* Posts by Dylbot

28 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Sep 2014

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – a true monster in the making

Dylbot

Generally hitting in the 50-60fps range with everything maxed except for the poncy hair effects at 1080p on an i5 3570k/GTX 970 combo. Enjoying it thoroughly so far, despite the fact that trying to point Geralt at the thing that you want to examine/kill/not fall off is like steering a barge using the power of suggestion. Also my horse spawned inside a house once. Did it come up from the cellar? Do horses dig now? I think we need to keep an eye on that.

Apple's Tim Cook and Salesforce's Marc Benioff DECLARE WAR on anti-gay Indiana

Dylbot

Re: "This is why this law is needed": industry move out of Indiana

I've got to appreciate your commitment here, but boy are you preaching to the wrong crowd. We've read enough terms of service to know not to let your actions be dictated by a lengthy work of fiction.

MARIO MOBES: Nintendo hooks up with DeNA, births NX gaming system

Dylbot

Sony were working along the right lines with the Xperia Play - smart enough to look like a normal mobe when shut, with the slide out physical controls for gaming, Perfect form factor for this sort of thing. The problem was that it came to market in a period of massive growth and advances with mobile chipsets - by the time it was on the shelf, it was already obsolete, and Sony weren't really pushing their own content on the thing beyond the odd PS1 port.

Imagine if a similar device came to market now, with Nintendo's name on it. Something along the spec of a Moto G - not exactly pushing billions of pixels, but still far in advance of the 3DS, and more importantly much cheaper to produce and sell than the premium devices. Give it the gamepad slider and actually bother to make content for it. Make sure it has an "adult" looking SKU, along with the usual Nintendo propensity to ship billions of different colours. Suddenly you're looking at a massive chunk of the 25-40 market that grew up playing NES and SNES games, who would be happy to blow through Super Mario World on the train on a device that isn't as obviously game-consoley as a 3DS. Give it simple touch screen, match-3-esque shit as well to keep the Candy Crush crowd happy. Hell, if they get Monster Hunter on it you can guarantee a 90% adoption rate in Japan at least.

It's not going to play out like this, though. It's going to be yet another pocket rectangle of screen, just like all the others, that's going to bomb because there's nothing to distinguish it from every other mobe on the market other than the Nintendo logo.

How's this for customer service: Comcast calls bloke an A**HOLE – and even puts it in print

Dylbot

I had a similar spat with an insurance company after cancelling a bike insurance policy. I paid my blood money to drop them and thought that was the end of it. Three months later, I received a final demand for payment of this extant 60-odd quid that they decided to stiff me for, and had already paid. After going backwards and forwards with the phone monkeys and providing proof of the payment being made, they said that my bank had somehow taken the money back after 2 months and refunded it to me.

Obviously that was complete bollocks (backed up by the rather bemused gentleman I contacted at my bank to make sure), so I told them I'd never received any such refund, that the whole thing was ludicrous, to which I got the greatest response: "Please provide proof that you haven't received a refund". Yes, of course, I will provide proof of the absence of a thing. Here, why not have my entire transaction history to check through and make sure that I haven't somehow strongarmed my bank into taking back that money.

Needless to say, it was "manager, please" repeatedly time, as the poor CC sods really don't get paid enough to endure the special mix of withering sarcasm and barely suppressed rage I had in store - I was balls deep in a mortgage application at the time, and I made it very clear that if it had gone to their debt recovery department and showed up on my credit report, sending mortgage lenders scattering like frightened pigeons, the next time I spoke to them would be in court.

Oddly enough, they couldn't produce any of the previous letters they had apparently sent me either, whereas I definitely had the one confirming the closure of my account. Useless bastards backed down in the end.

Fanbois to gamebois: Apple paperwork reveals iOS FUNPAD

Dylbot

Re: Another prior art work

Ah, the Powershell. Got one for £4 in an Amazon lightning deal and I still feel like I paid too much for it.

