Really, the most annoying part of a mumorpuger is the "community" that forms like an accretion disk around the game itself, usually a bunch of pushy whining kids who won't ever be satisfied, will always feel underpowered with their favourite in-game character, and threaten to leave to other games for years instead of packing up and leaving.

If there was a technology to eliminate actual players from those games, it would improve the communities a lot. We are finally getting closer to a point where it becomes possible. Exciting times.

I fully endorse obvious warning badges like that.

It would be immediately obvious when someone performed a MitM attack using a valid certificate for "webmail". Why? Because the real certificate is signed by a ghetto CA that isn't trusted by any of the "major" vendors, and both the certificate and some of the intermediates have long since expired.

I'll be worried if I can access that site without a bunch of ugly warnings popping up.

On CompSci conferences, you're easily overdressed, even for the evening events. IME, "business casual" is all you really need.

And if you meant "networking *winkwink*", forget it :-P

The most important part of a conference is the social event. You get to know interesting people who potentially work for interesting companies (although I'm not quite sure about the event you're supposed to go to). You also get to learn that other people "in the field" are really as smart or stupid as you are, which will make you more comfortable with the environment, or it will drive you away from it. Either way, you get to know if you would like to stay in academia.

We routinely try to make our students' theses into publications at decent venues, and then send them there. We usually pay for the trip and the conference fee too. If that's not possible at your group, check if there's some kind of travel grant for the conference where you can apply.

Platinum is also good.

That or printer ink.

Why should anyone be required to touch their router settings to install or run a game, unless they want to host game sessions? We're talking about settings here that mean opening up the system to even more vulnerabilities (UPnP gateway features), or require modifications that might well break functionality some time down the road (DNAT). In any case, the "average user" (and maybe to a lesser degree the "average gamer") does not have the knowledge about either alternative to evaluate risks or troubleshoot resulting problems.

I've had it just sit there with no progress for hours, and it timed out after several minutes for a few times, each time from a clean (re)install. In any case, the patcher was completely unable to resume, coughed up an error message, and terminated. No installation attempt resulted in any visible progress, either in the closed or in the open beta.

Seeing how the instructions that SE pushes out for the closed beta (i.e., close to none) don't mention either, no I didn't, and it didn't work. So I followed the documentation, and it still failed.

It's pretty much exactly 4 hours off for some reason. I set it to retrieve time from a time signal, but the antenna has been disconnected for the past few months. (I haven't ever seen it blink 12:00 though, it always starts at 0:00 you am/pm suffix hugging imperialist!)

The FFXIV beta really should mention that it uses a badly broken BitTorrent client as a "patcher". On top of pretty much requiring UPnP "trojan all-you-can-eat buffet" features to do anything useful, it will happily corrupt itself beyond repair if it ever times out or is interrupted for some other reason. Insofar, it didn't get to use much bandwidth on my network, as it didn't transfer more than maybe 1MB in the 20 or so attempts I made before sending some rather impolite feedback and uninstalling the POS.

The client is lacking any upstream limiting features, and poses as an opaque bandwidth stealer, so FWIW I consider it malware. There's also no easily reachable "STOP THE F***ING MUZAK" toggle. Any competent publisher that values its customers (so maybe all two of them) just buys bandwidth from some CDN and has the clients do straight downloads.

There's a VCR in my bedroom, but luckily there's a box blocking it from view at the moment, so I got to pick the 1–3 option.

means 6 months of retro computing.

I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing.

From the bug reports, it seems like KDE still can't handle silly things nobody ever uses, like persistent printer settings or SSL certificates. Both of those are regressions from KDE 3.5, and it seems like KDE tries to mimic Mozilla when it comes to usability.

But yeah, we totally need more UI bling. Not like there was work to do.

I call bullshit. KDE is a piece of crap when it comes to multi-monitor setup, even the latest 4.3.x series. One of the major issues is that RandR handling in KDE is basically a comment in the monitor setup tool, stating that nobody cares to implement it. So unless you're still running Xinerama, you're out of luck. And as was mentioned above, you can pretty much kiss composite desktops goodbye then. It goes so far that when you setup your monitors with the commandline xrandr tool, the control center will collapse all monitors back into one as soon as you open the monitor settings.

In happier news, Gnome seems to do far better in that regard and in printer handling

Dogs are not halal.