Stories of Note

News Comments > Warcraft III: Reforged Patch Plans and Refunds

NKD wrote on Feb 4, 2020, 02:08: Scheherazade wrote on Feb 4, 2020, 01:11: I don't get what all the fuss is about. Vanilla Warcraft 3 ... with a higher fidelity reskin. Isn't that the point? Am I missing something? Were people expecting the game to change some particular way? -scheherazade Yeah you're missing the part where you actually go read to see how colossally Blizzard fucked up what should have been the easiest pile of free money ever. If this was just WC3 with some better graphics, it wouldn't have a zero. I took a look at the reviews. Most jsut say "it's bad". The only thing that gets mentioned often is no support for custom maps (which is kinda bad). And it uses chrome for the UI. Which I mean whatever. Not my cup of tea either. -scheherazade

Re: Warcraft III: Reforged Patch Plans and Refunds

Feb 4, 2020, 01:11

I don't get what all the fuss is about. Vanilla Warcraft 3 ... with a higher fidelity reskin. Isn't that the point? Am I missing something? Were people expecting the game to change some particular way? -scheherazade

Re: A Michigan man found $43,000 in a second-hand couch. He returned it all.

Jan 20, 2020, 01:40

Cutter wrote on Jan 19, 2020, 14:28: Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 19, 2020, 14:02: I gotta say, I'm not sure I am that honest... Oh not a fucking a snowball's chance in Hell. I'd say the odds against that money being clean in the first place would be astronomically small. And of course there's the ancient law of "finders keepers losers weepers". Who would stash that sort of money - legally earned - in a couch...and then forget about it. Come on. The owner died. (I suspect he has a hard time remembering at this point) In any case, it's a reasonable wealth storage approach for anyone who has had their identity stolen, and doesn't want to deal with trusting a bank not to transfer out their savings into oblivion. All it takes is for an id thief to call the bank, ask for a password reset, provide your PII, log in, and transfer money. If they immediately re-transfer it overseas, or cash out, it's GG. Sadly, it's the fiscally responsible that are at greatest risk. They actually have savings. People up to their noses in loans have assets that the debts are against, and you can't transfer away cars or houses with a few clicks. If you were caught up in either the OPM hack, or the Equifax hack (which afaik is more than half the u.s. population), you are more likely to deal with ID problems in the future than you are likely to have your house broken into and thoroughly searched. Older people hid cash all the time, before they trusted 'them new fangled computerized banks'. And nowadays, ironically, it's even more practical than ever. -scheherazade This comment was edited on Jan 20, 2020, 01:54.

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Jan 16, 2020, 16:40

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 16, 2020, 16:12: Scheherazade wrote on Jan 16, 2020, 15:32: Huawei is half the cost of everybody else. That makes them the obvious choice. Okay, that is something I had not heard anyone say. If that's the case, screw Huawei and the corporate clowns who want to install this mostly worthless transmission standard on us. Throw 'em out on their ear and make everyone pay up. Huawei's pricing is the natural product of a 2nd world salaries making 1st world tech. I can't fault them for that. 5g will be 'it' for a long while. Both because of sunk cost, and because higher frequencies than those used by 5g are a shit show. For undirected radio, we are hitting the limits of physics. There is a long range 5g mode, but it is essentially 4g anyways. Has the same data rates and frequencies. That was logic behind the silly 'label 4g as 5g' that some privider did recently. -scheherazade

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Jan 16, 2020, 15:32

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 15, 2020, 21:00: The whole thing I don't understand about this Huawei nonsense is why are they so important to 5G implementation? Doesn't Cisco, Adtran, Juniper, Aruba (HP), or someone else make essentially the same stuff? Do they hold a key patent or something? 5g range and penetration is abysmal. It's essentially short range line of sight. You need a modem in every room, and every few street lamps. 5g adoption will involve a LOT of hardware sales. It will be massively expensive, far and away more so than any previous iteration. Someone is going to make a LOT of money. Huawei is half the cost of everybody else. That makes them the obvious choice. Without outside intervention, Huawei will be the primary 5g provider worldwide, and the other companies will take a towelling. -scheherazade

12.

