* Posts by foxyshadis

484 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2006

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Nvidia gamers hit trifecta with driver, optimizer, and mobile upgrades

foxyshadis

Re: You missed an important development

Boss would just remote in/screen-share if he cares that much.

Forkin' 'L! Facebook, Google and friends create WebScaleSQL from MySQL 5.6

foxyshadis

I'd be much more interested in a comparison of WebScale vs My vs Maria, to be honest, both upsides and downsides. It sounds quite rosy, but there has to be a downside over it not being integrated.

Molyneux: Working at Microsoft is 'like taking antidepressants'

foxyshadis

Re: "Like taking antidepressants"

The window theory really isn't it; there's just lots of things that can go wrong with brain imbalances with millions of variables, and short of a non-existent total brain mapping and diagnosis, docs have to start with the common drugs and work their way down to the weird and unusual. Unfortunately, if you're unusual, a common drug might pull you in exactly the opposite direction and lead to more debilitating depression or psychotic crazy.

They help far more than they hurt, but they aren't perfect, just like the rest of life. Trying a few is the only real fix unless you manage to get your personal life in order int he meantime.

The revival of survival – the gaming genre that refuses to die

foxyshadis

Sir, You Are Being Hunted

You want a survival horror game without zombies, see the title. It's so cruel and unforgiving it gave me bad weather on the brain, though, every moment of helplessness and crushed hope distilled into a game.

Another one bites the dust: AVG kills its remote access service

foxyshadis

Well

That's certainly the most passive-aggressive way to end a news article.

I think most techies understand that the niche thrives precisely because there isn't a unified remote access or screen-sharing mechanism in modern OSes, though. Port-forwarding and configuring VNC or RDP? Please, no. NX, RDP are fantastic for general remote working, once set up, and most VNC flavors rather less so, but none package it all up into a simple pre-configured control panel usable across all OSes with all the bells and whistles like TeamViewer and LogMeIn.

It's not that the niche is about to collapse, it's that there's apparently no room for too many players. The elephant in the room, Citrix, just about has a lock on the market, but they missed their chance to dominate the freemium end with GoToMyPC years ago.

EVE Online erects mashed-up memorial to biggest space fight in history

foxyshadis

EVE's triumph

Geez, guys, way to pile on about how much you hate a game that wasn't even marketed to you. This is a monumental moment of history for EVE and MMOs in general, enthralling thousands of players around the world, something that would have been a server-crashing event in the past and instead was executed flawlessly. It was EVE's Gettysburg. Let them have it, instead of taking the opportunity to let the world know how much you don't care but have to post anyway.

American Civil War nerds aren't far removed from EVE players (I wonder how much overlap there is), I wonder if there will be re-enactments and remixes of this battle in the future. The visuals are pretty spectacular, but sped up to full speed, it's just a ludicrous field of smoke and confusion and awe.

Now that they see the attention it brought, I wonder if they'd be inclined to designate a "World Cup" event one day a year, an epic battle for fans around the world to watch.

HARD ONES: Three new PC games that are BLOODY DIFFICULT

foxyshadis

Re: Less than generous respawn points ... rehashing whole swathes of levels again and again

Now you're being oblivious, Ragarath. Out of the thousands (often tens of thousands) of hours that go into Indie games, adding a routine that scales every enemy's stats up or down by a percentage is a rounding error, and adding or subtracting a few opponents in each scene is so simple it was always in low-budget NES games. They're already spending hundreds of hours balancing the game's fights and feats as it is, after all, why not simply scale it too?

Or haven't you ever wished for a hardcore mode on a game you felt was far too easy, that doubled the difficulty and disabled saves? Did you ever wish they'd taken a few minutes to make it that much more exciting for you?

foxyshadis

Re: Less than generous respawn points ... rehashing whole swathes of levels again and again

There's a reason even most Nintendo-hard games had a difficulty switch before you start (and some modern ones let you ratchet it down if in-game if you die too much): Some people relish the high that comes of conquering frustration, some just want to experience the game in a way that's more personal than a let's play but less than a soul-crushing death-fest. Not everyone wants to be Sisyphus.

