Yup. You read that right. Modern Warfare 2 PC now has dedicated servers.

Wait, PC gamers! Before you send Bobby Kotick a thank you letter, know that it wasn't they who did it, but rather the gamers who took Infinity Ward and Activition's attempts to lock down the game as a challenge. And bring it those gamers did, managing to hack in the developer console and enable the ability to set up dedicated servers. Keep in mind, the game hasn't even been out a week.

Perhaps some of the boycotters caught playing the game were not being hypocrites, but rather hard at work turning the highest-profile shafting of PC gamers right around, as the video below might demonstrate.

Alright, in the wake of Chipmaker Showdown being canceled, I'm once again certain I haven't been teleported to some parallel dimension.

Because, honestly, how long should it take for hackers to put the love back into Modern Warfare? I mean, that's like expecting to safely use wireless Internet at Defcon; it's just not going to be that way forever.

I'd try it myself, but you see, I bought it on steam. Hurry up and make it official, damnit.

Careful what you say – that iPhone over there could be a live microphone.

Which is to say there’s a new, free iPhone app called Soundbiter designed to monitor the world’s audio and upload it to Twitter and Facebook with the push of a button.

When running, the Soundbiter app is constantly recording, keeping an audio buffer of a minute or so. Then when you hear a good joke, a fine guitar riff or a politician’s slip-of-the-tongue, you hit the apps’s only button, which saves the last 60 seconds of sound. From there, it’s a cinch to edit, upload, title and publish the sonic snippet to Twitter or Facebook.

No no, it's true, you should always record everything you say when you're high. You are actually smarter when you're high, and all your friends will be embiggened by your... *shudder* "sonic snippets".

Look, I'm not even going to get into the privacy/ security ramifications of such an app. I'm just going to say this: congratulations, you just made the Internet dumber. No no, for decades we didn't think it was possible, but. There you have it.

Not even Google Wave will be able to save it.

@ RockPaperShotgun

Just as a FYI. (Click for the full thing)

@ Kotaku

According to "internal Activision estimates", Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 didn't just have a good launch, it had "the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment".

This claim is based on sell-through sales, with Activision bean-counters reporting the game managed to pull in $310 million in its first 24 hours on sale. And that's not a worldwide number, that's just in North America and the UK. $310 million. In a single day. In three countries.

Sure, games cost more than a movie ticket, but $310 million in 24 hours is still a mighty impressive number, regardless of the admission price.

So wait, like, does this mean you can't hack it? All these people are playing it because the ingenious multiplayer system turns out to be badass, right?

It totally does!

But you know what the most important part of this is? That the consumer, I, you, we... we spoke with our hearts, not our wallets. Because denying the economy even one sixty dollar game is unamerican and factually terrorism.

there are 27 countries in north america, you wankers

Think you can type? Now's your chance to jump in the ring – err, take a seat at your keyboard – and go head-to-head with the fastest typists around. Put your fierce typing skills to the test for a chance to win $2,000 and be crowned the first-ever Ultimate Typing Champion.

The current dude is leading at 171 WPM, which, actually probably beats her. But she can still blitz the rest of you. I mean, c'mon, she was a legal secretary, she doesn't break keyboards so much as punch them through desks.

Still, 171...

HAX

@ Ars Technica

Intel and AMD are fierce competitors in the world of chipmaking, but in recent years they've taken the fight to the courtroom. AMD has sued Intel for antitrust violations (allegations that have been picked up by a number of governments), while Intel fired back by claiming that AMD had violated a licensing agreement for x86 technology. This morning, however, the two companies made a surprise announcement: they've reached an agreement that settles all legal issues between them.

@ AnandTech

Out of this settlement come four major things for AMD:

1. $1.25 billion in cold, hard cash.
2. Intel will stop doing things that they and AMD agree they shouldn’t be doing.
3. The right to not have to produce x86 CPUs in-house. AMD can go fabless.
4. The right to have their x86 processors fabricated anywhere of AMD’s choosing.