Re: Out of the Blue

Dec 11, 2019, 02:21

News Comments > Evening Tech Bits

Doom was wonderful. It actually delayed me using the internet for years because BBS' were where it was played, and the internet was too lossy, so I considered the internet a waste of time. The nascent "pro" scene back then had a silly feature. Since there was no good way to identify/prove who was playing, each player had a 'dance' they had to learn (in game), so that organizers could challenge a player to demo their dance to verify that it's actually them. I still sometimes play it on zdaemon. Shame about the Roxette singer. I still play their songs time to time. Re : "Please Watch These Cats Find Comically Innovative Ways To Make Their Way Through An Invisible Maze". This video made me think : "The walls of Eryx" ... with cats. -scheherazade

Re: Evening Tech Bits

Dec 10, 2019, 10:30

News Comments > Evening Tech Bits

WaltC wrote on Dec 7, 2019, 11:01: Years ago, Intel was boasting that it could see 1,000 cores in its future...;) My, how things have changed cough But more cores is the way forward as we plateau in production processes, and it's AMD leading the way. The software has to catch up--programming languages need to improve in that regard. But single-threaded software is fast becoming an anachronism. IIRC, Intel was selling high core count chips before AMD. Just they were priced for commercial (xeon), so nobody used them in desktops, and nobody cared that they existed. I've been trying to get my partner a 3900x for months, and now am trying to get a 3950x (since it 'came out' before I could actually get my hands on a 3900x). The availability feels much like a soft launch (even if technically it isn't). -scheherazade

Re: Evening Tech Bits

Dec 7, 2019, 00:55

Burrito of Peace wrote on Dec 6, 2019, 23:17: RedEye9 wrote on Dec 6, 2019, 20:09: More cores, aren't most consumer apps single threaded. Yes, but mostly due to code monkeys being lazy asses. Over the summer, we hosted a code camp where teenagers were in their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year of Rust programming and the 3rd and, especially, the 4th year students were doing some amazing mulithreading work. We just need a new generation of code monkeys to accept something other than C as a viable language and that you should design multithread support in from the ground up. C just needs to be extended with some built int threading constructs. Eliminate the need for OS specific calls, and streamline spawning and joining threads. Something like 'parallel' keywords : ... synchronous for(int i=0; i<10; i++) // each iteration is actually an independent thread { shared double s = 0; // "shared" forces automagically mutexed access - applicable to calls by reference. someFunction( someData[i], s ); } // "synchronous" will block here until all threads join. Calling context is waiting at this line. ... asynchronous for(int i=0; i<10; i++) // each iteration is actually an independent thread { someFunction( someData[i] ); } // "asynchronous" will not block for join, calling context continues on immediately ... void callingMethod() { synchronous someFunction( someOtherData ); // function is called as a thread. Calling method does not return until this thread returns. } ... void callingMethod() { asynchronous someFunction( someOtherData ); // function is called as a thread. Calling method returns without regard to this new thread. } ... Just basic stuff like this would enable ad-hoc threading for things that would otherwise be left single threaded because 'it isn't worth the trouble'. -scheherazade

News Comments > etc.

14.

Re: etc.

Dec 5, 2019, 00:31

News Comments > Saturday Legal Briefs

Steele Johnson wrote on Dec 4, 2019, 16:52: There's a new multiplayer shooter culture where watching is more entertaining than playing. PUBG is the perfect game for it It has a pve co-op survival mode, iirc. -scheherazade

Re: Saturday Legal Briefs

Nov 17, 2019, 10:41

NKD wrote on Nov 16, 2019, 14:36: Well there's a punchable face if I ever saw one. Actually it might rise to the level of curbstompable. That's no reason to hit her. She should let the guy work in peace tho. It's not worth poking at an irritable dude, because they end up doing shit like this, and everybody ends up with regrets. -scheherazade

32.

