Posts by Ceiling Cat

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Being a janitor, I know better than to ever unplug any computer - desktop or otherwise. Granted, 99% of the places I've cleaned don't allow us anywhere near the servers, but I'd still never unplug anything. Even using the same outlet as a client's gear is a no-no.

That having been said, I once took over a site from a lovely older gentleman. My employer informed me that he was being removed because he'd received a complaint about the dusting of the desks. The problem wasn't the complaint itself, but the fact that he disconnected and moved everyone's PCs in order to do a very thorough dusting. Didn't shut them down first, just yanked the power cords and everything else that plugged into the back of the tower.

Poor old guy genuinely didn't understand why he was being taken off that contract.

Beer, because I desperately needed one after finding all that out.

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: Bienvenue en France

Upvoted for the Zappa reference. One of my favorite songs. Also, have a pint.

Slow Ring Windows 10 fragged by anti-cheat software in the games you're playing at work, says Insiders supremo

Re: WTF is a Slow Ring???

Anti-cheat programs are background apps that work at low level to detect cheating in games. Very specifically, they look for such things as : Keyboard Macro software, debuggers, packet injection type cheating, and the like, and either kill the processes involved or trigger the player's account to be banned.

Worst I ever saw was HackShield (or was it GameGuard?) actually defeating Speedfan's attempts to ramp up my fan speeds while I was playing a very CPU and GPU intensive game. At the time I was using a brutally loud CPU cooler, and I shouldn't have to risk tinnitus just to play a game.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

Re: Behind the curve

Not sure what Pledge Music is, but the releases in question are already available from the band's merchandise stall at the show, and succesfully shipping from Bandcamp.com as well.

Seems there are still a few tape duplictation houses operating here in Canada (and in the USA), and they do seem to ship product reliably. I just don't see the point in using cassettes anymore, as it's been ages since anyone actually made cassette decks or "walkmans".

Re: Behind the curve

There are quite a few bands on my local scene releasing on Compact Cassette, and few of them could be described as "hipster" bands... unless Hipsters these days are into Brutal Death Metal, Grindcore, and Crust Punk.

Beer, because it goes surprisingly well with all three of those genres.

I rip every CD I buy at shows, partly because I don't have a good CD player/HIFI to play them on. Hell, I don't even have a CD drive in my main computer, instead relying on an old Acer/Gateway all-in-one whose speakers are shite but whose CD drive works fine. Once I have the files ripped and copied to my main machine, i file the CDs neatly away in a box in my storage locker, as I don't really need them taking up space.

Thusly, the bands get their cut, and I get my listening fix.

All thanks to SoundKonverter, which conveniently ships with Kubuntu.

I forgot where I was going with this.... Has anyone seen my pants?

Re: Holding my breath turning blue

Upvote for the Techmoan link. Also, Have one ------>

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Re: Meltdown and Spectre - a Wake-up call for HPC

Your comment makes a lot of sense to me, even though I'm just the bloke who cleans the lavatory.

My interests are gaming, not HPC. In either, there is a need for data to be passed as quickly as possible, with a minimum of interference/pipeling lag introduced by what I'll just simplify as "security-related functions".

I only kind of understand the idea of "speculative execution" - I'm not a coder, but it feels like a cousin of a feature that Windows used to use to pre-load certain files based on the times they were most frequently used. Some kind of pre-caching whose specific name escapes me.

Being uneducated in this aspect of computing, I can't help but think that such a function is not as necessary for code which runs from a compiled state, rather than code that is runs "just in time". Or am I wrong on this?

I am only being so serious because my brain hurts from trying to figure this out : On one hand, there are explanations that are way too technical; on the other hand, there's a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of FUD, trolling, and general "Hurr Durr intel Fucked Up", and I can't really make heads or tails of this.

All I know is, If I'm patched, my performance may take a nosedive. If I don't patch, I'm at risk of ... [variable unknown]. Do either or both vulnerabilities really affect non-productivity machines as badly as HPC/Server Class gear? And will there be improvements made to mitigate the performance hit?

Can someone get me a Tylenol? As I said earlier, my brain hurts.

Re: Sigh... thanks, Reg (oh, and Intel)!

To the person who thumb-downed me, I did expect a reaction like that. I also expect that the bulk of people who thumbs-down me won't actually post why, or identify themselves.

