Posts by sisk

SimCity 2000

Re: @Flawless

@Chad H. - You're partially right. Abandonware is technically illegal, but there's more to the story. The concept of abandonware is that either the entity that owns the copyright no longer exists (in which case the copyright is effectively, if not legally, void because they can neither give permission to copy nor enforce enforce the copyright), no longer sees any point in enforcing the copyright because the game has long since ceased to be profitable (in which case why should you care about the copyright if the company owning it doesn't), or in a few cases the game has been released to public domain (in which case your argument is null).

Sure, it's (usually) illegal, but so is failing to stop your car and wave an orange lantern at every intersection in my home state. It's a law that no one is ever going to enforce. The morality is debatable, but I'm personally of the opinion that if the copyright holders don't care then there's no harm done and therefore no moral violations. Especially considering that some of these great early works of the art of making video games would be lost forever without abandonware sites and collectors.

Buy? Why would you buy it? It's abandonware. Just go hit of one of the abandonware sites. Doubtless they all have it.

I would have preferred if the series instead went down the "bigger maps" route

Indeed. I have a Sim City 2000 game that I've been working on 10-15 minutes at a time for about a month now. It's beginning to look like I'm going to run out of land before I hit the all important 120k population mark where arcologies become available. I must have done something very wrong early on (which, given that it's been 15 years since I last played it, isn't surprising).

US insurer punts 'bestiality' to wide-eyed kiddies, gasp 'mums'

Re: Entirely Typical

I'm pretty sure that the lack of easily accessible point-and-click corpse-making devices has a fair bit to do with it too though

As I mentioned before, there's a very strong correlation between high gun ownership rates and low murder rates on the national level. That's why I don't thank your gun policy has much to do with it. Even here, where there's a gun and a half for everyone in the nation, guns are only the 3rd most common murder weapon (knives and blunt objects are numbers one and two). If you count drunk drivers who kill someone as murderers (the law does in some states) then guns drop to number 4.

But I think you might have nailed it there. Here, and in most other parts of the world, it's not difficult for someone to become so poor that they have to steal their next meal. Also we have the rather annoying habit of tossing teens who got caught shoplifting a CD into the same juvenile detention facility as hardened gangbangers. That probably doesn't help matters. And, frankly, our foster care system is a freaking nightmare. The stories my wife can tell from having grown up in foster care are truly horrifying (but then her stories from before the foster care system are even worse).

As for healthcare, hell I'm comfortably in the middle class and medical bills can be a burden for me here. Even just having a baby is prohibitively expensive here. I'm not talking about feeding and caring for them. I'm talking about the $5k that it costs to have a doctor there to play catch. I can't imagine trying to pay medical bills on half of what I make (or less!).

The UK and the US are pretty close, both socially and politically, but the few differences between us are massive ones.

Re: Entirely Typical

Maybe it's the police not routinely having firearms either that does it. After all: We're nearly unique in that factor.

I doubt that, but I'll admit it's a possibility. Maybe when I get the time I'll look at some of the other anomalies in that particular set of statistics (like Sweden) and see if they have that in common with you. However I still think that the largest contributing factors to your low murder rate are going to be social, or possibly economic (I think, but I'm not sure, that you also have an extremely low poverty rate over there), and have absolutely nothing to do with guns or the lack thereof.

Re: Bloody Americans

But we're outnumberd...

We're not THAT outnumbered. At least not as outnumbered as it seems. The volume with which an American spews their rant is inversely proportional to their intelligence, so the dumb ones are a lot louder than those of us with more than rocks between our ears.

Re: Entirely Typical

How's that secular, gun-free utopia that is Britain working out for you?

Actually Britain is a statistical anomaly. Low gun ownership rates usually correlates to high murder rates at the national level, but somehow they manage a low murder rate in spite of their low gun ownership rate. I'm not sure I'd call it a utopia, but they're doing SOMETHING (that likely has nothing to do with guns) right. I strongly suspect the 'something right' is more social than legal.

Re: Yet "men are (still) pigs"?

because ask yourself this: what would be the sole purpose of a controversial commercial ?

In this case, I'd say the purpose was to be funny. It probably never occurred to them to think that someone might be oversensitive enough to be offended by it.

Outsourcing your own job much more common than first thought

Where's the work ethic?

