Pure Digital Thought

Commando Competitive Fly Zipping

Saccia — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:38:51 +0000

So, you know I love playswitch.com because of all of the great games I’ve gotten. I recently took a look at their commercials which are also available on YouTube. This one is just hilarious.

Boycott of BF:BC Video

Saccia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:50:38 +0000

Sarcasticgamer.com has posted a video spoofing the Battle Field: Bad Company game. Give these guys your support and listen to their podcast. It’s actually really good.

Boycott of EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company

Saccia — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:52:40 +0000

Sarcasticgamer.com’s Lono is staging a boycott of Battlefield: Bad Company. The game is another attempt by EA to suck more cash out of gamers who are already paying $59 for a game. DLC is supposed to be something that allows you to add more great content to the game to enhance the experience like small expansion packs or multiplayer map packs. However, EA has decided to package the Gold edition of the game with extra weapons. If you don’t want the Gold edition of the game, you can kindly fork over cash to buy those extra weapons. The weapons apparently don’t add anything. They aren’t more powerful. So what’s the point? The only point is to try to sucker some people into forking over more than $59 for a game. Even if the guns WERE more powerful, that would be even worse as it would be giving advantage to players who can fork over extra money to dominate others. I’m with Lono on this one. BS is right. Goodbye to your game EA. Maybe you’ll learn to stop this crap. I’m linking in the fun little banners that Lono has put up on the site for people to use on their sites. Join in and Viva La Resistance!

March Madness on Playswitch.com

Saccia — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:17:09 +0000

So I’ve been trading games on playswitch.com and I’ve been trading like a madman. Here’s a rundown of the games that I’ve gotten and the number of SBucks I got them for which is virtual dollars (1 SBuck == 1 USD). I’ve purchased some SBucks but most of them were earned by trading games from my rather large collection of 50+ games.

Prey - even trade for LoTR: The Battle for Middle-earth II
Viva Pinata: Party Animals - 5 Sbucks + Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars
Kameo: Elements of Power - even trade for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Fight Night Round 3 - even trade for Crackdown
Meteos - even trade for Picross DS
Just Cause - 20 Sbucks
Halo 3 - 32 Sbucks (WHAT A STEAL!)
Conan - 28 Sbucks
Luminous Arc - even trade for Mario Kart DS
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas - 20 Sbucks
And I still have some trades in the works!

I’m loving the service. I plan on replacing my entire game collection with games that I haven’t had a chance to play.

Thank You Microsoft

Saccia — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:13:09 +0000

Okay, I never thought I’d say “Thank You” and “Microsoft” in the same sentence. But after today’s post on Major Nelson about the Gamerscore Corrections for Cheaters I just feel I have to say “Thank You”. It’s good to see MS kicking cheaters in the rear. It’s hard to believe that people actually pay others to raise their gamerscore and earn achievements for them. That’s really sad. But I’m glad Microsoft takes it seriously and has stuck to their promise to end cheating. I just love the fact that they’re publicly marking cheaters. That should make people think twice about it.

Two Big HD-DVD Wins

Saccia — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:30:40 +0000

I was really surprised to see that both DreamWorks and Paramount have exclusively picked HD-DVD as the format for their movies. The reason cited is because of the cheaper players that are available. The XBox360 player can be purchased for $180 and standalone players are less than $299.

Personally, I think it is easier for a non-techie consumer to relate to what an HD DVD is. After all, we have HD TV and HD Radio and following the same naming is HD DVD. Although I know what Blu-Ray is and what the specs are I would bet many “average Joe” types may not. And then, if you factor in that the cheapest Blu-Ray standalone player is over $450 it’s really not hard for me to see why HD-DVD will win out. If you put Blu-Ray and HD-DVD side by side playing the same movie, I can guarantee you that most people won’t be able to tell you which is which. But if you put a little card on one side that says $248 and a card on the other side that says $450, 100% of the people will instantly tell you which hits them the hardest.