Bear in mind that I'm not really happy with Intel at this point, nor am I trying to defend them. I had been planning to start building a new gaming rig soon, as my current one (based around an old Gateway FX-6860) can no longer take video cards capable of meeting the minimum spec for most of the current/future releases. As I am still seeing reports of AMD hardware (both CPUs and GPUs) not running games as well as similarly-spec'ed Intel-based rigs, moving to AMD seems a no-go for me.

Seems that, as a gamer (rather than a datacenter admin or IT professional), I am truly fucked for choices at this point in time.

Console Master Race For The Win!

Sigh... thanks, Reg (oh, and Intel)!

For the love of christ!

All I want to do with my PC is play games and maybe some light web browsing! Some of us AREN'T using our systems for "mission critical" work, you know.

I will NOT risk what little performance my ageing I7-2600 (not "K") offers me by applying any patch that will even potentially rob me of 20% of my system performance, whether or not an "expert" claims that I will be unaffected.

I would rather move to using my main rig for gaming, and use my Raspberry Pi 3 for web browsing.

Not happy with intel, but blowing the lid off this was a pretty dick move, El Reg. You've actually, for the first time since I started reading the site in 1998, managed to lose some cred with me - which is too bad because I generally recommend you to people (both tech savvy and not).

How much for that Belkin cable? Margin of 1,992%?

Re: How much for that Belkin cable?

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

I had a friend who worked as a sales rep for the Chinese company who supplies a lot of the major MicroSD/Flash market with their products. He would often quote me prices like "Sandisc 128GB MicroSD for $3.25 CDN" or "Kingston MicroSD for $1.50 CDN". Then you go and look in the retail shops, and the same Kingston MicroSD is selling for $250 CDN.

The markups mentioned in this article are similar. It's just that now that the UK is preparing to Brexit, people want to pretend they are getting shafted because of brexit itself, not because retailers ALWAYS shaft consumers.

Ex-NASA bod on Gwyneth Paltrow site's 'healing' stickers: 'Wow. What a load of BS'

Re: High level spirit

[2] Strange as it might sound, I had a bottle of Indian Whisky recently and it was rather drinkable. Can't remember the name though.

Could it have been one of the many products from Amrut?

Only Indian Whisky distiller I know of at the moment, although there may be others.

BOFH: Halon is not a rad new vape flavour

Re: cloudy snake oil

Very, very rarely are janitors ever stupid enough to plug anything into a customer's computers, and even more rarely are they allowed access to the server room at all! If your server room needs cleaning, then your filtration system is in dire need of attention. Also, techs should be smart enough and capable enough to do a quick sweep (preferably not with a static-based cleaning tool like a dust-mop or swiffer).

That having been said, I once received a call informing me that I was being re-assigned. The gentleman I was to replace was somewhere between 60 and 70 years old, and completely tech-illiterate. He had received a complaint about his dusting, and had attempted to fix the deficiency in his work - the problem is that he disconnected and moved each and every computer in the office (a government office at that) in order to complete the task properly. I didn't ever find out if any of the systems had been damaged by his meddling.

I met the man, he truly didn't understand what he had done wrong. He literally had no idea why he was being fired for doing an extra good job.

KickassTorrents kicked out again, this time by Australia

Re: Cinemas

"Pays not to think of what goes on in those places. Largely darkened area, lack of cleaning..."

I was once employed as a Janitor at a movie theater.

It's not an easy task to clean one, and often involves an electric leaf blower, a snow shovel, a huge garbage bin, and several buckets of degreaser.

The one I worked at supposedly had carpet in front of the first row of seats, but years and years of people spilling full cups of soda (doesn't matter where it was spilled, all liquid runs towards the front of the theater) had left it more resembling squishy linoleum than actual carpet.

I haven't been to the cinema since.

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

Re: Petition to make Plasma (KDE) the default DE

There's already an Ubuntu-based distribution which does this - it's called Kubuntu. In fact, with the exception of my Raspberry Pi it's the distro I use on all my PCs.

Https://www.kubuntu.org

'Exploding e-cig cost me 7 teeth, burned my face – and broke my sink!'

