BioWare zeroes in on Mass Effect download snafu
Top marks to BioWare which yesterday pumped out a downloadable module for Mass Effect 2. The only problem: the DLC consisted of nothing but zeros - all 1.5GB of it. Dubbed Lair of the Shadowbroker, the DLC went live yesterday evening. Within minutes, fans reported that the installer failed to work on their PCs. At first, …
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refunds
Hopefully they'll refund people on metered downloads... that'll eat hugely into someone's monthly 2Gb allocation. Still, at least the file should compress well.
Easily compressable
How it is now, they should be able to compress it to a 4kb file
Something along the lines of - 0x999999999999 on a notepad file
if...
If you're into downloading huge DLC and patches and still only have a 2GB download allowance per month you've got nobody to blame but yourself...
Flipping heck!
1.5GB for an addon to a game?!?!
I can see ZX Spectrum coders turning in their graves!
I wonder
I wonder how many 48k Speccys you would need to store 1.5 gigs between them all? I cant be bothered to do the math(s) but maybe someone else could and then a "Speccys worth" could maybe become a new official unit of measurement?!
corrections to "SCIENCE!!!"
the first few " / " should infact be " * "
my aplogoies to any pedants, coders or mathematicians reading this comment
SCIENCE!!!
1.5GB of 48K =
1.5 / 1024 = 1536 MB / 1024 = 1572864 KB
1572864 / 48 = 32768
So. 1 BF (BiowareFail) is equal to 32768 DS (Dead Speccys)
also, as I pionted out on their forums a little earlier -
for any penguin lovers who want their very own bioware DLC for completely free, just run this command!
dd if=/dev/zero of=foobar count=1572864 bs=1024
won't even use up your download allowance :D
Remember...
...some of that 48k also drives the 'graphics card'.
Stuffing data in there will have lots of coloured flashing squares.
violation of EULA.
Using a hex editor to look at the bzillion zeros is probably a violation of 'reverse engineering' EULA
:P
Do you reckon someone did a
cat /dev/zero > MassEffectDLC2.exe
Oh come now, Google can tell you this
1.5 gigabytes = 12 884, 901 888 bits Guessing it's using 1024bits/Kb.
Paris, because even she can type "1.5 gigabytes in bits" into your favourite calculator-equipped search engine
Either 1500000000 or 1610612736
depending upon who you talk to
Watch out for the fakes doing the rounds on P2P
there's a 1 or two towards the end...
Says a lot about bioware
If the best thing the companies ever done is 1.5Gb of 0's
I bet they did run cat /dev/zero > foo.exe
"Do you reckon someone did a
cat /dev/zero > MassEffectDLC2.exe"
You know, in all seriousness, I bet someone actually did (or, the "dd if=/dev/zero of=MassEffectDLC2.exe bs=1024 count=1572864" so the size could be specified) to generate a fake file to seed on P2P networks. And then due to a mixup it was put up as the real DLC.
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