You got me. When I posted I mixed Blizzard up with Epic games. At least one mod thought it funny though.

I guess Blizzard needs to distract us from some controversy?

Every time I try to go to blogs.skype.com I get redirected to a microsoft.com landing page?!
Tried in firefox and chromium..

Turning humidity into drinking Water at suitable rate/quantity is a) completely impractical, and b) ignores the real issue of water treatment.

Here is a case in point

The more you watch that video, the more you'll realise how unrealistic it is to turn humidity into water. The video covers a specific case, but the generalities are true enough for any approach (e.g. conservation of energy)

Also, as pointed out in the video, most people (and animals) gravitate to and settle near a supply of water (even in arid climates), the problem is however: making/keeping that water clean, safe and drinkable. Please solve that!

I was (am?) always a big Lego Technic fan. Although I've not bought any this side of the year 2000.

I've had Minecraft PE on my phone/tablet, which I mostly play in creative mode (the controls are awful for reacting and moving quickly) every now and again, when bored.

However a couple of weeks ago I decided to jump in and get the "Real thing"; buying the java client for laptop/desktop.

It's fun, but I was shocked at how bad the server eco-system is: There is 1) The official server, which I use, but I am very worried about making it accessible from the internet. I'd feel like I'm putting a rabbit on the motorway, and hoping it doesn't get run over. Then there is 2) Bukkit, which tries to add features that make running an internet accessible server more feasible; but the project has been killed. (Majong hired some key developers and then shut the original down); next I found 3) Spiget, that is a clone for (2) the one of the community keeps alive. Finally 4) you can "rent" a "realm" from majong, basically paying them a monthly fee to run a server for you.

All these servers appear to become daemons by running a jre in GNU Screen! With various scripts that execute commands to the "server" via screen cli echos. Other functionality works by just copying key files around. I guess such Rube Goldberg server setups matches the in-game way of doing things

And I though Banking application web servers were terribly put together...

I had thought that after so many years, and money that the server side things would be rock-solid, and these days it would just about adding new things to play with in the world.
I'd expected a something near to a proper DB for the world data, with methods like transactions to prevent corruption; audit records that let you roll the state of a particular area or thing back to some previous state. Or the ability for users to claim (or be assigned) an area, that only they can break, but others can visit. Maybe a set of reasonable tools and features to identify and deal with misbehaving users, either via their own in world action, or via "modded" clients.

If you think I am being paranoid, search for "minecraft griefing", e.g. on youtube.

Despite all that I would still consider making my server internet accessible, probably only to people I know IRL. (Not to say my server is something special, that would be of any interest to anyone. Its of interest to just me, because its "my world")

Unlike headphones, I think you'll find that Thunderbolt display owners will find their displays still functioning tomorrow. In fact I would not be surprised if their display continues to do what they paid for, for many years to come.

If I bought a product that does (and continues to do) what I bought it for, how is that a failed experiment?

A number of sites are posting this story; and I really don't get why this is news of any interest to anyone...

A basic DVD-R is about 4GB and you'd have to be a hoarder to still have USB sticks smaller than 4GB.

I could also assume that the majority do not do offline installs anyway...

Despite all that, how is the size of some OS' install media attracting so much attention? And why Ubuntu? How about OS X or MS-Windows?

Maybe he's got the FBI job, and the first order of business is to discredit the possibility of being able to hack into an iPhone.

I am surprised by how accepting the /. community is of the 'fact' that he was indeed lying.


On a less factious note: In the days when iPhones had exploitable boot loaders, one could boot a version IOS in RAM, that let you brute force the PIN as long as you wanted to without wiping the phone. On iPhone 4 it took about 29 minutes to try all 4-digit combinations from 0000 to 9999. (The default PIN length at the time)

The only two things stopping you today from still doing this is: 1) the lack of a known vulnerability in the boot loader, thus requiring your "Special IOS" to be signed by Apple; and 2) changes to the H/W crypto chip in new models that force longer and longer time outs before you can try another PIN.
Although retries get longer, I don't think there is any limit set, in hardware, on how many retries you can have (yet); that's still handled by IOS.

If you really want to know how bad things actually are, see this 32c3 talk from people who work in the industry.

The film is 50% nostalgia and 50% new 'content'.

While watching it, I felt it paralleled a new hope a little too much. I guessed it was trying to keep the 'fans' happy.

After watching it, I took a look at few reviews (I was trying to avoid spoilers before); many pointed out that it's difficult to rate the film on its own. It's clearly there to provide a transition from the old to the new. As such it could be forgiven for its heavy use of nostalgia, but only if Star Wars VIII really is something new and amazing.

In case the difference between London (City) and the "City of London" is not clear to some, here's a great video on the topic.

It's a city within a city, within a country that's within a country.
It's also semi independent of the UK and its laws; an artefact of existing longer than the UK does.

For the same size SSD and advertised bus speed, there is already a huge price performance variance. SSDs vary greatly in both IO operations per second and total IO operations (lifetime).

There are SSDs that have worse IOPS than a HDD, but in most cases HDDs cann't touch SSD IOPS specs.

On the other side: A great SSD might have a better lifetime (IO operation total) than a cheap HDD; however it is still to be proven that an SSD could match a quality HDD in lifetime.

Whenever these price comparisons come up, I get the feeling that there is a huge bias in favour of the statement that article wants to make. i.e. If its about the falling price of SSDs, then compare a low spec SSD with a high spec HDD. If you want to argue for HDD, do the reverse.

As things stands both have their place, and you should be careful about what you buy in both cases. e.g. WD-Green for laptop, but WD-Red for a NAS (yes there is a difference). For SSDs only my budget would force me to buy an EVO instaed of an EVO Pro. (I only mention WD and Samsung to be able to give concrete examples).

In my (humble) opinion neither SSD nor HDD will be able to replace the other, before some other storage technology comes along and blows them both away. Although that tech might be a descendant of one or the other (memristor? crystal/optical?).

http://blog.visual6502.org/2015/11/the-visual-arm1.html

Who RTFA anyway? A badly edited summary should be enough for anyone (tm).

Venus should be a candidate for colonisation, it would probably be much cheaper and easier:

Should We Colonize Venus Instead of Mars?

We need a catchy media name for this spate of car hacks that have inundated us this last week or so.

Of all the XYZ-gate names contrived for controversies since watergate, "Circumnavigate" is the first one I actually like.

The Circumnavigate Controversy of 2015, costing Chrysler Millions of USD and Tesla Thousands (in bug bounties)!!