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Comment Re:Mod Parent Up (Score 1) 91

Let us not forget that it was supposed to have fully working XBMC at release time (if not included, then downloadable) which still hadn't materialized over a month later. Did that ever really happen? Before I took my Ouya back to Gamestop, I tried numerous nightlies and none of them were ever anywhere close to stable, nor did any of them really work properly anyway.

Ouya really set Android gaming back substantially with their incompetence. It's good to see that some other manufacturers are now bringing devices to market, even if the most reputable are Mad Catz and Razer — both known for making cheap knockoff trash.

Comment Re:And another sign of privilege (Score 1) 298

As it happens, yes. I have Aspergers, I get shit scared by ignorant cunts abusing standard English terms

Oh my fucking god you just made my day. I mean, I rarely ROFL, and I'm not now, but I'm about as close as I ever get right now.

in order to avoid having to defend their agenda of hatred.

You're the one misusing the word "cunt" on something you don't like. Closet case much? I mean, it's OK to be gay, but you don't have to hate on vagina.

Happens that 'privilege' is an excellent example of just that.

It just so happens that if you find yourself getting angry about the concept of 'privilege' then you are yourself a privileged person. If you even have time and leisure to sit around thinking about how privileged you aren't, you are.

Comment Re:Eh? (Score 0) 91

I want the benefits of mass production commodities and be able to buy a good PC gaming machine off-the-shelf for a lower price.

The Steam Machine won't give you that, because it's small and because it has a brand stamped on it. It's going to come at a higher price.

Iâ(TM)m tired of spending so much time building my own custom PC and doing OS installations.

So buy one prebuilt.

Iâ(TM)m sick of Microsoft charging me many times more than everybody else for a Windows license because I didnâ(TM)t buy a pre-configured machine from an OEM.

So buy a pre-configured machine from an OEM, which is what you are proposing to do.

Iâ(TM)m sick of Windows blue screening and corrupting my EFI boot partitions so my dual boots wonâ(TM)t work.

So stop putting multiple OSes on one disk. Segregate onto different storage devices. Problem completely solved.

- Iâ(TM)m sick of Windows nagging me about turning on Secure Boot. I donâ(TM)t want it.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2902864

Iâ(TM)m sick of big giant PC towers that take up massive space and donâ(TM)t fit well in home theater cabinets (or anywhere else).

Buy a SFF PC.

- Iâ(TM)m sick of loud PC fans and the unnecessarily high power consumption and heat

Buy a low-power CPU and GPU

I want a gaming PC that is fully utilized for games, not loaded down with needless background processes sucking up CPU and RAM

So disable the indexing service etc.

- Hardware driver updates for Windows is such a chore.

It is? The only ones that see many updates are the GPU drivers, and geforce experience handles that for me with very few clicks. Perhaps you are currently "enjoying" the AMD experience.

Windows mostly broke DirectX/DirectInput compatibility. Iâ(TM)m so sick of having to get xce360 working and re-configured for every single game I buy now.

Shoulda stuck with win7 for gaming, boyo

- I hate it that Fraps doesnâ(TM)t work any more with non-fullscreen mode starting in Windows 8

See last. Also, fraps is over, what are you, new? Now you use your GPU recording tools.

- I donâ(TM)t want to be pushed to Windows Store

Not going to happen yet. Maybe later.

TL;DR: a Steam PC isn't going to solve any problems; you didn't list any problems which aren't already solved.

Comment Re:My Ouya (Score 1) 91

You shoulda got a used original Xbox. You can often pick one up for $20, if you can solder you don't need to buy anything to mod most of them, there's a ton of games and a ton of indie software including a crapload of emulators. You could have saved it from the landfill and saved eighty bucks at the same time

Comment Re:/system/lib/libstagefright* (Score 3, Interesting) 203

I'm actually kind of hoping this is a viable option. I dread the idea of re-installing my phone from scratch, but a drop-in replacement for the affected files would certainly be welcome.

Probably not. libstagefright is, nominally, per-GPU. Every GPU vendor would have to roll their own. And then it would have to be tested... It's just not going to happen at all. Everyone is going to say "time to move on" and blame the vendors. The vendors will blame the GPU makers...