I don't think I could bring myself to do something like this. It just seems too unethical, and frankly I'd have trouble living with myself knowing that I was being paid to do something and getting someone else to do it instead. It would remind me too much of the bullies who thought they could get me to do their homework for them growing up. Though I suppose getting paid to do it instead of getting beat up for not doing it is better.

Ten smartphones with tablet ambitions...

Maybe I'm strange, but I'd still rather have a 4 inch phone and a 10 inch tablet. The idea of having a 5 inch phablet trying to do both jobs still doesn't appeal to me.

Trekkies detect Spock's Vulcan homeworld ORBITING PLUTO

Vulcan: Roman god of fire (among other things).

Pluto's moons: ice balls.

Am I the only one who thinks we can find a better name and maybe save Vulcan to name some super hot exoplanet or something?

Elon Musk: 'Fudged' NYT article cost Tesla $100m

Re: Who cares?

The only other negative review I've ever heard of Musk getting upset about was that Top Gear review that turned out to be completely faked.

Plus I trust the New York Times just about as far as I can throw one of their journalists. Mind you I wouldn't take Musk's word for it either. Get me a truly independent reviewer as opposed to one who has a vested interest in the automobile industry's well being (his job does depend on that industry and Tesla would be quite disruptive to it if it were wildly successful) and I'll be more inclined to give some weight to one side or the other.

Razzie voters drive stake through Twilight

I have no idea how anyone could sit through all of them

When I sat through them I just kept reminding myself that the next time my wife tries to veto a movie I want to see I can just look at her and say 'Twilight' and end the argument in my favor.

Re: Lautner?

There are four books and the last one was split into 2 movies. I was dragged to all of them against my will even after telling my wife that the books were so bad that I wanted to burn them. And yes, I did try to give them a fair chance. They truly are as bad as you've heard.

Lautner?

I actually thought he did rather well considering the crappy script he was handed. There's only so much you can do as an actor with a character as static and clichéd as Jacob. He was certainly better than some of the other supporting actors in those movies. The dude who played Jasper, for instance, managed to go through all five movies without ever changing his bewildered expression.

Re: probably closer to the actual public's view of the commercial film scene

The actual public's views are measured by bums in seats and pounds in tills. Therefore in the public's view, those twilight films are worth watching even if we think they suck.

In most cases I'd say you were right, but Twilight tends to have a love or hate effect on people. In other words, most of the people who didn't see it probably didn't because they hated it. With any other movie the majority of people who didn't go to the theater either didn't care, were waiting for the DVD, or, often, hadn't even heard of it.

And, given the nature of the movie, a fair chunk of the audience were husbands and boyfriends dragged to it against their will under the direst of threats. Even the number of bums in seats for the Twilight movies is a skewed figure.

Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant

Re: Is this about UEFI or SecureBoot?

Linus is well known for sticking it to the man with this attitude but it's about time he stepped up and showed us all what a real OS is ... BY MAKING ONE!

You mean like one that's on more devices than all other OSes combined? One so ubiquitous that it's in every reasonably modern home several times over? One that you'd have to give up modern life, or at least modern electronics, completely to get away from? Yeah, he's done that.

He's right

While I do wish Linus would conduct himself with a level of maturity more befitting his age in these conversations he is absolutely right. Allowing MS signed code into the kernel would be so incredibly stupid that it's beyond belief. Me, I'd have been tempted to remind they guy that April 1 is still a little over a month off.

US woman cuffed for 'booking strippers for 16th birthday bash'

more detailed reports suggest it was a woman in a bikini singing happy birthday.

Then what's the issue? Surely the idio....er, authorities can't be dragging a woman up on charges of exposing kids to a sight that they could see by popping down to the nearest pool. The moral police are brainless, but not THAT freaking brainless.

I doubt if sanity will ever prevail.

There, fixed that for you.

BOFH: Climb the corp ladder - and use your boss as a bullet shield

Yay!

Just what I needed. A good BOFH.

Re: Serious competition

...or a favorite relative comes on as his boss

Relative? You mean those people who bug the BOFH on his days off with computer questions? Surely he can't have a favorite amongst them. Unless it's the one who actually knows how to run a computer, and such a person would never be hired by HR as a boss.

Survey: Bosses are DESPERATE and GAGGING for Linux skills

Re: German Employment Agency

Wait, so the biggest chunk you found was jobs for PERL PROGRAMMERS??? I thought Germany was supposed to be ahead of the times in these things, not living in the last decade.