Why Microsoft's 3D HoloLens goggles aren't for Google Glassholes

Dylbot

I'd love to bin off my monitors at work and swap them for one of these. Imagine how much easier it'll be to stealth browse El Reg when no-one else can see your screen.

I mean work, and productivity, and pie charts and shit.

Want a cheap Office-er-riffic tablet? Microsoft Windows takes on Android

Dylbot

Bought an 8 inch one fully expecting it to be landfill, and I'm hugely impressed by whatever gypsy magic is working on this thing to make it not stutter and die constantly running Windows 8.1 on that paltry amount of RAM. Does Facetubery and other related internet things without issue, does Steam in-home streaming for full fat gaming without being stuck in my cold office, and, er, shit the bed completely when I tried to run Civ 5 on it, but I'm sure some ini tweakery will sort that out.

4Chan man Moot logs off as admin for last time

Dylbot

Probably got sick of being the scapegoat for everything that ever goes wrong on the internet.

Which of UK's major ISPs will let you have exotic p0rn? NONE OF THEM

Dylbot

Re: Competition

Try living in Hull. You can have Karoo (Kingston Communications' excellent offering), you can have dodgy satellite internet, or you can suck it.

The worst part is that I SAW YOU INSTALLING FIBER KIT DOWN MY STREET YOU BASTARDS, GIVE ME MY PROPER INTERNET.

Google unleashes build-it-yourself 'Ara' slablet phones (in Puerto Rico)

Dylbot

The second this thing gets a QWERTY slider module I'll be on it like stink.

Amazon DROPS next day delivery amid Cyber Monday MADNESS

Dylbot

Re: 5.5 million sales...

Let's not go nuts here, I've personally dealt with a situation where they couldn't deliver for three weeks because they couldn't find the address. The parcel in question was going to a massive school.

Hold onto your hats and follow the BYOD generation

Dylbot

Bollocks, nobody would ever shirk their working responsibilities to tit about on the internet!

Time to read the Reg all morning with a SSH session to my Pi open running cmatrix.

Planning to fly? Pour out your shampoo, toss your scissors, rename terrorist Wi-fi!

Dylbot

Hah, I've got a habit of using weird names for my hotspot, and for a while it was "Hooks for Hands". Pretty sure that'd have earned me a nice stay in a back office and a forcible prostate massage. Luckily I've since changed it for the much wittier "Pretty Fly for a Wifi".

Adobe spies on readers: EVERY DRM page turn leaked to base over SSL

Dylbot

Re: How does Adobe stay in business?

"there NO alternative to Dreamweaver"

A great number of Notepad derivatives exist that are just leagues ahead of Dreamweaver (Sublime Text being my particular poison). Christ, even vanilla Notepad itself is a better tool productivity wise. If you need a WYSIWYG editor for web design you're probably in the wrong job.

10 Top Tips For PRs Considering Whether To Phone The Register

Dylbot

Re: Personal Skills of IT bods

Yes, because hating cold callers with little to no knowledge of their target market, the products they sell, and possibly even their own name is purely an IT industry thing. I have never seen a single person that doesn't work in IT complain about this or screen calls.

Dylbot

Oh, and if I tell you to "ram it up your bellend you incompetent fucksponge" it means you've made the foolish mistake of trying to sell me a cloud storage solution or ask me about my IT supply flow before I've had chance to drink my morning coffee.

Dylbot

If you call and ask for my boss and I tell you he's in a meeting, it means he's sat opposite me and he's just heard me confirm your name and shook his head. If I tell you to email through to a generic address, it means I'm adding you to the mail filter. If you ask for "the director of IT" or "the managing director's office", I'll hang up immediately. If you waste my fucking time keeping me on the phone, purporting to be from an electronics company but getting our contact details from a 10 year old complement slip, and then saying you can't email through because "you don't have emails", then I invite you to go and read a few BOFH stories, realise the kind of people you're dealing with when you hassle an IT department with pointless bullshit, then maybe send me a tin of chocolates or something similar as restitution for your crimes.

