That is true. I wasn't really expecting a happy story to come out of a brewing battle between a fanatical horde of brutal slavers and a theoretically well intentioned but feckless and corrupt 'democracy' waging a logistically and morally questionable campaign of occupation; but they really squeezed you in that, despite your substantial power in the late game(both as a combatant, and with the support of the boomers and so on); you never appear to have even the option of forcing any of the factions to accept some other outcome than the one it originally demanded; and they all pretty much demand that you stab a bunch of the others in the back for no terribly compelling reason, or just tear everything down and read that Freeside is still a failed state.
On the other hand, part of why that failure was felt so keenly is that getting an ending required fucking over factions and people you cared about, for somewhat dodgy reasons, and without the chance to attempt to broker a more favorable outcome. In FO3, Bethesda put in a few 'Big Moral Choice' moments; but they don't have much of an impact because they ring so hollow: "Hey, you are restarting the big purifier machine! Want to betray your parent's life's work and commit mass murder for no obvious benefit because the enclave computer told you to? Please choose Yes/no." "Good work on breaking through the Enclave defenses and gaining access to the satellite targeting system. Do you want to blow up the base of the enemy that has been dogging you for most of the game, or suddenly turn on the Brotherhood for absolutely no personal reward or coherent reason and blow their base into a smoking crater instead?"
The choices you make surrounding vault 101 are the closest they get to actually affecting or bittersweet outcomes, with success meaning saving a home that is no longer yours and so on; but the other choices, while present, are pretty much a bunch of 'so, do you want to carry on helping your buddies, or just fuck them over because of cartoonish evil?'
NV really crimped your ability to either shape the outcome, despite your importance, or to just maintain the status quo and wander off into the desert; but, while went overboard on the "That's terrible; but apparently the plot won't advance until I do somebody's hatchet job..." they at least avoid the "I've just been offered a 'moral choice' where one of the outcomes is unremittingly bad and doesn't even bother to tempt me in some way" issue.
Apparently the driver still exists, it just doesn't ship with the default OS image anymore, and the OS will have to grab it from Windows update. Pretty much the same thing that they do to older printer models and other hardware from time to time.
MS is fairly conservative about actually murdering driver support that they've previously provided(firewire got the axe pretty hard; but most of the casualties are in drivers that only the vendor ever supplied, especially in XP->7 or 32->64 bit); but they've wanted to get the 'size of a windows install' down for a while now(it makes Windows tablets look a bit silly, when the OS uses more space than the lower end Android and iOS tablets have); and the safety of assuming that the customer has an internet connection is probably greater now than ever.
The actual playback application gets included because many users want out-of-box features, that one among them. The other incentive(and the one that makes the visible application comparatively trivial to include) is that OSes have a stronger incentive to include some sort of media framework that makes it relatively easy for people building applications for their platform to include media handling and allows those applications to benefit from additional capabilities provided by other media handling programs on the system without additional work to explicitly support them.
For Windows, that's Directshow and 'Media Foundation'. WMP is a relatively small(honestly fairly lousy) shell around the actual media framework. OSX does much the same thing with Quicktime, and the FOSS world has gstreamer and Phonon. These systems can get pretty hairy(XP with a couple of dodgy codec packs installed, in particular, frequently ended up in such bad shape that either installing VLC or nuking the system was the best way to get playback again); but when they work as intended, you get the very neat effect that anything that needs media handling can more or less automatically and more or less cleanly share the capabilities of other media handling software that might be on the system, without needing to do more than be able to accept some flavor of output for display.
Unless MS is really interested in turning the screws(in which case update handling will presumably interact with OS validation in some way intended to make it tricky to crack); the inability to defer updates will probably be a few registry keys that work equally well on any SKU; but don't have a UI anymore, and are intended to be manipulated with Group Policy in a domain environment.
Doesn't mean that it isn't a heavy handed move predicated on the assumption that consumers are idiot sheep who can't be trusted; but barring special effort it will probably require 10 minutes in regedit to do yourself.
This is also a fairly niche issue(given that most people shoving DVDs into computers either want them to Just Play, or want to rip the to some format that means never dealing with DVDs); but I'd assume that the MS codec that is being killed is a DirectShow filter; while everything in VLC's bag of tricks is specific to VLC(though some programs do specifically use VLC for various things).
In practice, the words 'DirectShow Filter Graph' typically mean that somebody just opened an industrial sized box of incomprehensible pain; but the theory is noble: it's Microsoft's stab at a modular media handling system that allows a given application to painlessly 'inherit' codecs, effects, demuxing steps, and assorted other operations provided by other software without having to be built with them in mind. If the application uses DirectShow, and there is a set of filters that will get you from the item you are attempting to play to the format the sink requires, things are supposed to work.
There are some atrocious complications(shitty 'codec packs' registering themselves as the most preferred codec for every possible situation, even ones they are horribly broken at, seemed to be a favorite), and much of the time the theoretical elegance of the system was excessive to the actual need, while the complexity was always lurking; but there probably are a few users who will find the announcement painful for this reason. VLC, ffmpeg, etc. are very good at what they do; but just as OSX-native applications expect Quicktime to handle media, and anything that isn't a quicktime plugin will remain isolated solely in the one playback program that it came with, Windows native applications expect Directshow, and if some piece of software is demanding a set of directshow filters that can take a DVD and do something useful, all the VLC in the world will not save them. Not VLC's problem; but one of the reasons why some users are going to be unhappy.
