As others have pointed out, DisplayPort does do audio.
There are two main reasons to favour DisplayPort over HDMI on PC, though both of them are situational. The first is that it supports multiple monitors from a single port/cable.
The second, perhaps more significant, is that the first generation of "affordable" 4k monitors (ie. sub $1,000) generally don't have HDMI 2.0 support. This means that if you want 60Hz output at 4k, you need to use a DisplayPort cable.
Having a strong currency is not always entirely in the national good. Sure, it's generally better than a weak currency (which is often a sign of political instability and a lack of international confidence in a country's prospects), but it does cause its own kind of problems. In particular, it can hurt exporters, as it costs overseas customers more to buy their goods.
The strength of the Deutsche Mark was often problematic for German industry. That's one of the reasons why Germany has been so enthusiastic about adopting the Euro, which gives it a significantly "weaker" currency than it would have otherwise, and locks it into currency parity with most of the rest of its regional bloc.
Actually, most of the games which have used GameWorks to date have been multi-platform games. For the most part, and with the odd dishonourable exception, the days of lazy, barebones PC ports are behind us. Developers are quite happy to spend time optimising PC versions, including through the use of Nvidia-specific tools/libraries.
The Witcher 3 was the highest profile example and, if you have the hardware to drive the GameWorks stuff (there is a serious performance cost), then it looks astounding next to the console versions.
It's aimed at Nvidia, not Intel, and it's all about hair.
Or rather, it's all about Nvidia GameWorks, which got a lot of attention this year thanks to a number of bleeding-edge games, most notably The Witcher 3.
The horribly over-simplified tl;dr version is that Nvidia have been encouraging PC developers to use a set of closed-and-proprietary tools, which allow for some remarkably pretty in-game effects but more or less screw over AMD cards.
This, combined with the fact that Nvidia has, in general, better driver support, quieter and more power-efficient cards and, at the top end of the market, better single-card performance, has put AMD into a pretty bad place in the PC graphics card market right now. Yes, they still tend to have a slight price-to-power ratio advantage, but the quality of life drawbacks to an AMD card, combined with the GameWorks effect, has driven down their market share and, right now, makes it hard to recommend an AMD card.
There are no "goodies" or "baddies" here. Nvidia's GameWorks strategy is undoubtedly fairly dubious in terms of its ethics. At the same time, they are putting out better (and more power-efficient, so also on one level more environmentally friendly) cards (and the GameWorks effects can be VERY pretty), while AMD continues to put out cards that burn with the heat of a million fiery suns and have long-standing, unaddressed issues with their driver support.
Any moment now we could have a horrible incident where somebody typing drunk on Facebook would make a stupid typing error, go crashing through all of the firewalls and accidentally kill five children on a Minecraft server. If that drunken-surfer was anonymous, the families might not know who to sue.
I'd estimate that at the school I went to between the ages of 11 and 18, in a major UK city (and not all that far from some pretty rough areas), around 75% of the pupils made their own way there, usually via normal commuter buses (and then walking the last half mile or so). Even now (a couple of decades and a good few abduction panics later), I think the norm in the UK remains for most children aged 11+ to make their own way to school, based on what I see on the streets, train stations and bus-stops of London every morning.
Hopefully somebody is going to tell me that this Federal Law was just designed to stop one or two particular states/counties from implementing nutty policies.
I think you might want to look elsewhere for your problems. I've got an MSI z170a motherboard, an i7 6700K and 32GB RAM, which I use to manipulate large Autocad files... and I have had absolutely no issues at all.
It's not currently possible to play pirated PS4 games.
The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.
It's still a long way from being able to play pirated games, although it is certainly a first step on that road. More to the point, however, it is even further from being able to make full use of pirated games, given the extent to which the full functionality of many PS4 games is tied to online features. History (e.g. the situation with the Xbox 360) suggests that console manufacturers are pretty good, over time, at detecting consoles running pirated software when they connect to online services and locking them out of said services. A PS4 which can't access the PSN is not much of a PS4.