Re: A "Twisted Vapers RDA" is just the "tank"

** Do they really call it "e-liquid"? **

I call it "e-juice", or often just "juice". I have a co-worker who refers to it as "oil", but he often gets a lot of sideways looks when he does so, as "oil" generally implies a THC-containing product.

I use a 150w Joyetech Cuboid along with "The Troll v2" RDA by MoToFo. My coils are VapeGeek clapton pre-builts @ 0.6 ohms, and my wick is Shiseido cotton. Batteries are "married pairs", my collection of which comprises Samsung, LG, and EFest brand batteries, all around 30A 2600mAh range. The "Juice" is a special blend at 1.5mg/ml, which I make from several different flavors.

I used to use mechs, but after two near-nasty fuckups caused by me forgetting to set the lock-ring on the fire button, I abandoned them in favor of regulated mods. Not because mechanical mods are "unsafe", but because I'm a fucking idiot.

Intel literally decimates workforce: 12,000 will be axed, CFO shifts to sales

Pricing

I do understand that InHell need to make a profit, but it might be a wise idea if, instead of slashing jobs, they cut their prices instead. It seems quite unreasonable for current-gen processors to cost in excess of $400 if bought on their own, but then the manufacturers somehow manage to sell a system based on said processors for $500.

Top Firefox extensions can hide silent malware using easy pre-fab tool

This is funny, because once I opted out of Whitelisted advertising through Adblock (they even tell you how to disable it in the iinstaller, ffs), I really haven't noticed a difference in operation between Ublock and AdBlock Plus.

I also opt out of the whole debate about the ethical factor of paid whitelisting. I would have a stronger opinion if AdBlock Plus were the only ad-blocker available, but it's not. As it is, I use both, depending on the install. For Example, i used UBlock on my Lubuntu install, but I can't be bothered to switch on my main machine. My wife's Kubuntu box got whatever I felt like installing (ABP, I think), and it seems to work just fine. The machine I built for my co-worker got Ublock, because he doesn't care which I put on as long as it blocks most ads.

Wish I could get ABP op UBlock for my tablet's default browser. Makes browsing the web a bit of a chore having al that extra crap on the page.

Game over, Ouya, the Android gaming console

Re: Count me out

Why would you install Razer Synapse?

Been using my Death Adder for well over a year without it.

If it enables any features, then they must not be ones that are actually useful, since I've not found the mouse lacking in any way.

Next year's Windows 10 auto-upgrade is MSFT's worst idea since Vista

Re: @Ceiling Cat

@Paul Crawford

I mean that they have broken sensors/pwmconfig so that it no longer recognizes my board as having PWM control at all. A bit of a pain, as call resources relating to the chipset appear to have been taken offline a couple of years ago.

Please Keep it up Microsoft, your continued blatant abuse of your own customers is doing FAR more for popularizing Linux on the desktop than anything the open source community could have ever achieved on its own.

Yeah, but then the open source devs do something ass-backwards and stupid, like removing fan control ability on certain models of motherboard well before all those boards are out of circulation/inoperable.

In my case, it's a board based on the IT8772F chip, and it's also my main gaming machine. The bios-based fan control does not do anywhere near an adequate job of not cooking the CPU, and being an off-the-shelf model, the crippleware bios that it ships with can't be flashed with a better one, because there isn't one.

Normally I wouldn't bitch, but I really want to try Kubuntu (and a few other distros) on this machine without having to virtualize it, plus I have enough linux games in my steam collection to make it worth my while. But I can't, without either : Suffering horribly form the sound of a 4000 RPM fan screaming beside my head, buying and installing an expensive fan controller module, or replacing my CPU cooler with something much beefier and praying it doesn't just bend/snap my motherboard.

Sprint sprints away from no-throttle policy – punishes 'unlimited' network hoggers

@John H Woods : This is limited to handset/mobile data plans. Steam isn't available on phones. I know Netflix is, but do you really need to watch that many films on your phone every month? And I certainly don't understand these people who use their phone for torrenting without first connecting to a wifi hot-spot. That's just dumb.

...... says the person who doesn't even own a smartphone.

Adblock farms out acceptable ad policy to independent reviewer

In all this, people seem to be forgetting that whitelisted ads can be turned off... with one click.

Are we all so lazy these days that we can't even click one check-box? It's not even hard to find, it's right there on the preferences dialog!