That's what surprised me so much about Skyrim: Fallout:NV had a fairly well fleshed out location based damage system, with both gameplay strategic implications and the pure gory amusement of taking limbs off.
Then they made a game set in a location where basically everyone carries a giant battleaxe or a huge sword all the time, and the only amputations are relatively rare decapitations that occur if and only if you have the right perk for your weapon type. Why?
No location would be immune from a potential fuckup; but The Institute, from its brief appearance in FO3, would be something I'd love to get to poke around in. Seeing a large, significant; but not Washington city post-nuclear-war, will also be interesting(Boston definitely does enough to earn a nuke in any likely superpower-scale missile exchange; but the distribution would be different from Washington, since federal infrastructure is quite limited and a lot of the defense contractors and such are outside the city, where space is cheaper).
I could also seriously consider delighting in the presence of a group of non-feral-but-deeply-unhinged ghouls who have gone from revolutionary war reenactment into full-scale holding-bunker-hill-with-muskets for reasons they no longer understand. Not a joke that could take too much beating; but if ghoul in a tricorn hat happened to attempt an authentic black powder musket kill on my vault dweller, I'd be delighted.
There is a legitimate argument to be made that 'Fallout' as in 'Old School Bioware RPG style; but with sardonic humor and the distinctive insanity of '50s civil-defense-and-suburbia taken to their logical extreme' did indeed die. The overhead, party-based, turn-based RPG, it is no more. Even Tactics, however tepidly it was received, was much closer to classic Fallout; and 'Van Beuren' died with Black Isle.
However, I'd agree that, while Bethesda didn't really understand the Fallout spirit(FO3 was a competent RPG and didn't do anything egregious in terms of fucking with canon; but it could have been transplanted into a non-fallout post-apocalypse without much modification), they did a fairly commendable job in reconciling the "the market wants first-person action RPGs" pressure with "Fallout is Not a first-person action RPG". It needed some refinement(the skills list, in particular, was much stronger in NV); but VATS was a surprisingly elegant compromise.
Obsidian understands the hell out of what makes Fallout Fallout, so NV was much more a 'Fallout' game, rather than just a 'post-apocalyptic game with fallout compatible canon', and they tightened up some of the v.1 mistakes from FO3's character and stat design. FO4 is, arguably, where we see if Bethesda has what it takes to establish a worthy 'east coast Fallout' aesthetic and gameworld(which needn't be the same as 'classic'; but can't just be another greyish post-nuclear shooter), or whether they did an adequate job of laying the foundations; but should really leave the game-building to Obsidian.
The one case where 'special charm' started to blur into 'is how much I'm enjoying this a bad sign?' is when Sit and Dream is on the radio and you are ensconced in a concealed, elevated, location with your COS silencer rifle; and you suddenly realize that you are timing your headshots by waiting for either "Sleep, go to sleep" or "just lay down your weary head"(especially for decapitations).
It does add a certain ambiance; and it's not as though Cottonwood Cove isn't full of assholes who have it coming; but 'using soothing lullaby style song as background for covert sniper attack' seems like one of those things that might make me a bad person...
It's a slightly weird tactic because of how deeply their GOTY editions eventually end up being discounted. I imagine that the cynical appeal of 'charge the fans full price for the game, full price for each DLC' is obvious, and why they do it; but it's a bit surprising that they don't have a stage between 'everything is full price' and 'GOTY is 75% off', where base game is still 100% of release; but 'DLC complete pack' is available to owners of the base game for a substantial discount in order to mop up the residual demand of people enthusiastic enough to buy the base game at full price; but not to go all in and shell out for each DLC at full price.
Instead, they just seem to go directly from 'everything full price' to 'GOTY available, frequently on sale for less than the price of buying 1-2 of the 4 DLCs separately'.
Not that I mind, when I'm in the position to buy that version; but it seems like a slightly curious discontinuity in the price discrimination strategy.
Depends: in NV, 'normal' mode made party members vulnerable to damage; but on 'death' they'd just fall unconscious for a short time(typically until the fight was over, so you couldn't just cynically meat-shield your way through a tough fight, because the enemy would turn and finish you before they woke up again); but they could not be permanently slain. In 'Hardcore', they would die, permanently, if their HP was depleted.
While the latter is more realistic, my experience was that the companion AI and pathfinding weren't really good enough to make permadeath anything but brutally frustrating. Especially in tight spots(like, say, vaults full of feral ghouls) they tended to 'warp' around, making any sort of "now, we are watching each other's backs and focusing fire on targets closing to melee" collaboration nearly impossible; and they also weren't much good at self preservation behavior like 'running away' or 'using antivenom, even though I gave you ten goddamn doses and you know that cazador stings aren't good for you'). In FO1 and 2(and even Tactics) you had something much more along the lines of the top-down and turn based RPG experience, and keeping party members alive was a challenge; but it was at least a challenge you could actually do useful things about, because you were calling the shots. in 3 and NV, 'companions' responded to only a limited set of commands and were pretty loosely controlled.
I'd love to see a take on the 3/NV 'companion' smart enough that permadeath would actually add to the game, not just require a lot of loading-from-save or telling the companion to wait in a safe area while I do all the work; but that will likely require some fairly substantial advances.
Like the intro to Fallout 3, it's intended to show somebody who knows nothing at all about the game enough that they can at least get themselves killed competently, rather than because they can't find the stimpack in their inventory and don't know what VATS is. If memory serves, it's also a fair bit shorter than the Fallout 3 intro(which was well done, and so fine the first time; but having to spend ten minutes being a baby and another 15 dealing with adolescent vault-bullying every time you want to try a new character build gets kind of dull). The character creation stuff in Doc Mitchell's house is obligatory; but you can skip Sunny Smiles' quest entirely(though it's a generous early-game source of caps and 5.56 rounds, so you might not want to).
