the data in their other programs and reboot the Mac (just to be safe). We connect to their computer via SSH and get to the command line. Now we need to find Internet Explorer in their process list. To do that, we issue the command:
ps -aux
This results in the Macintosh displaying a list of running processes that resembles the following:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMANDNotice the line which reads:
user
8735 0.0 1.2 179316
18452 ?? S 1:23PM
0:09.86 /Applications/Internet Explorer.app/Contents/MacOS/Internet
Explorer /Applications/Internet Explorer.app/Contents/MacO
This tells us that Internet Explorer has the process ID number 8735 associated with it. Now all we need to do is tell the user's machine to terminate that process. To do that, we issue the command:
kill 8735
This sends a "TERM" signal to the process, which it may ignore and not quit. If it still shows in the list after sending this signal, issuing the following command will force the termination:
kill -9 8735
Similarly, if you know the process name (in the example above, that's "Internet Explorer.app") you can kill the process by its name, such as:
killall "Internet Explorer.app"
Above would kill all running instances of Internet Explorer.
(Thanks to "kainjow" and "lurk" on macosx.com for filling in some gaps in my knowledge of this capability after I posted a link to this article on the OS X forum! :-) )
On blogcritics.org, a number of writers contributed songs to a playlist entitled "The Top 13 Most Overrated Songs". Their list included the following:
I don't disagree that the above songs are pretty much overrated, though I personally enjoy listening to a few of them (alright, if you must know, I'd listen to 6, 8, 9, 11, and 13 willingly, but I'd only bother loading 11 and 13 on my MP3 player).
This list inspired me to come up with my own list of the "Top 40 Songs I'd Never Miss If They Were Erased From Existence".
For your amusement ridicule, here it is (some duplication with the previous list is intentional):
I could probably extend this list to the Top 100, but if we got rid of these artists and songs I'd, musically speaking, be far happier.
NASA's Deep Impact probe successfully collided with a comet, in a move the NASA scientists describe as the equivalent of "hitting a bullet with another bullet while positioning a third bullet to be in place to watch the impact". Sadly, this monumental bit of engineering and calculation got only passing mention in the media compared to a local scandal involving a man accused with soliciting a 14-year-old for sex...
For information about the Deep Impact
probe, visit NASA's official page on the subject:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html?skipIntro=1
For
some additional images of the comet and the probe's impact with it,
see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/sci_nat_deep_impact0_a_mission_to_crash_into_a_comet/html/1.stm
Congratulations on a job well done, NASA! Best of luck with the Rosetta spacecraft (due to do the same thing in the year 2014).
Over the holiday weekend I had the good fortune to attend the Origins game convention in downtown Columbus. This annual event is kind of a massive gathering of gaming enthusiasts from around the word, attracting some 10,000 visitors a year to Columbus. The convention offers sessions on the game industry itself (e.g., how to get a game published, how to improve a game's design, etc.), opportunities to play various games (everything from Monopoly to computer games to Dungeons and Dragons, and many more you've never heard of), and the chance to buy games and game-related merchandise. If you enjoy playing games, especially the non-computer variety (though video games are represented there), you'll find something to interest you at Origins.
Waiting in Line for Badges
Waiting in Line for
Tickets
As for myself I went down after work on Thursday, June 30. I spent the better part of two hours in line getting my convention badge and signing up for tickets to various events I wanted to take part in. I then spent 6pm to 10pm playing Car Wars with other attendees at the Rogue Judges area in the miniatures gaming room (Exhibit Hall C of the convention center). We had a good time. The Rogue Judges gamemasters are a personable bunch, who clearly enjoy the games they host, and who try to maintain a delicate balance between adherence to the rules and a sense of logic/fairness. The unfortunate part of this game experience, to me, was that a young boy who either wasn't aware of the rules or chose to ignore them won the game. I'm pretty certain that (intentionally or not) he was cheating a fair amount of the game. I noticed a couple of the other players calling him on things he was doing, but he managed to "squeak by" somehow. He made maneuvers with his car that I didn't think were legal, managed somehow not to get destroyed in spite of having no armor on one side of his car, and I'm pretty sure fired more than once in the same round. Still, as I said, my brother and I had a good time in the game overall even considering this one player. I want to make it clear that I don't hold Rogue Judges responsible for what the kid was doing. They had 16 players to cope with, all of whom needed their assistance at different times, and there was no way they could keep track of who had and hadn't shot, who had and hadn't turned, etc.
