No malicious code in Half-life 2

Half-Life2 code booby trapped?

Hi,

No virii in it. Anyone dumb enough (insert halflife 2 fan site name here) to think folks in the warez community, and interested programmers, haven't swept the 36216 files, in all 821 folders (3,374,511,161 bytes if your counting), for infections like a mad fiend before playing around with it, probably gets infected several times a year, thinks MS puts out secure products, and falls in love with anything the valve PR guy deigns to hurl their way.

I strongly doubt that anything since the Doom3 Alpha release has received this much anti viral attention.... Keep up the excellent work :)

Ibn

Subject: Reply to "Oi, Planet Half-Life" article...

I guess some boys and girls are just a little silly and have the memory of a nail because if anyone reads this site regularly then you would see that on average you guys got it right.... Maybe not %100 accurate but sure as hell better than most people daily supreme wisdom in there personal life. So to you guys out there at the InqWell I say good job and keep it up, without you I'd be a ignorant dumbass like some unmentioned fools.

Name, email address supplied.

Subject: Okay.. Now for a flame...

64-bit Apple G5s trounced by Athlon 64s, Opterons

Firstly, keep in mind that some of the tests are completely unrealistic.. Word is worlds apart on the Mac than on Windows (thank Microsoft), the version of Premeire on the Mac, from what I understand, is an OS 9 application and runs in classic mode only (I'm not too familiar with Premeire, but this is what I've read by people who are who have posted about these results).. Certainly if this is true you can't compare an application that is running in emulation mode to one that can run natively. Keep in mind that raid had been setup on the other machines and they had video cards with 256M of video memory as opposed to the G5's 128M.. Plus I personally believe the drivers for the Radeon on the Mac DEFINITELY need tweaking..

Aside from all of that, I'd guess that Photoshop is probably the closest to a REAL test of the performance.. Also, they should have waited for Panter (Mac OS X 10.3) to come out (the 24th of this month I believe) which has been tweeked to work better with the G5's.. From what I've read, the only “tweaking” for the G5 that has been done by Apple for MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar) was to have it access more than 4 gigs of memory.. Not much else had been done by Apple on Jaguar (for the G5) since they were concentrating on the next release of the OS (which all G5 owners are eligible to get for shipping and media costs)..

Besides, if you READ through the PC WORLD article it's plain to see that they are completely drooling over the Athlon chips.. I'd be surprised if they didn't have a shrine to the Athlon-64 FX… Obviously they are not biased in anyway …

Don't get me wrong.. I >>LIKE<< the Athlon 64's (opteron's) as well.. In fact, I will probably upgrade my PC system as soon as prices come down a bit (I'm currently running an Athlon 3200+ on an Asus a7n8x, nforce2 mobo).. I'm a BIG AMD fan.. I'm not convinced that PC WORLD did a complete un-biased test though..

-dave

Subject: You can stop the disinformation

You posted a story on how the AMD 64 machines were tested by PC World and showed how the other systems (including Power Mac dual 2.0 GHz G5) were "Not even close". They scores they point use a crippled version of Quake 3 for the Mac instead of the most current build that takes advantage of all sorts of things such as multiprocessor awareness -- which is pretty important when you are testing the multiprocessor G5. Here is a letter I sent off the the PC World editors, and you should be so informed yourselves so as to stop promoting the disinformation that the PC World contains. At least PLEASE make a note of it by editing your piece http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12130 This would only be the right thing for you to do since as a news site you want people to have all the facts.

Thank you,

John G.

PC World editors:

Your article "64-bit Takes Off" is a nice attempt at comparing many different systems, however it shows that benchmarking/speed testing is a real art and science -- one that the PC World (and MacWorld) reviewers were not up to. I'll just show one example:

In your Quake 3 scores you have the Dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 scoring only 294 FPS in the 1024x768 resolution (the score of which you say you didn't test yourself, but got from your sister site, MacWorld), however, BareFeats, who has been testing Macs for many years intelligently, has a score at that resolution of 339 FPS (which beats all the scores on your chart) for the Apple version of the Radeon 9800 Pro. That's not all, however -- With the ATI retail version of the Mac Radeon 9800 Pro BareFeats actually scored a 342 FPS score on Quake 3 at 1024x768. BareFeats also tested a P4 with Radeon 9800 Pro as you did, and came up with around the same score (308), though he was testing a 3.0 GHz P4 and you were testing a 3.2 GHz P4. Since his 3.0 GHz score is at the same speed as your 3.2 GHz score for the P4, it lends credibility, in my opinion, that BareFeats is doing everything in speed testing as good as can possibly be done. What went wrong with your G5 Quake 3 tests?--The apparent answer is that you used the wrong build of Quake 3 to test, and in my opinion you should be responsible for that even though you say you just took MacWorld's scores and posted them into your chart. But that's what happens when you don't do your homework and rely on MacWorld who also didn't do THEIR homework; you end up not showing the true ability of the system. Which begs the question, "What other Mac applications for the G5 did you/MacWorld not handle correctly?" You used Quake III version 1.32 when you should have used version 1.32b which, according to BareFeats, has various optimizations made to the code by Id Software (the makers of Quake 3) including multiprocessor awareness! If you want to see for yourself, here you go: http://www.barefeats.com/g5b.html It's also interesting to note that BareFeats' 1.8GHz G5 score in Quake 3 was higher with a "lowly" GeForce FX 5200 than yours was with a Radeon 9800 Pro. Comparing BareFeats scores to yours in Quake 3, the dual 2.0 GHz G5 beats every single one of your AMD and P4 systems. So when you said "Not even close" on your chart it is not only not true in the case of the G5, but the G5 comes out on top.

Please respond to this. I'd really like to know what you think of this! You should want to know how you and MacWorld are big-funded testing sites compared to BareFeats, but how BareFeats is in-the-know enough to get a 48 frame-per-second better score than you simply by knowing that they are doing! With the disinformation promoted by many sites (including the Mac site, MacWorld) it is a wonder that Apple is thriving today and making a profit at all.

Sincerely,

John G.

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