Posts by Ben 42

'Call Corporate Of Apple and tell them to stop there persuit!!'

I can only hope you simply forgot the Joke Alert icon.

<-- It's this one, in case you missed it. ;-)

Microsoft scrapes Windows Azure name off cloudy kit

Re: An apparent title

I'm having a helluva time parsing the last paragraph too, thanks to this little gem:

"Like the death of Windows Live the significance of the changes are cosmetic than meaningful"

I'm pretty sure they just left out a word here or there, but it was way too much work to figure that out.

Facebook button triggers tidal wave of human organs

"Like handing in your ovaries in exchange for it."

You can have all my ovaries in exchange for a drink from the fountain of youth.

Black Ops II to take gamers to open worlds... and destroy them

Re: SMARTR AI Moves

That's a little creepy. I know a guy named Caleb who worked on the first Black Ops.

Linux Left 4 Dead port fuels Steam for Ubuntu talk

Re: Steambox? Can't see it happening

I'm not convinced. Why would a Valve fanboi go out and spend hundreds on a Steambox when they (by definition) already have a gaming PC that can play more games than a Linux Steambox would be able to (at least initially)? Maybe a few would, but I can't see that being a valid business model.

To be clear, I would love, LOVE to see this happen, but I've been gaming on Linux for years and seen pretty much every AAA title abandon the platform (even id hasn't ported Rage yet, to my knowledge) during that time. I would be dumbfounded if a Linux Steambox actually happened. If I'm wrong I will happily eat crow while enjoying a gaming renaissance on Linux. :-)

Re: Did you guys actually read the Phoronix article? (@Ben 42)

Well, it's the usual chicken and the egg argument. If more gamers used Linux, more games would get ported to Linux. If more games get ported to Linux, more gamers would use Linux. The Steambox being Linux-based would certainly change the equation, but I stand by my post below that it's unlikely that would happen. It's just not as simple as a lot of people seem to think to get dozens of developers to port their game to Linux. These people barely have time to finish the work they have to do, much less extra work for a platform that represents a tiny percentage of their audience.

Keep in mind, this is coming from a Linux gamer who has been burned for years by lack of gaming support for Linux. I would like nothing better than for Valve to put their full weight behind Linux and make it a platform on par with Windows (and even Mac gets better support these days). History suggests my pessimism is well-founded, unfortunately.

Steambox? Can't see it happening

Although Phoronix has been claiming a Steam client for Linux was "confirmed" for years, I find that less difficult to swallow than the idea that the Steambox would be based on it. So much of the Steam library would be incompatible that it would just kill the platform. Nobody's going to buy something that can't play the 90% or more of Steam games without a Linux port. Unless HL3 is exclusively released on it... ;-)

Re: Did you guys actually read the Phoronix article?

No, but with Steam you're not just talking about Valve's games. They'd have to convince every developer (or at least a significant portion of them) to support OpenGL too. I can't see that happening.

Opera retires Unite, widgets in latest browser cut

I always thought Unite seemed like a good idea in a perfect world without software exploits, but giving all the clueless users a server running on their poorly secured boxes struck me as big trouble. How many would have properly updated it when an exploit was, inevitably, found? Even professional sysadmins can't always be trusted to do that.

Widgets were an odd fit for a browser too IMHO, so I can't say I see that as a bad change either.

Major science fiction publisher to zap DRM

Re: DRM and Locks

"locks on house doors don't stop the skilled"

Here's the thing, you don't have to be skilled to strip DRM from books these days. In fact, it's pretty trivial for most formats.

For the hypothetical record, if I were to strip DRM from books like that it would be so I know I can read them in 10 years, not to share them. I wouldn't buy eBooks that were irrevocably tied to the store I bought them from.

'Selling your citizens to foreigner is not acceptable!'

Re: Nokia + MS Bashing

Thanks divx. Check's in the mail.

-Steve B.

(sadly there is no longer a Ballmer icon - this will have to do)

Death Star dinosaur aliens could rule galaxy

Re: Astrosaurs

Also Dinosaur Wars

TITANIC 'UNLIKELY' TO SINK AGAIN, says prof - apparently

Re: Well

This and this suggest that the word "unsinkable" was used in conjunction with the Titanic prior to its sinking. Which is not to say that the media didn't exaggerate and take out of context anything that suited them, but saying it was a complete fabrication is not true either.

Sci Fi recomendations?

John Carter?

I've only read two of them so far, but the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs was hugely influential on a lot of subsequent sci-fi. Plus, they're all available on Project Gutenberg.

