News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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Re:Bethesda blocks resale of used game on Saturday August 11, 2018 @01:56PM (#17740740)
For quite a while now, their games have only been made "good" after significant time and effort by the modding community to fix common game-breaking and progress-losing bugs, along with endless quality of life improvements and the fixing of console-port-related issues.

"Vanilla" Bethesda games are pretty bad by reasonable standards, particularly on and shortly after launch.

Re:AMC unveils answer to MoviePass on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @03:18PM (#17358769)
Nobody wants a dozen different "movie subscriptions" just like nobody wants a dozen different "streaming service" subscriptions.

The value of the early movers/original services is that they gave access to EVERYTHING (or nearly everything) with a single login/payment.

Whatever value was originally generated by the first service is quickly lost as soon as everyone and their dog gets greedy, spins up their own special snowflake version of (service), and pulls their content out of the original service. This forces consumers to choose between signing up & paying for a dozen different services, or canceling everything and simply going back to the convenience & ease of piracy, which, incidentally, makes everything from everywhere available in a single location (value!).

If you adjust the aspect radio by playing in windowed mode and keeping it full-width while lowering the height, you gain significantly more visibility. I imagine playing on an ultrawide display would have a similar effect.

Granted, it wasn't built to support a zoomed out camera so some controls behave poorly at the outer edges of visibility.

Re:Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers on Monday May 21, 2018 @01:11PM (#17119941)
Far more convenient when you consider that Netflix's catalog of reasonably mainstream as-seen-in-theaters movies has been shrinking for years.

As the end user I don't care "why" their catalog has been shrinking, I only care that something I watched last year and want to watch again is no longer available on that service.

And no, I'm not going to sign up for a dozen different services just on the off chance that one of them will have what I want to see at any given point.

Other responses indicate that the recipient/target has to opt into their location being shown via an SMS, so I fail to understand the outrage assuming the same requirement exists for the non-trial version.
Just because you "can" use a bunch of memory without issues now doesn't mean you "should" not make any attempts to cut resource usage whenever possible.
Fission is expensive to start up primarily due to regulation. Modern designs are extremely safe (fail-safe instead of fail-unsafe) and produce little in the way of dangerous waste. Politics is what killed fission.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:12PM (#16387671)
I believe the LTSB Enterprise edition physically does not contain the "windows app store", cortana, and all the other garbage that gets in the way of a normally functioning computer.
Re:Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator on Monday January 15, 2018 @12:45PM (#16152045)
They can claim something is illegal all they want, but that has no impact whatsoever on the actual legality of it. Anti-consumer EULA/TOS items haven't held up in court for a while now.
Because they have been bought and paid for by the existing ISP monopolies, who stand to gain enormously from the loss of net neutrality, at little to no extra effort on their part.
Re:Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @05:25PM (#15657720)
> There are great commercial ISPs too.

Sure, if you're lucky enough to live in an area with "actual" competition, which is the crux of the entire issue.

The vast, vast majority of us are stuck with 1 or 2 (if we're lucky) options, both relatively shitty, with one being markedly inferior, and both absurdly overpriced for the connection you get.

> Even the fastest computer and the highest-end Internet access can't get you such a huge advantage in performance that it can make the web feel snappy again.

Until you install an adblocker and disable javascript. An enormous amount of modern-web overhead is adtech and user tracking cancer.

If you don't believe me, install privacy badger/ghostery and ublock origin, visit any popular news/entertainment website, and look at the number of blocked elements/requests as you load a few articles. All of those take time and suck up resources.

Still can't actually opt out of forced updates (non-critical security at least)? Still can't actually kill the extremely invasive telemetry? Still can't get LTSB/equivalent as an individual user to help resolve the aforementioned issues?

Still not interested.

These "legacy ISPs" have, since they first got started and became entrenched, purchased enough legislation to make it effectively impossible for any real competition to take root. Google Fiber's failure was not a technological failure, it was a political failure.
Cue massive drops in traffic (again) and news orgs whining about it (again) and blaming the next boogeyman, whatever that is. Probably something something "piracy" etc.

Paying/subscribing for general-purpose news is old news. It had its time, and that time is over. Much like music industry CD sales with the real rise of p2p, news orgs will have to figure out what their "ipod" equivalent is going to be.

