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Luke Skywalker

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10-Mar-2003
Last activity
8-Feb-2022
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Post
#109762
Topic
The Adventures of Tin Tin DVD (region 1)
Time
its quite nice...

one problem is that it seems to have a pink hue that is only noticable during scenes with lots of white.... but its very hard to notice unless your looking for it...

i was just happy to get these the way i remember seeing them as a kid...
and the packaging is absolutly top notch... as long as you dont mind french DVD covers


the second set comes out november 2005
Post
#108801
Topic
Wired Magazine "Warez Wars" **LONG READ**
Time
For those who have the time this is a great read. It's very long but i guarantee you'll be thinking about it long after your done reading.

ENJOY!

Wired Magazine Issue 5.04 - April 1997.

Warez Wars

For the Inner Circle, cracking software is a challenge. For the wannabe underground, collecting it is an obsession. For the software industry, it's a billion-dollar nightmare.
By David McCandless

Sunday morning, 7 a.m., somewhere in US Eastern Standard Time: Mad Hatter gets up, has a glass of Seagram's Ginger Ale and a cigarette, and checks his machine, which has been running automated scripts all night. He looks for errors and then reads his e mail. He has 30 messages from all over the world: some fan mail, a couple of flames, a few snippets of interesting information, three or four requests - some clear, some PGP-encoded. After a quick espresso and another cigarette, he surveys the contents of a few private FTP sites, filters through a bunch of new files, and then reroutes the good stuff to his newsreader. After breakfast with the family, another wave of automated scripts kicks in. The ISDN connection hums to life. A steady stream of bytes departs his machine 128 Kbps and vanishes into the ether. By the end of the day Mad Hatter, a ringleader of the software piracy group called the Inner Circle, will have poured 300 Mbytes of illegal "warez" onto the Internet.

Monday morning, 9 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time: Phil arrives for work in Bracknell, England, in a suit and tie, just back from a few days in Switzerland. Inside Novell UK's glossy five-story headquarters, he lets himself into his office. It looks like a mad, bad bedroom - shiny desktops and derelict ones, disemboweled minitowers and battered servers, every last expansion slot distended with DAT machines, CD-ROM burners, extra hard drives. A metal shelf unit contains a rack of monitors, some video equipment, spare keyboards. Everything is wired insanely to a single ISDN line. After a coffee, Phil boots up and skims his email. Twenty minutes later he has ceased to be Phil. For the next week, he will pretend to be a trader, a courier, a cracker, a newbie, a lamer, a lurker, a leecher. He is an undercover Internet detective, a "technical investigator." He spends his days roving the Net, finding people like Mad Hatter - and busting them.

This is a story about a universe with two parallel, overlapping worlds. One is the familiar, dull world of the software industry, with its development costs, marketing teams, profit, and loss. Phil's world, at least part of the day.

And then there is warez world, the Mad Hatter's world, a strange place of IRC channels and Usenet groups, of thrills, prestige, and fear. A world of expert crackers who strip the protection from expensive new software and upload copies onto the Net within days of its release. A world of wannabes and collectors, whose hard drives are stuffed like stamp albums, with programs they'll never use. And a world of profit pirates, who do exactly what the software makers say: rip off other people's stuff and sell i t for their own benefit.

In Phil's world, software is a valuable tool that commands high prices - programs like QuarkXPress, Windows NT, and AutoCAD, costing thousands of dollars a shot. But in Mad Hatter's world, those sticker prices means nothing - except inasmuch as more expensive programs are harder to crack, and that makes them the most desirable, spectacular trophies of all.

In Phil's world, warez are a menace. In warez world, Phil is.

Filthy lucre
Phil's world is full of nasty numbers. Antipiracy organizations like the Software Publishers Association and Business Software Alliance estimate that more than US$5 million worth of software is cracked and uploaded daily to the Net, where anyone can download it free of charge. A running scoreboard on the BSA Web site charts the industry's losses to piracy: $482 a second, $28,900 a minute, $1.7 million an hour, $41.6 million a day, $291.5 million a week. A lot of that is garden-variety unlicensed copying and Far East-style counterfeiting. But an estimated one-third leaks out through warez world, which can be anywhere there's a computer, a phone, and a modem.

This is bad news for the business. Think of the lost revenue! The lost customers! "It's a frightening scenario out there," says Martin Smith, Novell's product-licensing manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. "We are seeing a very, very rapid development of crime on the Internet."

He's not being paranoid: look at the thousands of messages that pour through alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc and the other Usenet sites that are the warez world's pulsing heart. In a typical week, you'll see Microsoft Office Pro and Visual C++, Autodesk 3D Stud io MAX, SoftImage 3D, SoundForge, Cakewalk Pro Audio, WordPerfect, Adobe Photoshop 4.0 - virtually every high-end package in existence. All this plus impossibly early betas and alphas. Add a smattering of mundane Web tools, Net apps, registered shareware, games, and utilities, and you have everything for the forward-looking computer user.