Comment Re:Kickstarter forever (Score 2) 91

They delivered the product as promised

Well, no. Not really. They promised an open and hackable platform. But they didn't deliver that. They released a shitty and broken platform. Many units overheat. All original controllers were shit, they had to do a second run. And the "recovery" is shit. It's implemented at the same level as the OS, so if you ruin your OS, your Ouya is really and truly bricked. Nobody has figured out how to get JTAG on it. USB keyboards become controller #1 so nothing works until you unpair them and the keypad (which will have become controller #2) and then re-pair the keypad. Pairing of PS3 controllers was never reliable. Etc etc. Ouya is a turd, they failed miserably, and it's not clear why anyone would bother to pick up the pieces.

Comment I was thinking of "high end" in terms of (Score 1) 152

what consumers had access to by walking into a retail computer dealership (there were many independent white box makers at the time) and saying "give me your best."

You're probably right about me underestimating the graphics, though it's hard to remember back that far. I'm thinking 800x600 was much more common. If you could get 1024x768, it was usually interlaced (i.e. "auto-headache") and rare if I remember correctly to be able to get with 24-bit color—S3's first 16-bit capable chips didn't come out until late-1991, if I remember correctly, though I could be off.

SCSI was possible, but almost unheard of as stock, you either had to buy an add-on card and deal with driver/compatibility questions or one of the ESDISCSI bridge boards or similar. Same thing with ethernet, token, or any other dedicated networking hardware and stack. Most systems shipped with a dial-up "faxmodem" at the time, and users were stuck using Winsock on Windows 3.1. It was nontrivial to get it working. Most of the time, there was no real "networking" or "networking" support in the delivered hardware/software platform; faxmodems were largely used for dumb point-to-point connections using dial-up terminal emulator software.

And in the PC space, the higher-end you went, the less you were able to actually use the hardware for anything typical. Unless you were a corporate buyer, you bought your base platform as a whitebox, then added specialized hardware matched with specialized software in a kind of 1:1 correspondence—if you needed to perform task X, you'd buy hardware Y and software Z, and they'd essentially be useful only for task X, or maybe for task X1, X2, and X3, but certainly not much else—the same is even true for memory itself. Don't forget this is pre-Windows95, when most everyone was using Win16 on DOS. We can discuss OS/2, etc., but that again starts to get into the realm of purpose-specific and exotic computing in the PC space. There were, as I understand, a few verrry exotic 486 multiprocessors produced, but I've never even heard of a manufacturer and make/model for these—only the rumor that it was possible—so I doubt they ever made it into sales channels of any kind. My suspicion (correct me if I'm wrong) was that they were engineered for particular clients and particular roles by just one or two orgnaizations, and delivered in very small quantities; I'm not aware of any PC software in 1992 timeframe that was even multiprocessor-aware, or any standard to which it could have been coded. The Pentium processor wasn't introduced until '93 and the Pentium Pro with GTL+ and SMP capabilities didn't arrive until 1995. Even in 1995, most everything was either Win16 or 8- or 16-bit code backward compatible to the PC/XT or earlier, and would remain that way until around the Win98 era.

The UNIX platforms were standardized around SCSI, ethernet, big memory access, high-resolution graphics, and multiprocessing and presented an integrated environment in which a regular developer with a readily available compiler could take advantage of it all without particularly unusual or exotic (for that space) tactics.

Comment Re:I have no fear of AI, but fear AI weapons (Score 1) 313

Well, robbery would be a bit tougher than general mayhem. In the foreseeable future you'd probably need a human in the loop, for example to confirm that the victim actually complied with the order to "put ALL the money in the bag." Still that would remove the perpetrator from the scene of the crime. If there were an open or hackable wi-fi access point nearby it'd be tricky to hunt him down.

This kind of remote controlled drone mediated crime is very feasible now. It wouldn't take much technical savvy to figure out how to mount a shotgun shell on a quadcopter and fly it to a particular victim (if you have one). That's a lot less sophisticated than stuff terrorists do already; anyone with moderate technical aptitude could do it with off-the-shelf components. I'm sure we'll see our first non-state-actor controlled drone assassination in the next couple of years. Or maybe a hacktivist will detonate a party popper on the President or something like that.

Within our lifetime it'll surely be feasible for ordinary hackers to build autonomous systems that could fly into a general area and hunt down a particular victim using facial recognition. People have experimented with facial recognition with SBCs like the Raspberry Pi already.

You can forbid states from doing this all you want, but as technology advances the technology to do this won't be exotic. It'll be commonplace stuff used for work and even recreation.

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