AVG to flog your web browsing, search history from mid-October

Re: We wont pay for data slurping pesterware

Avast, although you'll be diving into Avast's settings fighting popups

Umm... no you won't. The only popups I see are when my virus definitions get updated, and even then that's usually only when I have just booted my machine. Technically, though, it *is* wise to actually configure software after you install it. If that's too much of a hassle, I'm sorry, but I can't help you.

As another AVAST! user suggested, Gaming Mode can help with that, too.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Re: "Personal" computer no more

I do tend to agree with your rant, actually. Once I'm forced over to Win10, I'm probably going to install linux as my main OS and just use Win10 for games, with a win7 install "frozen" on a separate drive for any of those games that don't get a Win10 compatibility upgrade (which, much like when I moved from WinXP to Win7, will be about 75% of my collection).

Ubuntu Wily gaggle builds 15.10 beta beachhead

Re: Not so easy

It doesn't disable the GRUB installation, it enables the ability to choose which disc to install GRUB to during the install.

IIRC, you used to be able to do that from the standard installer, not just from the graphical installer on the live disc, but they removed that feature for some reason.

Google turns up plenty of hits on how to install GRUB to something other than the primary HD.

Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software

Fact, or speculation and FUD?

Is this actually the true and proven direction for Windows 10, or is this speculation/FUD?

Just curious, as stupid cloudy buzzphrases like Software-As-A-Service get thrown around far too often these days.

I'm not in IT - I'm the bloke who cleans the bog - but I do own at least 1 windows-based PC and would like to know if this is definitely going to be a thing, or whether MS-Haters are just speculating and spreading FUD.

Relax, it's just Ubuntu 15.04. AARGH! IT'S FULL OF SYSTEMD!!!

What I really want to know . . .

Is whether or not Fancontrol/sensord finally support my motherboard? The temp sensors and fan control on my board is provided by a IT8772F chip, which is honestly a bit of a POS, but it's what I've got. If it's still not supported correctly, I can only run in a VM if I want my fans controlled properly, missing out on such goodies as proper GFX card drivers.

Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

Re: firmware

Nvidia has a policy to force obsolescence of older GPUs at driver level long before they need to be obsolete as hardware.

So do AMD. I can no longer use my laptop's AMD GPU with the proprietary Catalyst drivers because of the "xorg too new" scenario. Granted, it's not a great GPU to start with (4xxxHD I think), can't remember the exact specs of the laptop right now - it's an HP G-62, but there have been many differently spec'd machines under that badge. I wouldn't care much, but it's not actually dead yet, and I'd like to be able to make use of the chip's full capabilities, but no dice. THe open-source AMD driver (MESA, is it?) can't do anything, performance wise. It struggles to run RenPy-based games, let alone anything that really *needs* hardware acceleration.

As a result they are sitting in the spare parts drawer and all desktop GPUs have now been replaced by AMD.

Newer AMD parts, I hope. which they (hopefully) won't obsolete for a few years. Once I get the desktop that this laptop is replacing back in action again, I may well install Xubuntu on it and donate it to charity, or just leave it lying in the hallway of my apartment building.

Apple rats on Google to FTC: You thought WE were in-app-ropriate?

Amazon's unreasonable demand for registering a credit card when you sign up is the exact reason that I will not use their app store, or even buy a tablet which isn't Google Play certified. The only exception was my Polaroid PTAB-8000, and that was immediately rooted and the play store installed anyways.

Now that I'm in the market for a new tablet (the Polaroid tab turned out to be a p.o.s.), I'm being very careful to make sure that I go with one which allows you to use vouchers instead of requiring a free pass to my wallet. I really can't see why anyone would permanently store their payment details on a device that can easily be lost/stolen anyways.

Apple's 16GB iPhones are a big fat lie, claims iOS 8 storage hog lawsuit

Strangely enough, I have an Android tablet (Polaroid PTAB-800) that does it exactly the way you describe it. EXCEPT that it doesn't, as the OS and all installed apps need to fit into the dedicated space. If your apps use any extra space for app-specific data, it's stored in the OS section, not in the user section, which is brilliant unless you want to have more than two large apps installed at once. On the other hand, I still have a full 8gb of space, and can add an SD card for more storage, but can not get more app space. If you root the PTAB-800 you can *technically* run apps from the SD, but it tends to glitch badly more often than not, which cost me several months of progress in Valkyrie Crusade.