Re: Opportunities for All of whatever Smart Hue

Neither does his baby daughter, legally a US citizen.

If she was born on US soil then you've been lied to. Anyone born here is a US citizen, regardless of the nationality of the parents. At least until she's old enough to renounce it (if she so chooses, of course). That is, of course, unless the law has changed since my high school civics class twenty some-odd years ago.

As for the road to citizenship, I'm no expert but I believe you have to live here for 7 years before that road opens for anyone regardless of the visa type you have. I was handed my citizenship at birth though, so I may be mistaken about that. The people who have to earn their citizenship are better informed on such things than the rest of us are.

Re: Sigh

You make a good point actually. There're plenty of people out there who 'know' Linux well enough to run it at home, but there's a world of difference between running a Linux desktop with the latest version of Mint and deploying and maintaining a Linux server farm. Personally I have my fair share of Linux skills and could probably do some of the jobs that are looking for said skills, but I'd never claim to be at a professional level with Linux in general. I can handle Linux clients and LAMP servers, and if I had to I could probably handle file and print servers, but I'd have to be daft to apply for a position as a Linux administrator with my skillset.

Re: Also: MS Office For Linux (kernel)

Currently, there is no viable office competitor on Android,

That's because you can't have a viable Office competitor without a real keyboard. Seriously, have you tried to type a report or work with a spreadsheet with nothing but a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard? I'm sure my hairline shrunk back another quarter inch in terror the day I had to do that.

Higgs data shows alternate reality will SWALLOW UNIVERSE

Re: The laws of physics will be different in the encroaching bubble.

the only way to do that would be a base-pi number system

I took a class in base pi systems once. I gained 10lbs.

Re: The laws of physics will be different in the encroaching bubble.

Neat idea from a sci-fi/fantasy novel I read once (Starshield or some such....I forget exactly):

The (very unrealistic) setting in that novel has laws of physics that aren't constant across the universe. Earth had, about 10,000 years ago, drifted from one physics zone (which was based on magic) to another (with the laws of physics as we know them) and humanity's days of living in a different set of the laws of physics are the basis for many legends of powerful wizards and dragons and such. What I found most interesting about it was that a species leaving their home planet for the first time will invariably assume that the laws of physics are constant right up until their engines stop working because the laws of physics have suddenly changed.

Of course it's all fiction, but it makes for a fun thought experiment, especially in light of this 'alternate universe is going to eat us' thing.

I, for one, welcome our new Higgs Boson powered alternate universe overlord.

iPad? Pah. Behold the EYEPAD, patented by Sony for the 'PS4'

Re: FFS...

Actually I don't think I'd accuse them of copying Apple here. I'm thinking their eyes were trained more at Nintendo, and the EyePad name was just an ill thought out application of their existing naming convention.

Or am I the only one who sees this and immediately thinks of the Wii U?

Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We'll find you the right Linux to swallow

Re: Lots Of Propaganda Operatives Here

1) Truth.

2 & 3) One slight correction here: Windows DOES finally have a proper CLI, though it's about 20 years late. It's called Powershell, and as of Windows Server 2012 you can finally run the whole system from it without ever touching the mouse.

4) LUGs are great if you happen to have one nearby. Personally I'd have to drive 3 hours to get to the nearest one I've been able to find. The joys of living in the boondocks.

5) No joke. My file server's been going for 7 years now. The only time it's ever been off was when the power was out. Since it's cut off from the internet I haven't even bothered with security updates, so the only maintenance I've done on it is to poke the power button to boot it back up after a power outage. My web server isn't far behind (except, with it being a web server, I do keep up to date on the security updates on it).

6) I had a machine set up for my kids a couple years ago that had 64mb of RAM and ran Damn Small Linux. Sure it was slow as snot, but it was built in the late 90s so what do you expect.

7) Truth.

Re: Mint is great but ...

Uhm, ok, if you want to play it that way, then I make it ~ known 947 vulnerabilities JUST in the Linux kernel. Thats over twice as many as any complete distribution of Windows desktop or server....

And that is just as meaningless as the 3800 you quoted before. The raw number of vulnerabilities in a system is nowhere near as important as the severity and access required to exploit them. Looking at the raw number by itself means that you're giving a vulnerability that allows someone sitting at your desk to change the default desktop environment for another user the same weight as one that allows someone sitting in Hong Kong to gain root access and execute the command of their choice on your system.