Countless Belkin routers go TITSUP in massive mystery meltdown

Dylbot

But how else am I supposed to buy a VGA cable for forty quid?

Oh, wait, Maplin still exists. Never mind, carry on.

Will we ever can the spam monster?

Dylbot

The worst thing with spam is that it always attacks the weakest link in any organisational chain by dint of how it operates. No matter how vigilant we are, a percentage is always going to get through - and it only takes one spam email to hit the pointy-haired boss or an overworked admin staff member to infect and start spreading through the network.

This is why you're not allowed to use personal email, eBay, Facebook et al at work, bean counters. Because you can't be bloody trusted to worry less about being sniped on a bid than about accidentally getting the public network share encrypted by some rogue ransomware.

What’s the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for Delete?! Look in a contextual menu, fool!

Dylbot

This reminds me of the dreaded "HELP THE COMPUTER HAS DONE SOMETHING" - oh, it did that because you clicked this - "NO I DIDN'T, IT JUST DID IT BY ITSELF, FIX IT" conversation that any of us with a spouse or significant other has at least once a week. Windows 8 really doesn't help with the FUCKING touchpad swipe gestures, rescuing the missus from some godawful metro app is a daily occurrence now.

Proprietary OS source code LEAKED to web – from 40 years ago

Dylbot

Hah, I didn't know that Intel 8080 web emulator existed. Time to spend the working day playing Zork.

Xbox hackers snared US ARMY APACHE GUNSHIP ware - Feds

Dylbot

Unreleased Xbox One games in 2011? Time travellers, then?

Stunned by Shellshock Bash bug? Patch all you can – or be punished

Dylbot

Posted this on another article but it warrants repeating. I'm seeing a spike in phishing emails from obviously compromised domains today, enough that a couple has slipped through the net and one of the clients is now being cleansed by PXE fire after contracting a bit of ransomware. Might be a good time to remind the prolies that nobody sends confidential finanicial information in a link to an obscure building contractor's website, and that clicking links in emails that are obviously sus is grounds for cruel and unusual punishment.

Bad boy builds beastly Bash bug botnet, boxen battered

Dylbot

FYI, something seems to be spaffing ransomware-bearing emails at us today, much more than usual. Pretending to be BACS remittances and HMRC tax notifications and linking to files hosted on obviously compromised domains (a celtic music website and an Aussie quarrying site).

Batten down your mail filters and educate your bean counters, boyos, it's going to be a rough few days.

4chan outraged by Emma Watson nudie photo leak SCAM

Dylbot

Never mind the fact that even if anyone on 4chan had the ability to do something like this, getting them to agree on any one issue for long enough to carry out a co-ordinated attack on anything without devolving into a sea of reaction images and ad hominem would be akin to herding the world's largest cattery. It's like mainstream tabloid journalism doesn't even bother to investigate sources or something!

Heads up, Chromebook: Here come the sub-$200 Windows 8.1 portables

Dylbot

The Excite Mini is priced low enough that I'd be tempted to punt for one just to see what I could wrangle out of it, and given that I'm already unfortunately tied into the Windows 8 ecosystem it'd be nice to have a light and cheap device for out and about instead of hauling a fairly expensive laptop everywhere.

Plus, if it'll run Steam without shitting the bed (which with that staggering amount of RAM I'm not so sure about) then I can use it for in-home streaming when Hollyoaks is on the telly.

CNN 'tech analyst' on NAKED CELEBS: WHO IS this mystery '4chan' PERSON?

Dylbot

This gave me a headache on exactly half of my brain.

Also queue "I'm Spartacus!" style hijinks.

Apple tells devs: NO slurping users' HEALTH for sale to Dark Powers

Dylbot

After all this celebrity norks nonsense, I don't think it's third parties that should be scrutinised for access to sensitive data, eh Apple?