Having both an easy and hardcore mode increases sales, and in the end, that's what keeps more games coming out. The alternative is usually artificial difficulty combined with the hated in-app purchases.

(Obviously does not apply to fanatically insane grind games like Super Meat Boy.)

Having no save points at all just sounds like developer laziness, though. Even perma-death games let you pick up if you suddenly have to leave.

Haribo gummy bears implicated in 'gastric exorcism'

foxyshadis

Drama queens

Or more likely, creative writing 101 trolls. Over 200 reviews in the last 48 hours, immediately after a Reddit link, and not one Amazon Verified?

https://i.imgur.com/Ep4sEEY.jpg

Judge orders Yelp.com to unmask anonymous critics who tore into biz

foxyshadis

It's a good thing they're defending if it's borderline, but defamation is defamation, trying to be anon doesn't change that.

Guys, get over your petty Yelp phobia. They're not the same company they were in 2010, and it's pretty sad that every story about them ends up with dozens of people piling on about how shady they seem. They're a place to find a new spot to eat tonight, but you'd think they were breaking knees and calling in fake health reports on anyone who doesn't pay them -- something obviously not the case if you actually visit any listing. Even the "sponsored" listings have negative reviews these days.

Low power WON'T bag ARM the server crown. So here's how to upset Intel

foxyshadis

Re: ARM in the data centre is a certainty unless Intel can find a way to kill it.

The smallest Jaguar Opteron is 24.5mm x 24.5mm, while the smallest Ivy Bridge Xeon is 37.5mm x 37.5mm. The Haswells are the same size. Not sure where you got 160mm^2.

Drawers full of different chargers? The IEC has a one-plug-to-rule-them-all

foxyshadis

Re: MagSafe is neat

The MacBook Pro will complain if you feed it a 45W connector, but it'll work fine. However, if you run the system hard, it not only won't charge, it'll continuously run down the battery until you ease off. That's why the 85W adapter is necessary.

Mozilla: Native code? No, it's JavaScript, only it's BLAZING FAST

foxyshadis

Re: Low-level "arcane" nonsense...

What's new is the assembler backend that converts it back into machine code, without the overhead of a JIT or having to support any of JS's millions of corner cases. Read harder, do some research next time.

Asm.js is no different from any other intermediate object code prior to being fully linked, except that it's directly executable by any other standard engine as well. Might as well say C's .o files are a mess.

COW a-BUNG HER, dude! 'Secret Santa' Bill Gates buys lass a HEIFER

foxyshadis

Re: Hate him but...

Gates clawed his way to the top with a sociopathic need to win. Once he got married, had kids, and got older, he realized how much damage he'd caused, stopped micromanaging, set out to help the world, and eventually retired. He may be an ambivalent character overall, but he was redeemed, even if his former company still isn't perfect.

Larry Ellison on the other hand....

Google's Dart on target to replace JavaScript? That'll be the day

foxyshadis

Re: Translation

The problem isn't that Dart isn't fast - it is, consistently around 25-30% better than regular JS - it's that their V8 engine has been improving. Dart used to be 50-60% better, and hasn't gotten any faster, but V8 has improved tremendously in the same time frame.

Toshiba tweaks SSD model: She's flashy, but she's not dense ENOUGH

foxyshadis

Going from 4:1 to 5:1 isn't much.

Dropping to such a low process size is almost entirely about cost savings at this point, so the $/GB will be much more important than raw performance once the real drive comes out.

Bitcoin price soars after US Senate hearing on 'legit' currency

foxyshadis

Whelp...

It looks like it's already down to $450 and still falling. So much for that, one hell of a short-lived bubble there.

Miss Teen US 'sextortion' hacker pleads guilty

foxyshadis

So people caught with possession of child porn often get 2+ year sentences and put on the sex offender list, even if it's mostly converted to probation. This guy MADE child porn from unwilling victims, may well have distributed it, and he gets a mere 2.5 year sentence that will probably also be mostly converted to probation. Something is wrong here, I thought we were supposed to come down hardest on the creators.

foxyshadis

Re: No Off Switches?

