Posts by darkdog

Mac malware Crisis as Apple lets slip its Mountain Lion

Re: Lions don't drink coffee

you can disable java on the Safari preferences, which makes it a lot safer in this regard. still won't protect you if you open .jar files you downloaded, though.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

"look, i'm calling the wii a kiddie console, i'm all grown up now!".

i highly doubt that most zelda fans are in their teens, considering the series has been going on for 25 years and the last home console release was 5 years ago (and it's mostly considered to be a lackluster one). now if the same zelda game was brown and gray and gothic and repeated the lord of the rings's lore for the millionth time, i'm sure it would be loved by "grown ups" console owners everywhere...

First boss: you're doing it wrong

... and I did as well. fi's instructions are a little misleading on that one: after figuring out exactly what we're supposed to do, i manage to land hits 100% of the time.

swordplay is, by far, what i liked the most about this new title (which i've finished yesterday, sidequests not included). you can say that slashes are limited to horizontal, vertical and diagonal -- but direction is important as well, which means you have 8 different slashes + thrusts and the way you're holding the sword before performing any slashes is often important too. boss fights were much more satisfying than before.

that's the single complaint i can't quite understand: button mashing sword fights won't feel the same now that i've played this game.

Nintendo pwns notion Wii was only for casual gaming

here we go...

so you put mario in the same bag as wii sports? you might be confusing "hardcore" with "make me feel manly" games. the Super Mario Galaxy are not casual. they're colorful, feature characters that appeal to children, but are hardcore platforming games. seriously, this "hardcore games = shooters" mentality annoys the hell out of me.

Portuguese hackers strike back at Moody's downgrade

you've been had..

that wasn't a defacement -- that was only viewable on a specially crafted URL because the "defacement" was actually HTML on one of the GET variables that the page happened to render.

it's not even working anymore now, because they seem to have started doing some parsing of the said variable.

Fukushima reactor core battle continues

update

at about 6h10 a blast sound was heard from inside the No.2 reactor. it looks like it happened inside the suppression pool, and it might have been damaged (and thus be leaking contaminated water) -- this is nothing more than speculation at the moment though. also, the pressure inside is decreasing and the radiation levels are at 882 micro sievert. some workers from the No.1 reactor have been temporarily evacuated.

this is what i managed to understand with my broken japanese.. it's not 100% reliable info, but i tried my best :P

good news

i'm seeing some conflicting reports on this right now: nikkei.com mentions that all 3 reactors that were having trouble are now under 100ºC (article uploaded at 1:44am, japan time), but nhk is still reporting issues with the no.2 reactor (according to a press conference that happened shortly after midnight).

i'd really, really like to see this settled (preferably not the worst case scenario way) as soon as possible..

Steve Jobs bends iPad price reality

on a trolling mood, are we?

"If you sign up with Verizon for that Xoom with a two-year contract, you'll pay $599. For a comparably equipped iPad from Verizon, you'll pay the full $729."

if you want to compare apples to apples, why don't you mention that the ipad from verizon is a month-by-month plan? and according to what i read on xoom reviews the SD card slot isn't even working yet. anyway, if you do the math, a xoom + 32GB SD card is still more expensive than the 64GB 3G + wifi ipad. it might not be much on a difference, but the ipad does end up cheaper.. apple's always been bashed (often deservedly so) for the price of their products, but why do you still bash them when they're actually cheaper than the competition? is that some sort of denial?

Apple spews Judas Phone signal bar 'fix' to world+dog

not a fix in any way, but..

.. the issue was most definitely exacerbated because of the way the iphone was calculating the signal strength in bars: if there was no visible feedback, people would just say calls were sometimes dropped -- just like they've been doing for past iphones.. there's definitely an issue, but people's perception of its severity has a lot to do with how many bars the signal decreases. i'd say they're fixing people's perception of the issue.

i can't understand how a company that usually pays so much attention to detail and PR lets something this huge slip through the cracks, though. I can't believe they didn't know about the signal strength issue, so I can't understand that they didn't "fix" the bar calculating algorithm (which was too optimistic to begin with). The following reactions from apple were pretty bad as well... let's see if they manage to somehow fix things tomorrow.

Bono accuses ISPs of 'reverse Robin Hooding' over piracy

it hurts who again?

"the people it hurts are the creators - in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales"

so, music piracy hurts those who we wouldn't even know about if it wasn't for music piracy, right? those whose live we wouldn't attend if we hadn't listened to their album(s) beforehand? well, i suppose that taking a jab at the hand that feeds him is too much, even for the world's savior.

this is the kind of excuse i don't want to hear when the sole reason the album whose release i've been waiting for the longest is being held because of record label issues.