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Raptrex

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Posts posted by Raptrex

  4. Posted · Edited by snlildude87 (see edit history) · Report reply

    Google has sued Froogles.com, charging the rival shopping search engine with trademark infringement.
    Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, the No. 1 search engine, filed a 68-page complaint against Froogles.com in the Eastern District Court of New York. The complaint alleges that Froogles.com proprietor Richard Wolfe, a New York state resident, illegally traded on Google's famous name and search brand for profit with a "nearly identical" mark.

    "Upon information and belief, the defendant selected the mark Froogles with full knowledge of Google's prior rights in its Google name and mark," according to the filing. "As between the parties, Google is the senior user of marks that incorporate the formative--Oogle for Internet search services."

    Google asked the court to shut down its rival and order transfer of the domain name, among other relief.

    The case is only the latest legal showdown for Google, whose multibillion-dollar advertising and search business has become a wide target for complaints. The search giant faces several trademark infringement cases of its own, including complaints against its paid-search services in the United States and abroad.
    PC secrets

    The legal spat with Froogles.com goes back more than a year, when Wolfe filed a petition against approval for Google's trademark, Froogle, which was granted in February 2004. The search giant contends in the filing that its rival has instilled false doubt over Google's legal right to the shopping brand.

    The proprietor of Froogles.com registered the Web address in December 2000, according to the filing, but did not use the domain for business until July 2002. Google claims that this was four years after it had secured rights to its Google trademarks. Froogles.com registered for a trademark for e-commerce related marketing services in September 2003.

    For its part, Google filed a trademark application for Froogle in November 2002, and was granted the mark in February 2004.


    I new this would happen

    Notice from snlildude87:
    Changed "Froogle" to "Froogles". These are two different companies - Froogle is owned by Google while Froogles is not.

  5. Posted · Report reply

    CHICAGO (Reuters) - GameStop Corp. (GME.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the video game retailer, on Monday said it has agreed to buy competitor Electronics Boutique Holdings Corp. (ELBO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) for $1.44 billion in cash and stock, helping GameStop enter new international markets.
    Electronics Boutique shareholders will receive $38.15 in cash and the equivalent of 0.78795 shares of GameStop Class A common stock for each Electronics Boutique share, the company said. That is a premium of 34.2 percent, based on Friday's closing prices for the stocks.

    GameStop expects the deal to add significantly to its diluted earnings per share in the second half of its fiscal year 2005 and in 2006. It expects "meaningful" pretax savings, beginning in fiscal year 2006.

    After the deal, GameStop said its Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Fontaine and Chief Operating Officer Daniel DeMatteo will keep those roles at the combined company.

    Shareholders representing about 47 percent of Electronics Boutique's voting shares have already pledged their support for the deal, GameStop said.


    I THINK THIS IS DUMB

  6. Posted · Report reply

    The general perception of PSP games right now is that they look pretty good. Pretty damn good. You probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you that PSP games are going to look considerably better in the future. It stands to reason that over time, games look better and better across a console's lifespan as developers become more accustomed to the hardware and learn to exploit it more effectively. The first-generation games might put just as much strain on the system as the late-generation games, but the tangible improvements come from much more efficient coding. The console's capabilities don't improve, only the software does. Such is the case with all consoles.
    What if I told you that PSP was different? What if I told you that as well as enjoying the benefits of steadily improving software development, the PSP would, at some stage in the future (and without any modification), become capable of a hardware performance increase of fifty percent? That would be somewhat more surprising, wouldn't it?

    Well, that's what I'm telling you. At this year's busy GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco, lots of companies gave lots of presentations. On Friday the 11th of March, between midday and 1pm, Sony Computer Entertainment America staged four different presentations simultaneously. Mark DeLoura, SCEA's manager of developer relations, delivered one of them: a rather dry and technical presentation called "PSP Advanced Software Overview". It seems that with so many talks vying for attention, this particular presentation may have slipped under the radar of the mainstream gaming press. What was revealed in that presentation however, is very significant.

