Posts by Fibbles

Re: Popcorn

"So... downloading an archive from a CDN somewhere is the same as activating it via Steamshite? No. No it is not the same. Did you not even read what I said about GoG?"

Yes it is.

You activate game on GoG by paying for it with a credit card and then download it. You activate game on Steam by paying for it with a credit card and then download it. You can back up your games to disc with both services and you can reinstall your games offline from those backups with both services (though it needs to be on the same account with Steam).

"A quote from the back of the box on nearly every fucking game in the shop these days. I'm not confusing anything. Valve are rapidly becoming the Microsoft of PC games."

This is such a stupid argument. You're getting mad at an online distribution company for requiring you to go online to verify your purchase. Instead you should be getting mad at games developers for requiring you to use an online distribution service to verify the purchase of a physical disc. As I said earlier though, you're not going to get far with that since it's a lot more cost effective for developers to only use one kind of DRM (especially one maintained by a third party and offered to them as free to use).

"How about "no DRM"? Even less expensive."

How about, this is the real world and if you're going to get mad about games developers trying to protect their shit, then you're going to be perpetually mad. When it comes down to it you're complaining about one of the most permissive forms of DRM available. This isn't some EA style crap that requires you to maintain a constant internet connection to play and which refuses to store your game saves locally, it's connect once on initial install and you're done. It's also far better then the bad old days when every company had their own protection system that'd install as a constantly running, resource hungry, background process. You could literally end up with a dozen of these things going at the same time. Or when companies put so much protection on their discs you couldn't even backup your purchases.

"So, the AAA videogames industry really can die. I'll dance a little jig on its grave."

They're bigger than the film and music industries combined. I wouldn't hold your breath.

Re: Want more?

Surely the repetitive song from the multi-cultural Disneyland ride It's a Small World would be more effective?

The English portion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiaU0xbOKs

Though it actually loops in about a dozen different languages, sometimes played simultaneously. This video gives a better impression of its true horror:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bNWkXvNDTE#t=3m50s

It's odd the things that stick with you.

Teenage me seems to have typed that key so many times I now know it off by heart.

Re: @Fibbles - WTF is "tiles"?

That folder displays most visited pages by view count which is not the same thing as a most visited website. For example, an internet forum might be one of my most visited websites but the one page that shows up in the 'most visited' bookmarks folder is the 'post successful' page. That's not particularly helpful.

Then there's the actual ease of use:

Bookmarks > Most visited > Website

New Tab > Website

I'm not expecting you to have some sort of epiphany about the tiles on the new tab page. Everyone has a preferred workflow and there's nothing wrong with that. A little less condescension would be nice though.

Re: Obligatory adblock comment.

"I don't think even Adblock can save you from having an ad play before you see the video you want."

Guess again.

First time I saw a video ad play on Youtube was about a year after they'd introduced introduced them whilst trying to watch something on a friend's computer. Spent a good twenty minutes trying to figure out if she'd installed some dodgy search toolbar or other crapware that was causing it since "Youtube doesn't have adverts".

Re: Is it a real problem for Wikipedia?

Really? I had imagined that most people use Wikipedia as I do; good enough for a brief overview but not to be trusted on the finer details.

Re: SteamOS means Win7 is my last Windows ever

I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but a few points:

- Only the games in your library that have a Linux port will work on SteamOS.

- Whilst the underlying Debian system of SteamOS can be accessed you'd probably be better off installing a *buntu and the traditional Steam client if you want to use the computer as a general purpose PC as well as a gaming rig.

- The nVidia proprietary driver is by far the best graphics driver available for Linux. It offers performance parity with that of their Windows driver. It is AMD who really need to pull their finger out. I'm guessing the 'weak history' you refer to is in regard to the open source drivers which nVidia only offers limited contributions to. You'd be right, AMD is a lot better at this which is why the open source AMD driver is probably as good as if not better than the proprietary. Sadly however, both are a fair way off their Windows counterpart in terms of performance.

I blame the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Bunch of mindless jerks...

Re: Blame?

I'm not going to pretend that the misses and I don't argue, it's just part of being in a relationship and as someone else said it can be (occasionally) productive. However, if you're sick of being nagged to pick up your shit and wash your dishes there's and easy solution: pick up your shit and wash your dishes.

Re: Hmm...

It was a pound of silver, surely?

Pound sterling and all that...

Providing your mobile network gives you decent data coverage I find I get more peace of mind from using 3G/4G than I do from public WiFi hotspots (the devil you know and all that). The free WiFi you just connected to could be doing man in the middle attacks oe anything.

Re: red dots

No, those are incoming Mark VI photon torpedoes. Apparently someone out there doesn't appreciate being spied on.

"If 80% of people have made the active decision to switch OFF the filter, it is extremely unlikely that Cameron (or whoever) would want to upset that many voters by trying to force people to accept it.

If it was 50:50, then there would be more chance of legislation ("to force the few remaining"). And the worse the ratio, the greater the chance."