As for it being twice as many as Windows, unless you work for Microsoft in the division responsible for patching them, you have no way of knowing that. Unlike OSS projects like Linux Microsoft doesn't tell us about their known vulnerabilities until they have a fix. Also, due to the nature of OSS a vulnerability is more likely to be known by virtue of the fact that outside security experts can examine the source code rather than simply trying things until they find something that works.

Re: Who remembers ...

Personally I don't think Windows was ever as bad as Ubuntu. I really wish that turd of a distro would stop getting so much press. As much headache as using Debian, as many bugs as pre-SP1 Windows XP, and all the ugliness of my color blind grandfather's desktop all in one neat package.

Re: Mint is great but ...

I see that SUSE 10 is now on over 3800 security vulnerabilities.

If you don't understand how meaningless that number is then you have no business talking about security.

Is there actually a commercially supported Linux version that has better security than Windows?

I'm tempted to say 'all of them', but the fact of the matter is that Windows has gotten a lot better in that regard. Still, they are all at least on par with Windows and some are better than Windows.

Most of the distributions seem to suck for security.

Again, if you take the raw number of security vulnerabilities as your indicator and think it actually means anything then you've proven you're not qualified to comment on security.

Here's the thing: that 3800 security vulnerabilities is the number of vulnerabilities in the OS plus all the software in the repository. To get an equivalent number for Windows you'd have to count the vulnerabilities in Windows itself, which you can't do outside of Redmond -- I'm not slamming proprietary software here, just pointing out that Windows could easily have that many known vulnerabilities and we'd never know until they were fixed. Then you'd need to count the vulnerabilities in every single Windows application out there. And then you'd end up with an equally meaningless number.

Here's the thing: the vast majority of those vulnerabilities are things along the same severity of a legitimate user being able to change another user's default font with physical access to the machine. In other words, they are minor annoyances rather than true security concerns. Real security problems like remote execution and privilege escalation bugs tend to get squashed very quickly in Linux (or, for that matter, any other major OSS project). Usually those kind of bugs are patched in hours as opposed to days at the bare minimum with similar bugs in Windows.

Don't get me wrong: Redmond's a hell of a lot better with security than they used to be. We don't often see major security bugs for which the official answer to 'when will it be patched' is 'never' anymore (there were a TON of those back in the IE6 days). They've almost caught up to Linux security wise. I personally don't like the way ACLs are handled in Windows, but it works.

Re: Mint is great but ...

Why Ubuntu went down the road it did I don't know

When you create your distro by taking a snapshot of Debian's unstable branch every six months and then tweaking the hell out of it upgrade problems are a given. Even Debian users using the unstable branch straight have problems with upgrades from time to time. One particularly nightmarish upgrade when they were switching from hotplug to udev prompted me back to the relative sanity of the testing branch despite having to settle for slightly more out of date versions of most software that way.

Own a drone: Fine. But fly a drone with a cam: Year in the clink

Re: Its the USA isn't it?

I keep waiting for the rest of the world to understand the difference between a well armed population and a bunch of trigger happy lunatics. Only an utter fool would shoot at a drone in a populated area. Granted, we do have more than our fair share of utter fools (AKA gang bangers), but they're still an extreme minority.

I'm confused

How, exactly, is a cop with a remote controlled flying camera any different from a cop in a helicopter from a legal perspective? Other than the fact that it costs a hell of a lot less tax payer money to do the same job I don't see a difference, so why are they grounding their police drones?

Or does this stem from the increasing public perception that cops are the bad guys? (Which, frankly, is something else I don't get.)

The universe speaks: 'It's time to get off your rock!'

Re: Another technique

I believe that plan calls for a swarm of ships and a couple decades notice. If Apophis were going to hit us in 2036 we'd be deploying that solution now for it to have a chance of working.

Armageddon alone has 168 physical impossibilities

What? You mean we can't land a bunch of out-of-shape guys on an asteroid, have this drill a big hole, and drop in a nuke all to a soundtrack that includes Aerosmith and ZZ Top? Dang. Guess I need to make new retirement plans.

On a more serious note, Deep Impact was a much better movie. Why does Armageddon get all the media love?