It's a first-world problem, and one of the reasons I will never buy a cut-price tablet ever again, but it also points to why Apple did what they did. I'd love to see the plaintiff's reactions when they realize that they can only have a handful of apps installed in their "separate OS partition", but they still have 16 (or 8, or 32) GB left for porn and MP3s.

Australia deflates Valve with Steam sueball

Re: Not fit for purpose...

Also, since he mentions the fact that a non-Valve entity runs some game servers in Singapore, it shows that Valve aren't necessarily responsible for providing the servers in the first place.

Also, people seem to forget that Steam is just an online shop and DRM system - Valve may publish some of their software through it, but so do many other companies.

This could also be a case of Butthurt due to someone not liking the Early Access game they bought : these are pretty clearly labeled as "works in progress". I'd also not be surprised to find out that some of the customers represented are complaining about a game not working because they don't meed the Required Specs. You'd be surprised how many people get angry because their just-barely-meets-the-minimum-spec gaming rig won't run a game at 60 frames per second, and think that's a reason to get their money back, rather than sucking it up and upgrading their machine.

Dutch firm passes the world's first e-spliff to the left hand side

My local e-juice company makes a Gummy Worms flavor, and I've recently tried a really good Orange Creamsicle flavor, too.

The thing that the haters need to realize is that vaping plain, unflavored PG/VG mix is vile. And one of the reasons that smokers move to e-cigs is that the flavors taste a fuck-tonne better than even a flavored cigarillo, without being (as) harmful to the user or surrounding innocent bystanders.

As much as I do appreciate what the e-spliff is trying to do, I do wish they hadn't. There are some cases where negative publicity is actually just that.

Beer, because eventually a company will come up with lager vape, and then we're all done for.

Chrome OS leaks data to Google before switching on a VPN, says GCHQ

Upgrading to KitKat . . .

They recommend upgrading to KitKat, but neither of the Android devices I own have even received updates past the OS that they shipped with, save for the individual app updates....

If they, or anyone else for that matter, can advise on how to update a "Gateway Tab TP-A60" (honeycomb) or a Polaroid PTAB 8000 (IceCreamSandwich on under-spec hardware) to the latest android without rooting (not possible for Gateway, already done on PTAB, but the device was not Google Cert'd to begin with so it doesn't get updates), I would appreciate the help.

Still watching DVDs? You're a planet-killing carbon hog!

Re: If there wasn't DRM...

DVDs are normally protected using CSS, a form of DRM. That's why (under linux anyways) you have to install special packages in order to view DVDs. In hardware players, the decrypting is done by the hardware (obviously). Blu-Ray are also encrypted, but it's a different encryption scheme than DVDs use, and I honestly haven't been bothered to research what type of encryption they use.

"Region 0" or "Region Free" discs of either type are very very hard to come by, and usually when you do, they'll be from grey-market sources such as Hong Kong. Not all, mind you, but most.

Regarding the article itself, they must be assuming that everyone who owns a DVD player has a 100+ watt all-in-one DVD/Hi-fi setup and a CRT TV, as opposed to the (still fairly common) standalone DVD player and flat-panel TV/Computer monitor. They also seem to assume that we all drive to the store (I don't - it's a 5 minute walk away, if even) AND leave my car (which I don't own at all) Idling in the mall parking lot while I spend half an hour or more deciding what DVD to buy.

It also fails to take into account that people these days often watch on PC, a laptop, etc. as opposed to the television.

And don't even get me started on streaming services. The best choice I have found so far doesn't stream, per se, it sells you a download of the episode/movie that you download to your device. I live in Canada, and even *I* would have to cheat and use a proxy to get access to the "proper" Netflix catalog.

Beer, because.

Batten down the hatches, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS due in TWO DAYS

Kubuntu

Personally looking forward to trying Kubuntu 14.04 . . . Not been much of a fan of standard Ubuntu since Unity appeared.

I'd try Mint, but quite frankly I've grown fond of Kubuntu over the past couple of years. I've 4 machines here running various versions of Kubuntu, and none have given me any problems that I didn't totally deserve. Even the machine that's running 12.10 (due to that being the last time the Nvidia drivers properly supported the Geforce 9500 GT) hasn't had one problem so far.

