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Comment Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score 4, Insightful) 187

by greenfruitsalad (#48295881) Attached to: Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers

i have an artificial ceiling on game prices. i am mentally unable to convince myself a game can be worth more than 9.99 no matter what. and even that is only for an AAA title or good flight simulator. fortunately, i've grown out of impatience long ago and don't mind buying the likes of Crysis 3 a year or 2 after release.

last year I decided to see what this steam thing was and installed it on my linux machine. it was during their christmas game sale. a LOT of slightly dated AAA (windows) games went for 3 - 9.99. now here's the thing. at those prices i bought around 40 games, most of which i later decided i didn't like and only played a few minutes of and some of them i never even installed. and at those prices, i didn't care!

but paying 60+ dollars for a game? simply NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!!! incompatible with a healthy human brain. distributors need to realise that for every sucker who pays, there are 100s willing to pay a sensible price (not steal). and for each of those, there are even more willing to buy it as a hmmm i'll play it when kids grow up for a dollar or two.

Submission + - Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Now that the PC gaming community has grown very large, it has become only a matter of hours before the copy protection of a major AAA title is cracked and put up for download after its official release, or sometimes, even before. However, it looks like CI Games is having great luck with its recently launched next-gen video game known as Lords of the Fallen, as its PC DRM still remains uncracked now after 3 days of release. The DRM solution that the game uses comes from a copyright protection company known as Denuvo, and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15, which is also yet uncracked. While this DRM has kept the game from being pirated until now, it has also been speculated that this solution is supposedly the main cause behind several in-game bugs and crashes that are affecting users' gameplay experience. To improve stability, the developer is working on a patch that is aimed at fixing all performance issues. It remains officially unconfirmed if the new DRM solution is really causing all the glitches.

Comment Re:Phone Case? (Score 3, Interesting) 63

by greenfruitsalad (#48286341) Attached to: LG's 0.7mm Smartphone Bezel Is World's Narrowest

how will this work with fingers? i had a phone with narrow bezel (galaxy s4) and could not use it. it always assumed i was tapping the sides of screen with my palm, thumb, etc.. there was just no non-interfering way of holding it securely. when i got a case for it, the opposite happened - i could not tap on anything close to the edge. i got rid of it.

Submission + - Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants

Submitted by sabri
sabri writes: NBC Bay Area reports about indentured servants in Silicon Valley, primarily H1-B visa holders. NBC Bay Area and CIR’s team discovered an organized system that supplies cheap labor made up of highly-educated and highly-skilled foreign workers who come to the US via H-1B visas.

It virtually makes these employees a slave,” said one worker who came from India more than a decade ago.

Submission + - Italian Supreme Court Bans the 'Microsoft Tax' (fsf.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a post at the Free Software Foundation, lawyer Marco Ciurcina reports that the Italian Supreme Court has ruled that the practice of forcing users to pay for a Windows license when they buy a new PC is illegal. Manufacturers in Italy are now legally obligated to refund that money if a buyer wants to put GNU/Linux or another free OS on the computer. Ciurcina says, "The focus of the Court's reasoning is that the sale of a PC with software preinstalled is not like the sale of a car with its components (the 4 wheels, the engine, etc.) that therefore are sold jointly. Buying a computer with preinstalled software, the user is required to conclude two different contracts: the first, when he buys the computer; the second, when he turns on the computer for the first time and he is required to accept or not the license terms of the preinstalled software.9 Therefore, if the user does not accept the software license, he has the right to keep the computer and install free software without having to pay the 'Microsoft tax.'"

Submission + - BitTorrent Performance Test: Sync Is Faster Than Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now that its file synchronization tool has received a few updates, BitTorrent is going on the offensive against cloud-based storage services by showing off just how fast BitTorrent Sync can be. More specifically, the company conducted a test that shows Sync destroys Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Dropbox. The company transferred a 1.36 GB MP4 video clip between two Apple MacBook Pros using two Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, the Time.gov site as a real-time clock, and the Internet connection at its headquarters (1 Gbps up/down). The timer started when the file transfer was initiated and then stopped once the file was fully synced and downloaded onto the receiving machine. Sync performed 8x faster than Google Drive, 11x faster than OneDrive, and 16x faster than Dropbox.

