Who are the Demo Writers?

The typical demogroup consists of coders, musicians and graphics artists (sometimes referred to as graphicians). Some prominent scene figures (e.g. Laxity/Kefrens) perform multiple roles. Many legendary demogroups, like Razor 1911 and Fairlight, have roots in software piracy. In fact, the demo scene itself evolved out of the game piracy scene, where cracking groups tagged their releases with a short graphical “intro”. Some demo creators crossed over into game design, a pursuit naturally suited the hardware-intensive routines that make demos visually attractive. Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment, developers of Pinball Dreams for the Amiga and Battlefield 2 for the Xbox 360, was created by former members of Swedish demogroup The Silents.

The majority of demos for all computer platforms are produced in Northern and Eastern Europe. Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Poland and Germany are the primary nations involved in the demo scene. Demo writers span a wide age range, owing mostly to the maturity of the scene. In the golden era of the early 1990’s, the typical demogroup consisted of young men in their late teens and early to mid 20’s. Programmers must also have a strong mathematical background and intricate knowledge of the computer hardware – assembly language is the preferred language to maximize performance while keeping the compiled code size small enough to fit in a boot block or on a floppy disk.
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What is a Demo?

A “demo” (short for demonstration) is a multimedia presentation designed to show off both the graphical capabilities of the computer and prowess of the programmer. The Commodore Amiga was a popular platform for demo creators due to its advanced (for the time) and standardized hardware (as opposed to a PC, which comes shipped with many possible hardware configurations).

Most demos consist of various 3D (vector) graphics, 2D “blitter” displays and still art. The 3D graphics were typically rendered in the Amiga’s low-resolution mode (320×256 for European PAL; 320×200 for NTSC machines) while stills could be in high resolution mode or even high resolution interlaced (640×512 PAL; 640×400 NTSC).
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What is Hotlinking?

Hotlinking (also known as inline linking, piggybacking, leeching and bandwidth theft) refers to when one site links directly to an object on a second site. Typically, the object is a picture that can then be displayed on the linking site without the owner having to copy the actual file from the second site.

How Hotlinking can Affect your Wordpress Blog

Hotlinking not only allows another site to use your content without permission but also uses your bandwidth to do it. Every time a user surfs to the page of the offending site, the actual image shown is downloaded from your server to the user’s browser, even though the user is not on one of your web pages. This can degrade performance on your site or even cause your site to run over the bandwidth limit allotted by your web host - typically resulting in additional charges or even a suspension of service.
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Identifying the Problem

Using CPanel, you turn on Hotlink protection to prevent outside hot linking to your files from unauthorized sites.

Enabling Hotlink protection causes a 404 error for previously-working Wordpress URL’s

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Simplicity is key when presenting statistics to management or customers. Data analysts are often tempted to put as many details as possible on the standard “one sheet” template; however, too many numbers on a page can cause confusion about where to initially focus. When reducing the number of statistics on a page is not an option and summary stats are not appropriate, traffic-lighting is a quick and effective method to highlight trends or draw attention to information that need to be addressed.
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When performing data analysis on a cohort population, it is often desirable to categorize characteristics can have many values. Age, income level and credit card score are examples of population attributes that can be placed into “buckets” and easily analyzed based on broad categories (without having resort to linear or logistic regression). While variables can be quickly encoded using IF statements, SAS’s Format procedure provides a more elegant and portable solution.
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Imagine you are given a list of major Canadian political donators and wish to load it into SAS for further analysis. The list is in a text file with fields delimited by tab characters. SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) offers wizards to automatically import a variety of file formats, but using these GUI’s preempts the chance for automation or additional processing during import. Using code to load data offers several advantages:

• Ability to redirect data to multiple data sets
• Ability to clean and modify data during load time
• Ability to delete unwanted data
• Portability and reusability

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When buying electronics, two factors remain relatively consistent -

1. If it’s new, it costs a lot more
2. If Sony is involved, it costs a lot more

Yet, even these two truisms fail to account the the $699cdn (roughly the same in American dollars) price tag placed on a (third-party!) Memory stick currently being advertised at Staples. Granted, 4GB cards are relatively new but can be obtained for less than $150 if you are fortunate enough to have an SD slot. Given Sony’s penchant for being proprietary and expensive, perhaps we should not be so hasty to give up on HD-DVD?
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Phishing, in practical terms, is an attack used by hackers to gain access to private information such as credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and user passwords. Rather than breaking down a physical or technological barrier, phishing is a social engineering attack where targets are typically duped into providing this information directly to false versions of legitimate websites run by the hackers. Personal information can then be used for fraudulent purchases, resale to third parties and even identity theft. While there are no universal statistics on the number or nature of phishing scams, most security websites agree on the following –

-Financial Services is the most targeted industry sector overall
-Paypal, Ebay, Amazon and the major banks are the most targeted companies
-North America is both the primary target audience and the region were the largest number of phishing sites are hosted
-Websites are by far the most popular portals through which to gather information, although an increasing number of phishing scams instruct targets to call a telephone number

Below are screenshots from a phishing email I recently received. Have a look at the warning signs –
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What is Digg?

Generally referred to as a social news site, Digg is technically a user-driven news aggregator. Registered Digg users can “digg” (i.e. bookmark and submit) an article on a web page by submitting a URL, along with a brief description. URL submissions are placed on display for other Digg users (registered or not) to read, comment on, rate, and bookmark for themselves.

How Digg can benefit your blog

Two words: heavy traffic. A popular Digg article can easily send thousands of new visitors to a website in a single day. A website does not need an explicit link to Digg in order to receive the benefits of Digg exposure; however, adding a link at the end of every post will give regular and special interest visitors the opportunity to promote an article to a large news-oriented audience. The larger form of the Digg button also specifies the number of times an article has been bookmarked, which can be used as an indicator of its popularity among targeted visitors.

How to add a Digg button to Wordpress Posts

Digg support can be added directly to a Wordpress blog via editing the PHP code for certain files within the blog’s theme. The main challenge is finding the correct files to edit, since Wordpress themes can have different file structures. As such, this tutorial will be more of a strategy for altering a theme to add Digg support. To address most of the common issues users will encounter, a more complicated theme will be altered.

Prerequisites:

• A Wordpress installation with the ability to edit theme files (generally speaking, online services that do not allow you to upload your own themes also won’t let you edit existing theme files)
• An account with administrator privileges (required for editing theme files)

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