Beer, because what other bevvy is appropriate at 4am?

Google's SECRET contracts: Android lock-in REVEALED!

Bought an 8" tab made by Polaroid, who didn't bother with Google certification. Whilst it did come with a decent list of app stores that I could install, the ones that didn't seem sketchy all required a credit card and didn't offer free versions of apps. In the end, I wound up finding a one-click app which rooted the tablet and installed the play store.

Remember when SimCity ABSOLUTELY HAD to be online? Not any more – fancy that!

Ugh... Simcity 2013 :(

To be perfectly honest....

The game was crap, and te updates haven't helped. Maxis/EA roped me into a $70 purchase with promises of a decent game, and failed to deliver.

It looks much too cartoon-y. and yet, for it's lack of detail, it manages to get my video card (Geforce GTX 560 Ti) running so hot that the fan triggers my tinnitus (or a migraine) within an hour or so of starting a session.

The sound is terrible. The music in particular grates badly on the ears, whilst the older Simcity music was pleasant and somewhat relaxing. So far, the free DLC has all been pretty awful, and having it installed means that you'll always be pestered to put in a Progressive Insurance building, or build a place of worship.

My last attempt to play the game ended with me running a 4000 person mining town into bankrupcy within about 20 minutes of founding it, then quitting and playing Eufloria HD on my Playstation Vita for about 3 hours.

Pisses me off no end that a $10 game that I bought on impulse turns out to be better than a game I preordered for $70. Beer, because Beer!

Haswell micro: Intel’s Next Unit of Computing desktop PC

Re: Power Usuage

500 watts? From a laptop-style power brick? not a chance of that happening. Even my old Amiga 500 didn't draw that kind of power, and the brick was twice the size.

Someone else quoted some real-world figures. I just wish that people wouldn't jump to conclusions, especially conclusions that a little research would show as impossible.

HP: We're axing 29,000 workers? Add another 5,000 to that

HP - Never Again

I'll not start with my opinion of HP's pre-loaded software, as I found it at least all uninstalls fairly clean.

I *will* make mention of my opinion of HP build quality. It's crap. Even their Pavilion Elite line ship in off-standard size cases, with inadequate power supplies, and are built using components that are known to be faulty (MSI Geforce 9500 GS). Cable management is non existent. Their cases mount the motherboard on the wrong side, so that all the expansion slots are above the CPU rather than below - making it very hard to cool the video card. Extra cards are placed so that they trap heat (video card sandwiched between the video capture board and the (B/g only) wifi card).

I have two of these machines - one has had all it's extra cards removed and been turned in to a linux box for the missus to do her web stuff on. The other is my audio recording workstation, and has yet to give me further issues.

Here's what YOU WON'T be able to do with your PlayStation 4

Re: Commentards are xBots?

> Hands up who ever used a DVD or BD to play CD's...

Sheepishly raises hand.

Not only have I done that, I have used my DVD players and BD players to play CDs full of MP3s. I'd have used them to play DVDs full of FLAC instead, but there's a shortage of reasonably priced gear with FLAC support. Hell, there's a shortage of audiophile-centric gear that plays FLAC.

Loss of streaming support may well be no big deal - the current PS3 streaming options STILL struggle with subtitles. On last try, none of the streaming solutions could handle 1080p video with FLAC audio and "Advanced Substation Alpha" (ASS) subtitles. Hell, it was a toss-up whether or not it could manage subtitles from DVD VOBs.

This new announcement means very little to me, as I plan on sticking with my PS3 for as long as possible. There are still LOADS in the supply channel, and it would be monumentally stupid to buy a first-run PS4 as the PS2 and PS3 both suffered from overheating problems on the first run - a problem they managed to fix in later revisions of both consoles.

Beer, because breakfast.

E-reader barons file FCC plea to opt out of disabled-friendly regs

Re: Simple. If it can connect to the net, it is subject to the law.

You sound bitter. Especially in your last statement.

Probably doesn't sound that way when you process it through a screen reader.

Pink Floyd blasts Pandora for 'tricking' artists with petition

Let's see....

