MI-80 De Oppresso Liber

I've been playing The Darkness for the PS3. I was actually planning to review it as I got it off a trusted recommendation from a local GameStop employee and basically fell in love. I almost never finish games, but I was able to blow about 80-90% of the way through The Darkness in two sittings.

And then I hit a bug that won't let me finish the game.

What's so important about that 128bit hex string? Well that just happens to be the processing key which unlocks all current high-definition movies, both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

Hackers of the Doom9 forum [1] have been making plenty of news lately. Through the last few months they've made several breaks in the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) [10], the security mechanism aimed to keep high-definition movies locked up. Unfortunately for the movie industry it's proved only slightly more deterring than the Content Scramble System (CSS) used to encrypt original DVDs, which was broken by a lone teenager in his spare time to enable his movie watching under Linux [2].

“Covering your ass”: we've all done it. Unfortunately while most learn to eventually take responsibility for their actions the IT industry, and especially the security industry, still believe firmly in just that – solutions which don't enhance security, but limit liability.

To start off: let's define cron. Cron is a daemon in UNIX like operating systems, including Linux, that lets you schedule tasks. It's what lets you do things like run a virus scan every Sunday morning, or run that fun custom backup script you wrote every night after you've hit the sack.

So Drupal is controlled via a script, site/cron.php. Hitting that script causes Drupal to run its cron jobs which are defined throughout the CMS' configuration. In short: this is how things get done. Drupal's cron jobs send out emails, run submitted content through spam filters, update RSS feeds, and many other activities you expect from a dynamic site.

When I moved MI-80 to the new server I ran into a small issue. On my old host I relied on the crutch of cPanel, and when SUSE lacked a GUI cron tool I had to brush off my rusty cron skills. Cron is hardly difficult, but if you barely use it it's easy to forget the syntax, so I had to re-learn it basically.

Any who so I had a simple goal: get cron running so Drupal would run its scheduled tasks once an hour.

I'm not sure how many of you are gamers, or how many own a XBOX 360, but if you do have you noticed how terrible the backwards compatibility is? Sony and Nintendo with their next generation offerings have given amazing backwards compatibility. The Nintendo Wii will work with Gamecube games, controllers, and memory cards. The Playstation 3 will play both PS1 and PS2 games. Both systems will feature downloadable games from older systems. I love this all.

Why did Microsoft implement such shitty software support? Where as Sony and Nintendo will surely find and document a few games that don't work, Microsoft has taken the opposite approach. They have a very, very short list of original XBOX games which they've written software backwards compatibility support for. The result is that each game requires about a 10MB patch (the 360's hard drive has 12-14GB available upon opening), and you've got to have Live to get it. It also ensures that some games that are supported aren't perfect. Jade Empire has some missing textures that greatly detract from the gameplay for example.