Once you get past the intro, the game mechanics are largely the same(SPECIAL and VATS); but there is some additional polish to the skills and perks; the gameworld is really markedly different from the Capitol Wasteland; the local factions and characters are mostly well done and don't overlap at all with FO3(the Brotherhood of Steel is technically present in both games; but in very different capacities).
NV isn't a wildly radical re-imagining of what Fallout should look like in 3D or anything; but it's modestly more technically competent and polished than FO3 is(hence the existence of the Tale of Two Wastelands project; and it is very much it's own RPG. FO3 is a much more 'apocalyptic' take, since Washington was an obvious candidate for getting nuked to hell, and there's a lot more crumbling-cityscape and deaths by radiation and supermutant attack; along with the fact that the East Coast Enclave are still a reasonably viable force. NV is very much post apocalyptic; but there's a lot less tightly packed death zone and a lot more wilderness(some of it largely benign, some brutally lethal; seriously, don't fuck with Cazarores, or try to stop a deathclaw with anything less than.308 AP) and political and military struggle between new powers that aren't just scrabbling for canned goods in the smoking rubble and are actually starting to jockey for power in a post apocalyptic rebuilding.
You obviously don't have to trust my advice or anything; but especially if you already own the game(or find it when it goes on sale, which it frequently does), you are really missing out by not giving it a few more minutes to make its case. Let the doc patch you up, don't even talk to Sunny if you don't feel like it. If you really hate the intended early game, you can even go 'in reverse' by heading directly from Goodsprings to Camp McCarran: it takes a touch of practice; but there's a fairly safe path from Yangtze Memorial(veer to your right a bit if you see radscorpions on your left, early game weapons don't do much against their armor) and between Sloan and Black Mountain more or less straight to Repconn HQ. There are deathclaws on your left and supermutants on your right; but even feeble sneak skill should allow you to avoid the attention of the deathclaws without getting too close to the supermutants(always err on the side of too close to the supermutants: a deathclaw can run faster than you can, and is functionally unstoppable at low levels. A supermutant is something you probably can't defeat at low level; but it will usually stand and shoot at you and not pursue particularly aggressively. Unless you get particularly unlucky, or your character build has nearly no HP, you can survive being fired on, for a short time and at a distance, by a supermutant, which gives you time to get away).
Once you make it to Repcon HQ, you can either swing right and head to freeside, or head to Camp McCarran(if you go this way, try to stick reasonably close to the wall, where NCR troopers will provide a mixture of fire support and meat shield against any fiends. You can usually score some energy weapons from the fiends and and some 5.56, a
With 22 different models of crap home routers I would have expected the pen-testing equivalent of clotted rivers of gore pouring through heaps of smouldering rubble and pooling around the skull pyramids that seem to rise higher than the walls that once offered the false promise of shelter. Not merely 60 serious vulnerabilities.
Don't worry, things will still be nice and confusing: It is valid to use a "Type C" connector in conjunction with a USB2 chipset(at least on the peripheral end, and probably in practice on the computer end). Further, if the "Type C" connector is actually USB3, there is the matter of "Alternate mode".
"Alternate mode" allows the Type C jack and cable to act as a conduit for an entirely different protocol(Displayport and MHL have previously been announced, Intel's announcement presumably means that thunderbolt is along for the ride); but only if the system has the hardware necessary to implement whatever the other protocol is, and that hardware is suitably connected to the Type C jack in question. It doesn't actually give a USB 3.1(gen1 or gen2, yes there's that difference as well) device the ability to natively handle the other protocol in the USB silicon, merely to politely carry it from one end to the other, if the upstream device can generate it and the downstream device can accept it.
So, when you combine this with the inevitable variations in how much power is available(spec allows for up to 100watts; but given that very few laptops, much less littler widgets, even have a hundred watt brick for their own needs, it is clearly the case that most Type C ports will be good for substantially less); a Type C port can do almost anything; but is required to do effectively nothing beyond acting as a USB 2 slave device and not starting any fires when plugged in. It might have full USB 3 silicon, it might not. It might support 10GB/s traffic, it might only handle half that; it might deliver 100 watts of power on request, it might be incapable of doing much besides browning out without a powered hub to protect it. It might have implemented one or more 'Alternate mode' protocols, it might support none.
It's never 'welfare' if it involves defense spending: the spending doesn't have to actually increase security, or deliver a product that actually works(it's even acceptable to putz along for a decade or two until the project becomes so hopeless that it is quietly killed without ever delivering a product); but so long as it's for 'defense' and involves some sort of visible business, it's not welfare.
Since this is bullshit, we simply treat it as axiomatically true, which sidesteps what would otherwise be a tedious and difficult matter of 'proof'.
Exactly. When it's your own gear, you only have to worry about vulnerabilities that can be exploited despite whatever measures you have in place.
If there's potentially malware that embeds itself hard enough to resist a disk wipe, or even replacement, you have to worry about the prior owner's security, incompetence, potential malice, etc. And that's even if you aren't cool enough to have the NSA 'implant' teams intercepting your mail.
Given the size of the secondary market for things with firmware in them(ie. basically all computer parts more sophisticated than cables; and even some of the cables these days), I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't already become an epic clusterfuck. Especially with scary little things like LOM modules, which are full computers, most commonly with independent NICs, that you graft right into the brainstem of your servers. Flooding the market with poisoned LOM cards/modules seems like the sort of thing that might even be worth it for a commercially minded criminal, much less a nation state looking for juicy secrets.
