this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 185 points 1 week ago (1 children)

TLDR: a guy who beta tested Half-Life found a CD of said beta

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)

And might be sued by Valve shortly

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm guessing he signed an NDA so I'm not sure what he was thinking distributing it so publicly.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Do NDAs last for 25 years or something?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

NDA was the wrong term to use there but I'm sure there was a "don't give the game to anyone" in there they might be enforceable. I hope they don't sue, though

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't think Valve is going to do anything about a 20 year old beta being leaked.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Me neither but it's still a bold move

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Honestly, knowing how easy it is for just about anyone to contact GabeN (his email is publically accessible) and that this was a previous tester, I would say there's decent odds they're already contacted someone to make sure or already had permission to do so in some roundabout way. I have no way of knowing for sure, obviously, but it is super weird for this to pop up without the finder messaging anyone in Valve about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don't think the email of a CEO is a very private matter as you can probably very easily be found if you try hard enough. At least in comparison to telephone, home adresses etc.
I mean it's usually given name, surname + given name, initals and the domain.
So what? [email protected]?

Actually the first result for "email ceo apple" gives me the result

What is Tim Cook's email address? Email Tim Cook care/of Apple, [email protected] (Direct) or [email protected] (Media/Public Relations). 🤝 How do I meet Tim Cook?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Some organizations will setup a Honeypot/blackhole CEO email using common corporate email designs, then the actual CEO email will be something else entirely. One organization I worked at the CEO email was a actually just a randomized string

But in the case of Valve, Gabe Newell has generally encouraged people to email him which is unusually open compared to many companies whose leadership will ignore or even threaten anyone who stumbles into their inbox

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

That is certainly true, I guess I needed to specifically call out that he actually does reply. And this has been a constant recurring "rediscovery" every few years that GabeN personally responds to that email.

That also wasn't the particular point I was even talking about. The point was that a previous dev would most likely still have connections inside Valve given how easy it is for outsiders. And that even if they had zero connections, again, it would be super easy to get a response.

This is all just speculation, but a relatively confident one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Bravery means doing the right thing even when it's dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 week ago

Huge -> literally nothing will change, even for die-hard half life fans.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 week ago (1 children)

“ “ - Gordon Freeman (New dialogue found on beta disc)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Holy crap, a space?!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

CDs are actually really small. You're just used to higher density storage.

[–] stoy 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD

What?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 week ago (7 children)

"Burning" a CD means copying it. Idk why. I used to have someone in my family who would burn movies for everyone so we didn't have to pay to rent or own.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don't know what burning a CD is in an article about a game older than CD burners.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Just a small correction (that makes things worse):

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don't know what burning a CD is writing an article about a game older than CD burners.

The person asking the question here is correct, the phrase in the article makes no sense, and it's likely written by someone who heard the lingo "burn" in reference to discs but it's too young to have use it themselves (otherwise they would have said they ripped the intact CD, or they burned copies of it)

Edit: Also I think CD burners came out around the same time (I remember a store that sold copies in my city back in the 90s), although I personally didn't had a disk burner for many years (but also I didn't played Half-life for many years after it came out, so I guess it evens out)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Half-Life is definitely not older than home CD burners. Now if you'll excuse me, there's some damn kids on my lawn again.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Burning is writing a disc. Ripping is extracting data from a disc. Whoever wrote the article used lingo they don't understand.

[–] stoy 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That is what I thought, I have burned many discs in my day, and I have never got an ISO from bruning a disc.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I knew it had to do with putting data on a disc. I didn't know the specifics.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Yes, yes we are.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I haven't thought about burning CDs in a long time, man that takes me back. Remember Nero Burning ROM?

I think the etymology of the term is that when you're writing data onto a disk you're shooting a laser onto it to alter the chemistry and change its color, for which "burning" the data into it makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It wasn't the colour, you would burn little bubbles into the disk. The bubbles would deflect a laser and flat parts would not. This would give the 0 or 1 bits.

There were CD- and CD+ versions. I don't know which is which but one would create a divot, and the other would create a bubble. Either way the laser is diverted away from the sensor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah, that's what it was! I always thought it was just a different color for 0 and 1, today I learned! That makes more sense when I think about it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

CD - red laser

BlueRay - blue laser.. shorter wavelength --> more data on same size disk

and inbetween there was DL - dual layer
light scribe - could etch a picture on the top of the cd
and RW - rewriteable CDs

(CD is short for compact disc)

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[–] stoy 15 points 1 week ago (35 children)

What I ment was that bruning a disc is the secondary step to making a copy if a disc, you first need to rip the original disc into an ISO file.

I remember when we got our first CD burner, it was a black and copper colored Philips unit, it was back when you made sure to leave the computer alone when burning a CD because you you didn't want to risk buffer underrun.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

When you burn a disc it means using a laser to etch the data as pits and lands in a track on the disc. You're physically changing the disc when you write to it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Burning was originally used in the sense that to write to a disc you used the laser to "burn" in your data, at least irrc. It just started to be used interchangeably for copy and write operations. These days I think "rip" makes more sense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've literally never heard anyone use "burn" to refer to extracting data. This thread feels like someone trying to gaslight me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Don't worry, I'm old too, and I got you fam.

Burning is creating disks by etching the data onto the metal disc below the plastic layer, and ripping is extracting the data into a digital format, like an ISO, or in the case of music or video discs, usable media files (often includes a transcode because who uses CD/DVD format anyway?).

I've burned dozens if not hundreds of disks in my day, but haven't burned anything for years. I most recently ripped my entire DVD and Bluray collection onto my Jellyfin server so I don't have to deal with those ancient discs that keep getting scratched anymore.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Oh no, it finally happened

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