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I know some of you are avid GTAO players (Grand Theft Auto Online).
Last week Rockstar (aka R*, makers of the GTA series) pushed out a patch that included the much-maligned BattlEye software, which (in short) is intended to prevent cheating and third-party mods. They're probably better at it than R* ever was.
For years, R* has pushed out updates that try to mitigate said cheating and modding; it's been mostly a futile cat and mouse game. And it's only now that they've decided to start relying on a third-party to take care of that for them.
And the modders ain't happy. Don't get me wrong, they've managed to tweak their mods in very little time so they work again, but they're still unhappy and they've decided to take it a step further.
Since then, R*'s servers have been the target of DDoS attacks on an on-and-off basis. R*'s own service status page doesn't show it (most of the time I check), but this page shows reported outages and shows definite spikes. I've experienced these outages myself...the game launches, but you can only go into story mode (which is completely offline); the whole online side of it is unavailable as it fails to log you in.
The game's now over a decade old, yet still generates over half a billion dollars a year for them (according to multiple sources). If these outages annoy enough players, this is bound to start affecting them financially sooner or later.
I'm really curious at this point to see who's gonna blink first.
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It's bizarre to me.
Amongst all that you mention the stupid BattleEye thing pretty much killed all Linux and Steamdeck play overnight.
That probably wasn't a huge percentage but it wasn't nothing or I wouldn't have heard about it.
They probably flushed quite a bit of yearly revenue just doing that, none of those folks will spend anymore.
OTOH, these games tend to be overrun with hackers and cheaters shortly after release. Only now a decade later it has become a problem?
But R* is crazy anyway. I spent an hour with some younger modders looking at some things for them. Was blown away by the whole json-everywhere. Didn't expect to even see it because it'd be terrible in context. Driving screws with a hammer.
Oh, it was though. It was. In fact it was even worse because they messed it up. Fixing it after GTA had been out for like 5 years cut their load times by like 70%.
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And now I've somehow managed to be part of this new ban wave. Got an email claiming I've somehow violated their TOS/EULA, I've been banned from online player mode for 30 days (that, I can live with), and they reset my character profile (that - not so much).
They made themselves judge, jury and executioner with that one. No explanation given, and the email says their decision is final with no chance of any sort of appeal. I'd like to at least know what it is they think I did.
The people I play with regularly can all vouch for me - I'm the last person playing GTAO that would try to cheat, use mods or take advantage of any type of loophole. I've literally got thousands of hours invested in this game, and if I could just use a mod, say, to change my RP score or the amount of money I have...that would completely negate the time I've put into this game. Why bother? It would mean I've been wasting my time all along, if I could just type in a value in a field.
There have been times where I was in a public session and a modder "money-dropped" on all players. I never asked for that, and every time it happened, I got pissed and quit the session as quickly as I could. Then I'd try to "burn" through any amount of money that was illegitimately added to my account. If their system has "proper" accounting built into it - in the sense that they could track where the money or reputation points come from - it's all legitimate, down to the last penny, except for, like I said, those instances where a-holes just sent money to everyone in a session. And then they expect to be thanked for it, believing they're doing other others a favor.
I did send a protest email to their support, and I did find a support phone number. If I don't get a response, I'll follow up with an actual call, and if they don't undo my character reset - I'm done with that game. No way, I'm not starting over. R* has found a way to cure me from my GTA addiction. Maybe I should be sending them a thank you note instead.
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Does this mean that I can't use the cheat codes to materialize a military tank out of thin air? Is there still a cheat code to turn off gravity? If you activate both of those cheat codes, you can get inside the tank, and fire the cannon repeatedly. The recoil of the tank's cannon causes the tank to gain enough speed to take off into the air like an aircraft. Most of my time playing GTA consisted of playing it as a flight simulator. I still don't know how to play the game, but I enjoyed being a tank pilot. 
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Are those cheat codes built in the game, or do you have to use mods to access and changes these values?
If it's using a third-party, it's a big no-no. If it's built-in...then you may be okay in offline mode, but online...even though it's built-in, that would be against their "modifying gameplay" policy.
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"I can't continue because I can't install this CD on my laptop."
A phrase uttered just yesterday by a coworker.
I bought a serial-to-USB adapter for him to connect his laptop to a scale, but the driver came on a CD and wasn't available on the internet.
Just packed my external CD player from home so he can continue on Friday.
Takes you back some 15 years 
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It would be quicker to buy another adapter (maybe of a different manufacturer). 
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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If you really want to screw with him, put it on a 5.25 floppy. 🤣
Jeremy Falcon
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3.5", I could still deal with - years ago I salvaged an external 3.5" floppy drive that hooks up via USB, when the previous company I worked for shut down, and I was given first dibs on any hardware I was interested in.
But I've never seen the same type of setup for a 5.25" floppy drive.
[Edit]
Had a quick peek at Amazon. They have a crapton of different models for 3.5" floppies, but I haven't seen a single one for 5.25". I did find a 5.25" drive, but that was just an internal drive with an IDE connector. Good luck with that...
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dandy72 wrote: But I've never seen the same type of setup for a 5.25" floppy drive.