What the hell, I get the flu and the whole world changes! You can't end the legal throw-down, that upsets the balance of God damn everything. Next thing you know, NVIDIA and AMD will freely allow cross-licensing for multi-GPU configs, the Crunchpad and the Open Pandora will hit mass market, and Kyle Bennett will go vegan and quit drinking.

This just doesn't sit well with me at all.

Alright. You put a lot of miles on a mouse. Over time, they get quirks, and those are actually just little stress fractures and other flaws that you beat into them, and I don't just mean the body of the mouse. The feet are ablative and wear away, the plastic used to make the buttons go click gets rickety, and the wheel gets greasy and inaccurate.

The way cheap mice get around this is by using bulkier, thicker plastic and wheel-tracking optics that scan larger, lower-resolution areas. All that makes 'em last longer, but it makes it harder to click and scroll, and fucks with the relationship between your brain saying click and the computer hearing click. It adds inconsistency.

Using cheap input devices is like using bulk Bic ballpoints. Your lettering slides around and the amount of force required to overcome the ink's tackiness is also the amount of force it takes to throw the ball across the whole word.

And that's just the buttons. A cheap mouse sticks its cheap circuitry anywhere it fits in the body, where a good mouse levels the weight of the internals across the axises you use to move it around. That means that cheap mice pull and push in directions that even if you subconsciously correct for, track the cursor in directions your brain is opposed to.

The most noticeable change when using a good mouse is the tangible effects of the USB cable. The cheap mouse cable is designed to withstand, to resist change, and they do it by using thick plastic shielding. Good, thin shielding is expensive. But there's more to it than just inflexibility; a cheap mouse cable pushes constantly towards the front of the device. But a floppy cable will get tangled underneath, so the cable has to be rigid enough to supports its own mass but not impede or deflect the mouse's movement. And that means sticking knit sleeves between the insulator and the wiring, but without adding weight.

There's all this before you even begin dealing with latency and accuracy, and they're all real costs that make these devices more expensive. Macros? On-the-fly reprogramming? More than three chunky, finger-bashed buttons? These are all good things.

But the real test for using a good mouse is to then switch to a bad mouse. Like, you're helping a friend delete all the pornspam off his machine, and you do that swirly thing you do to calibrate your brain to someone else's sensitivity and acceleration, and then it hits you: this mouse is a piece of shit. I thought I knew you, man. I thought you were cool.

So what is it? Are you a good Mont Blanc owner, caretaker, secret lover? Do you only use Mont Blanc ink because you know to use otherwise violates not just the warranty, but the honor of your implement?

Or does it not matter. A pen's a pen, a mouse is a mouse, and they both smell like spit after a week, anyway...

i have a fever and love my mouse

In fact, many of you have commented that you have cancelled your preorders in response to the design decisions made by Infinity Ward. But Activision, publisher of what will be one of the largest titles of the year, doesn't seem all that worried about the backlash from PC gamers.

"We're, of course, watching this very carefully and paying attention to it," Activision president Mike Griffith said in response to a financial analyst, as noted by Kotaku. "But we're not overly concerned about it."

"One of the problems with our PC SKUs in the past is that it has not been as friendly a consumer experience in terms of matchmaking and online play as the consoles have allowed it to be," he added. "Our solution here improves that consumer experience overall by a significant margin. And so we think that the benefits we will see are going to far outweigh any negatives that seem to be surfacing."

"Any negatives" in this case means "profits lost over money gained by using a crippled peer-to-peer multiplayer system."

Originally, I thought that this magical never-before-tried could have been something new and different. As it turns out, it's just a bullshit cost-cutting measure, which shouldn't surprise me or anyone, for that matter.

I still stand by my support of the single-player game, that is, I'm going to wait and see, but if it's only just as good as Modern Warfare, there's no reason not to buy this game, unless you're a baby-killing, terrorism-pot-smoking liberal anti-Modern Warfare fakeriot.

real americans pledge their faith to god and country through video game violence

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

...among others.

