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Comment My first reaction is never, but........ (Score 1) 258

by JDHawg (#50678367) Attached to: You can have my passwords ...
Until March, 2014 I never, ever shared my passwords with anyone. Banking, Facebook, email, you name it and I wouldn't share it. On 24 March, 2014 my wife of 29 years died suddenly from a rapid onset of cancer. From "Gee, I'm not feeling so good" to GONE was less than two weeks. The last thing on my mind sitting in the hospital with her was getting all of her accounts and passwords. During our 29 years of marriage, I was in the U.S. Air Force for 20 of those and traveled quite a bit. She set up online bill paying and I never knew about a lot of the credit cards she had. Once she was gone it took close to 6 months to get everything straightened out with accounts that I had to pay but couldn't get logged into. When I would call the bank/credit card company/etc I was often given the response of "she needs to let us know you can handle her accounts before you can change the password". One company wouldn't even accept her death certificate as proof she wasn't here any more! I recently got remarried to one of my late wife's best friends. The first thing we did was put all of our accounts and passwords into KeePass. Security is good, but peace of mind for your loved ones it important too.

Comment Fake Thermostats (Score 2, Interesting) 402

by JDHawg (#34111918) Attached to: The temperature where I am now is controlled by...
Several years ago, I was in a meeting about some building modifications at an Air Force Base that my squadron was relocating to. The base Civil Engineer asked if we would like thermostats on the walls, and my response was "Sure, it will be nice to adjust the temperatures in the offices." He looked at me and started laughing, and then with a straight face told me that most thermostats in government office buildings were for show only, and the real controls were in an obscure closet somewhere.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Code Review of Doom For the iPhone 161

Posted by Soulskill from the old-dogs-new-tricks dept.
Developer Fabien Sanglard has written a code review for id Software's iPhone port of Doom. It's an interesting look into how the original 1993 game (which he also reviewed to understand its rendering process) was adapted to a modern platform. "Just like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was rendering a screenframe pixel per pixel. The only way to do this on iPhone with an acceptable framerate would be to use CoreSurface/CoreSurface.h framework. But it is unfortunately restricted and using it would prevent distribution on the AppStore. The only solution is to use OpenGL, but this comes with a few challenges: Doom was faking 3D with a 2D map. OpenGL needs real 3D vertices. More than 3D vertices, OpenGL needs data to be sent as triangles (among other things because they are easy to rasterize). But Doom sectors were made of arbitrary forms. Doom 1993's perspective was also faked, it was actually closer to an orthogonal projection than a perspective projection. Doom was using VGA palette indexing to perform special effect (red for damage, silver for invulnerable...)."
The Almighty Buck

EA Flip-Flops On Battlefield: Heroes Pricing, Fans Angry 221

Posted by Soulskill from the put-your-money-where-your-gun-is dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

Comment Re:One problem... (Score 1) 291

by JDHawg (#26486875) Attached to: RIAA Hearing Next Week Will Be Televised

Kelly Clarkson has had several hits which landed in the Billboard Top 100 for 2004, 2005, 2006, et cetera, but none of the others "idols" have made it.

Wow, someone had better tell Kellie Pickler and Carrie Underwood that they haven't "made it" yet. Hmmm... I'll bet they think having #1 songs and headlining tours actually means something.

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