Given that FPGAs are big, slow, and hot compared to equivalent logic built as a fixed function chip(but with the obvious benefit of not being fixed function), Altera FPGAs manufactured on the fanciest processes available seem like a fairly obvious product of the acquisition.
Any bets on what other purposes they have in mind? FPGAs with one or more QPI links built in, for fast interconnect with Xeons? Xeons with FPGAs on die? Intel NICs with substantially greater packet-mangling capabilities, at full wire speed, thanks to reconfigurable logic?
Merely producing FPGAs on a nice process is logical; but could also be done just by selling them fab services. They presumably have a plan that goes beyond that.
Aren't we all smart enough to turn off the adware during install? I even know some old people who turn off "add-ons" that they don't need.
Well, given that adware 'offers' still get injected into installers, I'm going to use my incredible mental thinking skills to hypothesize "no, we aren't".
Aside from that, even if you don't get hit by the adware, having to defang an installer just to use a program leaves the indistinguishable taste of pure sleaze in your mouth for the rest of the process(looking at you, Oracle and the Ask.com toolbar...)
Sourceforge is dragging the GIMP project's name through the mud by bundling this shit, even if they don't hit anyone. That alone is more than enough to be displeased by.
Given that laptops(especially Apple's) are an increasingly heroic enterprise to open; 'internal jumper' probably isn't happening; but you might be able to get away with some other 'physical presence verification' mechanism that exploits buttons that the system already possesses(similar to the way that Chromebooks killed physical dev-mode switches, because OEMs didn't like the added cost, so now it's some multi-key combo during boot).
Not as good as a true hardware write protect(in theory, a suitably capable attack might be able to emulate USB HID or ACPI button events); but much more likely to actually happen than anything that requires cracking the case or increasing the BoM.
If I'm just harvesting nodes for my botnet, macs are pretty lousy targets, no more capable than PCs and substantially more obscure.
If I'm attacking systems for the data on them, or to MiTM/trojan/keylog the users of the systems; grab banking credentials and the like; mac users are a conveniently self-selected group of people atypically worth harvesting. Sure, there are a bunch of underemployed baristas with degrees in Individuality using the macbook pro that mommy and daddy bought them to watch movies in their dorm room; but as a whole, thanks to the higher prices, users of OSX devices skew upmarket pretty substantially(iOS devices have some of the same effect; but much less, since at least an iPhone 5c or the like is probably available as the 'free'-with-usurious-contract model on most telcos).
If you are attempting a corporate/institutional intrusion, macs vary in value: they are way, way, less common, frequently absent entirely; but where they are present, their minority status often means very limited integration into the enterprise's legion of 'security' products, IDSes, and everything else that the Windows users complain is causing logins to take 30 minutes. This makes them handy 'beachhead' systems, especially if they are loaded up with Office, Adobe Malware Runtime, and similar stuff that may well have cross-platform or partially shared libraries of vulnerabilities; but much reduced vigilance on OSX clients.
Less of an issue among people/organizations who exclusively buy new, from manufacturer or authorized retailer; but (at least on the PC side, I don't deal much with mac procurement), refurbished off-lease units are an enormous market. Very, very, popular with organizations that can't afford to ride the latest-and-greatest. It's not glamorous (something like the Optiplex 780 is nothing to write home about; but if you need a few computer labs or a cube farm on a tight budget, the fact that you can get units with an adequate 3rd party warranty, no DOA, 4GB of RAM, and an adequately punchy CPU for ~$150, sometimes a little less, each, is pretty compelling.
"Previous owner" isn't a scary vulnerability for exploits that live at the OS level; all the refurb stuff typically gets wiped once by the refurb house during their testing process, and re-imaged when it reaches the customer; but it is damn scary for firmware-level exploits. Especially motherboard firmware(HDD firmware exploits are scary; but taking out the HDD and shredding it, then replacing it with another low-capacity-everything-is-on-the-network-anyway boot disk is at least cheap); which compromises the system at a scary-deep level, and also compromises the component that makes up most of the value of the computer.
Without a good OS-level vector, preferably with a nice internet infection capability, it isn't a good candidate for a pandemic; but if this sort of firmware fuckery makes the used market about as reliable as buying street drugs, it will have a major impact.
When it comes to 'software replacing teachers', we really haven't made many fundamental advances since Gutenberg(who at least substantially increased the percentage of the world's books that weren't produced by students taking lecture notes in class, which presumably meant that you at least had the option of reading the textbook and skipping the class). If you just need information, technology has done quite well, and continues to make improvements; but if you aren't ready to turn information into knowledge all by yourself, there isn't much on offer.
There is a certain amount of irony; but it's those years of expensive and supply-limiting training that are precisely what make such an attractive target.
It's not an easy target; the computer system that ends up replacing your radiologist or your lawyer or whatever will likely have cost far, far, more to develop than the human it replaced did to raise and train(even if you count the human's recreational spending); but the computer's ability to do work will just keep increasing if you buy more silicon, while the human doesn't scale. If you could hire a single radiologist and make him more productive just by buying additional office chairs, you probably wouldn't bother with the robot.
Based on my (layman's) reading of CDC data from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report; it would appear that we may have settled on a solution for the middle aged and surplus.