Re:A “right to repair” movement tools up on Thursday September 28, 2017 @06:06PM (#15361161)
> There are some downsides.

You can say that again. Just look at the John Deere debacle that's been happening for an exceptionally good example of why this is a terrible idea. Physical good = ownership = full end-user control. Anything less is dangerous for consumers.

Which is exactly why most friends and colleagues have switched to uBlock Origin or similar plugins.

Whitelisting is not the solution. Letting the entire industry die in the pit they've dug for themselves is the solution.

Re:Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @12:44PM (#15228866)
People are being pedantic about the actual meaning of words as opposed to the commonly-understood-and-accepted meaning of words.

It's annoying, because it distracts from the immediate issue and causes confusion.

Re:SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors on Thursday August 10, 2017 @04:11PM (#14983665)
"Soundcloud is fine and will be around for years, stop backing up all of the music".

Didn't the CEO say something along those lines ~2 weeks ago when they forced the archive.org folks to stop pulling down a backup copy of everything? Funny how quickly that was proven to be BS.

Not that anyone should be surprised by this outcome.

"They" are going to eventually realize that one of the primary draws and reasons for the early success of Netflix was the single-source-access to (at the time) pretty much everything.

Nobody wants to maintain a dozen different accounts with a dozen different services who have a dozen different content catalogs with a dozen different payments and have to bounce between them all to find what they want to watch.

It's much easier to just pirate or pick a different form of entertainment at that point.

But why?

It's a browser. All it should do (and do well) is display content.

I don't want a bunch of extra garbage tossed in because it sounds good on some marketing slide.

Chrome has been and continues to eat FF's marketshare alive because it has been both faster and lighter. More junk is not going to help FF beat them.

"Nuclear" is not an economic disaster. "Nuclear politics" is, and has been since the technology first appeared.

We have the technological capability to build perfectly safe, high-performance reactors that spit out low-risk waste products (or no waste products) for far less than the cost of any current/planned project.

What we don't have is politicians with the balls to push through the political minefield that come with it.

This. All of my old hardcore MMO buddies were pumped up during the Kickstarter days and during the following development phase.

Once Oculus took FB's "dirty money" though, every single one of them saw the writing on the wall, lost interest, and those with dev kits sold them off.

Gamers don't want social garbage getting in their way and pimping their activity/habits/preferences out to advertisers. Oculus may not have had much of a choice with their burn rate, but taking FB's money certainly didn't win them any friends among the userbase they were targeting from day one.

Re:Global Foundries discloses 7nm process detail on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @06:20PM (#14706574)
Always relevant for informational purposes when chip manufacturing is discussed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

Effectively does not matter if you aren't distributing. Format shifting shouldn't be illegal, regardless.
Re:Nintendo Announces SNES Classic, Comes with 21 Games on Monday June 26, 2017 @01:02PM (#14638335)
I hope they go all-out and produce 51 consoles instead of the 50 NES Classics they managed to scrape together and sell. /s

Availability of new systems has never been a strong point of Nintendo.

Does this mean an individual could actually get their hands on the fabled Enterprise LTSB edition and thus actually have control over updates?
I thought I was reading an overtuned ELI5 machine translation for a minute. This is awful and significantly more difficult to read than even the KJV, which isn't exactly friendly for modern readers.
Still no actual control over what data they suck up and keep for who-knows how long and sell to anyone who asks? Still no actual control over what updates happen, when?

Still don't care about W10.

Re:Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:38AM (#14341431)
If Microsoft hadn't burned a decade's worth of "leave auto-updates on to keep your system safe!" public goodwill by force-feeding WIN10 BS to a massive number of people who did not want it, it's highly likely that this update would have been nearly unconditionally applied.

The default attitude of most people I've interacted with regarding technology is apathy. If it works, they're happy and they leave it alone.

Do you really think that a significant number of non-tech people would have gone to the trouble of looking up how to turn off updates to their facebook/email/google machine if Microsoft hadn't caused a massive shitstorm with their forced update BS?

The vendor is entirely at fault for making stupid short-sighted decisions that caused users to lose trust in the update process. No amount of handwaving can change that fact.

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