Submission + - The Largest Ship in the World is Being Built in Korea

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant “megablock” cross sections. Most of the 955,250 litres of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand colour, “Hardtop AS-Blue 504”, is sprayed on.

Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.” The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships’ size. “You don’t feel like you’re inside a boat, it’s more like a cathedral,” Wiper says. “Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It’s like trying to think about infinity.”

Submission + - FBI: backdoors in software may need to be mandatory (nytimes.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: The New York Times:

The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said on Thursday that the "post-Snowden pendulum" that has driven Apple and Google to offer fully encrypted cellphones had "gone too far." He hinted that as a result, the administration might seek regulations and laws forcing companies to create a way for the government to unlock the photos, emails and contacts stored on the phones.

But Mr. Comey appeared to have few answers for critics who have argued that any portal created for the F.B.I. and the police could be exploited by the National Security Agency, or even Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies or criminals. And his position seemed to put him at odds with a White House advisory committee that recommended against any effort to weaken commercial encryption.

Comment Re:But is Linux any better? (Score 1) 577

by greenfruitsalad (#48048759) Attached to: Will Windows 10 Finally Address OS Decay?

nonsense. on my thinkpad, i installed "debian potato" in 2001, but as i ran dist-upgrade every few years, i've had to:
* add more RAM (128MB hasn't been enough since woody)
* migrate the installation to >20GB hdd (etch-and-half just wouldn't fit with all my applications)
* with the stupid vesa driver, I'm forced to run windowmaker as my UI (everything better needs 3d and enlightenment is no longer available)
* the last release that properly supported apm (power management) was woody
* oss (sound) went completely to hell with etch (or maybe even sarge)

so now, even though i have a perfectly fine as-new laptop, i'm forced to buy a more powerful machine just because kdm/gdm alone would eat my entire ram (384MB) for breakfast.

Comment Re:FP? (Score 2) 942

by greenfruitsalad (#48034645) Attached to: David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures

I've heard these retarded reasons so many times when I lived in England... as if using 2 separate units and fractions was easier than using simple numbers
- is it really easier to say "6 foot 4 and a half" instead of "1.94 metres". guess what? nobody measures height of people in metres. people just say "i'm 194"
- what about ounces and fractions tea/tablespoons? again, retards would claim they don't want to talk in hundreds of mililitres. fine, for larger quantities we use decilitres (2dcl == 200ml == 7oz and the tip of a teaspoon)
- stones and ounces instead of kilos? you're english, nobody apart from children in your vicinity weighs below 20 stones. If they do, they're foreigners and don't understand stones anyway.
- it annoyed the hell out of me when google maps in my phone said "in 1000 feet, turn right". why didn't it just say 12000 inches? makes just as much sense.

I also spent some time in Ireland where they successfully switched to metric. At the time it was quite new and all the road signs were in both miles and km. It was funny listening to builders fixing my house, they measured everything in mm and it sounded just as silly as you are describing - e.g.: the bathroom was 5700mm by 4300mm.

Comment Re:I wasn't fundamentally altered by it. (Score 1) 191

by greenfruitsalad (#48021691) Attached to: The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning

somebody shed light on this one please:
25 years ago, (when I was but a wee lad), in the middle of hot summer, I was running home because it was about to rain. The clouds were almost black and really low, the wind was getting crazy, a few large drop here and there. One could feel in the air a storm was about to start.

I pulled an umbrella out of my bag and as I opened it above my head, my thumb and index finger were still on the plastic runner; suddenly i heard a crackle and saw sparks between the metal shaft and the 3 remaining fingers of that hand. There was no lightning or sound of thunder around me, but the tips of my fingers got properly burned and I could not feel them for a week. WTF? (I'm no electrical engineer.)

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