Car Wars
Car Wars
Car Wars
On Friday, I played Injurius Games - Keep What You Kill that Red Shirt Games hosted. The guys at Red Shirt are really a class act, in my opinion. They know the rules to the game, administer the rules fairly and impartially, keep things moving, keep them fun, cater to new players without making them feel like idiots, and generally uphold the highest standards of "gamemastering". I have never walked away from a Red Shirt game (and I've played several) feeling like it was anything but a positive, fun experience. That's probably why I've subsequently sought out and bought every game I've ever played with their people during the last couple of years. Friday evening I played another round of Car Wars with the Rogue Judges crew. This time the game went perfectly, everyone played by the rules, and a good time was had by all. The only hitch in the whole game was the amount of time it took the gamemasters to sort out a multi-car collision and the resultant damage. But given that it was a complicated crash and they wanted to determine the outcome logically and fairly (which I believe they did), it was a great experience. Rogue Judges seem to be another good bunch of GMs and I wouldn't hesitate to sign up for their games in the future.
Injurius Games Ready to Begin
Injurius Games Underway
Saturday my step-son Austin, my brother, and I all went to Origins. We took a brief walk through the vendor area in Exhibit Hall D. Austin enjoyed watching the live action RPG chess game and battle demonstrations with foam weaponry, seeing all the games and costumes, etc. So did I. Around noon, we took part in the "Reaper Paint and Take" session, where you could receive a free figure and paint. Believe it or not, this was the second or third time I'd ever tried to paint a figure, and those didn't really count because they were mostly one-color spray jobs. I think I did pretty well for a first attempt, painting a dragon hatching from its egg.
After the painting, we played Sudden Death - Red Shirt Smash (a.k.a., Astrosmash) with the gang at Red Shirt Games. As mentioned earlier, it was a great experience as I expected. Austin, who had never played any miniatures game before, loved it - in large part because the Red Shirt GM (Rob, I believe) and other players were patient with him and taught him what he needed to know. We lost, but still had fun.
Silent Death
Silent Death
After dinner, we came back to check out "Barbie's Bad Hair Day". We got back too late for me to actually take part in it, but I watched for a few minutes to get the flavor of it. The gist of the game is that Barbie's hair looks really bad, so she's gone postal. She's in the top of her dream house with a rifle, ready to shoot anyone in the yard out front. In the yard are several groups of her fellow toys, including the stuffed animals and the GI Joes. The animals want to sneak a fashion magazine into the house that tells her "bad hair" is in. The Joes, it appears, want to take her out military style.
On our way out, we stopped to play a demonstration game of Mayfair's Pirates Cove, run by the folks at bigboxgames.com. They played a 10-minute video for us, showing the basic play of the game, then let us sit with some other folks and play a game of it. We all agreed that it was a fun game to play. At $37.46 plus $9 shipping, I'm not sure I'll be buying it any time soon, though. It wasn't much more strategic or detailed than something like Risk, and didn't strike me as being worth that kind of money. Still, if I find it cheaply somewhere (say $20-25) I would pick it up.
Sunday I spent most of my time in the dealer room, picking up some bargain bin games and miniatures, some not-really-bargain T-shirts and a polo shirt, and some decently-priced computer games from Matrix Games. After that, we headed home and called it a day (and "a convention").
While in some ways I didn't quite have as much fun as I did at Origins 2004, overall I did have a good time there. I got to play Car Wars for the first time this year, and played a couple of favorites from last year (Injurius Games and Silent Death). I ended up buying more shirts and miniatures this year than actual games, though I did pick up two games (Spammers and something else that was $1) as well as three video games (Starshatter, Reach for the Stars, and one other).
As it always is with "Origins weekend", it was all over way too quickly to suit me, but as always it was a good time.
Basic Premise
In the distant future, the emperor Injurius has decided to hold gladatorial combat games in a manner similar to ancient Rome. Groups of warriors enter an arena and fight for their lives. As warriors gain battle experience by killing their opponents, they grow in skill and ability, becoming more formidable. When you play Injurius Games you're controlling the gladiators in one of these battles. This review will attempt to describe the game play at a basic level (there is a lot more to the rules than I can cover here), so that you can determine if this sounds like the right game for you.