As for pirated games on the PS3, it was possible. Sort of. There was a specific firmware version which, if you didn't update past it, could be tricked into running pirated games (via a USB dongle, if I recall). However, you should note that firmware updates on the PS3 were mandatory both to use online services and to play games released after that firmware version was issued. So in other words, if you had an old PS3 you kept at the right firmware version and never tried to use it online, you could play pirated games which did not require a more recent firmware version. So it was of limited use for most people and was only ever really a proof of concept.
Any sane ad-broker has a very good reason to care about malvertising and to put a lot of resource into filtering it out - and you identify it in your own post.
The rise in malvertising is serving as a huge driver for the use of adblockers. Moreover, while early adoption of adblockers was mostly by well-informed home and small-business users, the rise of malvertising means that major corporate and Government networks are increasingly switching to adblock-by-default. Which in turn means that a lot of less-informed users are becoming aware that adblockers exist and make web-browsing a much more pleasant experience.
If ad-brokers don't get serious about stopping malvertising, then they may find themselves pushing their ads out into the void. Frankly, they may already have left it too late...
Indeed. The role of games in cementing MS's domination on the desktop is often overlooked. But it's games that keep the general public running Windows on their home PC (whether for themselves or for family members). And it's the fact that pretty much everybody uses Windows at home that means that businesses and Governments know that they can save a lot of time and money on staff training by using Windows, as everybody will just know how to use it.
The irony is that MS just spent more than a decade trying to downplay PC/Windows gaming, by throwing out a competitor to it in the shape of the Xbox line. What's interesting is that since Phil Spencer took over MS's gaming operations, he's swung the focus heavily back onto PC gaming (implying, I think, that he "gets it"). We hear a lot less about "Xbox exclusives" these days and a lot more about "Xbox/Win10 exclusives").
And no, Linux gaming is not even vaguely close to being an acceptable replacement for Windows gaming at the moment. A good chunk of PC gamers use the platform because it allows them to run the latest titles with better performance and visual fidelity than the consoles. Telling them to use an OS where they'll be mostly limited to older games and crappy driver support isn't going to cut it.
Valve have been trying hard to push it, as they know that in the long-term, having their platform be dependent upon a competitor's OS isn't a good business strategy. They got a nasty shock from Win8's app store, until it turned out to be shite. But the jury is very much still out on whether Valve are going to make serious headway with SteamOS. They've got a lot of work to do to convince publishers and hardware manufacturers.
Actually, we've seen something vaguely similar before on the PS3, via its short-lived PS Move accessory. Remember that? The Wii-mote knock-off that nobody bought because it shipped with an unutterably shit Wii Sports knock-off as its launch-title, which required the controller to be recalibrated roughly every 3 picoseconds.
Thing is, there were (at least) two FPSes which had an option to use the PS Move: Killzone 3 and Resistance 3. The latter, despite being a great game, suffered from a poor implementation of the Move controls and is best played without them. However, while Killzone 3 is a fairly shit game, it did the motion controls very well indeed and using them was an absolute revelation.
See, the PS Move used a camera/light system to augment the motion sensing, which meant that the tracking was much more accurate than the Wii-Mote (even with the Wii-Mote+ upgrade) and it had much lower input latency than the Kinect. What this meant in an fps which did the controls properly was that you had a device which basically gave you rapid fine-aim which, once you adjusted to it, was basically as good as mouse control. It still fell behind mouse controls for large, rapid turns, but for lining up shots and picking off headshots in most battles, it was far ahead of a console controller. Combined with the nunchuck thingy in the other hand, you actually had a pretty decent control system for console FPSes. Certainly, Killzone 3 gave me the impression that I was playing two difficulty levels lower than I actually was when using the Move rather than a controller, which is on a par with what I expect when comparing the same game on mouse and keyboard vs controller.
Sadly, the Move was badly supported by Sony, sold badly and developers quickly lost interest in it. Which is sad, because it could have been a big step forward for console shooters.
Believe me, it was nothing like as sophisticated as "we can't tell the difference between IT/CS/Computer Literacy". It was more "all of a sudden these computer things are everywhere, there are qualifications in them, universities are offering courses in them and fee-paying parents are starting to expect us to teach them".
