XenoPhage - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Queue "Piracy" reasoning (Score 1) 310

by XenoPhage on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:39AM (#28730617) Attached to: US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years

I completely agree, thus my post.. Typically these types of reports turn into blamefests about piracy and those damn kids and whatnot.. In reality, the economy sucks and there just aren't that many truly decent games coming out.

I miss the days of shareware when you could try a game before buying it. Nowadays, you spend $40-$60 on a new game for your shiny console and if you hate it, you're pretty much screwed. Most places have a no exchange policy, so the only real alternative is to sell it used. GameStop will be happy to give you $10 for that $60 game you bought 5 minutes ago...

In the end, I find myself having a problem justifying buying any game I haven't directly played. So, I end up not buying any. This is probably a very good thing for my wallet, but not such a great thing for game developers. :)

Comment Re:It's "CUE" you dumbfuck (Score 2, Funny) 310

by XenoPhage on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:24AM (#28730401) Attached to: US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years

Stop trying so hard. The word with the obvious spelling is the right choice.

captcha: souped

Sorry to offend your sensibilities. I blame way too much network tuning and programming.

Comment Queue "Piracy" reasoning (Score 3, Insightful) 310

by XenoPhage on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:12AM (#28730177) Attached to: US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years

Watch.. this will turn into a big "See? Piracy is ruining the gaming business" blamefest... It's easier to blame piracy rather than crappy game design.. Of course, I'm sure the economy is playing a part as well. Although, from what I've read, people are reluctant to give up their hobbies, even in the face of a bad economy.

Comment Re:Spacewalk (Score 1) 209

by XenoPhage on Monday April 27, 2009 @08:32AM (#27728523) Attached to: Cross-Distro Remote Package Administration?

Even with Oracle, it's still a decent solution and works fairly well. I've had it up and running since the 0.1 release.

It has its problems, not least of which is the absolute resource hog that Oracle is, but it's better than having to log into every machine when an update comes out.

Comment Took down the links, not the content.. (Score 5, Informative) 273

by XenoPhage on Monday March 09, 2009 @09:05AM (#27120105) Attached to: Adobe's ADEPT DRM Broken

There is of course, Google Cache ...

Or, you can just get it from pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/f1cb3663c

and

http://pastebin.com/f26972321

Submission + - Conficker/Downadup mitigation

Submitted by

XenoPhage

on Friday January 23, 2009 @01:20PM

XenoPhage writes: "I'm working on possible mitigation scenarios for a potential Conficker/Downadup outbreak. One of the ideas we have is to "poison" our own DNS caches, effectively redirecting any infected clients to a local server. The thought is that this would help identify infected systems as well as prevent them from receiving updated instructions from command and control. The question is, however, how to do this, as well as what possible side effects will we encounter. Is this method absolutely taboo and should be avoided at all costs, or is this a valid method of detection/mitigation?"

Comment Re:Seriously... (Score 1) 693

by XenoPhage on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:06AM (#26432183) Attached to: iTunes DRM-Free Files Contain Personal Info

I don't see the problem. I didn't want them to remove DRM so I could ignore the copyright on the music, I wanted them to remove it so I could use it on any device I wanted to listen to it on. They did that; now I can, as far as I'm concerned, we're all good now.

I completely agree. Since the announcement of this change, I have seriously considered purchasing digital music via itunes rather than buying CDs. The way I see it, if I can choose the songs I want rather than getting stuck with an entire CD, I'm more likely to buy more music. It's definitely a win for the music industry this way.

Presumably, without the DRM, I can convert these files to the format of my choice? Though I don't think I'll have to as I'm pretty sure rockbox plays AAC...

Comment Re:Quake Live is awesome. (Score 1) 205

by XenoPhage on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:00AM (#26432067) Attached to: Most Popular Free, Arena-Style FPS?

If only they would sort out ta damn mac client!

Small team and they want to get everything sorted out on one platform first. I can't blame em..

That said, Quake Live is a ton of fun.. I recommend checking it out.. :)

Michael Crichton Dead At 66 388

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 05, 2008 @09:39PM from the velociraptors-confirm-it dept.

Many readers have submitted stories about the death of Michael Crichton. The 66-year-old author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," a press release said. In addition to writing, he also directed such sci-fi classics as Westworld and Runaway. Crichton was married five times and had one child.

Who Do Warcraft Players Want As President? 82

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 30, 2008 @06:18PM from the give-the-orcs-a-voice dept.

I'm not sure how many electoral votes Azeroth has, but it could be a key battleground state.

Researchers Decentralize BitTorrent 262

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @02:01PM from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

A Cow writes "The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova. The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam."

Submission + - Worlds First Quad Core Capable Laptop Spy Pics

Submitted by

Jason

on Monday May 21, 2007 @04:11PM

Jason writes: "This laptop will supposedly support dual 8800 Video cards, a 17" screen and chassis, Up to three internal hard drives of 160GB each, and the new quad core Intel CPU all using a 965 chipset. We dont think the cooling solution is up to the task of cooling that amount of heat but time will tell. Spy Pictures of World's First Quad Core Capable Laptop"

Submission + - Intel ISEF Winners Announced

Submitted by

marshmallow soup

on Monday May 21, 2007 @03:57PM

marshmallow soup writes: "Last Friday brought the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair to a close. Top honors and a $50,000 scholarship went to Jack Li of Maryland, Philip Streich of Wisconsin, and Dmitry Vaintrob of Oregon. Projects ranged from building robots to studying suspended animation to advanced proofs in string topology. You can find a list of winners here."

Submission + - Testing AJAX applications

Submitted by

matthew.thompson

on Monday May 21, 2007 @03:53PM

matthew.thompson writes: "At work we've recently taken delivery of a web application that we host for a partner company. We were informed that the application would use a little more bandwidth but in going live it's gone from creating 4Mbps to 20Mbps of traffic. While we're a little late in discovering this can anyone suggest any load testing tools which make it easy to test AJAX applications with results that management can understand but enough detail for developers to be able to tweak the app?"

Submission + - Vista problems reaching mainstream press

Submitted by

mcgrew (sm62704)

on Monday May 21, 2007 @03:49PM

mcgrew (sm62704) writes: "The tech press has been talking about Vista's shortcomings for quite a while now; Slashdot has posted numerous stories. Today I saw a "Tech Talk" in the St Louis Post Dispatch, one of the US' largest mainstream newspapers. The article is about a "normal" (i.e., non-geek) user's woes. From the article:

After his initial computer purchase from a local retailer, he tried starting Vista and had no luck: It gagged on other preinstalled software, and the retailer had no remedy. He received a replacement laptop.

On our colleague's second try, he ran into a wall with Microsoft, which insisted through its online validation process that his copy of Vista was not legitimate. About a third of all new Vista owners with valid copies of the OS already have suffered through this. The retailer assured our colleague that his Vista was valid but replaced his laptop again anyway to solve the problem.

Armed with yet another new laptop, our colleague escaped repeats of the first two problems but hit a new bump: Vista refused to acknowledge his computer's peripheral devices, even though Microsoft's own hardware compatibility list said it should.

He returned to the retailer and this time asked for his money back. He says he might try buying his first Mac with the refund. "There's only so much I'm willing to put up with," our colleague said. "I just wanted the [expletive] computer to work, you know. Isn't that all anyone wants?"
I notice that he returned the second computer because of MS' onerous DRM, which insisted that the OS was counterfeit. I'm aghast that one in three valid copies are flagged as "pirated". Note: I'm not a Mac user; my OS of choice is Mandriva."

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