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Comment Re:Still busted (Score 1) 537

I'm not trying to say you're wrong or anything but that sounds the exact opposite of how the Square pre-release is on Linux platforms right now. HW Accel is only supported in the 32-bit flash and is supposed to be available for 64-bit users when the next Flash release is finalized. If it's the other way around, then I find it pretty strange that I still don't have 1-5% CPU usage with 1080p under Linux w/NVidia while I have no issue whatsoever under Windows w/NVidia. As it is I can expect a 1080p flash video to eat about 40% of one of my four cores under Linux. Actually, just tested now in my Chromium nightly (32-bit) with the latest Flash and I'm getting about 10-20% CPU usually for the 1080p playback.

If things are really that way in Mac-land, the opposite of how it is in Linux-land, congratulations on having a better 64-bit plugin than the 32-bit plugin. Seems you are unable to really make use of it though.

Classic Games (Games)

Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Algorithms 194

An anonymous reader writes "This article has a very interesting description of the algorithms behind the ghosts in Pac-Man. I had no idea about most of this information, but that's probably because it's difficult to study the ghosts when I die every 30 seconds. Quoting: 'The ghosts are always in one of three possible modes: Chase, Scatter, or Frightened. The "normal" mode with the ghosts pursuing Pac-Man is Chase, and this is the one that they spend most of their time in. While in Chase mode, all of the ghosts use Pac-Man's position as a factor in selecting their target tile, though it is more significant to some ghosts than others. In Scatter mode, each ghost has a fixed target tile, each of which is located just outside a different corner of the maze. This causes the four ghosts to disperse to the corners whenever they are in this mode. Frightened mode is unique because the ghosts do not have a specific target tile while in this mode. Instead, they pseudorandomly decide which turns to make at every intersection.'"

Comment Re:Assange (Score 1) 579

To quote your linked article:

On Saturday a WikiLeaks spokesman, who said he uses the name Daniel Schmitt in order to protect his identity, told The Associated Press that the group had requested help from NATO to check the files prior to publication to ensure the lives of civilians were not put at risk.

"For this reason, we conveyed a request to the White House prior to the publication, asking that the International Security Assistance Force provide us with reviewers," Schmitt said. "That request remains open. However, the Pentagon has stated that it is not interested in 'harm minimization' and has not contacted us, directly, or indirectly to discuss this offer."

If the government/NATO wants to protect civilians that assisted them then they should do what's right and help Wikileaks to redact such names from the documents. This is exactly the same thing that happened with the leaked cables -- Wikileaks asks the government to, if it wishes, tell them what names need to be redacted from these documents, and the government refuses to do so. The recklessness is coming from NATO and the government, not from Wikileaks which has shown every interest in addressing this particular issue.

And if you don't think they're serious about cooperating for redactions, I would remind you that the ball is not in Wikileaks court regarding such redactions. Anyone that does die because of these leaks (something that has not been proven anywhere) dies because the government refused to shield them, when it should be doing the right thing and focusing on damage control. The stuff is out there and it's going to be released, it's only responsible to try to make sure that innocent people who aided your efforts won't get hurt because you want to play the role of tough guy.

Comment Re:Still using KDE 3.5.X... (Score 2, Interesting) 224

I honestly think if more people knew about NX they would never use VNC unless it was absolutely the only solution available, period. VNC just blows chunks way too bad, and NX makes things so easy when bandwidth is important. Anyone who has not tried NX and uses VNC should seriously give it a try because the difference is night and day.

Comment Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score 2, Informative) 473

Ext4 doesn't have online defrag yet, it is planned. Btrfs has an fsck tool but it is not capable of fixing any problems on the disk, it can apparently only let you know there are problems (I say apparently because while I've used btrfs I haven't before had to fsck it thanks to lots of luck with not running into any hiccups during my usage). They say as much on the front page of the Btrfs wiki. To quote the main page of this wiki:

Btrfs is under heavy development, but every effort is being made to keep the filesystem stable and fast. As of 2.6.31, we only plan to make forward compatible disk format changes, and many users have been experimenting with Btrfs on their systems with good results. Please email the Btrfs mailing list if you have any problems or questions while using Btrfs.

Note that Btrfs does not yet have a fsck tool that can fix errors. While Btrfs is stable on a stable machine, it is currently possible to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your machine crashes or loses power on disks that don't handle flush requests correctly. This will be fixed when the fsck tool is ready.