As a private school, they tend to recruit from outside of the usual teacher-training pathways (though they were never above poaching good state-school teachers who wanted to spend more time teaching and less time on crowd-control). They had some long-standing industry links they used to recruit some of their science and technology teachers, but those were in the "old" industries, not in the emerging tech sector. That's likely to be how they ended up with a chemical engineer (though I later picked up suggestions that he'd been less than honest about his experience in his job application). Of course, when you have nobody on your staff who knows anything about "those computer things", it's that much harder to make sure you're recruiting the right people to teach IT and/or CS as your interview panel will be operating blind.
Don't forget, we're talking about the mid-1990s here. While we were reaching the tipping point where most people had a computer in the home, internet connections remained a rarity (and were almost invariably 56k (or less) dial-up. The UK educational establishment was particularly crusty; most subjects at GCSE (exams taken at 16) and A-level (exams taken at 18) level still required coursework to be submitted hand-written.
Most of the lessons that the school delivered were firmly in the camp of "computer literacy". Basic use of Windows 3.1, MS Word and so on, taught from worksheets by staff who were themselves computer illiterate. Hell, one of the earliest problems I fixed for the school came around when one of the teaching staff was unable to install a new piece of software (required for the next module) on one of the PCs... because the hard drive was full. He didn't even know what a hard drive was, let alone how to free up space. They also started to offer a GCSE qualification in "IT" (which I didn't take, as it seemed pointless and it was clear universities didn't respect it), which was even more shambolic.
Actually, the slightly shocking thing was that when I went to university in the late 1990s (to study an arts-subject), none of the CS students I knew had qualifications in IT or CS at GCSE or A-Level. They all had maths and science subjects (by and large, the UK educational system forces students to narrow their subject choice much earlier than the US one, going for depth over breadth), combined with extensive self-teaching and participation in open source development.
Back in the mid 1990s, my (otherwise extremely good) private school found itself caught off-guard by the need to provide IT teaching. With no existing staff with computer science experience, it went about trying to rectify the situation in fairly horrible ways. First, it recruited what it thought was an IT specialist from industry, only to find he was a chemical engineer with no more than a basic level of computing literacy (and no teaching qualifications). He lasted a year.
Then it decided to use non-specialists to teach IT classes, having basically bought a bunch of mail-order courses. I'll emphasise that this was a private fee-paying school with high academic standards that would never have considered this approach for any other subject.
Anyway, the level of teaching was predictably disastrous. The teachers drafted in to cover the subject (including a number of elderly Catholic Priests) lacked any kind of background in it. Not only couldn't they teach the subject, but they couldn't convey why they were even trying to teach the subject. They would spend each lesson reading from one of those mail-order worksheets, with no idea how to either advise a pupil who was having problems, or how to recover the lesson if something went wrong.
The fact that the school's computer lab functioned at all was basically down to the volunteer efforts of a few of the more IT literate students (self-included), who would fix things after the latest balls-up and be called on during free-periods to get an IT lesson back on track after a teacher encountered an error message he hadn't seen before. I didn't particularly mind at the time; I wasn't taking any qualifications in IT, so the quality of the teaching didn't matter to me and helping out earned me a few perks. In particular, it got me out of the compulsory (but non-academic) religious education classes from ages 16-18.
But for those who were actually taking the subject formally (admittedly only a tiny handful in my year-group) it was a pretty catastrophic situation. In any other subject (including the practical ones such as design and technology), my school expected its teachers to be in command of their area. IT was just seen as being different somehow.
It's starting to feel a bit like the end of an era for the advertising-based business model for the web. Almost everybody I know now uses an adblocker on their desktop/laptop PC. My employer recently switched on adblocking-by-default on our office PCs, due to concerns over the number of malware-spreading adverts. Meanwhile, adverts while mobile browsing have become so disruptive (it's virtually impossible now to browse certain websites on an iPhone) that I'm strongly considering adblocking on my phone as well.
The web-advertising industry is on the verge of suicide. Few people had a problem with the static banner ads and most tolerated the animated.gifs, but the video-ads were a further intrusion and, for many people (self included), the auto-playing video-ads were the tipping point. The increasing prevalence of ads as a means of pushing malware and the failure of the advertising networks to screen them out seems to have been the tipping point for a lot of Government and corporate networks as well.