Now, if they would just *stop* making the stupid dual DVD/HD-DVD discs that no one wants, the HD-DVD discs could be cheaper since they would be HD-DVD only. That would help HD-DVD even more.

Apache hangs on Digest Secret generation

Saccia — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:39:22 +0000

I kept running into a problem where I would try to restart apache and in error_log I would get a message stating:

[notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication …

Apache would just appear to hang for minutes. Stopping and restarting would result in the same thing. I looked around on google and others had similar issues. I finally found a site that has apparently gone away but I was able to get the text intact thanks to Google’s cache (Apparently it’s still there but has a funky connection). So, thanks to the guys at raptorized.com. Below is the text as found in Google’s cache to preserve this for future admins who hit this issue. Personally, I used the rng-tools package and that worked for me so I just stuck with that.

(more…)

West Nile Distributed Computing Project

Saccia — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 02:03:31 +0000

IBM’s World Community Grid has teamed up with scientists at UTMB in Galveston, Texas to help search for drugs that can cure a family of diseases such as dengue fever, West Nile encephalitis, hepatitis C, and yellow fever. The project is called “Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together”. The fact that this project is targeting the West Nile virus has hit home with those of us living in the south where West Nile has been flaring up over the past few years. Researchers say it will take about 50,000 years of computing time to help run all of the drug molecules against the various virus variants but by using distributed computing formed by volunteers who join the World Community Project and process workunits for the project, the project should take about a year. This should give scientists a fair number of drug candidates that can affect the virus and eventually lead to actual vaccines. I’ve started moving many of my machines to help crunch workunits on this project since I think this is an important project and the faster it runs the faster the scientists can get on with the task of testing the drug molecules that are found through this process. So, join up today and help find candidate drugs for West Nile and other viruses in its family. As a side note, make sure you download the BOINC client instead of the United Devices (UD) client from World Community Grid as the “Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together” project only runs on the BOINC client.

A lot more information can be found directly on the UTMB DDD-T website where they will post project status updates and other information as the project progresses.

Ode to DCMA

Saccia — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:54:54 +0000

Oh nine, eff nine, one one oh too!
Nine dee, seven four, eee three, five bee.
Dee ate for one,
Five six,
See five,
Six three, five six, ate eight sea oh!

[as seen in a slashdot comment]

Federal Trade Commission Supports Video Game Self-Regulation

Saccia — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:43:41 +0000

I got this email from the Video Game Voters Network and I wanted to pass the info on to help increase awareness. This is copied verbatim from the note.
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Inform Capitol Hill and Help Share the FTC Report Findings

In a recent report on entertainment media, the Federal Trade Commission commended video game self-regulation, recognizing the ESRB ratings as a “useful and important tool” for parents, and that retailers have made “substantial improvement” in limiting sales of Mature-rated games to children. Help us spread this information on Capitol Hill so we can further educate policymakers and hopefully put an end to harmful video game legislation. We at the Network believe that self-regulation is a better solution than government legislation, but to convince legislators, we have to make sure they know self-regulation works.

Write A Letter & Make Capitol Hill Aware of the FTC’s report!

Some of the FTC’s positive findings about Video Games:

High Parental Awareness: 9 out 10 parents are aware of ESRB ratings.
Clear Ratings: 94% percent of parents said the ESRB ratings are easy to understand–up from 77% in 2000–and 87% are either very or somewhat satisfied with the ESRB system, up from 76% in 2000.
Parents Taking More Active Role: The number of parents who restrict the games their children play is up to 85% from 69% in 2000.

Write your Senators and Representative to educate them on the FTC’s findings before another video game bill comes to a vote.

This report is further evidence for the argument against video game regulation, but public officials must hear about it from video game-playing citizens like you!

Please take two minutes to send a letter, and help defend your favorite form of entertainment!

Thank you,

The Video Game Voters Network
http://videogamevoters.org