If you can disable them in software, then RAT hackers can enable them in software. Kind of obvious.

And they sure as hell don't ALL have LEDs, and even of the ones that do, some have driver hacks to turn off the LED.

Unplugging or covering is definitely the best way.

Ding-dong! Bye bye Sunday lie-in, your Amazon package is HERE

foxyshadis

What makes you think the same person is working each of those days? Particularly on Sunday, if the only deliveries are priority/express packages, you can make do with a skeleton crew. The USPS is also trying to get rid of regular Saturday and possibly one weekday delivery, but now might replace both with express parcel deliveries only at a hugely reduced cost.

As it is, mail carriers usually work five days a week, and a substitute picks up the remainder.

Bitcopocalypse! Top cryptocurrency can be hijacked, warn boffins

foxyshadis

This already happened in the early days

But no one cared, because new coins were showing up every few hours on basic home PCs.

There are quite a few Bitcoin-ish derivatives that geeks and crims trade about, and it's very common for everyone's investment to suddenly not authenticate when a new mystery chain appears from someone attempting to take over the currency. Sometimes it's abandoned right then, sometimes now.

For BTC itself, it seems like you'd all have to toil for years with the most advanced mining hardware, always upgrading, to stay ahead.

Have you reinstalled Windows yet? No, I just want to PRINT THIS DAMN PAGE

foxyshadis

Re: What is it this week?

Raymond Chen once outed the real reason behind Windows attempting to reinstall a device every time you move its port: The braindead morons who wrote the firmware for the device's embedded USB controller used one of a handful of demo serial numbers that were given as examples in the USB spec. It's the hardware version of copying MSDN or codeplex code right into your production app. Sometimes, you can have two different devices with identical serial numbers, supposedly illegal by the spec, in different ports, and how is Windows going to know for sure what's what?

If the device has a unique serial number, as it's supposed to, it'll be re-detected with no reinstall no matter how or where you move it. In that case, it almost certainly sounds like a combination driver and hardware problem.

Linus Torvalds seeks REDEMPTION for every coded SIN

foxyshadis

Wouldn't the "bugs fixed only! no new features!" actually be a final 3.xx feature, while 3.99/4.0 is supposed to be the horribly broken release where nothing works, everything crashes, but it's crazy fast and doubly awesome? And around 4.4 regular people actually start migrating to it?

Because that's the basic idea of almost every product release. Don't screw with our expectations, Linus!

The worst possible outcome would be to adopt a FIrefox-style new major version every 4 months.

I am a recovering Superwoman wannabee

foxyshadis

Re: The Need for Validation

If that's the case, then most men in the workforce aren't really males either. This identical insecurity and drive for acceptance cuts a swath through both sexes, although they might not have exactly the same motivators.

Techno-thriller author and gaming franchise Tom Clancy dies at 66

foxyshadis

Re: I have to agree entirely

There were ten Net Force novels and 18 Net Force Explorers novels, all written within 6-7 years. I doubt he ever even saw them before publication, let alone contributed.

foxyshadis

A short but notable run

If you enjoy endless technical and procedure manuals in the middle of your fiction - why hello, Neil Stephenson - I suppose Clancy was an all right writer. More than anything I think he just tapped into the zeitgeist of his time and sold boatloads to the military, ex-military, and wannabe military, taking advantage of their particular ingrained tolerance for excessive detail, which isn't a bad thing. I just wish he'd actually written anything in the last two decades; Sum of All Fears is the last one that was distinctly his, and not a ghostwriter's.

Apple bags top Windows feature: Blue Screen Of Death arrives on iPhone 5S

foxyshadis

RTFA!

It's the third freaking paragraph. Learn to read more than the headline and opening line.