    DeLoura explained that the PSP's CPU and bus have software-configurable clockspeeds. The CPU core is currently locked to a maximum clockspeed of 222MHz, and the bus (typically operating at half the CPU speed) is locked to a top speed of 111Mhz. The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) operates at bus speed, in other words, up to the 111MHz cap. The advantage of having configurable clockspeeds in a portable device is that power consumption can be controlled by adjusting the clockspeed to the demands of the software at any given moment. When the PSP is rendering complex in-game graphics at around 222MHz it will necessarily chew up more power than it would need to when displaying a simple menu screen running at say 5MHz.

    The hardware specifications of the PSP were released last year. Since then it's been known that the PSP CPU's top clockspeed is 333MHz and the bus and GPU's top speed is 166MHz. See what's going on? Sony have deliberately locked the PSP's operating speed at exactly two-thirds of it's actual potential. They have an extra fifty percent of it's current performance ability simply waiting in reserve to be unleashed at a later date.

    As I pointed out in my PSP Lowdown back in January, the graphical performance exhibited in PSP's launch titles looks like it's somewhere between PSone and PS2 standard. Now I understand why. The PS2's Emotion Engine (CPU) runs at 294.912MHz and it's Graphics Synthesizer (GPU) runs at 147.456MHz. While the PSP is clearly a more powerful device on paper, it's currently being restricted to a sub-PS2 standard of performance.

    Of course, this begs the question: why? Why would Sony choose to cripple their own hardware? Well, the most obvious answer is that they needed to maintain an acceptable battery life. In the lead up to PSP's debut, it's battery duration was often quoted as it's single biggest potential problem. Had they launched the PSP with games running at a fully unlocked 333Mhz, the battery could have been dead in less than two hours. That just wouldn't do. Through capping the PSP's clockspeed (and enforcing other power-saving guidelines) Sony have achieved a respectable 4-6 hours of gameplay from a single charge. It now seems apparent that Sony have actually delivered a portable console whose capabilities are too advanced for current battery technology. Once that technology improves, it seems inevitable that Sony will release a higher capacity battery and unlock PSP's full potential.

    The current performance cap may have other benefits in the long run. Rather than letting developers wastefully chew up the whole of PSP's hardware capability from the get-go with inefficient code, the restrictions essentially force them to code more efficiently from the beginning. Consequently, when the ceiling is eventually lifted, the developers will be ready to put the extra power to good use.

    It has been theorized that the clockspeed cap is in the PSP's firmware, and will be removed by a firmware update. A developer at the gaming-age forums recently disclosed that this isn't the case. The restriction is actually being imposed at the game development stage, by way of limits in Sony's PSP libraries. The PSP devkits allow developers to constantly modify the CPU clockspeed settings from anywhere between 1 and 333MHz (or 0.5-166Mhz for the GPU and bus), but the current software libraries simply won't go above 222MHz (or 111Mhz for GPU and bus).

    Initially restricting certain features of a console is not as uncommon as you might expect. As an example, the PS2 was restricted from displaying progressive scan for many years, though usually such restrictions are handled by the TRC process, not by a software restriction. The TRC (Technical Requirement Check) is the console manufacturer's checklist that games must pass before being published. Any developers who try to hack the current PSP libraries to exceed the clockspeed limits will undoubtedly have their games rejected at the TRC stage. Sony probably felt it would be easier to simply restrict the libraries than to ask the developers politely not to go above 222Mhz, and have to later issue a wave of TRC rejections. Sony will provide developers with new software libraries when they are ready to remove the restrictions. Games developed after that will be free to exploit all of the PSP's processing power. Ridge Racers' associate producer Hideo Teramoto recently confirmed in an Edge magazine interview that unlike the underclocked Ridge Racers, Namco will release PSP games in future that run at 333MHz.

    When the time comes, consumers won't need to do anything. No firmware update should be required. Old games won't run any faster than they ever did, because the restrictions are in the game software, not in the PSP itself. The new games will simply push PSPs harder than ever before. Sony will have much improved high-capacity batteries on the market by then, but you won't actually need to buy one. The latest and greatest games will run on your old battery. Of course, the speed at which they'll drain your old battery should be incentive enough for you to rush out and buy a new one.