Obama says patent trolls 'extort money', pledges reform

Not true Obama

Stopping patent trolls in their tracks is exceedingly simple: Make it so that in order to enforce a patent you have to show that you are actively marketing, selling, and/or developing a product that uses it. Also, make it so that if you are only developing a product and don't bring anything to market in some reasonable timeframe, say 5-10 years, then you have to pay back double what you won in the lawsuit. Granted that solution doesn't fix the rest of the problems with the US patent system, but it would kill the trolls dead.

Tesla vs Media again as Model S craps out on journo - on the highway

Re: Hey, Lewis ...

Most US homes have one or two 240V outlets. One will almost always be behind the clothes drier and there's sometimes another behind the stove (though that one is often missing). The only times I've ever seen one in the garage is when someone has either wired it themselves or brought in an electrician to wire it up for their arc welders or other professional grade equipment. I've lived in houses where 30 amps was sufficient to blow the main breaker, though admittedly that is not the norm.

Now, the hassle of an electric car is another thing all together. I'd happily deal with it, but my daily commute is roughly 4 miles round trip, with perhaps another 10 or 20 miles a week added on by carting my family around when I'm not at work. (There are advantages to living in a small town that thinks itself a big city, even if it is often frustrating.) If I had a more typical commute, covering my normal weekly driving just going to and from work every day, I might feel differently.

Re: Writer was intent on high risk of failure

I see two possibilities for 2/3 of the charge vanishing overnight. Either there was a short or faulty batteries or some other problem of a mechanical nature or he left something on. I find both unlikely, but I find it far more unlikely that a brand new electrical device of any kind without manufacturing defects would lose that much charge just sitting there. I also find it unlikely that they would have let a reporter get his hands on a vehicle with a defect that glaring, so, although it's still unlikely, I believe it to be most likely that he left a dome light on or something.

Billionaire baron Bill Gates still mourns Vista's stillborn WinFS

It's a pity really. WinFS is one of the few promising things to come out of Redmond around that time. Had it not been tied to the nightmare that was Vista it would have been hailed as a revolutionary idea. Unfortunately it was all wrapped up with a bunch of bad ideas that Microsoft THOUGHT were revolutionary.

Montana TV warns of ZOMBIE ATTACK in epic prank hack

Re: Jerry Springer-style show

@Kubla Cant - That's a common misconception. While they usually demonstrate the same intellectual prowess as a zombie they generally are not infected with that particular virus (and thus have no excuse).

Re: The government are VERY worried about zombies...

Not true. As zombies do read well enough to vote and no one else is likely to stick up for them they are required to pay 115% income tax. They also technically pay 347% property taxes, but since they're dead they can't legally own anything.

Unfortunately getting them to pay up has been a problem. There's some sort of issue with all the IRS auditors getting eaten. So maybe they're doing their part after all.

Men's rights activists: Symantec branded us a 'hate group'

Re: Err...

You bring up a good point Trevor. After my brother in law's divorce (before he was my brother in law, I might add, so no one thinks my sister is the such-and-such I'm speaking about) my niece (yes, she's my niece even though we're in no way blood relatives) went to live with her mother despite his long hard fight to keep her. Said mother has been in and out of jail for fraud and hot checks several times over the course of the last few years and the courts STILL gave her the kid in the final custody hearing just a few months ago. She was only out on bail awaiting a sentencing hearing at the time. Why? Because 'kids should be with their mothers'. Never mind that this particular mother is a convicted criminal several times over or that there's plenty of proof that she isn't a particularly good parent. They even keep sending her back there every time the woman gets out of jail even though she can't manage to stay out for more than 5 or 6 months.

That said, as I pointed out in another post, masculism probably has nothing to do with this site being labeled as a hate site. There's a post on there (posted for rebuttal), that could easily be mistaken by a spider as anti-Semitic. I'd guess Symantec's spider latched onto that post and the mistake just hadn't been caught yet before people started getting angry.

Well no wonder

Mystery solved. See this page:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/misandry/put-them-on-trains/

Symantec is no doubt using a spider of some sort to classify hate sites. While a human would read this whole article and realize it was posted for rebuttal purposes a spider would look at it and think neo-Nazi propaganda was in the works.

Curiosity photographs mysterious metal object on Martian rock

So THAT'S where it ended up.

I've been looking for that lightsaber for years!

Dead Steve Jobs 'made Tim Cook sue Samsung' from beyond the grave

If the pressure to sue came from Steve Jobs why has Apple not settled with Samsung and put the case to bed?

Tennessee bloke quits job over satanic wage slip

Funny thing is....

Biblically, 666 is also the number of man.