FFS, stop trying to spin the Gamergate content. So far every single submission has bought hook, line, and sinker into the lie that it's about misogyny and harrassment, to avoid talking about what the game journalists did (and still do), and how they colluded to cover it up. This is the worst so far.
This is transparent and embarassing and I never expected it out of/. At least users are still in charge of moderating the discussion here, unlike most of the gaming press sites where even speaking against the groupthink is banned immediately.
Hopefully Google has a plan to help stomp out this anxiety. They could tweak their search algorithms to flag pages likely to express such anxiety. And scan everyone's email for keywords that might indicate this unaccoutable anxiety over spying. And provide bounties/mechanisms for reporting suspected anxiety.
It's good to see Google calling out the real problem, and placing blame where it belongs.
Your right to free speech extends only to GOVERNMENT restriction of speech. Private venues are fully within their rights to limit your speech all they want in their venue. Don't like it? Leave.
Oh, they're leaving all right. And warning everyone about how pro-censorship those venues are.
As a side note, one of the initial sparks setting off the firestorm was Zoe Quinn's fraudulent DMCA takedown request against a youtuber (MundaneMatt) talking about the controversey. The government is arguably somewhat involved in that one important case.
The controversy is called Gamergate, and it is strange that the summary doesn't mention it by name. I've never heard "gater" used to describe it before. The anti-Gamergate side has a history of trying to alter the name--they've tried "Game Ethics" and hilariously "We Love Videogames")--in an attempt to take control of the narrative, so maybe that's happening again here.
The wikipedia article is not much help, as it has adopted the anti-Gamergate narrative that the movement is about misogyny. Many of the primary sources cited are the same ones whose journalistic integrity has been called into question.
Here's an interview with a law and ethics professor about some of the journalistic behavior involved, and whether it's OK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Probably the most disgusting (and damning) behavior of the anti-GG side is the attempt to silence discussion, from the fraudelent DMCA notice to the initial media blackout, and ongoing widespread censorship of user forums/comments.
This is how I always explain streaming games to people who can't immediately see the horrible problems with it:
Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to be behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with Onlive, etc. it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they ded everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that Onlive would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
the "i want to be totally anonymous" solution some people seem to look for doesnt really apply to the product.
Then "the product" (Google Plus), in turn, doesn't apply to products like Search, Youtube, Gmail, Picasa, etc. . . . so keep it the FUCK away from them.
Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, this is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America (before you even consider data caps).
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who push this stuff seem very, very confused (at best).
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with this tech it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and no one has ever done anything to explain how they intend to solve them. Onlive did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that it would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streaming games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
One tactic I've heard of in the US is to buy a part to a gun (something small and convenient like a grip or a trigger or something). Then get a nice big lockable gun case and place it and everything else you care about inside.
Hackers welcome.
Have at it: It's easy to root (and rooting won't void your warranty). Everything opens with standard screws. Hardware hackers can create their own peripherals, and connect via USB or Bluetooth. You want our hardware design? Let us know. We might just give it to you. Surprise us!
After people began calling Al Sutton out over this, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).
As for "Open"; Well, a year or so ago the idea of going into a gaming centric store like GameStop or Game, buying a console, taking it home, writing a game on it, and publishing it without spending big money on development kits, licensing, and the like was pretty much non-existant. That's where OUYA is open; It's open to anyone to write games and apps without having to pay dev kit and licensing fees, it's open in that once you have your console you can code for it.
The reason you can still simply get root access is that I've seen people want to tinker beyond what most users would do. OUYA could stick to what was originally put on the Kickstarter page and take away root from non-devkits, but I, for one, would be against that, because I've seen that people do use it constructively and responsibly, and not everyone bricks their device then raises a support ticket to try and get OUYA to fix it.
So yes, I'll stick to calling it "shocking."
PS. A functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console.
I decided to never buy one after I learned that the company didn't support a genuine end user recovery mode, and witnessed an Ouya employee (Al Sutton) berating and insulting the customers who insisted on one.
His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.
I'm keeping a track of how many requests we get relating custom firmware, and from what I'm seeing the user base is not as interested in custom firmware as you might think, which is echoed by this thread (we've shipped 60,000+ units, and less than 10 people have commented in the last month in this thread about getting access to recovery mode).That doesn't mean that we're shooting the idea down, you need to keep in mind that in terms of priorities this is way down the list as you'd expect from any feature where it's being requested by less than one tenth of one percent of the user-base.