Prehistoric monster snake crushed prey under 1.5 Brooklyn Bridges

Re: I bet the Discovery channel

For a second, I thought you meant the Syfy channel. Maybe a collaboration is in order?

Vote now for the WORST movie EVER

Re: Zoolander?

Agreed. Michael Bay should feature prominently on a list such as this.

Also, did I miss the obligatory Uwe Boll entry? A discussion of the worst movies of all time is a sham if he's not included. Yes, I just called this poll a sham.

Also also, Titanic and Avatar? Really? So they're not as good as their box office numbers suggest, that doesn't make them bad. It's just trolling to include them on a list like this. Which means I've just been trolled. Sigh.

With this ring, I thee frag

Left 4 Dead 2

I know (virtually) a guy who proposed in Left 4 Dead 2: Linky

Top Gun 2: It's happening - and the choice of star is stirring controversy

Re: Completely unrealistic

Perhaps not, but this being Hollywood you can count on them somehow finding a way to destroy the Statue of Liberty.

Drew's Cookie Jar - psst. want a forum upgrade

Re: Oooh...

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Mostly I just wanted to try out the new reply feature though... ;-)

Kodak to kill off digital cameras

And now they're going to make money how?

So they're killing off their digital photography arm - exactly how are they going to make any money now? Just by licensing their name? I guess they make printers too, but I can't imagine there's a ton of money to be made there either unless your name is HP.

Kodak is a photography company that's no longer going to have cameras. Unless they're planning to return to their core competency and sell film cameras again...

Eolas claims royalties for browser apps and plug-ins

“Contrary to what Defendants may believe, many businesses choose to relocate to Texas and to Tyler, Texas each year for reasons that are unrelated to venue. Eolas points out the tax benefits it receives in Texas, and additionally, many people find that Tyler is a wonderful place to live and work."

Congratulations, you just overloaded my bullshit detector. I can't picture him saying this as anything other than a cheesy movie villain who's pretending to play nice while he waits to unveil his grand plan for world domination.

Amazon 'rolling out a retail store in Seattle'

Exactly what I thought when I read this. But now that I think about it some more, I seem to recall that the issue of sales tax in some state (California?) was going to be revisited in the near future, so maybe they think they're screwed on that front anyway and are making the best of it.

Or it could just be a rumor. Who knows?

Sick of Ubuntu's bad breath? Suck on a Linux Mint instead

Yep

This is why I keep saying Ubuntu isn't really Linux for the masses. They are way too quick to include bleeding edge (and frequently broken) software for me to recommend it to Linux newbies. Beta software makes for a lousy introduction.

First-person shootout world record set

Based on my experience with 64 player servers in other games, I can't imagine what a clusterfsck this must have been. Not that I wouldn't be interested in trying it, but my expectations would be low.

Icon because that's what I imagine a 1000 player FPS would look like most of the time. ;-)

Welcome to the latest forum features

Will do

su

su

su

su

su

Don't mind me, just testing out my super user powers. ;-)

I can haz power user?

How about if I promise never to use lolcat-speak again? ;-)

Steve Jobs action figure kicks the bucket

Sounds like it already is

At least by my standards that's a fortune for a doll.

Best-selling games of 2011 revealed

Stick to your own tastes

My experience has been that when I play games that sell gazillions and chart in the top 5 or 10, I'm disappointed.

Billions of potentially populated planets in the galaxy

PLANET, the Probing Lensing Anomalies Network

Thumbs up for an excellent backronym. :-)

Navy pays 2x purchase price to keep warship docked for 5 years

I think you mean

/pedant

:-)

YaCy takes on Google with open source search engine

Not surprised

I thought about trying to do what YaCy is doing years ago*, but I don't see any practical way to do it with existing hardware and connections. How big is Google's index? Petabytes? Maybe more these days? Even if you can distribute that to enough different systems, how do you give everyone access to that data fast enough to make it usable? A huge part of Google's engineering effort seems to go into making their server farms able to process that data and get it back to the user. And that's with data centers they can control and optimize. How do you do that with flaky internet and crappy, spyware-crippled systems that most users have?

While I think the concept is great, I just don't think it will work well enough. I'd love to be wrong and if they pull it off it will be an immense triumph, but I don't see it happening.

*And I'm sure I wasn't the first or the smartest to come up with the idea, so the fact that it hasn't been done yet lends credence to the rest of my post IMHO. As do the experiences reported in teh comments so far.

Mm, Silverlight, what's that smell? Yes, it's death

Steam survey

It's probably a bit skewed because of the audience, but according to the Steam survey only about half even have it installed: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Compared to flash at 95+% that's pretty severely limiting your audience right off the bat if you go with Silverlight.