I just... I don't get this. Didn't the US Congress just bolster the FCC's authority over the Internet? Isn't proactive another word for invasion? Jesus, how is any of this feasible, let alone legal?

"Give me six..." shit, I just used that quote. Just go read Schneier. Man, if this gets codified, up will be down, black will be white, and our turkeys will be photoshopped.

No but yeah, this is bad.

As a fan of the ridiculous acrobatics in the games, one of the aspects I was specifically watching for in the trailer was the stuntwork. As expected, the action is heavy on the CG, but as a result the free running in the trailer is as unbelievable as in the games, if not more so. Some specific moves shown off in the trailer will be familiar to fans of the games, while others are so fantastic that a game would be hard pressed to replicate them outside of a cut-scene or quick time event. Suffice it to say that I was pleased with the quality and density of acrobatic stunts in the trailer, and I hope that the movie maintains both.

As far as combat, there is not much to say. Much like combat took a backseat in The Sands of Time videogame, it wasn't featured particularly prominently in the movie trailer. I can say that bows and arrows are confirmed, as is at least one swordfight. At least!

What dominated the trailer, however, was the newly scripted story, which borrows elements from The Sands of Time trilogy (most obviously, the Dagger of Time), but otherwise introduces a new prince, a new female lead, and an original plot. The trailer naturally spoils very little of the film, but it showed enough to be clear that it won't simply be a silver screen retelling of the videogames.

While I'm kinda-sorta excited to see how this all works out, I can't help but think, aren't there movies to be made that don't just re-purpose existing media? I know it's not really possible to make something truly original, but everyone agrees, if ticket sales are down, the industry only has itself to blame.

There are so many breathtaking, edge-sitting tales out there that are just begging to be shot, and I'm not even talking about an action-packed cop movie about a rogue
parahawking detective, which would without a doubt be, well, original, I mean something as knuckle-whitening as the history of the solid-state disk.

i'd watch that over and over

The first step to solving this problem of limited inventory space is to use your characters as mules. In my game, every single character has a secondary weapon equipped. Every amulet and belt slot is used. Both ring slots are filled. Not necessarily because the character is going to use those items, but because it frees up slots in my backpack.

The second step is to shell out for the backpack expansions. These are an ingame money sink. They partly encourage you to visit various merchants to see if they sell one of the precious backpack expansions. But they mostly force hard decisions about how to spend your money.

But then there's the third step. It's called Warden's Keep and it'll cost you seven dollars to download. It adds a new party camp that includes storage so you can free up backpack slots when you're adventuring. Bioware claims this was created after early reviews complained about the lack of inventory space. But rather than fixing the game by giving everyone a storage locker, they opted to use the problem as a way to make more money.

Oh, everyone look shocked and then start an online petition. There has to be a way to show your outrage with you non-wallet. Because, you know, it's busy enjoying Dragon Age.

Not that I've played it; I'm skeptical about Bioware's ability to make a great game after they blew their wad on Jade Empire. Blah blah blah Mass Effect. I played Moon Patrol already, thanks. On a black-and-white television, even.

I'm guessing that the astounding praise is like when they give someone an Oscar for a shit movie, but five years ago, the guy did an awesome job but got passed over, and in this case, everyone's all nostalgic about Baldur's Gate because we all bought 4th Edition and didn't bother with it, and now it's just another box on the shelf.

Minsc wasn't funny then, and he isn't funny now, and space lesbians don't make games good.

In terms of data on current human scales, a yottabyte is nearly infinite (though I'm sure the NSA will manage to fill the thing in like 2 weeks, and iPods will come with yottabytes in just a few months).

To be fair, the yottabyte figure is just one estimate generated by a Pentagon think tank. The facility could hold a mere hundreds of petabytes. But either way, the prospect is as unsustainable as it is frightening. This one facility will burn through as much electricity as the entirety of Salt Lake City.