So the question is, what comes next and what does it mean? The strangulation of advertising income is going to fundamentally change the way a lot of sites operate. The pace at which newspapers and magazines are paywalling formerly free content is accelerating. In other cases, the content is free but subscription plans are available for an enhanced service, or even required if users want to leave comments or participate in forums. Are we moving towards a world in which only sites with a product to sell and small-scale operations will be free to browse?
If so, there might be upsides as well as downsides. One product of the advertising model has been the clickbait-culture. That's not just about "10 shocking things you won't believe" and "this one neat trick" headlines, it's also about deliberately provocative content. Stories which get people riled up are great business, if your business model is based on page-views and ad-views. Give people an interesting article that they enjoy reading and they will view the page once then move on. Give them something that makes them angry and they will leave an angry comment, then refresh the page 30 times over the course of the day to argue with other people leaving angry comments. Just look at the stories on Slashdot which get the highest number of comments...
Slashdot is a long way from the worst offender (even though, in the DICE-era, it undoubtedly is an offender). The advertising web model has turned the angry fringe voices, whether the ultra-conservative demagogues of the right, or the "ban everything I don't like" Angry Campus Narcissists of the left into a profitable business model and in doing so has arguably coarsened public debate and poisoned the wider political sphere.
So maybe the death of the advertising model and the move to a subscription-based web might be a good thing.
Require all of the videos to be played back at 150% speed, with the musical accompaniment of the Nyancat song, with all voices replaced by audio clips of 1980s children's television shows and subtitles in the style of the doge meme.
Just about as practical to implement and probably more effective.
The coverage I've seen of this today has emphasised that the Venezuelan Government's filing has essentially no chance whatsoever of success. That's undoubtedly true, but I suspect it misses the point.
This is unlikely to be about the law, or even about an attempt to stifle the website in question. Rather, it's likely to be gesture politics aimed at a domestic audience. Maduro, like Chavez before him, keeps his political base motivated by constructing elaborate theories to show that almost the entire world (and particularly the US) is conspiring against them. The sense of victimhood and isolation this creates is a useful political tool.
When this filing is rejected (likely at the first hurdle) it becomes another piece of "evidence" that the US is seeking to destroy Venezuela.
I don't really see the appeal myself, but I know three people in my office who swear by them (all three of whom are at the lower end of the tech-literacy spectrum, so I doubt it's platform-fanboyism). The UI isn't bad for a mobile platform, I guess, it's just that the software ecosystem is rather poor. If you're not going to need a huge amount of third-party software, then I suppose a Windows Phone might be as good a choice as any?
The Surface tablets are becoming outright popular around here as well. I see almost as many of those now as I do iPads. Back on a "proper" laptop myself, though; my efforts to turn a tablet into a substitute for one ran into the brick wall of functionality some time ago.
I'm guessing that "electronics that burn your house down" are the must-have present here in the UK this Christmas. Just a couple of days ago, we had Amazon UK offer refunds to most customers who had bought a hoverboard from them, advising them to destroy the offending item due to fire-safety concerns associated with the plug and charger.
Are standards of cheap electrical goods with outsourced manufacturing falling to new lows? I'd have thought that plugs and chargers were fairly important things to get right - and probably not the most difficult things, either.
I've seen good discussion forums over the years which have had pretty ban-happy policies. I've also seen good forums turn into bad ones because they weren't ban-happy enough and antisocial behaviour was allowed to get out of control. By and large, if you're banned from an online forum, your freedom of speech is not being suppressed, provided you have the ability to go and say the same thing somewhere else.
Of course, I've also seen things swing the other way. I've seen forums which have become nasty, incestuous cliques because of ban-happy admins who instantly remove any user they personally disagree with. That's an increasingly common problem as a growing number of forums are administered by a category of people usually described using a particular three letter acronym (which I personally think is a bad term for them, preferring Angry Campus Narcissist). But again, it's not a freedom of speech issue (at least in respect of online forums); it's a forum management issue.
The biggest issue is generally whether or not you have decent admins.