I have prchased Dark Side Of The Moon no less than 10 times, and many of those copies were purchased brand new. Roger would be quite displeased to hear that nowadays I prefer Eclipsed over DSOTM, and Eclipsed was never ever released as an official recording. Best version of it was the Empire Pool recording, iirc. If the boys need cash, perhapse they should look at arranging somthing with the bootleg traders. It'd b a damn sight more interesting than just another reissue of the same stuff again and again.

Also, not all internet radio pays royalties. How many Icecast "djs" would be willing to pay royalties on everything they broadcast? probably not too many.

wish I could choose more than one icon, sinct this post is sure to get a bunch of thumbs-down and flames in response.

isoHunt loses appeal against search ban

Re: Another mole is whacked with a rubber mallet...

I remember those days - I was a not-so-spotty teenager hammering away on my Amiga. I do seem to remember, too, that I didn't own much in the way of "retail copies" of games back then. The ones I did own, I actually *OWNED*. Now, you don't own a game, the company grants you permission to use the game.

I don't agree with the whole DRM thing, but I fail to see an alternative. One of the biggest problems is that the people who "vote with their wallets" in regards to DRM are quite often more than happy to pirate the game. Phrases like "If they're going to treat me like a criminal after I bought the game" are happily connected with the phrase "I'll just go download the cracked version whe it comes out.", and nobody seems at all willing to acknowledge the hypocrisy of this behavior.

Personally, I take the stance that if I want to play the game badly enough, I will suffer with the DRM. I have many many games which I have had to bin because I didn't want to use a crack to bypass CD protections that didn't work under modern operating systems. I could build and maintain a legacy box, but I already have 3 desktop PCs and a laptop to deal with. Some of them, like Earth 2160, I had to bin because the activation servers were taken down (nobody could possibly still want to play this, right?).

There's no way I believe that SimCity (or any of my games which use Uplay) are going to be playable in 5 years. Even 3 would be a stretch. The point is to get the most out of them while you can, not worry that sometime down the road, you'll have a hankering to play some more and it won't be able to authenticate. That's even a concern with my PS3, but I'm not just going to stop buying games (and DLC for those games) just because they might go away.

Re: Another mole is whacked with a rubber mallet...

@ asdf :

No way with the roaring success of DRM heavy handed online titles like the latest SimCity convincing users of the value of DRM, the MAFIAA is just a few take down orders from ... having to pay more lawyers.

All the SimCity "fiasco" convinced me to do is wait a few more days before trying to play any "AAA" releases which use online DRM.

And where were we talking about DRM?

Oh, that's right, you must be one of those bitter customers who vented their spleens on the forums and in the comments at Amazon. Good job, that. I do understand the frustration at not being able to play, but did you guys really have to take it that f**king far just because you couldn't play on release day? Sad, really - poinsoning the reviews just because you couldn't get on with sitting on your duff. Classy!**

** - Not much of one to talk, though, since I'm cutting down some poor tool who's still pitching his toys out of the pram over something that happened a fortnight ago. I could have some sympathy, but I'm fed up with the anti-DRM squad. Actually had a "friend" turn against me just because I wouldn't avoid DRM laden games. Someything about I was helping to encourage them to take away his freedom.... no I wasn't, I was buying and playing a f**king video game.

Nuke, because I'm not a trained IT professional, I'm the bloke who cleans the lavatories.

Experts finger disk-wiping badness used in S Korea megahack

AhnLab? Seriously?

I didn't know AhnLab even made an Antivirus program. I do know that they make anti-cheat software for K-MMORPGs. Their product, Hackshield, is absolutely BRILLIANT at stopping legit players from playing, while allowing the cheaters to get on with ruining the games that it is being used to protect.

Imagine that : It's OK to edit network packets so that you can do obscene amounts of damage, but it's absolutely not OK to monitor a temperature sensor on your motherboard.

Not that any other anticheat or antivirus is 100% effective, but AhnLab's offerings seem to be worse than many. Never had Avast block Speedfan from operating correctly. Some anticheat software does take exception to being run in a virtual environment, but some game companies REALLY don't want you multi-boxing*.