The thing about modern politicians is that they usually don't base their decisions on numbers but on who shouts the loudest. It's difficult to get people to speak out about network level filtering if they think they're going to get themselves branded as a pervert. This unfortunately means that, regardless of the actual numbers supporting filtering, the 'something must be done' brigade are going to seem very loud indeed.

With our main political parties being very homogeneous they'll likely all respond in the same way to this noise; legislation mandating compulsory network level filtering for everyone. At that point it won't matter who you vote for, the outcome will be the same.

Re: So?

To be honest, if someone has pwned your system enough to be able to reprogram your webcam's firmware then the fact that they can see you gurning at the monitor is probably the least of your worries.

Re: Such memories.....

I swear I remember playing Afterburner in one of those r360 cabinets sometime in the mid 90s. They looked like giant wheels and would rotate a fair bit from what I remember.

A real pilot would have g-force pinning them to their seat. I just remember it being very difficult to aim at anything when you banked the plane and suddenly the cabinet shifted and you were pinned up against its interior wall... Still, it consumed quite a lot of my money.

I've no doubt it'll run Crysis at a fair clip but workstation cards aren't really tuned for gaming. You could probably get similar performance for half the price by buying consumer graphic cards.

Re: Makes your choices and takes your chances

"Where does this article say that the police would not regard bitcoins as a "real" asset?"

That's poor phrasing on my part, sorry. What I meant was that the police and prosecutors don't think they have to follow the usual laws surrounding asset seizures. This is because bitcoins are neither a tangible asset nor are they a currency - not even an electronic representation of a real-world currency. Bitcoins are (as I understand at least) just hashs and AFAIK it is not possible to 'own' a hash.

A few months back the Dutch authorities seized a bitcoin exchange that was allegedly run by people engaged in money laundering. Plenty of innocent people had bitcoins stored on the exchange. The Dutch just liquidated them all into real currency which they kept. There's no chance of anyone getting their bitcoins back since they didn't 'own' them in the first place.

"I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but I really don't accept that there is any evidence for the idea that this is some massive government conspiracy to control what you see on the internet. Web filtering is already the default on mobile phones."

The justification for default filtering on mobile phones is that a child can quite easily take their pocket money to some high-street store to buy an unlocked mobile phone and a pay-as-you-go simcard. No credit check, billing address or proof of age is required. A child can use this to access the internet without their parents being any the wiser. This is why the porn filter is switched on by default and you need to verify your age by use of a credit card to switch it off.

A child can't covertly sign up for a fixed internet connection. Even if the parents were somehow oblivious to the engineer drilling a whole in an exterior wall to run coaxial through it and for some reason didn't question the new box in the corner of the room with all the blinking lights, they certainly wouldn't miss the monthly charge showing up on their credit card.

I'm sick of seeing politicians and lobbyists conflate these two situations. Please don't make me read the same drivel on what is supposed to be a tech site

Re: iWatch ? I cannot believe

"But what if all I want to know it the time? I have to go fishing for 00's tech to look for the time. How Dickensian. Next you will be extolling the virtues of the spy glass."

Wear a £4.99 Casio if you simply must save the second or two that pulling your phone out takes. Like it or not, most people just don't bother carrying around a second device for that small saving of time.

I'm still at a loss as to how being slightly more convenient for telling the time is going to make smartwatches the next big thing.

Re: Terrorist

BREAKFAST BOMBER'S PLANS ARE TOAST.

Arrested after threatening to 'shoot the bacon'.

Re: Also Mint 16 XFCE incoming.

I'm a Xubuntu user and I'm genuinely curious as to what the advantages of Mint XFCE are? It seems to require double the RAM of Xubuntu.

Re: @AC 08:32

I'll admit I laughed. It's actually quite a light hearted joke by /b/ standards. Consider that they used to create infographics that would supposedly teach kids how to grow their own amazing looking crystals using nothing more than everyday cleaning products but would in reality just create a cloud of poisonous gas.

Re: a cunning plan

I love the idea that some spook somewhere has convinced their superiors that they need the Mists of Pandaria expansion to better spy on the Chinese.

Re: 5GB for £26/month

The One Plan is great.

£18 on a one month rolling contract. Unlimited data, tethering allowed.

Re: Umm...

Somebody add turkey hunting and an aversion to proper stuffing to the list.

Have we nominated an official chronicler?

Re: More intelligent psychopaths?

The title of the article is entirely misleading. The study does not suggest that 'VIOLENT video games make KIDS SMARTER – more violent the BETTER' (my emphasis).

What it says is that games involving teamwork and spatial awareness improved the teamwork and spatial awareness of those playing them. A very 'no shit Sherlock' result.

Whoever wrote the title for the article has managed to bizarrely twist this into 'violence is good' because games that require lots of teamwork and spatial awareness (such as first person shooters,) often portray some degree of violence.

I certainly don't subscribe to the Jack Thompson world-view of 'computer games will turn all our kids in murderous psychopaths' but I also don't believe that twisting the facts as this article's title does helps the pro-gaming cause at all.

Re: Stop. Watch.

Called it.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/04/13/pebble_kickstarter/#c_1378547

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/04/13/pebble_kickstarter/#c_1378700