Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Dropbox and Dropship

You may have heard about Dropbox, a cloud storage and file synching company, trying to kill off an open source project. Of abusive DMCA takedown notices, and Dropbox deleting files from users accounts. Maybe you haven't, so I thought I'd spread the news.

Dropship is an open source python script written by Wladimir van der Laan. It exploits the dropbox hashing system to allow you to download files that other people have on their dropbox, or allow other people to download files from yours without making them public. This has some useful applications, such as if you wanted to give a file to one person without making it public. However, it also has the ability to be used for the downloading of pirated files, and dropper didn't like it one bit.

Dropbox quickly contacted Wladimir van der Laan, asking him to take down Dropship from github (where it was hosted), which he complied with. Several people heard about this, and in typical internet fashion, put up mirrors of Dropship, in various places, including public dropbox folders. Dropbox issued several DMCA takedown notices, against an open source project nonetheless, and deleted the files from dropbox user's accounts. It has rescinded the DMCA takedown notices however.


Its easy to understand why dropbox wouldn't want people to know about the way they do their hashing, and how this could be misused. However, it is also wrong to abuse the DMCA in an attempt to scare people into doing what you want. So is censorship. Comment how you feel about this, here's a link to a mirror if anyone wants one.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Computer Virus

There's been a recent lull in posts, mostly because my computer was infected with a virus. One of those ones that pops up, looking all like some windows security thing, concerned about your computer. "Oh noes!" It says, "I've found some bad, bad viruses and trojans! Pay some money and I'll fix it!" when in reality it is the virus. It screwed over my antivirus, and warned me about every page on the internet being insecure. It also managed to kill of windows defender (not that it did much anyway) and replace the security center with itself. I've gotten rid of it, but there's still some cleaning up to do and file migrations to deal with. I might not be able to post in awhile, so have fun talking in the comments about viruses or malware, or whatever strikes your fancy.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Dragon Age II Preconceptions


I've played the first Dragon Age on the pc the whole way through, and experimented with all the possible class and race combinations. I really liked Dragon Age Origins- it had a rich plot, as well as loads of quests and dialogue. I liked that you could make so many different choices- both in dialogue and in plot- that actually had an effect, and made it so that you could replay the game over and over, picking different choices to change how the game progressed. And part of that replayability and depth came from the fact that you could pick different races and classes, with different origin stories, and people throughout the whole game would react to you differently based on your race and class.

A lot of gamers who liked Dragon Age Origins say they dislike Dragon Age II, or say that the game is ruined by certain decisions made by Bioware. Changes such as the fact that you can only play a human named Hawk- a decision which, though having obvious detriments, does have advantages. Dragon Age Origins had no player voice acting, because they would need so many different voices, and everybody thought of their player in a different way. In Dragon Age II, everyone plays essentially the same character, so voice acting was a feasible option.Voice acting can make your character seem more real, and

There are other reasons why fans of the first game don't like the second as much, but I won't go into all of them. While the sequel to Dragon Age Origins may not be as good as its predecessor, I don't want to let feelings of that color my reactions to the game before I give it a fair crack. I'll try to finish a review within a couple days. In the meantime, I'm posting a new poll asking how you all feel about Dragon Age.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Poll Results

There weren't that many votes cast, which is of course expected for a poll on a new blog. But anyway, the results are in, and the winner is *drumroll* AMD! What does this mean? Well, not much, since this is in no way a scientific poll. But I guess it means that the average viewer is more likely to prefer AMD than marketshare sujests.  Right now I'm coming up with another topic for a poll, and working on a Dragon Age 2 review, which will take a bit longer but should be good. If you have suggestions for a new poll, or comments about Dragon Age, feel free to post below.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Pinball Nostalgia


                The other day, I saw some kids playing pinball- yes, the pinball cadet game that used to come with windows, and it really took me back to the days I spent playing it. So I decided to relive my nostalgia, but there was one problem: pinball isn’t included with windows 7. So I clicked around on the web, and found this site, which allowed me to get pinball up and running.

                Though I’m not still any good at it now, I remember having almost literally no clue how to play as a child. I knew how to control the flippers and that was it. Tilting when the ball is headed straight down the middle? All I knew was that, during exciting and vital parts of a game, I would loose control and the message “tilt” would appear. Why this happened, I had no clue, but I hated that tilt. It turns out that the keys for tilting are right next to the keys that control the flippers, so I would sometimes press them accidentally, causing the tilt. This was very frustrating.

                Similarly, I didn’t know anything about upgrades. All I knew was that sometimes, if I was lucky, the targets would change color, and that was good. Of course, since I didn’t know how to get upgrades that meant I got them only very occasionally by pure chance. It was the same situation with the missions- I was ignorant of the greatest point earner in the game, but sometimes I got lucky.

                Its interesting that I found this game so engaging, despite not having a clue what I was doing. In some ways it made the game more fun. Sometimes I think that being really serious about a game and trying to maximize how well you do takes some of the fun out of it, and adds stress to something that is supposed to relieve stress. Sometimes, I’ll be playing a game and enjoying it, and when I go online to read about it I find out that I had picked some less optimal choices, or was missing opportunities to maximize experience, or whatever you’re trying to get. Then I feel like I have to do these things in the future to play the game properly. I think that a lot of enjoyment you get from a game comes from bumbling through parts of it and figuring out the best ways to do things on your own. Share your own thoughts on this, pinball, or whatever you want in the comments below.


Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Need a New Show


                So, I need a new show to watch, after finishing Full Metal Alchemist. I plan on watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood some time, as I’ve heard it follows the plot of the manga much more closely, but I don’t really want to start that now, since the first half of each show is pretty similar. So, I thought I’d turn to you guys, who seem to be into this sort of thing, to throw out some names of shows that you like, so I can check them out.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Fullmetal Alchemist


                I know this is an old show, but I recently got sucked into it and watched it all (helped that it was all on youtube for free), so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it and see what you all think. In another vein, I now need another show to watch, so hit me up with some suggestions in the comments.
                Overall, I enjoyed the show. It was fun to watch, had some great characters like Roy Mustang, and most importantly a good plot. At some points in the show I was on the edge of my seat, watching episodes as fast as I could, at other points it was nice relaxing entertainment. It doesn’t have a ton of fluff episodes like some shows do, which often end up annoying me if nothing happens in the plot for a long time. However, there were some things that annoyed me. I heard that some of these are different in Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, so I might check that out.
                Now, I’m probably now the standard viewer, but I like it when shows include the political aspects. When the show is introducing the world of the show and the conflicts in it (in this show, war), I want to know about other countries and they are different, and what their attitudes are. In FMA, there is lots of talk about wars with other countries, but almost none of it is shown (other than the Ishbalan war), and the name of another country is only ever said once. I like worldbuilding where I know more about the world than just what the characters experience. FMA did this somewhat, but I felt like there was a lot of promise that was never exploited.
                Something thing that annoyed me at first (eventually decided I’d be happier just thinking about the alchemy as being magic) was that they make so much fuss about the law of equivalent exchange, but it’s never really enforced. Again, I’ve heard this is better in Brotherhood and the actual manga. I also didn’t quite like that Al looses his memories in the ending, and that Ed got stuck in a different world than Al. It created new conflict, because Ed wants to return to his own world, and I felt that after all their struggles they should have been able to live together happily.

New Additions

From now on I’ll be posting a weekly poll and then posting the results about interesting questions, and to gauge the actions and interests of the viewers. Right now its about Intel and AMD, you should see it over there to the right. If you have any ideas for a good poll topic, drop by in the comments section.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Flamers and Fanboys

Plenty of flame wars have started about whether Ati or Nvidia is better, Intel or Amd, Apple or Microsoft. Maybe its because we feel the need to argue about something. Maybe we shout out about the superiority of what we happen own, because nobody wants to feel like they made a dumb decision, especially when it comes to expensive things like hardware. Whatever the reasons, arguing over preferred brand can be fun. So, I'll just list my preferences and then you all can do the same in the comments.

I tend to favour AMD over Intel, partially because I like to support the underdog, but also because you get better performance per buck with AMD. Its the same story with ATI and NVIDIA. NVIDIA has the greater marketshare, so to compete ATI lowers prices. Given that I'm pretty cheap, its no surprise that I prefer PC's over Macs. I'd use linux, but the cheap ass wireless adapter I bought only has drivers for windows. Give your preferences in the comments, try to keep it clean everybody.

Shogun II

Somehow I missed the release of this game, so this post is coming a bit late, but oh well. I enjoyed Rome Total War and Medieval II, so I hope they don’t drop the ball on the latest installment in the series. The three things that will make or break this game are the:
1.       AI
2.       Campaign Mode
3.       Multiplayer
If the AI is bad or boring or too predictable, the game will lose its replayability. If the AI is weak, then it won’t be worth coming back to play again and again against a computer that poses no challenge. The AI has to succeed at more than just battles. If the AI isn’t aggressive or smart enough to expand and pose a threat on the overall campaign map, the player will grow bored and won’t finish the game. If the AI can’t be made competitive without massive handicaps, then no amount of pretty graphics and cut scenes can make up for it. For an example of a game partially crippled by poor AI, look no further than Civilization 5.
Similarly, the quality of the campaign mode is a vital factor. The campaign is the meat of the game, the thing that ties it all together. Sure, you could play custom battles against the computer, but without the campaign to give them meaning, they would grow dull all the sooner. If the campaign gameplay is poorly done, the game can’t succeed.
Now onto the third thing: multiplayer. True, good multiplayer isn’t essential. There are plenty of single player games that are fun to play and have left their mark. But multiplayer is what keeps players coming back. A computer can’t match the challenge of battling another person, someone who comes up with new tactics and strategies, who can actually think. Multiplayer is what keeps games alive, multiplayer is why Starcraft 1 is still played today and multiplayer is how you make fans. If they can pull off a good multiplayer it’ll be a boon to them later on.
Like I said, this game is already out, so if you have it go ahead and comment how you feel about it.

First Post!

This is going to be a blog about things that interest me, and hopefully others. Things like gaming, anime, technology, and computers. I hope to be able to update this blog regularly, at least two or three times a week, but sometimes life just gets in the way.