* - Once played a casual MMO hosted at Aeria games. Their reasoning behind not allowing multi-boxing at that time was that some people can barely afford the one computer they own, and that it's not polite to flaunt the fact that you can afford several machines. I've played other games where it was thought to just be too difficult to multi-box (Granado Espada, where you control 3 characters at once). On Granado, I managed to juggle 3 (!) teams of 3 characters, with at least one team farming on a different map (and therefore not able to benefit from the other two teams apart from a couple of bonuses based on how many faction-mates you had logged on at one time.

Acer's tiny raft of profit smashed onto rocks by Gateway and co

Re: Gateway kit was good

Still is. My most recent Gateway box came with excellent specs for a (just barely) sub-$1000CAD machine. So, for that matter, did my previous Gateway, which is only 2 or 3 years old. Even my Tablet is a Gateway.

Acer/gateway build quality is miles ahead of HP. My HP Pavilion Elite 9505mf suffers badly from airflow problems, partially because the used a sub-atx case and partially because there wasn't even an attempt at cable management. Also, HP's cases mount the motherboard on the wrong side - the CPU is Dow near the bottom of the case, and the video card is up i n an unventilated area. In the case of my HP box, a video capture card and a wifi card helped to strangle the GPU's supply of fresh air even further.

Virty market share race reaches the bend and heeeeere comes Oracle

Virtualbox Vs. VMWare

Up until recently, I'd always used VMWare for virtualization. Lately, though, I use a mix of Vmware and Virtualbox. It really depends what I'm doing in the VM.

If I need to run Windows XP in a VM, then I always use VMWare, because it can run DirectX 9 games fairly well. I'd just dual boot, but I hate having to attend the morning bootup on days when I want to run XP.

If I want to run a desktop linux that utilizes OpenGL in the window manager or any of the programs I'm using, then I use Virtualbox.

If I want to run a server OS, then who cares, both are pretty damn good for a hobbyist's needs.

Both have their problems, although price is not one of Virtualbox's problems. TBH, the cost of VMWare was off-putting too, but when I need a feature, I will pay to get it.

I haven't had a go with Citrix, but I have heard that it's not good on the user end.

Explosion - because I'm NOT a trained professional, I'm the bloke who cleans the lavvies.

Amazon yanks SimCity download from store

Actually, the game is fairly good....

Really good, although let me be perfectly clear that it's NOT the same as the old simcity games. It feels like a cross between The Sims Freeplay, Simcity, Simcity Societies, and Cities XL. As such, even though I'm quite enjoying it, I still have no idea what I'm doing, and am constantly having to restart my cities/regions. With the way things are going right now, I may never have a city that I'm happy with, but at least I can play.

Don't get me wrong - I wasn't happy about the release-day problems (actually it was only on Thursday, March 7 that I got to properly try the game, and the release was on Tuesday, march 5). It is blatantly obvious that EA tried to go cheap with server provisioning. To be fair to them, two limited closed betas is NOT the same thing as real load testing - it also doesn't take into account that not everyone plays SimCity the way it was designed to be played. Still, it's no excuse. I'm just glad that I have other games (on PC and PS3) to keep me entertained while stuff like this is driving other people batsh*t mental.

Not a fan of Always on DRM, but considering the number of people I see saying they'll just wait and pirate it when the inevitable (and extremely buggy) crack comes out, I don't really see people offering any other alternative to the piracy problem that the studios believe is running rampant.

After all, what better way to "stick it to the man" than to do exactly what it is they're trying to stop.

No AC, because I really don't care what you lot think of "ceiling cat". It's a lame throw-away alias I only ever use on this forum anyways.

Beer - Because everyone knows the best way to design a city is drunk.

Shiny, shiny! The window's behind me...

Matte vs. Glossy

I currently own 3 matte displays, a laptop with a glossy display, and a tablet.

All 3 Matte displays are used daily. The tablet is used faily often as well. The laptop, for various reasons, has been mostly abandoned to the "oops" pile. The reason :

The Glossy Screen.

The problem isn't fingerprints, or the fact that the screen is 100x easier to scratch when cleaning (even with a microfiber cloth). The problem is that the "Optimal viewing angle" (you know, the one where black looks black, and not kind of brownish-reddish-blueish) and the angle at which there is no glare are so far apart that the display is unuseable when there's no glare, and also unuseable when there is.

The tablet doesn't suffer this problem because it has a very wide "optimal viewing angle", and it's very easy to put myself between the source of the glare and the screen if I can't find an angle that works.