Re: Out of the Blue

Oct 12, 2019, 03:04

jdreyer wrote on Oct 12, 2019, 03:01: Scheherazade wrote on Oct 12, 2019, 02:37: jdreyer wrote on Oct 11, 2019, 16:24: Creston wrote on Oct 11, 2019, 12:01: Also, if you're worried about your kids surviving, maybe don't buy them a car that accelerates like a fucking rocket. Is 0-60 in 4.0 seconds fast? A McLaren can do it in 3. My friend has a Tesla, and I've ridden in it. The acceleration is incredible. I was afraid to drive it actually. I daily drove a 3 second 0-60 car for 8 years. Flooring it at every red light, from 0-speed limit. Not even a week and I was so used to it that it felt mundane. Just the new normal. The only thing it did was to alter my perspective on what feels slow. A 90's accord, or a modern mustang, I didn't really distinguish anymore. They were both just different flavors of slow. (only tuner cars with engines loaded up with upgrades costing more than the average car actually felt fast anymore - and I suspect only because I didn't have one of my own to get used to) It made me think of how an 80's Ferrari has the same 0-60 as a modern minivan. In the 80's people would say 'who needs to go this fast?' about the Ferrari, but today nobody even notices the minivan. I'm basically in the same zone with the ~3 ish second stuff. After everything gets quicker and everyone gets used to it, it will just be the sort of normal that nobody even notices. I suspect electrification will be sooner than people expect, and I suspect this sort of acceleration will just come along with it. Actually, I've kinda stopped caring about 0-60 as much as I used to. Now I just want 'quick enough', while also being small, light, manual transmission, no frills, older, a bit loud, a bit rough around the edges... basically fun. -scheherazade What did you drive that did 0-60 in 3 seconds? 09 GTR, with very minor mods. Here's a link to a transmission build (and general maintenance) I did at home. https://forums.dcawd.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13204 I mostly did reliability upgrades, as I considered it 'fast enough', and going faster quickly balloons in price. In hind sight, it was a good car. Very comfortable, effortlessly quick, and all-in-all cheap to maintain (Parts are quite affordable, maybe 2x the cost of a typical sedan's parts. DIY labor tho.). Resale was incredible, I paid far more in property tax than I lost in devaluation. And if I were to buy one today (prices bottomed out already), I could lose ~nothing. Actually, I spent more money maintaining a Subaru (Over a shorter time period, too. Completely unmodified.) If the GTR was a manual, I probably would have kept it for life. Unfortunately, being an auto, it became boring in regular use. I would take it to an autocross and it was fun. But the drive there and back was snooze town. By comparison, a Lotus Elise is a riot just going from A to B - absolutely giggle worthy, even though it's far slower. A side note that's more on topic : Modern race car safety gear (cage, containment seat, HANS device, harness, etc) does actually make a 116 mph crash into a wall survivable. Actually, it's more likely than not that you would avoid life threatening injury - as happens all the time in races. You can watch clips of horrendously fast (even faster than 116) racing impacts onto barrier walls where the drive gets out and walks away. If people were actually willing to go through the rigamarole of gearing up, car crash deaths would be an anomaly. It's interesting to me how many people die in car crashes, in light of how it's technically a choice (generally/phylosophically speaking, in light of what's possible) to be vulnerable in the event of an impact. Comfort/convenience vs risk. -scheherazade This comment was edited on Oct 12, 2019, 03:42.

28.