Hardbitten NYC cops: Sir, I'm gonna need you to, er, upgrade to iOS 7

foxyshadis

Re: Amateur

Using bleach for personal protection is as illegal (and effective) as wasp spray. If you hang around after your mugging, or if you get caught walking around with it, you're probably going to go to prison for at least as long as your mugger, for a premeditated attempt to seriously injure another person. It's safer to go with pepper spray.

RSA: That NSA crypto-algorithm we put in our products? Stop using that

foxyshadis

SELinux had mostly to do with that

Ah SELinux, headache of sysadmins everywhere except the obsessive-compulsive micromanagers. At least it's slowly being bundled into wider policies, instead of relying on hundreds of individual manual program-to-file(/socket/etc) mappings every time you want to get something done.

Intel waves LONG TENT POLE, pokes Data Domain boxes with it

foxyshadis

Blast from the past

They upgraded to processors merely two generations behind the current, and this is monumental news?

Windows 8 apps pass 100K, Windows 8 passes Vista

foxyshadis

Hate Win8? Get Classic Shell.

Given that Classic Shell takes 30 seconds to install, I don't understand why everyone is so intent on moaning about the new start screen. Big whoop, alternatives are available, avail yourselves of them while you avail yourselves of Win8's otherwise complete superiority over Win7. Some people just want to attention whore and look cool, I guess.

Apple said to be 'exploring' 5.7-inch iPhone

foxyshadis
Devil

Re: Anti-Apple bias

Very clever buildup to a great troll, but I'd have let it run a bit longer. :D

Signatures no good at protecting databases, says Juniper

foxyshadis

Re: How can this still be a problem?!?!?!

Yup, it's the silently zeroing out invalid data that allows attackers to layer it up into a real attack. Better to replace them with placeholders.

But this isn't about XSS, and you can't exactly ban real words like "SELECT" from most text input fields.

foxyshadis

Re: Another technique

I'll be sure to call you up to administer that second parallel system, then, because I don't know anyone else who would. Using the test/dev system has its own security implications.

I'd just redirect them to a trollface.

Going under the knife? Avoid Fridays. Trust us, we asked a doctor

foxyshadis

Re: I'd assumed that the increased risk at weekends was

I wonder how many doctors are mentally already at their golf game or bar by then.

Industry execs: Network admins an endangered species

foxyshadis

Re: it'd be interesting

The interface issue is one reason why Juniper and Netgear are making big inroads on the old iron, like HP and Cisco. The downside is that their really hot tech is still very pricey and out of reach of any but the most dedicated midrange business, whereas just buying one more HP is cheaper in the short run, even if it's much less powerful. Since salaries come from a different budget, there will always be a conflict.

Supreme Court sides with FCC in NIMBY wireless tower spat

foxyshadis

But they blend right in with Los Angeles' and San Antonio's oil rigs! Geez, what a waste of time and money.

Figures that Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts would dissent, since they'd be fine with dismantling the FCC entirely (all for entirely different reasons), but I'm surprised Thomas affirmed given his absolute hostility to the non-military Federal government.

Tesla earns first profit, Model S wins '99% perfect' rating

foxyshadis

Re: Musk...

I don't understand why he gets so much hate from some people, though. Yes, he's rather arrogant, like every CEO. Is it just that he's pursuing electrics instead of oil, though?

Why are scribes crying just 'cos Google copied their books? asks judge

foxyshadis

@Syldra

Amazon has to get approval to post even the first couple of pages. I've passed up buying multiple books because there was no preview, since I've been burned too many times by terrible authors that sounded great in the short summary.

Publishers and authors need to get their asses in gear before they get left completely in the dust, especially when it comes to out of print books that should be getting new life thanks to the digital long tail. Book piracy is rampant and incredibly easy online, and has been for two decades, and if they don't heed the wakeup call soon they're going to end up where the music and movie industries were a few short years ago. You can't stop piracy, but you can make it more convenient to purchase. The small and shrinking literate population is only going to move to where they are more appreciated.