All of this data comes from the book The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid. And while the paranoid among you may read it, I, MARK WILSON, HAVE NO REASON TO FEAR THE NSA'S INVOLVEMENT IN MY LIFE OR INFORMATION AT ALL. [NYBooks via CrunchGear]

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
--Richelieu, Cardinal de

But yeah, weren't the wiretaps supposed to stop? Oh, wait, we still have that homeland to secure. If we let the NSA record all our calls, can we at least bring pocketknives on planes?

Unfinished Windows 7 Feature Turns Laptops Into Wi-Fi Hotspots

A Philadelphia developer has rooted out an unfinished feature of Windows 7 that turns any laptop into a wireless access point, allowing other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share the connection without special software. Nomadio, which specializes in military network consulting and development, used the new "Virtual Wi-Fi" feature in Windows 7 to create Connectify, a free application that it released as a beta last Friday.

Windows 7 Turn Laptops into Wi-Fi Hotspots

PC Advisor reports that Philadelphia developer Nomadio has discovered an unfinished Windows 7 feature (Virtual Wi-Fi) that can turn a laptop into a Wi-Fi hotspot. That means other devices in the near vicinity can access the Internet without the need for special tunneling software. The company has now exploited the uncovered treasure and created a free application called Connectify, released just last week.

See, the enterprising high school geek will, in his head, use this as a lure to acquire the attentions of hot, Internet-needy ladies.

But that T shirt'll put an end to things, don't worry.

@ Wired

The good news is that this feature-rich handset, running version 2.0 of Google’s Android OS, compares very favorably to the Goliath of the smartphone world as a utility mobile-computing device – and, oh yeah, a phone. The bad news is that there may be too many good things going on to make using this device the quick, intuitive, out-of-the-box experience it should be. That’s a problem, given that the iPhone has set the usability bar so high.

@ PC World

Especially snappy is the Droid's Web browser, which loads images quickly thanks to the powerful 550MHz processor and speedy hardware-accelerated graphics. Though you are at the mercy of your 3G high-speed data network coverage, once you're in it, Web surfing is breezy and smooth. Video from sites such as YouTube looks equally impressive; the playback of a high-definition YouTube cartoon ("Sita Sings the Blues") was excellent, with no stalling or audio dropouts. Audio also sounded great piped through a pair of high-quality headphones. The straightforward music player supports playlist building, album art, and shuffle and loop playback modes. You can purchase DRM-free music at the Amazon MP3 store via the preloaded app on the device.

OK, this needs to be said: no matter what your feelings about Motorola, Google, Android, Verizon, smartphones in general--that is a stunning photo. Maybe a little too narrow DOF, but that backdrop makes up for it. What is it, a driveway? And you know that the vignetting's fake, but damn, is it used right.

Also, Kurtis, get me one of these phones; I'm on Verizon. I promise to keep it charged! I promise!

Well, triple resurrections, if you also include the upcoming sequel/relaunch. For the purposes of this post though, it’s vintage Mechwarring. Not been able to try this myself yet — mainly due to the torturously slow proprietary bitorrent client necessary to download the thing — but there’s a whole lot afoot in Mechwarrior land. First, a major new version of a free remake of Mechwarrior 2 made in Blitzbasic. It’s called Assault Tech 1: Battletech. Tech tech? Tech. Tech! Apparently, it now looks better than the original, thanks to a revamped DirectX7 engine. Oh, mighty seven. Decide for yourself in the videos below. As an additional ray of robotic rapture, the MW fan/mod site behind AT1:BT, MekTek.net, are also gearing up to re-release the rather splendid Mechwarrior 4, in its DRM-free, modern-Windowsed entirety.

Man, Mechwarrior 2, that brings back all kinds of memories, namely, peer-to-peer modem games. And kicking the shit out of Angelo until he discovered the nuke. And then not finishing my project, begging my dad to tell the school I was sick, and then ditching class to go to the library to finish my homework.

I ditched a lot of class to get classwork done. In hindsight, I sometimes wonder what part, if any, of my post-sixth-grade education was derived from school. No, really, I got out of the shower this morning and started to wonder; if I just didn't even bother with school would I have been dumber or just missed out on a lot of awkward fumbling (also at the library).