How it's Played - At a High Level
I played Injurius Games at the last two Origins conventions in Columbus, Ohio. My favorite variant is the "keep what you kill" one, where you're given one unpainted miniature for each one of your opponents' corresponding figures you kill in the game.
Basic Injurius Games gameplay works like this. Across a table, on which is configured a map with various kinds of terrain, are groups of warriors, one for each player. There are 5 warriors in each group, every one with different weaponry and abilities. There is the commander, who runs the show and spurs his men on to victory. There is the sniper, able to inflict great damage from a long distance, if he can hit you to inflict it (which isn't easy). There is the plasma gunner, able to shoot into areas and fire on enemies who are hiding behind walls and the like. The mini gunner, whose weapon fires fast and powerfully. Last, there is the lowly grunt, whose basic skills make him useful, and whose grenades can make him deadly to groups of his enemies.
At the beginning of the Injurius Games, warriors are in their "starting boxes". The game master draws a card to decide which team is going to move, and which warrior gets to move. The commander, if he hasn't moved already, can move on any of his team's turns, in addition to the warrior who is supposed to move that time around. The commander, when activated, gets a certain number of "command points" he can use to improve his (or his men's) performance as needed during the game. This is the paper equivalent of using his leadership skills to spur his men to fight better.
Warriors who haven't fought yet have the chance to do so when their card comes up, or they can go into an "opportunity fire" mode where they wait for an enemy to come into range. When fire happens, the player doing the firing has to quickly calculate the effects of "cover" from the terrain, bonuses due to battle honors and power-ups, etc., to determine what it takes to hit the enemy. The firing player rolls the dice to attempt to hit. If he does, the player being fired upon rolls the dice to see if he manages to escape damage from the fire. If not, the firing player rolls the amount of damage dealt to his victim. A victim who receives too much damage dies and is out of the game.
Also during Injurius Games play is a chance that a "power up" will be placed on the field. A power up is something like the same concept in a video game. When a warrior steps on a randomly placed power up, he gains a weapon, skill, or other improvement that makes him more formidable. That is, unless he rolls a 12 and actually damages himself from then on. The exact location of power ups is determined by a pair of die rolls that determine where to place the item vertically and horizontally from the rolling player(s).
When one warrior defeats another, he obtains a battle honor. Battle honors, similar to power ups, enhance the warrior's stats, skills, and abilities. Needless to say, a warrior who has killed even a few opponents in battle is likely to become quite formidable in a hurry.
In the beginning rounds of the game, the teams on opposite sides of the table are enemies in the Injurius Games. Later, in the last turn, the game masters turn it into a free-for-all, where anyone can shoot at the units of any other player. In the "keep what you kill" games, this is where you'll start collecting (and losing) miniatures very quickly.
Injurius Games Review
Injurius Games is a fun combat game for anyone who doesn't like extremely detailed combat rules (like me). A game between 8 people, each with 5 warriors (one of each type) will take about 4 hours to go through 6 turns. Smaller groups, naturally, go faster.
The one element of Injurius Games I find a bit annoying is the calculation of "to hit" values on each shot. The calculation usually goes something like this:
Most of the time, in the "keep what you kill" scenarios, the calculation ends up being this: "OK, I need a 5 to hit you. But I moved to get into firing position, so I need a 6. But I'm a hero, so that goes back to a 5. But you're behind partial cover, so it goes back up to a 6. But my battle honor makes it a 5 again." So you go through all that math and end up back at the start again. Personally, I think I'd adjust the Injurius Games character sheets so that the Hero and Champion figures were already included. If a character gets a promotion/demotion during battle, then adjust that figure. I'd also adjust the sheets to assume a character is moving when he shoots, and give him a bonus for being stationary, rather than assume he's stationary and penalize him for moving. Then the long-winded above thing would become something more like "I need a 5 to hit you while I'm moving, but my battle honor makes that a 4, except that you're behind partial cover, so it's a 5." Still longer than I would like, but it would be faster and easier to sort out.
Aside from that, I find Injurius Games to be well balanced, not unnecessarily complex, reasonably fast paced, and above all, fun. Kids and adults alike can enjoy it and grasp the rules.
Definitely recommended. See Red Shirt Games to buy your copy and miniatures.
Injurius
Games Ready to Start
Injurius Games
In Play (Yes, I'm getting my butt kicked by a girl...but a very nice
one!)
My late grandmother's spaghetti sauce recipe, as recounted by my uncle.