It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability.
Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.
Some may be wondering how this could be possible when almost all Apple devices have built-in cameras. The military employs a skilled third party to remove them completely instead of just disabling them. Here is some of his work (a Mac with the iSight taken out): http://i40.tinypic.com/2yvs9ki.jpg .
The reason I always bought Intel SSDs was because they always had Intel controllers, and Intel controllers were always stellar. Intel for years prioritized random access and did it better than anyone else. The 510 series, the first to be released with a non-Intel (Marvell) controller, seemed like such a pointless drive, with worse random performance than the 2 year old X25-M.
The problem is that sequential numbers are always faster and therefore easier to market to people who don't know any better. The 510 served a marketing need, not an engineering one.
I don't follow the market as closely anymore so I don't know if the 520 series makes any more sense, but if we know that Intel was willing to sacrifice random access performance to use a Marvell controller. What will they sacrifice for a Sandforce controller? Reliability?
I have bought six X25Ms in total; all are tremendous performers and give me no problems. The are all G2s and range in age from 1 to 2 years (except for a used 40GB one I bought a month ago).
Unfortunately the Intel 320 series (really the X25-M G3) has had its own reliability issues with a nasty firmware bug that causes it to suddenly report its capacity as 8MB (causing complete data loss).
Intel on Sunday acknowledged that a bug could cause its SSD 320 solid-state drives to fail, and said a firmware upgrade is on its way to address the problem.
In some instances, a power loss may cause Intel's SSD 320 drives to crash and lose data. On rebooting the system, the system BIOS could report the SSD as having only 8MB of storage capacity. Intel two weeks ago said the error was possibly a bug, and that the issue was being investigated.
"Intel has reproduced 'Bad Context 13x Error' utilizing strenuous testing methods. This 'Bad Context 13x Error' can be addressed via a firmware update and Intel is in the process of validating the firmware update. A future update will define the schedule to deliver the firmware fix," an Intel spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.
It's ironic that a power failure triggers this problem, since Intel had marketed the 320 as especially resilient to them:
Intel always prided itself on not storing any user data in its DRAM cache. The external DRAM is only used to cache mapping tables and serve as the controller's scratchpad. In the event of a sudden loss of power, Intel only has to commit whatever data it has in its SRAM to NAND. To minimize the amount of data loss in the event of a sudden power failure, Intel outfitted the SSD 320 with an array of six 470F capacitors in parallel.
Some posters say it can happen without a power failure:
Intel said they found the cause and released a firmware update, but applying it seems to have actually triggered the bug in previously problem-free drives for many posters:
Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.
This issue was enough to convince me to buy something else (even though the 320 series would otherwise have been my first choice) when I had to shop for an SSD last month. I found a used "like new" (according to the SMART data, at least) X25-M G2 on amazon instead.
Interestingly, X25-M G2 prices have held steady ($2/GB or so) and only gone up over the last year. Yeah it's probably because of dwindling supply, but I can't help but suspect that lack of confidence in the 320 series may have contributed to an increase in demand for the G2.
I just installed it on your recommendation but can't find any option to disable automatic updates. Any software that requires phoning home every time it runs is a non-starter for me.
Yes, they learned that passing a constitutional amendment involves the participation of the People, who then realize that it's within their power to prevent that amendment (or indeed, revoke it after the fact). Note that when they restricted both guns and drugs soon after, they just ignored the Constitution and left the People out of the loop.
However, capping the upload speed to something ridiculously low (10-30 k/sec) seems to fix the problem.
It makes me wonder if the upstream pipe is just saturated with all the connections made in the P2P network.
It's that, and the fact that higher upstream traffic causes higher (corresponding) downstream traffic. In fact, manipulating upstream traffic is exactly how linux QoS works. This is a very well-written guide:
You should look into getting a router that supports third-party linux firmware with QoS, like Tomato and TomatoUSB (not DDWRT, its QoS GUI (among other things) is long-broken with no fix in sight). Then you can not only cap your upstream traffic, but also give priority to certain traffic (such as DNS, HTTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, etc.) so that your internet connection is always responsive no matter what you're doing.
Don't worry, they will "shaky-cam" the footage in post and overlay the letters REC with a blinking red dot. This will override the audience's minimum quality threshold, replacing it with an appreciation for (literally) gritty realism.