My first job was at a library, I was six. I tracked down law books for students and was paid in vending machine snacks. I also dug up microfiche and floppies for sodas, and made copies marked up a nickel each. 'Course, now we have the Google, nobody knows what microfiche is, and kids these days don't get taught how to use card catalogs.

See: Google. This is tech-related.

Speaking at BAFTA’s Annual Video Games Lecture last night, Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux revealed what he believes to be the 5 most revolutionary games from the past 20 years.

In a typically passionate and engaging presentation, Molyneux spoke of the need for designers to defy perceived wisdom and custom, saying, “The best innovations come from challenging the foundation stones of conventional wisdom.” The 5 games selected by Molyneux were specifically chosen for their success in doing just that.

The first title Molyneux highlighted for discussion was Dune 2, an early RTS. Molyneux said Dune 2 took gaming away from twitch-based reactions and instead encouraged a slower, more cerebral approach. Furthermore, alongside its innovative multiplayer, Dune 2 could be played in a variety of ways. Terms to describe these differing play styles, such as ‘turtle’ (where the player is overwhelmingly defensive), are still used in gaming to this day. According to the man himself, Molyneux is a turtle.

No. Fact. System Shock 2 is not on this list. Fact. He doesn't have the world's best video game/ movie tie-in, which itself is a tie: Goldeneye and Blade Runner. Fact: I think Dark Reign 2 was a huge let-down. Fact: OK, Dune 2 was pretty cool even if it ripped off a lot from Command & Conquer.

Fact: his games aren't on the list. Even the guy who made Fable can't really claim Fable goes in the top five.

And Black & White just got annoying. I don't want my peons to tell me when I got email. I want them to get their own damn jobs and stop bugging me every time the sky light up with fire. That shit happens all the time, be happy you don't live in Mordor, whiners.

No, really.

"Rockstar Games is proud to be a major sponsor of Movember, the annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men's health issues, specifically prostate cancer. Grow a rugged moustache and send us a photo by the end of Movember for an opportunity to be immortalized as a character in Rockstar Games' next action-adventure, Red Dead Redemption."

Read the details here.

If you're unclear on how your 'stache ties into fighting prostate cancer, check the bullet points more closely. Right after Rockstar asks you to register with your email so that you can be kept abreast of developments relating to their upcoming Western action game, there's this:

"Tell your friends and family and get them to sponsor you and raise money for men's health charities."

You know I apreciate the sentiment, having plenty of the imperiled junk in question, but people know that boob cancer kills, like, double the people what butt cancer does. And dudes get it, too, and almost certainly die from it, since we never, ever get mamogramized.

I'm just saying, if you're going to help cancer people, don't help old dude cancer people. They're stacked and fund research damn well already.

Just picked up from Richard Cobbett’s twitter, it appears that Interplay are re-releasing Planescape Torment. Its release date is listed as the 30th October and the price is a — not-much-change-from-the-nature-of-twenty-quid — 17.99 of your Earth pounds. In fact, it appears to be a whole load of Interplay other material too. It’s a surprise to see a decade-old game released at a mid-range price… but it’s also one that I find hard to argue against. A game that’s still placing high in all-time lists, that’s been unavailable for years, that goes for full-price when it turns up on eBay and hasn’t been superseded in any way. If the gaming equivalent of the Beatle’s price never going down and this means that Dan Gril has no excuse but to finally return Alec’s copy to him. Hand it back, you bast.

Free as in, free from its confines to rare physical media, that is. You still have to buy it (again, should that be the case).

So maybe a decade-old D&D game won't get your heart fluttering, but know that it is, at the very least, a mind-fuck of a title. And because it's old and doesn't use 3D, it's actually gorgeous, as opposed to geometric, pixellated diarrhea like most sorta-old games.

Man, have you looked at these rules, though... I can't believe I memorized them all at one point have never bothered with them, ever. Pshaw.

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names – or addresses – that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN – the non-profit group that oversees domain names – is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic – in which Russian is written.

