Half-Life 2 Preload Date Announced

[Hyakki-Yaku]

Just got out of a review meeting. 8/11 the Cafe's turn on (tomorrow). 8/16 CZ/ATI users pre-load. 8/18 CZ/ATI turns on. 8/17 HL-2 pre-load starts (textures, audio and other stuff that doesn't change).
Posted at HL2 Fallout - I'd wager on a September release if this goes ahead as planned. The thread can be found in it's entirety here. (http://www.hl2fallout.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2369) Spotted over at PHL.

[Rush the Resplendent]

Well, this is just "Crazy ****ing ideas for betas" week, ain't it?

[Rush the Resplendent]

Just to let you know: Tommorow's the day! So either go out and buy CS:CZ if you want to play the Source beta test, or... yep. I can't wait to play, Half-Life is the best.

[Hyakki-Yaku]

It'd be nice to have a concrete release date but, despite what all the jaded nay-sayers might think, I actually believe HL2 will be released next month. I doubt they'd be beta-ing CSS so openly if Valve didn't mean business. Indeed, Half-Life is the best.

[Hyakki-Yaku]

Thought I'd revive this to direct folks to this (http://www.hl2fallout.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4221&st=0&#entry76575) thread, posted again on HL2Fallout. It appears the likelihood of a September/November release is gathering pace..

[Edit] It's rumoured that the IP of that post doesn't match the ones usually traced when Newell posts, and instead leads to a proxy. All the more reason to be skeptical.

[Re-Edit] This has been confirmed as a hoax.

[Rush the Resplendent]

Man, the Source leak started when Gabe got his computer hacked, too.
It's official: Gabe is just a stupid bastard. Maybe if he understood that he was the CEO of one of the most hotly anticipated FPS ever, and didn't run around with such ridiculous security holes, we wouldn't have all these problems.

[Hyakki-Yaku]

I assume you know that he had his forum password set to 'gaben'? Boy, that's not predictable or anything.

Eh, as long as the game gets released in the near-ish future, I'm content.

[Rush the Resplendent]

Yah, I knew about the Gaben thing.
God, how could someone be so stupid? Putting the source code on a lightly secured personal computer, such a ridiculous password.
id is boring and unoriginal, but at least they're professional, I'll give them that. They'd never make such boorish mistakes.

[Saben]

Gabe needs to get a wake up call and smell the coffee. What is he doing using gaben as his password. People are accusing the guy who used his account as hacking when all he really did was guess the password.

Maybe gabe will realize that there are thousands of gamers waiting for this game and wont make such dumb mistakes in the future.

[Charles Ensign]

Gabe Newell is a suit. If I didn't have enough experience with suits to expect this sort of thing, I'd say he did it on purpose.

As is, I'd just say 'yeah, but he's a suit, what'd you expect?' Security is not something that most people pay sufficient attention to, even the CEO of a software company with a history of security blunders.

Peace,
-CxE

[Astayanax]

If anything, whoever set up the server (whom I am pretty sure isn't the CEO of the company) should be the one taking the heat, for quite frankly the responsibilities of security handling falls under him. Knowing Gabe, he is probably just like every other normal CEO out there and knows crap about computers.

[Hyakki-Yaku]

Newell worked at Microsoft for over a decade before founding Valve - you'd sincerely hope he knows at least something about computers by now.

[Citizen]

Newell worked at Microsoft for over a decade
I saw a documentary on government and corporate security and one of many hilarious facts was that a good percentage of corps and gov offices never change the network default pw from admin/admin. Also, many microsoft and goverment higher uppers were using "password" as their password.

This documentary was about 3 years ago, so lets hope they progressed some since then. This is the kind of stuff that leads to passwords like gaben.

[Astayanax]

Newell worked at Microsoft for over a decade before founding Valve - you'd sincerely hope he knows at least something about computers by now.


Depends on what he worked there as. Not like I am with Gaben or anything, but business at the senior level tends to be clueless about most computer related things (with the exception of the CTO who should -really- have a clue of what is going on). Now if he was working there as a network administrator for instance, then he deserves two slaps... but if he was working as say a marketing manager, then how could he get blamed for doing stuff which regular people do?

[toxic boy]

hmmm... even with the preload started im not thinking we'll see this game in september and i we are it'll be late september... or i could be pleasently suprised, but i'd rathe aim low and not get disapointed

[Scyne]

Wow. All my passwords are at least 15 characters long, containing letters, numbers, and special characters if allowed. Oh, and if the password's case sensitive, well, I have a field day with the SHIFT key.

Not to mention I use a different password for my computer, forum account, GW account, email, bank account, domain login and firewall login.

eg:

Userid: Scyne
Password: TruthBEtoldnonEshallguESSth15

[Hyakki-Yaku]

The merry-go-round just keeps on spinning..

HL2 Done? (http://www.jaded-gamer.com/comment.php?324)

It's been basically written off as a mistake (not to mention the glaring grammatical error in the ad itself), but it could mean we're not that far off.

I 'aint holding my breath.

[Hyakki-Yaku]

Spin!

Half-Life 2 RC for submisson by September 15? (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/news.php?aid=4272)

Spotted at BluesNews.