Warez world's volumes are impressive, too - a good 65 Mbytes a day of freshly cracked, quality new releases, chopped into disk-sized portions (to make it from one hop to the next without clogging the servers), compressed, and uploaded. Postings can vary from a few bytes (for a crack) to hundreds of megabytes. The nine main warez sites alone account for 30 to 40 percent of the traffic on Usenet, an average of more than 500 Mbytes in downloads every 24 hours, according to OpNet.

Bad news indeed for Phil and his friends, gazing at those endless dollar signs. But warez world's leading citizens say that filthy lucre is beside the point - at least for them and the hungry collectors they supply.

"No money ever exchanges hands in our forum," says California Red, one of a half dozen of the Mad Hatter's Inner Circle colleagues gathered for an IRC chat.

"We're on the nonprofit side of the warez feeding chain," insists another, TAG (The Analog Guy).

"It's a trade. You give what you have, get something you need. No money needed," adds Clickety.

"We're not in it for the money. I would never sell something I got from warez," California Red reiterates.

"Never made a dime," says Mad Hatter.

Even Phil admits these are not the people responsible - not directly, anyhow - for the 500-Mbyte, $50 bundled software CD-ROMs from Asia that are the industry's most prominent nightmare. Warez crackers, traders, and collectors don't pirate software to make a living: they pirate software because they can. The more the manufacturers harden a product, with tricky serial numbers and anticopy systems, the more fun it becomes to break. Theft? No: it's a game, a pissing contest; a bunch of dicks and a ruler. It' s a hobby, an act of bloodless terrorism. It's "Fuck you, Microsoft." It's about having something the other guy doesn't. It's about telling him that you have something he doesn't and forcing him to trade something he has for something you don't.

In other words, it's an addiction. Listen to a typical dialog on an IRC warez trading channel:

"What you got?"

"Cubase three."

"What's that?"

"A music program."

"I got it. What else?"

"No, but it's Cubase three-oh-three - the latest bugfix."

"Shit. Gimme."

"It's not a patch. It's another seven meg download."

"Don't care. I want it."

Warez traders scour the newsgroups every night, planting requests, downloading file parts they don't need. Warezheads feel unfulfilled unless they've swelled their coffers by at least one application a day. They don't need this Java Development Kit tool, or that Photoshop plug-in - the thrill is in creating the new subdirectory and placing th
Post
#108800
Topic
FOX issuing takedown notices to Sith downloaders
Time
what a joke...

people are going to download no matter how they're threatened...
the MPAA cant do anything about that...
they should be looking to the future on how to prevent this from happening... because they cant stop it once it starts... its impossible...

plus ive already got a copy of it off a site...
the quality is average but not watchable....
as someone said earlier people are only using this as their "fix" until it comes out on DVD...
Post
#108776
Topic
The End Of Star Wars - What to do now?
Time
Quote

Me....I'm really not too sure. I'm somewhat dissappointed with the state of things. The prequels, while good, did not fill the void IMHO and it looks like we will never get the OOT on DVD....so I'm thinking about jumping off the SW bandwagon for good.


i've already jumped that bandwagon.... the originals will always be my favorite movie series of all time... but Star Wars in general has a tarnished name now because of Lucas....

I'm just gonna look forward to a prequel that is hopefully going to be better than the current movies that are out now...
im simply awaiting the Hobbit

Post
#107756
Topic
a fresh rant about ep.3
Time
then why are you posting here???
oh right... someone didnt like the movie so you've gotta rain on their parade....
sigh

I agree with ya Shunty!
Lucas fucked up the PT on every level ... it looked good in trailers and on paper but when it came down to it im sure it will be known as one of the biggest mistakes in cinema..

I mean to make 3 movies that basically had the story literally written out for him...
all he had to do was fill in the blanks... but obviously had problems doing that...

once a great filmaker, is nothing more now than and old man holding on to his memories of what he once was...
Post
#107139
Topic
Episode 3 was disappointing on many levels...
Time
Quote

Originally posted by: Hardcore Legend
Quote

Originally posted by: Luke Skywalker
i find it funny that although i didnt like this movie i can admit what i did like and what things were done well...

however when we make a comment about how something was done bad in this movie... people are just jumping in with explanations left and right trying to back up what was seen onscreen.... lol

maybe it was just a mistake...???
could that be it?

does everything have to have a explanation?


No, but if there is a logical explanation, wouldn't it be smart to talk about it on a message board? I mean, we could ignore logical explanations and pile on Lucas, but that doesn't make much sense.


right... and coming up with explanations that will never be proven right or wrong is??
might as well just try and find then last digit in Pi...


i think its safe to call this thread... "Back up Lucas' mistakes with excuses"
i think it makes just as much sense as people giving their views on the movie even if they are negative...
OH WAIT they're not the same at all...
lol
Post
#106966
Topic
Episode 3 was disappointing on many levels...
Time
i find it funny that although i didnt like this movie i can admit what i did like and what things were done well...

however when we make a comment about how something was done bad in this movie... people are just jumping in with explanations left and right trying to back up what was seen onscreen.... lol

maybe it was just a mistake...???
could that be it?

does everything have to have a explanation?