Hurray, finally, spam can re-take streaming video as the number one consumer of bandwidth.

I really don't get this wave of YouTube video out there. The Internet's for text, except what's for porn, where video should stay. I don't care how relevant the clip is, I get work done in public, and it just seems like an assholish thing, watching a video when there's a completely unobtrusive gaggle of high school girls talking about... wait, today wasn't a holiday.

Ditchers are going to coffee shops now? Stupid kids, you're supposed to go to the Village Inn, it's tradition.

I've read so many posts of such a batshit, bugfuck nature about this Modern Warfare Server Thing that it's hard to know where to begin. If you are angry at this break from tradition, and if you feel betrayed by these eleventh hour revelations, these are both situated well within the reasonable and comport (by and large) to the known. Do not buy it. Your platform of choice is the most open, universal digital venue on the planet. A suitor will be along presently.

It's not cherry-picking to say that the notion of Microsoft somehow being involved runs deep. You could be charitable and say they mean Infinity Ward was infected somehow by Microsoft's peer to peer vision, but that's not what they're saying. They're talking about literal collusion to bring about the downfall of the PC. Even though Modern Warfare 2 is launching on Steam, leverages Steamworks, and grants Steam Achievements.

Some of the rage is channeled semi-constructively into (not a boycott, per se, but) a redirection of funds from Modern Warfare 2 over to Battlefield 2: Bad Company - a notion that has been cannily seized by the would-be recipient. Battlefield 2 is going to be pretty good, so why not buy it - but let's pause for a moment and really absorb the idea that PC gamers are rallying around a DICE console port in their zeal. Nevermind the fact that you can't host your own Battlefield 2 servers, and that having a dedicated server for the game involves renting it from one of their partners. Maybe they didn't read the FAQ?

I love how everyone's complaining about a system they don't even understand.

Nobody really knows how Modern Warfare 2 is going to handle multiplayer except for Infinity Ward, and without a big-ass audience, it's still just theory for them. I don't care who decided to do what, and how different it is, not until I actually see it. This could be a revolution in multiplayer matchmaking that completely reinvents the way shooters are played. It could chomp beached whale dick. It could basically do nothing differently, it could also take matchmaking to its roots and get you laid, I don't know how, neither does anyone, because it doesn't exist yet.

But here's why I really don't care about how the multiplayer system works: because I don't give a damn about multiplayer. I want a sequel to Modern Warfare, which had such a great single-player game it's even fun to watch someone else play it. I've beaten it many times. Not even in arcade mode or whatever. Just over and over, because the game is so awesome it might as well come with hot pink truck nuts.

and if you don't think hot pink truck nuts are awesome i'm not sure we can be friends

So how easy is it to pirate? Assuming you have a Jailbroken iPhone and Cydia installed, you can simply add a new package source to download the pirating software from Hackulous. This pirating software is simply a kernel patch that bypasses Apple’s DRM system (or something like that).

When you add the package source Cydia is nice enough to give you a message warning you that what you may be doing may be morally wrong (see below). Since I was only intending to pirate our apps, I added it anyway. A quick install of the software and a reboot is all that is needed to allow your phone to run pirated software.

Once the phone is rebooted, all you have to do is download a cracked version of the app from one of the MANY places on the internet, add it to iTunes, sync, and you are done. NOTE: Surprisingly this is MUCH easier than actually buying it on iTunes!!

And therein lies the meat of the piracy nut. Getting Fallout 3 to run, a legitimate, store-bought copy (the last physical PC game I've ever acquired) took me more time to install and verify than it took me to purchase, download, and install Red Faction through Steam. Or, to draw an actually parallel, to install Neverwinter Nights on my laptop--I had a problem with my media, so hello torrents--it's easier to pirate shit.

One major problem is that there isn't some universal, or at least, really common, way to get software. All these different platforms, all these different companies, all these different producers, they want their own, in-house distribution channels.

What we need is an online software mall, where you can return crappy stuff for mall credit. Amazon, get to it.;;