Re: Out of the Blue

Oct 12, 2019, 02:37

jdreyer wrote on Oct 11, 2019, 16:24: Creston wrote on Oct 11, 2019, 12:01: Also, if you're worried about your kids surviving, maybe don't buy them a car that accelerates like a fucking rocket. Is 0-60 in 4.0 seconds fast? A McLaren can do it in 3. My friend has a Tesla, and I've ridden in it. The acceleration is incredible. I was afraid to drive it actually. I daily drove a 3 second 0-60 car for 8 years. Flooring it at every red light, from 0-speed limit. Not even a week and I was so used to it that it felt mundane. Just the new normal. The only thing it did was to alter my perspective on what feels slow. A 90's accord, or a modern mustang, I didn't really distinguish anymore. They were both just different flavors of slow. (only tuner cars with engines loaded up with upgrades costing more than the average car actually felt fast anymore - and I suspect only because I didn't have one of my own to get used to) It made me think of how an 80's Ferrari has the same 0-60 as a modern minivan. In the 80's people would say 'who needs to go this fast?' about the Ferrari, but today nobody even notices the minivan. I'm basically in the same zone with the ~3 ish second stuff. After everything gets quicker and everyone gets used to it, it will just be the sort of normal that nobody even notices. I suspect electrification will be sooner than people expect, and I suspect this sort of acceleration will just come along with it. Actually, I've kinda stopped caring about 0-60 as much as I used to. Now I just want 'quick enough', while also being small, light, manual transmission, no frills, older, a bit loud, a bit rough around the edges... basically fun. -scheherazade This comment was edited on Oct 12, 2019, 02:53.

27.

Re: Out of the Blue

Oct 12, 2019, 02:32

News Comments > Saturday Mobilization

Primalchrome wrote on Oct 11, 2019, 12:23: Who pays for CBS All Access, anyway? I know one person that did when Star Trek originally released but he let it lapse after the first season... The user comments on the Tesla death story are hilarious. "That dad and his son must be liberals" is the consistent sentiment. I'm not sure political affiliation has anything to do with trying to game our Torts system. Going on historical record in the media, the two types of people that often 'pass the buck' in these cases are either liberals (because it's always an institution's fault, never the individual's) or low income folk ('wallet content' and 'probability of disavowing culpability - for a payday' are [understandably] inversely proportional). BTW, this isn't a criticism, just an observation. Conservatives have their own stupid legal stereotypes (sovereign citizens, starting fights then losing then 'standing their ground'), just this sort of case isn't really one of them. -scheherazade

Re: Saturday Mobilization

Aug 10, 2019, 16:29

I suspect that this will have no effect on automated trucking (literally, as in : que sera sera). Companies don't want employees. Employees don't want to be out of work. Waiting with popcorn to see the shit show coming soon. I suspect fear of liability will keep automation fairly tame without the need for a lot of oversight. Of course some oversight will be needed - so you don't have a boeing situation where the computer has more control authority than the operator, and you're helplessly left to your fate. I'll stick to old 80's and 90's cars till I'm dead. Maybe a few early 00's too. -scheherazade

12.

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Aug 10, 2019, 15:48

Bodolza wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 20:01: Scheherazade wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 19:15: Your game is ignoring the line right after the one you quoted The line after you wrote To which the news coverage was : "Trump said 'send them back'". was The trump social media summit, where a cnn reporter was going around to reporters who were invited saying shit like 'fight me bro'. I didn't ignore your next line, but it has no bearing on the line I did quote, so I didn't include it. I only include the quotes I'm commenting on directly to keep it clear what my comments are about. The line you quoted and the next line were : " ~Nowhere says [something like] : Trump said "go back to where you came from". ~Everywhere says [variations of] : Trump said 'go back' to where you came from. " Your post is silly. You do realize people can look at post #6 and post #9 and see that what you claim was the next line was not in fact the next line? I'm not interested in arguing with fantasy. Believe what you want to. I'm not big on religion. Take care, -scheherazade