Slashdot Mirror
FFS, stop trying to spin the Gamergate content. So far every single submission has bought hook, line, and sinker into the lie that it's about misogyny and harrassment, to avoid talking about what the game journalists did (and still do), and how they colluded to cover it up. This is the worst so far.
/. At least users are still in charge of moderating the discussion here, unlike most of the gaming press sites where even speaking against the groupthink is banned immediately.
This is transparent and embarassing and I never expected it out of
Hopefully Google has a plan to help stomp out this anxiety. They could tweak their search algorithms to flag pages likely to express such anxiety. And scan everyone's email for keywords that might indicate this unaccoutable anxiety over spying. And provide bounties/mechanisms for reporting suspected anxiety.
It's good to see Google calling out the real problem, and placing blame where it belongs.
Horse shit.
Your right to free speech extends only to GOVERNMENT restriction of speech. Private venues are fully within their rights to limit your speech all they want in their venue. Don't like it? Leave.
Oh, they're leaving all right. And warning everyone about how pro-censorship those venues are.
As a side note, one of the initial sparks setting off the firestorm was Zoe Quinn's fraudulent DMCA takedown request against a youtuber (MundaneMatt) talking about the controversey. The government is arguably somewhat involved in that one important case.
The controversy is called Gamergate, and it is strange that the summary doesn't mention it by name. I've never heard "gater" used to describe it before. The anti-Gamergate side has a history of trying to alter the name--they've tried "Game Ethics" and hilariously "We Love Videogames")--in an attempt to take control of the narrative, so maybe that's happening again here.
This is a good summary of the events so far (though decidedly from the pro-Gamergate side):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The wikipedia article is not much help, as it has adopted the anti-Gamergate narrative that the movement is about misogyny. Many of the primary sources cited are the same ones whose journalistic integrity has been called into question.
Here's an interview with a law and ethics professor about some of the journalistic behavior involved, and whether it's OK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Probably the most disgusting (and damning) behavior of the anti-GG side is the attempt to silence discussion, from the fraudelent DMCA notice to the initial media blackout, and ongoing widespread censorship of user forums/comments.
This is how I always explain streaming games to people who can't immediately see the horrible problems with it:
Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to be behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with Onlive, etc. it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they ded everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that Onlive would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
the "i want to be totally anonymous" solution some people seem to look for doesnt really apply to the product.
Then "the product" (Google Plus), in turn, doesn't apply to products like Search, Youtube, Gmail, Picasa, etc. . . . so keep it the FUCK away from them.
Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, this is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America (before you even consider data caps).
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who push this stuff seem very, very confused (at best).
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with this tech it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and no one has ever done anything to explain how they intend to solve them. Onlive did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that it would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streaming games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
of course the first link should have said "webpage explaining this"
One tactic I've heard of in the US is to buy a part to a gun (something small and convenient like a grip or a trigger or something). Then get a nice big lockable gun case and place it and everything else you care about inside.
Here is a video explaining this:
http://deviating.net/firearms/packing/
and a video presentation of the same:
http://vimeo.com/3923535
Which is probably a fair enough comment, given we are not talking about some vast multinational company here.
But compare it to the Kickstarter page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
After people began calling Al Sutton out over this, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).
So yes, I'll stick to calling it "shocking."
PS. A functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console.
His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.
http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?3193-Let-OUYA-know-we-NEED-to-be-able-to-boot-to-recovery
It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability. Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.
In their rush to infringe on the 2nd Amendment, New York unwittingly banned cops from carrying certain guns earlier this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_SAFE_Act#Criticisms
Poorly thought-out authoritarian extra-constititutional power-grabs aren't solely a left- or right-wing thing.
Agreed. If you count tablets as "PCs" then you should include smartphones. So don't.
Some may be wondering how this could be possible when almost all Apple devices have built-in cameras. The military employs a skilled third party to remove them completely instead of just disabling them. Here is some of his work (a Mac with the iSight taken out): http://i40.tinypic.com/2yvs9ki.jpg .
This guy makes a compelling case that it was intentional (I especially like the "can't put my finger on it" shot): http://youtu.be/K1r5dOwUS6Y
The reason I always bought Intel SSDs was because they always had Intel controllers, and Intel controllers were always stellar. Intel for years prioritized random access and did it better than anyone else. The 510 series, the first to be released with a non-Intel (Marvell) controller, seemed like such a pointless drive, with worse random performance than the 2 year old X25-M.
