This is what I see in case it differs from you: http://imgur.com/jhjSV Im on Windows 7 using Chrome.
Personally I feel as though the gray box explaining what the page is, is taking up most of the page. Any way to make it smaller? This way I feel as though it would remove any scroll bars on the page and prominently show your "WordCount.is is a useful web utility by Joel Runyon"
Other then that, page looks clean and is simple to use.
Curious question here: If you take the screenshot you get from WOW and open it up with photoshop/gimp/paint and save it now as PNG or different format, would it be possible to degrade the quality of the dots rendering it useless to be tracked?
PNG is a lossless format and will not cause the image data to change whatsoever upon saving. JPEG, on the other hand, is a lossy format, but until more is known, it's impossible to say whether or not this secret data (if that's what it really is) happens to be muddled by the lossyness of JPEG's algorithm.
Probably not. It looks like this might be doing something clever and possibly relatively robust in the frequency domain, though the details haven't been reverse engineered yet.
He sends the user's steamid (a unique identifier of the account) back to one of his servers. Presumably, that server compares it to a list of people who have purchased the game. There's very little little chance of a false positive. The check will not crash the game if the server is unreachable (which the pirates have already discovered), so it won't turn into your usual "DRM servers are down, can't play my games!" issue.
Thanks! I was going to ask for a link to how you know this but it makes total sense. I was already thinking if that was the case or if something else was being done but going back to the servers is the most logical explanation. What personal computer isnt hooked up to the internet these days. The game must have come from somewhere, most likely the internet and not someone’s floppy disk/zip drive/usb stick.
I was checking some fairly well known pirate forums to see how long the protection had lasted, and they talked about how it worked. It lasted for about 3 hours after he posted the cause of the error.. probably would have lasted longer if he hadn't done that.
tl;dr
"Reports were ... flooding in about an error message upon booting up Garry's Mod which reads "unable to shade polygon normals" followed by a bunch of numbers.
The thing is that those numbers that appear after the error is actually the user's SteamID. ...The SteamID...has allowed for easy permanent ban distributions"
That picture is not very accurate. It makes it seem as though USWest simply changed their name to QWest, in reality they got bought by QWest which was a young (founded in 1996) company which had been focusing on fiber optic runs up until they bought a for-reals telecom. I'm sure there are other inaccuracies, that one seemed particularly glaring.
It's riddled with mistakes. SNET was never part of AT&T. GTE and Contel merged, keeping the GTE name, so GTE should be next to Contel. BOCs should be before the 7 RBOCs as part of AT&T. Many missing like NY Tel and NE Tel which became the NYNEX RBOC. MCI line should start with MCI. There are others, and arguably the Sprint/United connection needs to be with GTE. Nice idea, but I hope nobody uses this for serious information.
It seems to imply that Bell Atlantic et all merged to become Verizon around 2000.
Bell Atlantic merged with NYNEX in 1997.
In 1999 Vodafone merged with Airtouch to become Vodafone Airtouch in the US.
Vodafone-Airtouch in that same year went after PrimeCo and merged with it.
Verizon Communications is actually the result of the Bell Atlantic and GTE merger of 2000 (signed 1998).
GTE was not a Bell. Neither was Contel which was acquired by GTE in 1991 (so they should both be on the same level).
Verizon Wireless is a joint venture signed in 1999 and begun real operations 2000 between then Bell Mobile. and Vodafone-Airtouch-Primeco.
Finally in 2005, Verizon Wireless bought MCI.
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Looking back on things, the chart really only shows named succession. It doesn't attempt at all to do what you're expect---place companies on a family tree.
The one beautiful thing that cardpool can do that cash cant do is get you a discount without having to bargain. All you need is a little bit of foresight.
When I was going to buy my Droid X, I knew BestBuy was going to be selling it so I went on cardpool and bought two 100$ cards and got 6% off of 200 from the phone. Its a great service if you know your going to spend the money and want to reward yourself for planning ahead.
I hope you realize that the Cardpool marketplace requires sellers who aren't happy (or aren't wanting to redeem) the gift cards they have in hand. And they take a loss, of sorts, for you to get your discount. That doesn't happen with cash.
I'll also say that I'm glad Carpool exists to limit breakage to some extent, but I'd be much happier if gift cards were gone altogether. Your discount notwithstanding...
Personally I feel as though the gray box explaining what the page is, is taking up most of the page. Any way to make it smaller? This way I feel as though it would remove any scroll bars on the page and prominently show your "WordCount.is is a useful web utility by Joel Runyon"
Other then that, page looks clean and is simple to use.