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TLDR: a guy who beta tested Half-Life found a CD of said beta
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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And might be sued by Valve shortly
I'm guessing he signed an NDA so I'm not sure what he was thinking distributing it so publicly.
Do NDAs last for 25 years or something?
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
I don't think Valve is going to do anything about a 20 year old beta being leaked.
Me neither but it's still a bold move
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.
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? tim.cook@apple.com?
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, tcook@apple.com (Direct) or media.help@apple.com (Media/Public Relations). 🤝 How do I meet Tim Cook?
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
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.
Bravery means doing the right thing even when it's dangerous.
Huge -> literally nothing will change, even for die-hard half life fans.
“ “ - Gordon Freeman (New dialogue found on beta disc)
Holy crap, a space?!
CDs are actually really small. You're just used to higher density storage.
Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD
What?
"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.
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.
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)
CD-Rs and CD burners were first available in the early 90's but they were "we'll take the helicopter out to the yacht" expensive. By 1998 they were starting to become normal consumer-grade equipment. I had one as a teenager in the year 2000, along with a Rio CD-MP3 player.
I've still got the computer I had in later high school and college, a Pentium 3 rig that I plan on turning into a sleeper PC for my midlife crisis. It has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD burner. I wonder if they're SATA or some older "we don't do it this way anymore" buses? I remember that machien talking about SCSI during boot-up.
My drives in the early 2000s were SCSI, the connector was a flat wide grey cable. I remember my first SATA disk as being a great improvement, still had jumpers though.
In any case, the game is not older than CD burners, like I said, I was buying burned CDs before that, and I lived in a small South American city, so they should be very accessible for North American/European folks.
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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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Burning is writing a disc. Ripping is extracting data from a disc. Whoever wrote the article used lingo they don't understand.
That is what I thought, I have burned many discs in my day, and I have never got an ISO from bruning a disc.
Yeah I would read "managed to burn the disc" to mean "managed to create a new CD-R copy of the original." "Managed to rip the disc" would mean successfully created an .iso file.
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I knew it had to do with putting data on a disc. I didn't know the specifics.
Am i this old now 😂
Yes, yes we are.
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.
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.
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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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Idk why.
When writing to a CD-R, the laser literally burns a chemical in the disc which causes it to change optical properties, which will cause it to appear to be the same as the pits and lands on a manufactured disc. "Burning a disc" meant to write it. It's not the original that's being burned, it's the new copy. In casual conversation someone might say "I really like this album." "Tell you what I'll burn it for you." short for "I'll burn a copy of it onto a new disc for you."
The line "Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD", in the context of "thought lost to disc rot", I would extrapolate this to mean that the original old CD was thought to be damaged or destroyed due to age or mishandling, but he was successfully able to copy the data onto a new CD. Handling or using the fragile original my cause the data to be lost, so copying it to a new disc better preserves it.
The word "rip" is usually used to mean take all the data off of a CD and store it elseways. "I ripped the CD to my hard drive." The nuance is, there isn't a new optical disc, the data just exists on a computer's internal storage. Which is probably what they actually did.
The term "burn" survived into the USB thumb drive age to differentiate writing the contents of a .iso file to a thumb drive replacing any file system or data that is currently there from simply storing a copy of the .iso among the existing file system. Often the same software you'd use for CDs would be used to image thumb drives as well so the "BURN!" button would be used to start both processes. Unlike on a CD-R nothing gets permanently altered on a USB drive.
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.
I've literally never heard anyone use "burn" to refer to extracting data. This thread feels like someone trying to gaslight me.
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.
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.
Oh no, it finally happened
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