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That is true. I wasn't really expecting a happy story to come out of a brewing battle between a fanatical horde of brutal slavers and a theoretically well intentioned but feckless and corrupt 'democracy' waging a logistically and morally questionable campaign of occupation; but they really squeezed you in that, despite your substantial power in the late game(both as a combatant, and with the support of the boomers and so on); you never appear to have even the option of forcing any of the factions to accept some other outcome than the one it originally demanded; and they all pretty much demand that you stab a bunch of the others in the back for no terribly compelling reason, or just tear everything down and read that Freeside is still a failed state.
On the other hand, part of why that failure was felt so keenly is that getting an ending required fucking over factions and people you cared about, for somewhat dodgy reasons, and without the chance to attempt to broker a more favorable outcome. In FO3, Bethesda put in a few 'Big Moral Choice' moments; but they don't have much of an impact because they ring so hollow: "Hey, you are restarting the big purifier machine! Want to betray your parent's life's work and commit mass murder for no obvious benefit because the enclave computer told you to? Please choose Yes/no." "Good work on breaking through the Enclave defenses and gaining access to the satellite targeting system. Do you want to blow up the base of the enemy that has been dogging you for most of the game, or suddenly turn on the Brotherhood for absolutely no personal reward or coherent reason and blow their base into a smoking crater instead?"
The choices you make surrounding vault 101 are the closest they get to actually affecting or bittersweet outcomes, with success meaning saving a home that is no longer yours and so on; but the other choices, while present, are pretty much a bunch of 'so, do you want to carry on helping your buddies, or just fuck them over because of cartoonish evil?'
NV really crimped your ability to either shape the outcome, despite your importance, or to just maintain the status quo and wander off into the desert; but, while went overboard on the "That's terrible; but apparently the plot won't advance until I do somebody's hatchet job..." they at least avoid the "I've just been offered a 'moral choice' where one of the outcomes is unremittingly bad and doesn't even bother to tempt me in some way" issue.
Apparently the driver still exists, it just doesn't ship with the default OS image anymore, and the OS will have to grab it from Windows update. Pretty much the same thing that they do to older printer models and other hardware from time to time.
MS is fairly conservative about actually murdering driver support that they've previously provided(firewire got the axe pretty hard; but most of the casualties are in drivers that only the vendor ever supplied, especially in XP->7 or 32->64 bit); but they've wanted to get the 'size of a windows install' down for a while now(it makes Windows tablets look a bit silly, when the OS uses more space than the lower end Android and iOS tablets have); and the safety of assuming that the customer has an internet connection is probably greater now than ever.
The actual playback application gets included because many users want out-of-box features, that one among them. The other incentive(and the one that makes the visible application comparatively trivial to include) is that OSes have a stronger incentive to include some sort of media framework that makes it relatively easy for people building applications for their platform to include media handling and allows those applications to benefit from additional capabilities provided by other media handling programs on the system without additional work to explicitly support them.
For Windows, that's Directshow and 'Media Foundation'. WMP is a relatively small(honestly fairly lousy) shell around the actual media framework. OSX does much the same thing with Quicktime, and the FOSS world has gstreamer and Phonon. These systems can get pretty hairy(XP with a couple of dodgy codec packs installed, in particular, frequently ended up in such bad shape that either installing VLC or nuking the system was the best way to get playback again); but when they work as intended, you get the very neat effect that anything that needs media handling can more or less automatically and more or less cleanly share the capabilities of other media handling software that might be on the system, without needing to do more than be able to accept some flavor of output for display.
Unless MS is really interested in turning the screws(in which case update handling will presumably interact with OS validation in some way intended to make it tricky to crack); the inability to defer updates will probably be a few registry keys that work equally well on any SKU; but don't have a UI anymore, and are intended to be manipulated with Group Policy in a domain environment.
Doesn't mean that it isn't a heavy handed move predicated on the assumption that consumers are idiot sheep who can't be trusted; but barring special effort it will probably require 10 minutes in regedit to do yourself.
This is also a fairly niche issue(given that most people shoving DVDs into computers either want them to Just Play, or want to rip the to some format that means never dealing with DVDs); but I'd assume that the MS codec that is being killed is a DirectShow filter; while everything in VLC's bag of tricks is specific to VLC(though some programs do specifically use VLC for various things).
In practice, the words 'DirectShow Filter Graph' typically mean that somebody just opened an industrial sized box of incomprehensible pain; but the theory is noble: it's Microsoft's stab at a modular media handling system that allows a given application to painlessly 'inherit' codecs, effects, demuxing steps, and assorted other operations provided by other software without having to be built with them in mind. If the application uses DirectShow, and there is a set of filters that will get you from the item you are attempting to play to the format the sink requires, things are supposed to work.
There are some atrocious complications(shitty 'codec packs' registering themselves as the most preferred codec for every possible situation, even ones they are horribly broken at, seemed to be a favorite), and much of the time the theoretical elegance of the system was excessive to the actual need, while the complexity was always lurking; but there probably are a few users who will find the announcement painful for this reason. VLC, ffmpeg, etc. are very good at what they do; but just as OSX-native applications expect Quicktime to handle media, and anything that isn't a quicktime plugin will remain isolated solely in the one playback program that it came with, Windows native applications expect Directshow, and if some piece of software is demanding a set of directshow filters that can take a DVD and do something useful, all the VLC in the world will not save them. Not VLC's problem; but one of the reasons why some users are going to be unhappy.
That's what surprised me so much about Skyrim: Fallout:NV had a fairly well fleshed out location based damage system, with both gameplay strategic implications and the pure gory amusement of taking limbs off.