    The tangible difference in the games should be very noticeable. Example: Right now, the PSP has a maximum fillrate of 444 Mpixels/sec. After the restrictions are lifted that will become 664 Mpixels/sec. Games will be able to feature more complex models with higher polygon-counts, more fluid frame-rates, better physics, you name it. We are talking about an across-the-board fifty percent performance increase after all. PSP's hardware supremacy over the PS2 should become evident. It's even possible that when the new battery is released, the PSP's fourth screen brightness setting (uber-blinding strength; currently only selectable when the PSP is plugged into mains power), will be available all the time.
    PSP's future certainly looks bright.


    http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

    more power equals more energy and psp's battery sucks
    its like Sony's technology is too advance for todays batteries

  7. Posted · Report reply

    A new scam by hackers has some people believing they are receiving an e-mail about a critical update to Windows when in actuality they are installing a Trojan horse, Sophos said on Friday. The e-mail directs victims to a fake version of the Windows Update site, where there are links to download the malicious "patches."
    "The email uses the Microsoft branding and style so to the casual observer it appears to be legitimate," Gregg Mastoras, Senior Security Analyst at Sophos, told BetaNews.

    If users download the "patches," they are actually installing the Troj/DSNX-05 Trojan horse that lets the attackers remotely take control of the infected PC.

    People may be more apt to click on the links since the e-mails are coming around the same time as Microsoft's April security updates. Microsoft, since making a commitment last year to better secure its products, has been issuing aggregate updates each month, sometimes with as many as a dozen patches at a time.

    Mastoras, however, disagreed with that theory. "My assumption is most people don't know Microsoft's security update schedule, so I don't think that influences the timing," he said.

    Most updated anti-virus programs should pick up the Trojan before it has a chance to install.

    Nonetheless, Sophos is urging users to watch what they download. "Clicking on a link in an e-mail is equivalent to downloading a file onto your computer. So if you don't know who is sending you the e-mail or it is unsolicited, users should delete the e-mail," Mastoras added.


    http://betanews.com/2005/04/08/windows-update-scam-fooling-users/

    so in other words, if you get an email from microsoft , dont open IT

  13. Posted · Report reply

    Former First Lady Slams GTA

    New York Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton sides with right-wingers against violent videogames.

    by Douglass C. Perry

     

    March 29, 2005 - Hilary Rodham Clinton, D, NY, has taken sides. Apparently, the wrong one. In an article with the Sunday Times, the first-time senator and two-term first lady, said she wants to launch a $90 million investigation into the effects of videogames on children.

     

    Her efforts mirror long-time Senator Joseph Lieberman D, Ct, though this time she has sided with right wing Republicans Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum.

     

    She cites Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto as as a "major threat" to morality in America.

     

    "Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them," Clinton said in a statement. "This is a silent epidemic of media desensitisation that teaches kids it's OK to diss people because they are a woman, they're a different colour or they're from a different place."

     

    Apparenly Clinton is new to the subect of violence in videogames, which first erupted over the finshing moves in Mortal Kombat. Having sex with a prostitute and then running said woman over in GTA is not a goal or mission in the game, leaving that option open to the morality and choice of the gamer. Furthermore, GTA3, which kick-started this new wave of complaints against violence in videogames, came out in 2001, almost four years ago. Clinton's statement appears to be the first part of her bid for the democratic presidential election in 2008.

     

    Clinton's proposed $90 million investigation will study the impact of games and other electronic media on the "cognitive, social, emotional and physical development" of children, reports the Sunday Times.

     

    We'll have more on Clinton's pre-presidential campaign ideas in the near future.

    http://www.ign.com/articles/2005/03/29/former-first-lady-slams-gta

     

    will this be the end of violent games???

    i hope not

  16. Posted · Report reply

    Posted Image

     

     

    Heres a quick summary, in the game Whipout Pure, theres a hidden function to download new updates for the game. The site to download the new features will be running in 1 month or 2

     

    some guy found this out and was able to browse the net

     

     

    As far as I can figure out, its NOT part of the firmware...But this can be made into a general purpose browser if you create a portal-like site to jumps to links. When you select "Go to home page" it returns you to the portal site (index.html). So thats an easy way out.