We've done it - we've gone and made LONG-LIFE BEER

foxyshadis

Re: I already have a cellar full of very long life beers

Have you considered that the further wait may do nothing for the beer but increase its resale value and novelty, and it won't get less sweet? By then, you'd think that basically every chemical and biological process is dead, and you're just creating plonk.

At that point, wine is well into the stage where the only changes happening are the settling out of sediment, carrying with it any remaining flavor and pleasantness.

Four Apple execs among US top five best-paid in 2012

foxyshadis

The economy is finally graspable!

Now that we have a proper measure of currency, are we someday going to see trends measured in Real Ballmers or Constant 2013 Ballmers?

Intel doubles Thunderbolt speed to 20Gbps

foxyshadis

Needs laptop support

Call me when an ultrabook gets Thunderbolt. Every interesting laptop I've come across in the last year that was going to include it eventually stripped it before mass production. When the U2442 dropped it, the laptop was no longer even close to worth the price tag to me. HDMI ports just can't handle external resolution higher than 1920x1200 no matter what the specs say.

EMC, Carbonite fight off patent pursuer

foxyshadis
Childcatcher

Re: "Cisco revealed that it spends $US50 million annually fighting off.............."

Their revenue is $50 _billion_ a year, so it's only one-tenth of one percent. Say you make $50,000 a year, you'd be spending $50 a year on those nuisance claims, in their position.

They spend more than that on Cisco Live!, their conventions.

Forget the invisibility cloak: Boffins invent INVISIBILITY FISHNETS

foxyshadis

Re: Surely Not Invisible

Still invisible to RADAR, just because radar doesn't check for the absence of anything, only the presence, so they're a simpler target.

Wealthy London NIMBYs grit teeth, welcome 'ugly' fibre cabinets

foxyshadis

Nah, much too large for red paint to look right. Paint 'em blue with police box markings, on the other hand....

Intel's set-top TV effort snags on cable

foxyshadis

Re: Not a technology problem...

There are already lots of internet sites doing channel rebroadcasting outside of the normal reach of the law, and they've been around for many years, although the individual sites come and go. It's merely a Google away, but since most of them aren't advertised except through word of mouth, they'll never seriously catch on.

foxyshadis

Re: Don't know I'd back Intel, specifically...

At this point all of the channels I used to love and want unbundled are now ad-infested reality TV. The whole Discovery Network is dead to me now, and Logo is nearly as bad. The basic cable channels have been horrible since back when I was a kid, too bad all the rest followed.

I could now live with nothing but Food Network, Cooking, AMC, and a few premium movie channels. Even if I paid the same as I do now, it might mean less commercials and at the very least my money is going where I want it to, not the ESPN juggernaut.

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong

foxyshadis

Many ebook transcriptions come from OCR+spellcheck, and are only updated if enough people report problems. I've found that professional versions are no better than your average pirated transcription/scan, and some pirate communities exclusively deal with proofread versions that are actually better than the selling copy.

Of course, real books have plenty of editing failures, too, so it's hardly unexpected....

foxyshadis

Re: Its is amazing

A lot of people are constantly looking for subtext with their favorite stars. It's really no different from the people who breathlessly tell everyone about Harry and Hermione's eye-flirting in this one scene. With the gay rights movement just gearing up, you'd better believe a lot of people were looking for validation.

The 'Digital Economy' in 2012: A big noisy hole where money should be

foxyshadis

Re: Cheap, effective justice = DMCA takedown

Here's a sample template, there are lots on Google:

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/09/dmca-notice-of-copyright-infringement.html

The great thing about a DMCA takedown is that it's free, fast, easy, and simple, and utterly safe as long as you don't perjure yourself. You don't have to be an American citizen to use it, it only matters that the company does business in the US and that you hold the American copyright, which is automatic if you're a citizen of any Berne Convention country (unless you've signed foreign rights away, of course). They may contact you to verify your contact information.

If you're the creator but not the rights owner, don't do it. You would be perjuring yourself and opening yourself to huge damages and an arrest warrant if you didn't answer to them.

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