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Aug 8, 2019, 19:15

~Nowhere says [something like] : Trump said "go back to where you came from". So by your own admission, you know your statement wasn't true. Who's the one playing games? Your game is ignoring the line right after the one you quoted, and pretending that your quoted line is the entirety of what I wrote, so as to recast my statement into a different meaning. Exactly the kind of thing that I _am_ complaining about the media doing. a selective out of context summary designed to mislead. Which is your opinion. If you read the first NPR article you linked to you'd understand why telling someone to "go back..from which they came" has a racist meaning to a lot of Americans. Trump is not liable for other people's imagination. He said one thing, people criticise another. Not his problem. If you let people consider the entire paragraph it's extracted from, it goes from offensive to mundane. No, it really doesn't. The paragraph starts off with "originally came from countries" when most were born in the USA. That's already problematic, especially when targeted only at people of color. Its much easier to strawman from select fragments. Take the entirety. Even take what the tweets were a reply to for extra context. A more accurate recast of his tweet would be : 'All you ever do is complain about the U.S.. If you're so smart, prove it. How about fixing the broken government where your family is from before you try to fix the working government here. I'll even pay for the trip.' Take a-few-words sized fragments from anyone's spoken/written history and build any monster you please. Trump's supporters clearly understood his meaning since they started chanting "Send her back" during his rally. And we can thank the news coverage for (a) most people even knowing about the tweet, since it was 24 hour news for a ~week and is where most people heard about it, and (b) for those supporters even thinking that 'go back to where you came from' is what he said, since that's how the news portrayed it. Ultimately, his quote is online. You can read it yourself 'taken in its entirety' and see the difference between what he said and how it was covered. -scheherazade

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Aug 8, 2019, 14:45

Beamer wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 13:30: There's too much incorrect fear-mongering there to even attempt to rebut. Let's start with Brian Karem being the Playboy White House Correspondent, not CNN (he is often on CNN, but they're not the ones that send him to the White House), and that Gorka isn't "some Gorka guy." And Karem wasn't going around to other reporters, it was solely Gorka. It's a weird way to miscategorize the whole thing. Based, likely, on angry and misleading YouTube videos instead of actual fact. The specific interaction, whose second half made news, was this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMVmkTFedUc Gorka was not the only one Karem trolled, just the only one to get mad enough to react. -scheherazade

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Aug 8, 2019, 14:29

News Comments > Steam Zero-Day Exploit

Bodolza wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 13:05: Scheherazade wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 11:11: Between leaks from management inside social media companies all To which the news coverage was : "Trump said 'send them back'". And can you find me a single reputable news organization that quoted Trump saying this? Let's not play head in the sand games. ~Nowhere says [something like] : Trump said "go back to where you came from". ~Everywhere says [variations of] : Trump said 'go back' to where you came from. One would get you sued. The other is a selective out of context summary designed to mislead. You can't open vanilla microsoft edge without being showered in articles summarizing his statement as 'go back' and 'racist'. There are single quotes around 'go back' all over the place, it's designed to establish it as a stand-alone concept. If you let people consider the entire paragraph it's extracted from, it goes from offensive to mundane. You can't watch cnn/abc/cbs/msnbc without the same terse and out of context summary. Same goes for late night host spin. Here's the top few big name hits on a 'trump go back' google, just the first page. npr nytimes cnn nbc ... And pages more. You are free to google it yourself. -scheherazade

11.

Re: Steam Zero-Day Exploit

Aug 8, 2019, 13:44

ldonyo wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 13:18: Scheherazade wrote on Aug 8, 2019, 09:55: The reason for rejecting is not senseless. The hack requires local configuration changes, presumably to be made by a complicit/malicious process already on the box. If there is a malicious process already on the box, then this vulnerability is just another straw on a pile of hay. I would have accepted it as a low pri, deferred till later, rather than rejected. -scheherazade Reread the article, this hack requires nothing of the sort. I did. It's semantics. The hack only works with registry changes. On a normal system it won't work. So it boils down to who makea the registry changes. The argument pro-accept was that : The user can make the changes using regedit. Ergo no other program/script is needed. Ergo the hack is a valid external attack. The argument pro-reject was : I reality, would you ever manually make those registry changes? - No. In reality, what would make those registry changes? - A compromised application/script/etc, with sufficient privilages to make registry changes. Where must the compromised application/script be ran? - On the system targeted by thr hack. When must the changes be made? - Before the hack attempt. Hence if in reality a compromised application/script must first be ran on the box, the hack is OBE. Still worth fixing, but it's not a burning fire. -scheherazade

Re: Evening Legal Briefs

Aug 8, 2019, 11:11