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[Ruski]

Well, the fake slang was always part of the alure of shadowrun for me personally.

although, if you want to get REALLY technical; the term for what most 'hackers' are doing in SR4, is actually more akin to phreaking. (Hacking the wireless telephone system)

most hackers are good at bouth, but it is a specality area of expertiease.

-RuskiFace the Phreak

[Retread]

I still don't see why they'd suddenly switch. The freakin' C2 deck was still called a "deck" even though it was implanted. How can a commlink designed to hack not be called a deck? Did all the old deckers just up and die in five years or what? It just doesn't make any sense.

[Ruski]

well, everyone has comlinks. only deckers use theirs to hack.
er... hackers use theirs to hack.

comlinks are like cellphones and computers. it's kinda a hybrid.

everyone's got them. most people can use them, hackers abuse them.

you don't have to have any special tools, really, to be a hacker. if you ran by and pulled the cellbud out of joe-corperate's ear, you could start hacking the world arround you with that. it's all about how you use and understand the technology.

actually, I never really liked the idea of a cyberdeck to be perfectly honest.

illegal modification of otherwise legal hardware asside, hacking IRL never really is about how great your computer was. you could hack with the biggest peace of crap you dug out of a dumpster if you wanted to. it's more about getting the utilities necessary, and knowing how to use them. my big complaint with the 'deck' system, was that even though you put 2 million newyen into hardware on the thing, it wasn't super enough to write code on. you'd have to get a diffrent 'just plain ol' computer' to write the code. and I think that the new system is actually a little bit more accurate to real life events.
*shrug* but it's not like the game IS real life, so they could do whatever they want with it.

-RuskiFace the Pirate

[Retread]

I think the implication of the cyberdeck was that there is too much data to hack code directly so you need a computer that can run a program to do it for you. I mean, sure, you can use your hacking pool to write an attack util on the fly, but spending the cred to have that rating 9 utility with deadly damage is much more efficient.

As for the programming part, I always treated a cyberdeck as a computer. However, I'd want all my programming softs stored somewhere besides active memory.

The whole hacking thing still bothers me, because they've suddenly made the nature of data in SR4 seem "less" than what it was in 3rd edition. If you can simply hack without any of the gewgaws from 3rd edition, what happened to the companies that made said gewgaws? Did companies suddenly stop putting hostile protection in their systems. All that infrastructure just disappears, people suddenly change their vocabulary, and a new system comes in. It's a terrible continuity error, if you ask me.

[Ruski]

no, i think perhaps I didn't explain my possisition well enough.

I was thinking more 'cyberdeck' versus 'tortouse' not so much 'cyberdeck' vs 'just using your brain'

because, while the creation of software is a very complex process, the actuall running of programs is much less so.

and, most of the 'effects' of thoes programs you run, takes place on the target computer.

so, really, the speed of your own computer/deck wouldn't make much of any diffrence at all.

the points when processer speed is important, like cracking amazingly complex encription routines, is almost compleatly overshadowed in the rules. *shrug* go figure.

-RuskiFace the Pirate

[Retread]

Eh, you ever look at the multiplier on the Counterfeit utility? It's 8, that's a LOT. Certified cred however is deeply encrypted though.

The way Matrix rules in 3rd edition were described made everything sound way more complex than perhaps it's given credit. I mean, if we knew exactly how much a megapulse is (which we shouldn't since its an abstraction) you can consider that it's just a wonder that a person doesn't need the aid of their machine just to get anything done at all.

The game always implied that you have to upload your programs to your icon in the system, this basically represents your bandwidth/processing usage. This is why you can't "deck" someone's desktop computer, because it doesn't have the processing power to actually handle an icon's programs. Now, reverse that and consider that a Red-8 host is going to do everything in it's collective power to stop you from doing what you want. This is millions of megapulses of processing power dedicating itself from stopping you. Now, sure, if you're significantly godlike enough at decking, you could break through the system, but in the end, you're gonna want help from your own personal super-computer to break those memory address algorithms stopping your attack programs and some extra hardening to keep the blaster IC from nuking the same.

Without an accurate gauge of how much processing is actually going on, it's not really appropriate to use present-day analogue to compare hacking and decking. Which is why I think that Fanpro is full of crap. It's like saying "Well, we don't need nuclear weapons anymore" Five years later, are all the nukes gone? Nope.

[Ruski]

well, that's actually helping my point.
if you have this super code busting machine to support your persona, and run software able to stop the bajillion megapulse attacks of Red-8 systems... why can't you write software on it?

-RuskiFace the Pirate

[Retread]

You can, the active memory and storage simply have to meet the requirements, so no running other softs with your deck. I'd rather have my desktop computer writing my softs while using my nova-hot deck to steal bits of code from elsewhere. Better yet, if you're gonna write code with a deck, I'd rather deck a high-rated Orange host and use it to code my softs, or use my Agent to auto-code half of it and work on the rest while hiding inside the system. A deck can be used as a computer, even if the canon doesn't say so, but a spendthrift would use his deck for other endeavors. As long as your deck can hold the programming library: Oblong, Renraku Teng, etc. then you can code with that. Your desktop computer is just a cyberterminal with no real attributes and I don't think that the rules intended to say that you can't use a deck to program, because most matrix work is programming.

[Ruski]

*shrug* oh well. I guess it dosn't really matter at this point.

4th edition everyone's just phone phreaks.

and no one wants to program anything on their cellphone.

...

in other news, I've got a compiler that can write code for cellphones. anyone want to bet me that I can't write a virus for cellphones? LOL

-RuskiFace the Pirate

[AJStarhiker]

lol Just don't send it to me

[Ruski]

Oh... right... uh... don't read any of the text messages you get in the next little bit.


-RuskiFace the Pirate

[AJStarhiker]

lol!

[Janus_Neckbreaker II]

feel free to send any viruses you want to test to 828.308.3356 Ruski, my Ex girlfriend would love them I am sure.
I would sure as hell laugh!
Janus