I've seen it

I know of a couple of websites (government ones, no less) that use Silverlight, but in every case they offer a non-Silverlight version of the site too. Makes you wonder why they bothered.

Feds warn 'pox party' zealots not to send viruses in post

However

All of the envelopes I've used are still the lick and stick type, so the point still stands. :-)

Gallery mulls 'damage' after cleaner scrubs modern art

Cilit Bang

For a second there I thought maybe the title of the article was just one big double entendre.

Report: Popular CAPTCHAs easily defeated

I had the same experience with reCAPTCHA. When I investigated, I found discussions that suggested reCAPTCHA had been broken with a pretty solid success rate by one of the forum spam bots. I switched to a custom question and answer system that required a certain amount of reading comprehension in order to answer (one says to leave the answer blank, for example), and so far it has worked great.

US Navy in new electromagnetic railgun milestone

re: two words

Technically that's three words, or one word and one number. ;-)

Steve Jobs named most influential game guy – ever

This was my first thought too when I saw the list.

Also, no love for Carmack? I mean, he's only largely responsible for the FPS genre that is still kind of a big deal today.

The Register Guide on how to stay anonymous (part 1)

Everybody's tired of hearing about it...

...but NoScript almost completely eliminates those obnoxious ads without blocking the less intrusive ones. I can't remember the last time I had a popover ad while running NoScript. On the other hand, I was on a NoScript-less browser the other day for some reason and ran into a couple of sites with full-page flash ads that had to be closed. I nearly put my fist through the screen.

I don't understand those ads either. Why would you want me rage-quitting the internet because of your ad? Is that what you want me associating your product with?

Miley Cyrus hacker let off with probation

RTFA

A lot of commentards seem to have missed the part about how he informed on other people involved in similar activity. They didn't just let him off because they thought what he did wasn't that bad - he cut a deal.

And as a previous comment mentioned, his odds of not breaking the law again during his probation are not very good, so I'm pretty confident that he'll get his.

Open-sourcers suggest Linux secure boot block workarounds

That's an OR. Still quite easy to spend a couple grand on a new PC if you so choose.

Seattle superhero arrested for assault

This might be the best comment thread on the site. :-)

My geometry angle (no pun intended)? This post is complementary, of course.

Sutter: C++11 kicks old-school coding into 21st century

Eh, what? That really makes no sense. You seem to be conflating object orientation and memory management, and they're not the same thing.

Besides which, any C++ programmer worth their salt knows to use smart pointers (my understanding is that they're part of C++11 now too) these days and so _doesn't_ have to worry about allocating and deallocating memory. But if they have a need to they still can, which is kind of the point.

Beer bottle shagging beetles with HUGE MEMBERS win prize

Mating errors

Might be my new favorite expression.

GNOME emits 'head up the arse' desktop update

Henry Ford

Except I would argue that in your analogy, Henry Ford was working on iOS or Android - something new that performs a similar task to what came before. Whereas what Gnome is doing is building a car by putting a horse on a treadmill. It's awkward, forced, and doesn't make sense because it's mixing paradigms. Cramming a touch interface onto a desktop makes no more sense than a horse-powered car.

Although to be fair, that may apply more to Unity than Gnome, and I haven't spent enough time with either to say for sure. Mostly I just liked the analogy. ;-)

Boffins prove Queen ballad 'world's most catchy song'

Sweet Caroline

My anecdotal evidence suggests that Sweet Caroline is the runaway winner in the category of "most likely to trigger spontaneous singalongs". The fact that it's not even on the list tells me their research is seriously flawed.

Also, Livin' on a Prayer kind of shoots holes in their theory about catchy songs having a small range so they're easy to sing. I don't think I've ever met anyone with the vocal range to sing that (properly, anyway :-).

Facebook 'personal' news feed gets algorithm rejig

Cleary Nanki Poo and all the upvoters have not been forcibly converted to the new format or they would know that those options disappeared. Unless as you say they were just buried somewhere so as to continue Facebook's long tradition of awful UI. Either way it's a stupid change because the Top Stories view was always useless in my experience, and nothing appears to have changed.

HP sued by investor over PC and TouchPad antics

But...

If they had informed shareholders about their plans ahead of the announcement, wouldn't that be insider trading? I don't understand the complaint here, other than HP's woeful mismanagement, but if he did his homework that shouldn't have been a surprise either.

First Google Plus API released to developers

Thumbs up for Googlike and FaceGoo.

Man City boss quits over cancer email

Troll icon

There is one. ;-)

Unless that was some sort of meta-troll to elicit just such a response, in which case I can only congratulate you on a smashing success :-)