So not only are you railing against ext4 for a fsck operation which should take a long time (5TB? Come on, most people don't have 1TB in their box, and we're talking about desktop users), but you are unawares of the features and capabilities of both filesystems you are discussing. Btrfs is great, but it's not something Average Joe should be using just yet either in production or on their desktop. I have used it before and I will use it again in the future, but it is not complete yet.

If I had any mod points I probably just would have modded up ratboy666's reply because he did a fantastic job of explaining the whole situation.

Comment Re:Well that's stupid. (Score 1) 495

WoW and most MMOs are under constant development, and while early development could be interpreted as "during alpha/beta" it could also be interpreted to mean "early on in the game's lifetime".

It wasn't even really a trick of wording though, because the patch notes linked by KingMotley explains the change in more depth. The change was drastically for the better, as the patch notes explained it allows for more freedom in exploring aspects of gameplay aside from level grinding. Before, you had a set amount of time before your XP was diminished significantly. After the modification, the only thing that was really impacted by being rested was level grinding. This change gave users the freedom to not have to worry about spending the first few hours grinding, and they could play at their own pace.

So your point really doesn't stand because much more of the gameplay was changed than "oh the rested mechanism works slightly different but pretty much the same" because it's an oversimplifcation. If you don't see the very real and very drastic differences between how it worked and how it's been tweaked to work, you aren't trying very hard or you haven't played the game for a significant amount of time.

Comment Re:Well that's stupid. (Score 1) 495

As a small addendum I forgot to mention: In the beta the XP gains worked differently. Beta was a long time ago and gamers don't generally consider discussions of Beta stages to be relevant to the game at-and-post-launch. TBH your description is similar to how things worked in Beta, but it's not like there was widespread outrage because WoW didn't exactly have a huge public beta test (Or any public beta test that I can remember).

See this for more details on the situation how it was in Beta, and then scroll up to see how it's been ever since..

Comment Re:Well that's stupid. (Score 1) 495

World of Warcraft was never like that. If you spend any time, logged out or logged in, inside a major city or an inn at a minor city/outpost then you become "rested". While you are rested you gain a bonus to your XP gains, This mechanism has never been modified and has been in place since launch, and I do not remember ever hearing anyone raising a stink over getting to log out for the night in town and come back in the morning with half a level or more rested so that your leveling is in fact highly accelerated.

Comment Re:Good to see (Score 1) 203

The results from html5test have my Chromium nightly leading the pack with a score of 241 with 8 bonus points out of a total of 300. For comparison, in order of most "compliant" to least:

  • Chromium 7.0.531.0 (60152): 241/8
  • Chrome 7.0.517.8 dev: 231/12
  • Firefox 4 (Minefield nightly): 207/9
  • Opera 10.61 build 3484: 159/7
  • Firefox 3.6.10: 139/4
  • Internet Explorer 9 beta: 96/5

So the IE9 beta does lag pretty far behind the competition on this test for html5 support, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see Chromium/Chrome in the lead with FF4 gaining ground. The point is, though, that no browser is completely standards compliant yet, much less with html5 and/or CSS3.

Comment Re:Maybe time to move to Chrome? (Score 3, Informative) 358

SRWare Iron was created for the sole purpose of earning the "creator" some money on ad revenue. To borrow from my previous post on the subject:

Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron. The article and the linked IRC log tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Chromium with a few checkboxes in "Under the Hood" defaulting to off.

The guy who runs that blog does not try to hide the fact that he's a Chrome developer, and he admits that there is the highly unlikely possibility that the person who was asking these questions was not the person who went on to release Iron. I was skeptical as well until I checked out the log file itself and quite honestly it would have to be an incredible coincidence for this guy to be asking such questions and providing the information that he does in his attempts to glean information on the right way to advertise his product as well as how to go about renaming the executable. There's more that makes it very reasonable to believe this is the guy who went on to release Iron, so please don't dismiss it until you've checked out the log file in detail. If this was a supremely unnecessary and elaborate hoax it sure is pulled off convincingly.

Using Iron after reading this information made me feel like I was supporting the wrong guy here and I couldn't do it anymore, it was just too uncomfortable seeing that this guy was looking for adsense revenue and to make a name for himself. The attitude of this developer is not one I would encourage at all.

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