If there's a separate problem on Reddit that users are banned for behaviours which were not previous forbidden, then their problem may well just be that they have bad admins. But on the other hand, I have little sympathy for that particular category of forum user who is determined to practice every single aggravating behaviour which isn't explicitly forbidden and expects that they should be immune from a ban as a result.
It's not really a freedom of speech issue, surely? Reddit is a privately owned and operated forum and it's entirely up to them which users they want to ban and which posts they want to delete.
Now if we got the point where Reddit was so omnipresent in modern life that it was impossible to find a job or take out a mortgage or order a pizza without being on Reddit, I might start to get concerned.
But it isn't. It's a fairly daft forum filled with a lot of people who mostly talk crap (so entirely different from Slashdot, of course). Being banned from it will not ruin your life. You want to post there, you follow their rules.
It does raise questions about how best to moderate a large forum. But not about freedom of speech.
... and I didn't think it had aged too badly. It's more or less what I remembered. A lean, fast-paced space opera, with a handful of iconic scenes and an uncanny ability to raise a smile. It's not a deep or profound movie, which is in some ways part of its charm.
For me, the Star Wars I loved growing up was never really about the movies. It was about the 1990s games; in particular X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which unlike most other space combat games of the time weren't afraid to allow their starfighters to be complex, tricky beasts, and the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games. It was also about the early novels; the Timothy Zahn ones in particular, before the later degeneration into unreadability. Those games and books showed a very different Star Wars to the one you saw in the films; darker, more complex and more focussed on detailed world-building, compared to the light-touch magical space-opera of the films.
That Star Wars is gone now; it took a body blow when the prequels ignored it and since Disney took over the franchise it's been officially retired. But that's fine, I can live with that. I'll go and see the new movie and I hope I'll like it. I'm fairly confident it won't be a mess on a par with the prequels. But it won't be the Star Wars I grew up with.
Floor-space requirements were a fairly big issue for people with Kinect. The first generation of the device in particular was a bit of a stickler for having a room with the right dimensions and, in particular, the ability to get around 10 feet distance from the sensor. That meant problems for a lot of people who had their TV along the long-edge of their living room, opposite the sofa. Their choices were to a) reconfigure the living room furniture or b) not bother with Kinect. Unsurprisingly, many just went with b). The requirement in many early Kinect titles for the player to jump up and down like a madman was also a bit of an issue for a lot of people who lived in apartment buildings with downstairs neighbours.
So on that basis, I'm inclined to side with HTC on this one. It's better to adapt to the practical environments of people's homes than to go for the "technically" optimal solution. Particularly given that Valve's approach is only a stopgap anyway; it's not much use being able to move anywhere in your living room while playing if the area your avatar is in in-game is the size of a football field. Unless, of course, living room is the size of a football field. Mine isn't.
But I am getting a bit bored of these endless VR willy-waving debates without any consumer hardware actually on the shelves to buy. I was really hoping we'd see that during 2015. Guess not...
These digital item trading systems which allow items to be redeemed for real money are, when linked to otherwise-useful gaming account systems, an absolute plague. They're the worst kind of incentive to spamming, scamming and outright criminality.
It's not just limited to Steam. If you look over at Xbox Live, you'll find there have been (and to some extent continue to be) serious issues there, despite there only being a single game series that allows these kinds of trades (FIFA Ultimate Team).
It's a funny thing; everybody knows about the Sony PSN hack. And yet very few people ended up actually being inconvenienced by that hack, save for the inconvenience of the PSN being down for a few months. What's not widely known is that there have been a number of less eye-catching but more severe compromises of Xbox Live security in recent years. The most serious exploit involved a flaw in Microsoft's phone-support protocols. It got very little publicity, because it doesn't fit with the media's perception of what a "hack" looks like, but it hit an awful lot of account and resulted in an awful lot of fraudulent credit card transactions.
And why were the scammers doing this? Mostly, it turned out, so that they could purchase and then monetise FIFA Ultimate Team trading items. Ordinarily, there was no means to get money "out of" the Xbox Live system. So you could compromise somebody's account and use it to buy games or DLC, but you couldn't sell these on and once the original owner got their account back, you were left with nothing to show for your efforts. FIFA changed all of that and created a pretty large industry in compromising XBL accounts. Worse, besides keeping a constant eye on their account, there was nothing at the time that users could do to protect themselves; there was no need to get people to divulge a password or click a dodgy link - the scammers were going straight to MS's flawed support services.