The problem is that sequential numbers are always faster and therefore easier to market to people who don't know any better. The 510 served a marketing need, not an engineering one.
I don't follow the market as closely anymore so I don't know if the 520 series makes any more sense, but if we know that Intel was willing to sacrifice random access performance to use a Marvell controller. What will they sacrifice for a Sandforce controller? Reliability?
Unfortunately the Intel 320 series (really the X25-M G3) has had its own reliability issues with a nasty firmware bug that causes it to suddenly report its capacity as 8MB (causing complete data loss).
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236468/intel_acknowledges_ssd_320_bug_working_on_firmware_upgrade.html
Intel on Sunday acknowledged that a bug could cause its SSD 320 solid-state drives to fail, and said a firmware upgrade is on its way to address the problem.
In some instances, a power loss may cause Intel's SSD 320 drives to crash and lose data. On rebooting the system, the system BIOS could report the SSD as having only 8MB of storage capacity. Intel two weeks ago said the error was possibly a bug, and that the issue was being investigated.
"Intel has reproduced 'Bad Context 13x Error' utilizing strenuous testing methods. This 'Bad Context 13x Error' can be addressed via a firmware update and Intel is in the process of validating the firmware update. A future update will define the schedule to deliver the firmware fix," an Intel spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.
It's ironic that a power failure triggers this problem, since Intel had marketed the 320 as especially resilient to them:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review
Intel always prided itself on not storing any user data in its DRAM cache. The external DRAM is only used to cache mapping tables and serve as the controller's scratchpad. In the event of a sudden loss of power, Intel only has to commit whatever data it has in its SRAM to NAND. To minimize the amount of data loss in the event of a sudden power failure, Intel outfitted the SSD 320 with an array of six 470F capacitors in parallel.
Some posters say it can happen without a power failure:
http://communities.intel.com/message/133499
Intel said they found the cause and released a firmware update, but applying it seems to have actually triggered the bug in previously problem-free drives for many posters:
http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121?start=0&tstart=0
Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.
This issue was enough to convince me to buy something else (even though the 320 series would otherwise have been my first choice) when I had to shop for an SSD last month. I found a used "like new" (according to the SMART data, at least) X25-M G2 on amazon instead.
Interestingly, X25-M G2 prices have held steady ($2/GB or so) and only gone up over the last year. Yeah it's probably because of dwindling supply, but I can't help but suspect that lack of confidence in the 320 series may have contributed to an increase in demand for the G2.
. . . but upon closer inspection it turns out to be Maybelline.
I should have mentioned that it was the Windows version (7.7.1).
I just installed it on your recommendation but can't find any option to disable automatic updates. Any software that requires phoning home every time it runs is a non-starter for me.
did we learn nothing from Prohibition?
Yes, they learned that passing a constitutional amendment involves the participation of the People, who then realize that it's within their power to prevent that amendment (or indeed, revoke it after the fact). Note that when they restricted both guns and drugs soon after, they just ignored the Constitution and left the People out of the loop.
No. It's just an animal native to Japan. It really does have very large testicles.
This is true. And while I sometimes have trouble shopping for pants, it's worth being able to make tough decisions and stick with them.
However, capping the upload speed to something ridiculously low (10-30 k/sec) seems to fix the problem.
It makes me wonder if the upstream pipe is just saturated with all the connections made in the P2P network.
It's that, and the fact that higher upstream traffic causes higher (corresponding) downstream traffic. In fact, manipulating upstream traffic is exactly how linux QoS works. This is a very well-written guide:
http://tomatousb.org/tut:using-tomato-s-qos-system
You should look into getting a router that supports third-party linux firmware with QoS, like Tomato and TomatoUSB (not DDWRT, its QoS GUI (among other things) is long-broken with no fix in sight). Then you can not only cap your upstream traffic, but also give priority to certain traffic (such as DNS, HTTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, etc.) so that your internet connection is always responsive no matter what you're doing.
Don't worry, they will "shaky-cam" the footage in post and overlay the letters REC with a blinking red dot. This will override the audience's minimum quality threshold, replacing it with an appreciation for (literally) gritty realism.
Why is Altavista mentioned in the title and the summary when this slashvertisement has nothing to do with them?