Then they made a game set in a location where basically everyone carries a giant battleaxe or a huge sword all the time, and the only amputations are relatively rare decapitations that occur if and only if you have the right perk for your weapon type. Why?
No location would be immune from a potential fuckup; but The Institute, from its brief appearance in FO3, would be something I'd love to get to poke around in. Seeing a large, significant; but not Washington city post-nuclear-war, will also be interesting(Boston definitely does enough to earn a nuke in any likely superpower-scale missile exchange; but the distribution would be different from Washington, since federal infrastructure is quite limited and a lot of the defense contractors and such are outside the city, where space is cheaper).
I could also seriously consider delighting in the presence of a group of non-feral-but-deeply-unhinged ghouls who have gone from revolutionary war reenactment into full-scale holding-bunker-hill-with-muskets for reasons they no longer understand. Not a joke that could take too much beating; but if ghoul in a tricorn hat happened to attempt an authentic black powder musket kill on my vault dweller, I'd be delighted.
There is a legitimate argument to be made that 'Fallout' as in 'Old School Bioware RPG style; but with sardonic humor and the distinctive insanity of '50s civil-defense-and-suburbia taken to their logical extreme' did indeed die. The overhead, party-based, turn-based RPG, it is no more. Even Tactics, however tepidly it was received, was much closer to classic Fallout; and 'Van Beuren' died with Black Isle.
However, I'd agree that, while Bethesda didn't really understand the Fallout spirit(FO3 was a competent RPG and didn't do anything egregious in terms of fucking with canon; but it could have been transplanted into a non-fallout post-apocalypse without much modification), they did a fairly commendable job in reconciling the "the market wants first-person action RPGs" pressure with "Fallout is Not a first-person action RPG". It needed some refinement(the skills list, in particular, was much stronger in NV); but VATS was a surprisingly elegant compromise.
Obsidian understands the hell out of what makes Fallout Fallout, so NV was much more a 'Fallout' game, rather than just a 'post-apocalyptic game with fallout compatible canon', and they tightened up some of the v.1 mistakes from FO3's character and stat design. FO4 is, arguably, where we see if Bethesda has what it takes to establish a worthy 'east coast Fallout' aesthetic and gameworld(which needn't be the same as 'classic'; but can't just be another greyish post-nuclear shooter), or whether they did an adequate job of laying the foundations; but should really leave the game-building to Obsidian.
The one case where 'special charm' started to blur into 'is how much I'm enjoying this a bad sign?' is when Sit and Dream is on the radio and you are ensconced in a concealed, elevated, location with your COS silencer rifle; and you suddenly realize that you are timing your headshots by waiting for either "Sleep, go to sleep" or "just lay down your weary head"(especially for decapitations).
It does add a certain ambiance; and it's not as though Cottonwood Cove isn't full of assholes who have it coming; but 'using soothing lullaby style song as background for covert sniper attack' seems like one of those things that might make me a bad person...
You didn't take the "Puppies!" perk?
It's a slightly weird tactic because of how deeply their GOTY editions eventually end up being discounted. I imagine that the cynical appeal of 'charge the fans full price for the game, full price for each DLC' is obvious, and why they do it; but it's a bit surprising that they don't have a stage between 'everything is full price' and 'GOTY is 75% off', where base game is still 100% of release; but 'DLC complete pack' is available to owners of the base game for a substantial discount in order to mop up the residual demand of people enthusiastic enough to buy the base game at full price; but not to go all in and shell out for each DLC at full price.
Instead, they just seem to go directly from 'everything full price' to 'GOTY available, frequently on sale for less than the price of buying 1-2 of the 4 DLCs separately'.
Not that I mind, when I'm in the position to buy that version; but it seems like a slightly curious discontinuity in the price discrimination strategy.
Aren't party members invincible?
Depends: in NV, 'normal' mode made party members vulnerable to damage; but on 'death' they'd just fall unconscious for a short time(typically until the fight was over, so you couldn't just cynically meat-shield your way through a tough fight, because the enemy would turn and finish you before they woke up again); but they could not be permanently slain. In 'Hardcore', they would die, permanently, if their HP was depleted.
While the latter is more realistic, my experience was that the companion AI and pathfinding weren't really good enough to make permadeath anything but brutally frustrating. Especially in tight spots(like, say, vaults full of feral ghouls) they tended to 'warp' around, making any sort of "now, we are watching each other's backs and focusing fire on targets closing to melee" collaboration nearly impossible; and they also weren't much good at self preservation behavior like 'running away' or 'using antivenom, even though I gave you ten goddamn doses and you know that cazador stings aren't good for you'). In FO1 and 2(and even Tactics) you had something much more along the lines of the top-down and turn based RPG experience, and keeping party members alive was a challenge; but it was at least a challenge you could actually do useful things about, because you were calling the shots. in 3 and NV, 'companions' responded to only a limited set of commands and were pretty loosely controlled.
I'd love to see a take on the 3/NV 'companion' smart enough that permadeath would actually add to the game, not just require a lot of loading-from-save or telling the companion to wait in a safe area while I do all the work; but that will likely require some fairly substantial advances.
I wouldn't let the intro to NV put you off:
.308 AP) and political and military struggle between new powers that aren't just scrabbling for canned goods in the smoking rubble and are actually starting to jockey for power in a post apocalyptic rebuilding.
