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Comment Re:I remember Doom 3. (Score 1) 108

Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway).

I disagree. The recent Serious Sam releases were great, and showed that the old-school FPSs formula still makes for a good game in today's world. Fast paced, lots of shooting, and meaningless plot. The good character helped, but it was the gameplay that really made it stand out. The problem with Doom 3 wasn't that it failed to add all the things that modern FPSs have, but rather that it failed to replicate the fun gameplay of the originals.

Comment Not sending history to Valve (Score 4, Informative) 511

The biggest part of his announcement is that this checking is done client side; your DNS history is not sent to Valve. They also only record MD5 hashes that match the cheat sites they are looking for, not your entire DNS history. Finally, they claim to only check for DNS lookups of servers used by the cheat software itself, not just websites where you might read about and download cheats (although in some cases I imagine these could be the same), and use this as a second check after the client has already detected a cheat installed on you machine. So simply visiting cheat software websites without using them shouldn't get you banned.

Comment Depends on how you measure. (Score 1) 177

If you consider just current employees, about half started before me and half after me. But if you consider everyone I have worked with at this job, probably close to 4/5 have since moved on to other jobs. Since most people here either stay all the way till retirement, or for just a few years, without much middle ground, the second measure will continue to grow much faster than the first.

Comment Not a standard. (Score 4, Informative) 249

The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe ... I thought standards were there to implement not argue with.

CSS Regions is not a W3C standard. It is a Working Draft. The entire point of publishing a working draft is to solicit feedback from the community. There have been several working drafts that were never promoted to final recommendations, because there was no community consensus that they were a good idea. What Google and Mozilla are doing is a perfectly constructive part of the standardization process.

Comment This is being done client-side (Score 1) 79

A new error code won't help, because for that to work the original website would have to send it. But if a link is broken, then they already negelcted to send a usefull response code. This feature is about how the client responds to a 404 error, in which case the most honest thing to do is show the user the 404 message that the site provided, but also let them know that they can access an older version of the page if they wish. Which is pretty much how the existing Wayback plugins work.

Comment Redirect, don't 404. (Score 3, Insightful) 79

None of those examples should result in a broken link if you are maintaining your website correctly. And this feature is only "fixing" broken links; that is links that once existed and are now 404'ed.

If you want to discontinue a product, then replace those pages with one that explains that the product is discontinued, and provides links to simular current products, as well as the support page for the discontinued product. If a users is clicking on links in reviews or forum posts about your old product and receive 404's, or redirection to a completely unrelated and unhelpfull page on your site, they will be frustrated with or without this feature.

In the second case, just redirect the entire demo website URL tree to a current list of examples.

In the third case, you shouldn't do that without redirecting the old url to the new one. Seriously, are you trying to make your content hard to find?

Again, redirect to the new menu.

In no case is sending a user a 404 useful or benificial, nor is it the most appropriate thing to do according to the HTTP standard. If you really want to be pendantic then send a 301 or 303 to perform the redirect, otherwise use URL rewriting, or just change the contents of the existing URL, whichever is easiest. The user should only see a 404 if they clicked an invalid link that was never a real URL for your website. Otherwise, you have failed your users, and it's no-one's fault but your own if they choose to use a service that tries to make up for your short-commings.

Comment You are misinterpreting this ruling. (Score 5, Informative) 143

If you sue someone for patent infringement you have always had the burden of proof, even before this ruling. All this ruling is saying is that if you threaten to sue someone, and they go to a judge first asking you to put-up or shut-up, the burden is still on you as the patent holder, same as if you had sued them.

Secondly, this ruling does nothing to limit the discovery process. As a small inventor suing a big company you still have the same subpoena powers during discovery as you did before.

In other words, the Supreme Court simply reaffirmed that accused infringers are innocent until proven guilty, regardless of the procedural nuances of how the lawsuit is initiated. None of the concerns you voiced will become worse due to this ruling.

Comment Re:seems like a weird sanction (Score 2) 55

Yeah that was my reaction as well. The link has slightly more information, and seems to imply that the current policy may comply with French Law, but the way the change took place did not:

On the substance of the case, the Sanctions Committee did not challenge the legitimacy of the simplification objective pursued by the company’s merging of its privacy policies.
Yet, it considers that the conditions under which this single policy is implemented are contrary to several legal requirements:

If that is true, then the change was a one time offense, and a one-time remedy is fitting. That said, I think the remedy ought to have included a "redo" of the policy change not just a fine; declare that Google's users may choose to be bound by either the old or new policy until Google enacts the change in a manner that is in compliance with the law.

Comment They shouldn't be asking you. (Score 5, Insightful) 365

If they plan on implementing this in hardware, then they should have people who are capable of answering that question. If instead, they are just a manufacturer and aren't capable of doing the actual hardware design, then you have bigger problems than answering this question. That is something you should find out about ASAP.

Security

4 Tips For Your New Laptop 310

Bennett Haselton writes with four big tips for anyone blessed by the holiday buying frenzy with a new laptop; in particular, these are tips to pass on to non-techie relatives and others who are unlikely to put (say) "Install a Free operating system" at the very top of the list: Here's Bennett's advice, in short: (1) If you don't want to pay for an anti-virus program, at least install a free one. (2) Save files to a folder that is automatically mirrored to the cloud, for effortless backups. (3) Create a non-administrator guest account, in case a friend needs to borrow the computer. (4) Be aware of your computer's System Restore option as a way of fixing mysterious problems that arose recently." Read on for the expanded version; worth keeping in mind before your next friends-and-family tech support call.

Comment Re:Already has good adoption (Score 1) 62

It may not have been designed for audio files, but it's pretty damn good at them anyway - the hydrogen audio chaps rate is as equivalent to AAC and vorbis at the same bitrate, as well as having excellent quality at low bitrates along with low algorithmic delay. It appears to be a "cake and eat it" codec at present.

Not quite. It's true that for the majority of western music it performs just as well as AAC and Vorbis, however there are certain classes of audio that it does poorly with, in particular polyphonic music. This is an inherent limitation (steming from the pre/post comb filter), that cannot be overcome in future encoders.

For streaming audio, this isn't a big deal as it is somewhat of a corner case and people don't hold streaming audio to flawless standards. However, for a music library, you want an audio format to encode anything you throw at it to transparent level of quality, without thinking about the technical details or limitations.

Now the problem that#s always plagued vorbis... will we see widespread hardware support for it?

Opus uses less computational resources than Vorbis, to the point where doing it in hardware is almost pointless for a smartphone (especially for streaming where the radio will be active and using more power than the encoding/decoding), and ultra-low power dedicated MP3 players are becoming scarcer. So it's less of an issue that it was in Vorbis's day.

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