     

    Yes you can use input (we googled stuff), when you enter a textbox and press X the PSP pops up the Keyboard API (remember there's alot of API to be taken advantage of with the PSP). After that its as simple as any other input on the PSP.

     

    The way I loaded up my own "page" is by setting up my FreeBSD machine with some DNS entries that point ingame.scea.com and webcluster.scea.com and all NS's for scea.com to my internal LAN machine. So then I changed the PSP's NameServer settings to point to the server on my local LAN (FreeBSD machine). When the Wipeout client accesses http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ it gets my LOCAL file because of the DNS mapping.

    It's all pretty simple after that. I made a static page with a bunch of spring-board (or portal-like I guess) links to access from the PSP.

     

    Browsing is simple enough, up and down to move from link to link. D-Pad only though. Also there is no cursor anywhere, and no title-bars. If there is no link in the nearest vicinity, the PSP just scrolls the page (awesome). Entering links is X, refresh page is []. Again entering text into boxes pops up the API.

     

    JavaScript works (Again API for Alert boxes, NEAT feature), Java is yet to be tested. Frames don't work. Large pictures are to be tested too. Uhm I think thats it for now. Most of HTML works (no H1's and stuff). Background colors and pics etc work fine.

     

    Info:

        Once the network connection is established and the PSP gets an IP, it sends a request (specifically a GET for US_holding_page.jpg from http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/?tpure_psp_umd_1

    &hostLanguage=en&pspId=<REMOVED>&skin=Default) to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ using User Agent "SCEJ PSP BROWSER 0102pspNavigator", its Wipeout's webbrowser but it looks as if it's a Sony (Sony Computer Entertainment Japan) piece of code, so this might be a standard browser we'll be seeing. PHP rendering works great, I browsed phpinfo(); and there's not much in there to gush about. Since there are no links on that page, the browser lets you scroll up, down, left and right


    Read Here

    And Here

  22. Posted · Report reply

    World of Warcraft players banned for selling goldBlizzard Entertainment has permanently banned more than one thousand users from its massively multiplayer World of Warcraft title after an investigation into 'gold farming'.

    An investigation into gold farming, which involves collecting large amounts of gold and selling it to other individuals in exchange for real world currency, has been going on for several weeks.

    In a posting on the game's official forum, in-game support manager Maleki said Blizzard has 'issued permanent suspensions to over one thousand accounts that have been engaging in this practice'.

    'We do not condone such actions and will take decisive action as they are against our policy and damage the game economy as a whole. We will continue researching this matter.
    'If you suspect someone of taking part in said gold farming, please email the report to wowgm@blizzard.com,' he added.

    Since the game launched in the US last November, Blizzard has been firm in its apparent zero tolerance policy on cheaters, suspending a large number of accounts for a variety of reasons and encouraging users to report anybody suspected of hacking or cheating the game in various ways.

    Speaking last year prior to release, the game's producer Chris Sigaty said that cheaters would be identified and dealt with, but added that the developer was willing to acknowledge grey areas where quirks of the game gave out an unfair advantage and would deal with those without penalising players for discovering them."

    Source: Gamesindustry.biz
    posted by fatbooggy  # 3:08 PM 
    Comments:
    Blizzard is pathetic.. I am glad they are hot on cheaters, but the time they have to spend to get ebay records, and track down farmers is ridiculuous when you compare it to the downtime this game has, and the serious game stopping bugs.

    Blizzard has no idea how to manage what could possibly be *THE* game in MMOland.. Indstead they flounder in ineptitude, resting on the laurels of huge sales, and catering to non-us countries.

    Screw blizzard, screw thier game.

    they really dont know what they are doing I mean look at how many people are actually playing this game.. and all the time they are spending to ban 1000 accounts? They need to focus on their game first making it stable and reliable then they can mess around taking care of cheaters etc.


    got it from here

  25. Posted · Report reply

    A reader writes:"A french appeal court ruled yesterday in favour of somebody who downloaded about 500 movies, on the ground that those were private copies, and that he didn't redistributed them, and that a tax was payed on blank media. This sets the huge precedent that P2P is legal over there. For the details, apparently no distinction was made on the method used to download the movies (upload issues) and the famous EUCD directive was even used by the defending lawyer."

    that is crazy

    go her yo

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