Like the intro to Fallout 3, it's intended to show somebody who knows nothing at all about the game enough that they can at least get themselves killed competently, rather than because they can't find the stimpack in their inventory and don't know what VATS is. If memory serves, it's also a fair bit shorter than the Fallout 3 intro(which was well done, and so fine the first time; but having to spend ten minutes being a baby and another 15 dealing with adolescent vault-bullying every time you want to try a new character build gets kind of dull). The character creation stuff in Doc Mitchell's house is obligatory; but you can skip Sunny Smiles' quest entirely(though it's a generous early-game source of caps and 5.56 rounds, so you might not want to).
Once you get past the intro, the game mechanics are largely the same(SPECIAL and VATS); but there is some additional polish to the skills and perks; the gameworld is really markedly different from the Capitol Wasteland; the local factions and characters are mostly well done and don't overlap at all with FO3(the Brotherhood of Steel is technically present in both games; but in very different capacities).
NV isn't a wildly radical re-imagining of what Fallout should look like in 3D or anything; but it's modestly more technically competent and polished than FO3 is(hence the existence of the Tale of Two Wastelands project; and it is very much it's own RPG. FO3 is a much more 'apocalyptic' take, since Washington was an obvious candidate for getting nuked to hell, and there's a lot more crumbling-cityscape and deaths by radiation and supermutant attack; along with the fact that the East Coast Enclave are still a reasonably viable force. NV is very much post apocalyptic; but there's a lot less tightly packed death zone and a lot more wilderness(some of it largely benign, some brutally lethal; seriously, don't fuck with Cazarores, or try to stop a deathclaw with anything less than
You obviously don't have to trust my advice or anything; but especially if you already own the game(or find it when it goes on sale, which it frequently does), you are really missing out by not giving it a few more minutes to make its case. Let the doc patch you up, don't even talk to Sunny if you don't feel like it. If you really hate the intended early game, you can even go 'in reverse' by heading directly from Goodsprings to Camp McCarran: it takes a touch of practice; but there's a fairly safe path from Yangtze Memorial(veer to your right a bit if you see radscorpions on your left, early game weapons don't do much against their armor) and between Sloan and Black Mountain more or less straight to Repconn HQ. There are deathclaws on your left and supermutants on your right; but even feeble sneak skill should allow you to avoid the attention of the deathclaws without getting too close to the supermutants(always err on the side of too close to the supermutants: a deathclaw can run faster than you can, and is functionally unstoppable at low levels. A supermutant is something you probably can't defeat at low level; but it will usually stand and shoot at you and not pursue particularly aggressively. Unless you get particularly unlucky, or your character build has nearly no HP, you can survive being fired on, for a short time and at a distance, by a supermutant, which gives you time to get away).
Once you make it to Repcon HQ, you can either swing right and head to freeside, or head to Camp McCarran(if you go this way, try to stick reasonably close to the wall, where NCR troopers will provide a mixture of fire support and meat shield against any fiends. You can usually score some energy weapons from the fiends and and some 5.56, a
With 22 different models of crap home routers I would have expected the pen-testing equivalent of clotted rivers of gore pouring through heaps of smouldering rubble and pooling around the skull pyramids that seem to rise higher than the walls that once offered the false promise of shelter. Not merely 60 serious vulnerabilities.
Don't worry, things will still be nice and confusing: It is valid to use a "Type C" connector in conjunction with a USB2 chipset(at least on the peripheral end, and probably in practice on the computer end). Further, if the "Type C" connector is actually USB3, there is the matter of "Alternate mode".
"Alternate mode" allows the Type C jack and cable to act as a conduit for an entirely different protocol(Displayport and MHL have previously been announced, Intel's announcement presumably means that thunderbolt is along for the ride); but only if the system has the hardware necessary to implement whatever the other protocol is, and that hardware is suitably connected to the Type C jack in question. It doesn't actually give a USB 3.1(gen1 or gen2, yes there's that difference as well) device the ability to natively handle the other protocol in the USB silicon, merely to politely carry it from one end to the other, if the upstream device can generate it and the downstream device can accept it.
So, when you combine this with the inevitable variations in how much power is available(spec allows for up to 100watts; but given that very few laptops, much less littler widgets, even have a hundred watt brick for their own needs, it is clearly the case that most Type C ports will be good for substantially less); a Type C port can do almost anything; but is required to do effectively nothing beyond acting as a USB 2 slave device and not starting any fires when plugged in. It might have full USB 3 silicon, it might not. It might support 10GB/s traffic, it might only handle half that; it might deliver 100 watts of power on request, it might be incapable of doing much besides browning out without a powered hub to protect it. It might have implemented one or more 'Alternate mode' protocols, it might support none.
It will certainly be exciting, at least...
It's never 'welfare' if it involves defense spending: the spending doesn't have to actually increase security, or deliver a product that actually works(it's even acceptable to putz along for a decade or two until the project becomes so hopeless that it is quietly killed without ever delivering a product); but so long as it's for 'defense' and involves some sort of visible business, it's not welfare.
Since this is bullshit, we simply treat it as axiomatically true, which sidesteps what would otherwise be a tedious and difficult matter of 'proof'.
Exactly. When it's your own gear, you only have to worry about vulnerabilities that can be exploited despite whatever measures you have in place.
If there's potentially malware that embeds itself hard enough to resist a disk wipe, or even replacement, you have to worry about the prior owner's security, incompetence, potential malice, etc. And that's even if you aren't cool enough to have the NSA 'implant' teams intercepting your mail.