Back in the 80s, those 5.25" drives were still used a lot despite 3.5" ones being out. By the time the 90s rolled around, we had cat pictures to contend with. Ain't got no time to mess about with low storage when it comes to cat pictures. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Lucky you that the driver for the external CD player didn't come on a CD.
Happened to me for a Plextor drive I had once upon a time.
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I've seen installation instructions for a CD player come on a disc. I never could figure out how to read them.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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I have a little portable DVD rom / actually maybe it's a writer too - that I keep around for just such occasions. I haven't used it in years.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Y'all still have serial ports on pcs over there, like rs-232 type?
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You wouldn't believe the amount of A/V equipment that is still controllable over a serial cable. It works over long distances under harsh condition, I guess, especially if you can do a 232 -> 422/485 -> 232 conversion. That differential serial runs over great distances.
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3-4 years ago, I ran into a need for hooking up some old RS-232 equipment to my PC. Problem was that I couldn't find the socket. Not here, not there. I finally dug out the handbook that came with the motherboard: It claimed that it had RS-232 support. I found the header on the motherboard, too, and and old bracket with a 9-pin socket that fit. So I did succeed.
Yet, I was truly surprised: The PC was more than two years old at the time. For more than two years, I never noticed that it didn't have an RS-232 socket. If you had asked me during that period, I would have answered "Of course I have an RS-232 socket!" When I discovered the truth, I made the obvious conclusion: RS-232 is dead. Maybe not for special purpose use (like the 8051 CPU, which is still used for special purposes - those two fall in the same category), but for ordinary home/office PCs, it is dead.
On the other hand: To me, CDs are not dead. I still buy music on CD. One of the record companies in Norway obtained the rights to a lot of old recordings, and released a new label called "Norwegian Album Classics", publishing a lot of old vinyl albums, never before available in a digital format. Half of the "Album Classics" I buy, I already have on vinyl, but the record was so worn out that when I digitized it myself, the sound quality was just terrible. Now I have lots of the music from my younger years in better quality than ever on a vinyl record.
For those saying "Why not use streaming services?": First, most of this music was never available on streaming services. Second: When I pick music from my own record collection, I do not reveal any information about my listening habits. Not using streaming services is one of my principles for protecting my privacy.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Do not forget to make an *.iso of that CD, this way you won't run in the same problem again (at least not with that software / drivers)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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A long time ago, I wanted to download some software bad had thought I needed to burn it on a CD or DVD. My boss looked at me (he was a good boss, and still is) with that look and held up an 8GB USB drive. Enter the stupid zone.
Nevertheless, I have no lock on stupid, but I was the local consultant. I had no patience for wasting time, especially on stupid or IT. So, I had this collection of CD and DVD external drives in my drawer. You had to have the ejectables so the stupid small discs could be mounted. Years later, I have about 1/2 dozen of these things floating around.
I'm cleaning out my office - if you are interested, all you have to do is pay shipping 
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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I have one of those flying around. For ages after CDs stopped, I used to MP3 all the CDs I bought. Which sold a few portable hard drives back in the day
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I bought a USB CD drive for exactly that reason a couple of years ago; needed to load something ancient. More recently, I bought a USB 3 1/2" drive, too, for a similar reason.
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Someone came to me yesterday saying their Seagate drive wasn't working. I explained that the problem was right on the label: "Seagate" and that the safest thing is to take a hammer to the unit before throwing it in the bin and buying a western digital. He tried using it some more, and the whole system crashed. I hate being right.
That same day a dear friend of mine and I were on the phone and he got the windows error "Unable to enumerate objects in {folder}"
I told *him* his drive was bad. Ran CrystalDiskInfo on it and sure enough, SMART was critical.
A day or two before that a friend came to me reporting a BSOD in windows in their gpu driver. I told them a BSOD on a modern windows box like that points to a hardware issue. "But there are no lines on the screen or other artifacts". Me: "Doesn't matter. You overheated your GPU running AI messes on it because your thermals weren't set up properly from the factory (it was a laptop) and now you've cooked it." Poured over the event log, tried different driver versions, and even linux before he decided to call in his warranty.
On one hand, I've saved these people potentially hours of frustration and trouble.
On the other hand, after all that I'd be the last person I'd want to talk to about my computer, because I'd jinx it: "Your hardware is bad"
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I've had the same experience. Several years ago we bought an external RAID array populated with 4 Seagate hard drives. Over the next 1-½ years each of the Seagate drives failed and were replaced with Western Digital drives we had on hand. The RAID array ran with the WD drives until the array controller died.
We bought a new and larger version of the RAID array. Interestingly, it's populated with Western Digital drives  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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honey the codewitch wrote: the problem was right on the label: "Seagate"
Your mileage may vary. I have only Seagate in my NAS and two of them have over 50000 hours (5.75 years). I switched to Seagate from WD after a couple of bad experiences. Later on I found out that it goes by model: both companies have had "duds" at different moments. My advice is to search reviews by HDD model.
Mircea
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I tend to ask around, especially after I end up with multiple bad drives from a manufacturer, as I have Seagate.
I encourage you to as well. You'll find so many more horror stories when it comes to Seagate.
I mean, I haven't done any kind of study, so it's anecdotal, but it's enough that I won't use a Seagate, even if it's given to me.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Well, in my case the proof is in the pudding
Mircea
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