Given the size of the secondary market for things with firmware in them(ie. basically all computer parts more sophisticated than cables; and even some of the cables these days), I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't already become an epic clusterfuck. Especially with scary little things like LOM modules, which are full computers, most commonly with independent NICs, that you graft right into the brainstem of your servers. Flooding the market with poisoned LOM cards/modules seems like the sort of thing that might even be worth it for a commercially minded criminal, much less a nation state looking for juicy secrets.
Given that FPGAs are big, slow, and hot compared to equivalent logic built as a fixed function chip(but with the obvious benefit of not being fixed function), Altera FPGAs manufactured on the fanciest processes available seem like a fairly obvious product of the acquisition.
Any bets on what other purposes they have in mind? FPGAs with one or more QPI links built in, for fast interconnect with Xeons? Xeons with FPGAs on die? Intel NICs with substantially greater packet-mangling capabilities, at full wire speed, thanks to reconfigurable logic?
Merely producing FPGAs on a nice process is logical; but could also be done just by selling them fab services. They presumably have a plan that goes beyond that.
Aren't we all smart enough to turn off the adware during install? I even know some old people who turn off "add-ons" that they don't need.
Well, given that adware 'offers' still get injected into installers, I'm going to use my incredible mental thinking skills to hypothesize "no, we aren't".
Aside from that, even if you don't get hit by the adware, having to defang an installer just to use a program leaves the indistinguishable taste of pure sleaze in your mouth for the rest of the process(looking at you, Oracle and the Ask.com toolbar...)
Sourceforge is dragging the GIMP project's name through the mud by bundling this shit, even if they don't hit anyone. That alone is more than enough to be displeased by.
Given that laptops(especially Apple's) are an increasingly heroic enterprise to open; 'internal jumper' probably isn't happening; but you might be able to get away with some other 'physical presence verification' mechanism that exploits buttons that the system already possesses(similar to the way that Chromebooks killed physical dev-mode switches, because OEMs didn't like the added cost, so now it's some multi-key combo during boot).
Not as good as a true hardware write protect(in theory, a suitably capable attack might be able to emulate USB HID or ACPI button events); but much more likely to actually happen than anything that requires cracking the case or increasing the BoM.
If I'm just harvesting nodes for my botnet, macs are pretty lousy targets, no more capable than PCs and substantially more obscure.
If I'm attacking systems for the data on them, or to MiTM/trojan/keylog the users of the systems; grab banking credentials and the like; mac users are a conveniently self-selected group of people atypically worth harvesting. Sure, there are a bunch of underemployed baristas with degrees in Individuality using the macbook pro that mommy and daddy bought them to watch movies in their dorm room; but as a whole, thanks to the higher prices, users of OSX devices skew upmarket pretty substantially(iOS devices have some of the same effect; but much less, since at least an iPhone 5c or the like is probably available as the 'free'-with-usurious-contract model on most telcos).
If you are attempting a corporate/institutional intrusion, macs vary in value: they are way, way, less common, frequently absent entirely; but where they are present, their minority status often means very limited integration into the enterprise's legion of 'security' products, IDSes, and everything else that the Windows users complain is causing logins to take 30 minutes. This makes them handy 'beachhead' systems, especially if they are loaded up with Office, Adobe Malware Runtime, and similar stuff that may well have cross-platform or partially shared libraries of vulnerabilities; but much reduced vigilance on OSX clients.
Less of an issue among people/organizations who exclusively buy new, from manufacturer or authorized retailer; but (at least on the PC side, I don't deal much with mac procurement), refurbished off-lease units are an enormous market. Very, very, popular with organizations that can't afford to ride the latest-and-greatest. It's not glamorous (something like the Optiplex 780 is nothing to write home about; but if you need a few computer labs or a cube farm on a tight budget, the fact that you can get units with an adequate 3rd party warranty, no DOA, 4GB of RAM, and an adequately punchy CPU for ~$150, sometimes a little less, each, is pretty compelling.
"Previous owner" isn't a scary vulnerability for exploits that live at the OS level; all the refurb stuff typically gets wiped once by the refurb house during their testing process, and re-imaged when it reaches the customer; but it is damn scary for firmware-level exploits. Especially motherboard firmware(HDD firmware exploits are scary; but taking out the HDD and shredding it, then replacing it with another low-capacity-everything-is-on-the-network-anyway boot disk is at least cheap); which compromises the system at a scary-deep level, and also compromises the component that makes up most of the value of the computer.
Without a good OS-level vector, preferably with a nice internet infection capability, it isn't a good candidate for a pandemic; but if this sort of firmware fuckery makes the used market about as reliable as buying street drugs, it will have a major impact.
When it comes to 'software replacing teachers', we really haven't made many fundamental advances since Gutenberg(who at least substantially increased the percentage of the world's books that weren't produced by students taking lecture notes in class, which presumably meant that you at least had the option of reading the textbook and skipping the class). If you just need information, technology has done quite well, and continues to make improvements; but if you aren't ready to turn information into knowledge all by yourself, there isn't much on offer.
There is a certain amount of irony; but it's those years of expensive and supply-limiting training that are precisely what make such an attractive target.
It's not an easy target; the computer system that ends up replacing your radiologist or your lawyer or whatever will likely have cost far, far, more to develop than the human it replaced did to raise and train(even if you count the human's recreational spending); but the computer's ability to do work will just keep increasing if you buy more silicon, while the human doesn't scale. If you could hire a single radiologist and make him more productive just by buying additional office chairs, you probably wouldn't bother with the robot.
Based on my (layman's) reading of CDC data from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report; it would appear that we may have settled on a solution for the middle aged and surplus.
It's just not a terribly nice solution.