Back over on the PC, Valve have been very slow in waking up to the issue of compromised accounts. I suspect it's only the growing prospect of a number of countries' consumer protection authorities taking enforcement action against them that's prompted this recent action. The option they've gone for is slow and over-burdensome. I was disappointed to read in their statement announcing it that they had considered but rejected the idea of just scrapping these trades. Sadly, given they cream off a good chunk of each transaction, that was too much to hope for. But for as long as it is possible to launder money out of Steam, large-scale attempts to illegally access accounts will continue.
A genuine question (though possibly not one best directed at Slashdot) - is anybody actually using Edge?
I've moved to Win10 Pro on my home machine and am mostly pretty happy with it (having disabled or blocked the phone-home nastiness). But Edge in its current state seems fairly shocking. It lacks basic functionality that we've taken for granted in other desktop browsers for years. You can't even change the folder it saves downloads to without manual registry editing. All told, it feels like an attempt to do a lightweight phone/tablet browser on the desktop (and I thought MS had learned that desktop/laptop users don't like that crap after the Windows 8 start menu fiasco).
Given that there's nothing to stop you using other browsers (including Internet Explorer) on Win10, I just can't imagine why anybody would be using Edge right now.
And don't get me started about the Windows 10 mail client, which is, if anything, even more primitive than the one on my phone. Why on earth they replaced the perfectly serviceable Windows Live Mail with that catastrophe I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, DisplayPort does do audio.
There are two main reasons to favour DisplayPort over HDMI on PC, though both of them are situational. The first is that it supports multiple monitors from a single port/cable.
The second, perhaps more significant, is that the first generation of "affordable" 4k monitors (ie. sub $1,000) generally don't have HDMI 2.0 support. This means that if you want 60Hz output at 4k, you need to use a DisplayPort cable.
Having a strong currency is not always entirely in the national good. Sure, it's generally better than a weak currency (which is often a sign of political instability and a lack of international confidence in a country's prospects), but it does cause its own kind of problems. In particular, it can hurt exporters, as it costs overseas customers more to buy their goods.
The strength of the Deutsche Mark was often problematic for German industry. That's one of the reasons why Germany has been so enthusiastic about adopting the Euro, which gives it a significantly "weaker" currency than it would have otherwise, and locks it into currency parity with most of the rest of its regional bloc.
Actually, most of the games which have used GameWorks to date have been multi-platform games. For the most part, and with the odd dishonourable exception, the days of lazy, barebones PC ports are behind us. Developers are quite happy to spend time optimising PC versions, including through the use of Nvidia-specific tools/libraries.
The Witcher 3 was the highest profile example and, if you have the hardware to drive the GameWorks stuff (there is a serious performance cost), then it looks astounding next to the console versions.
It's aimed at Nvidia, not Intel, and it's all about hair.
Or rather, it's all about Nvidia GameWorks, which got a lot of attention this year thanks to a number of bleeding-edge games, most notably The Witcher 3.
The horribly over-simplified tl;dr version is that Nvidia have been encouraging PC developers to use a set of closed-and-proprietary tools, which allow for some remarkably pretty in-game effects but more or less screw over AMD cards.
This, combined with the fact that Nvidia has, in general, better driver support, quieter and more power-efficient cards and, at the top end of the market, better single-card performance, has put AMD into a pretty bad place in the PC graphics card market right now. Yes, they still tend to have a slight price-to-power ratio advantage, but the quality of life drawbacks to an AMD card, combined with the GameWorks effect, has driven down their market share and, right now, makes it hard to recommend an AMD card.
There are no "goodies" or "baddies" here. Nvidia's GameWorks strategy is undoubtedly fairly dubious in terms of its ethics. At the same time, they are putting out better (and more power-efficient, so also on one level more environmentally friendly) cards (and the GameWorks effects can be VERY pretty), while AMD continues to put out cards that burn with the heat of a million fiery suns and have long-standing, unaddressed issues with their driver support.
Think of the children, you monster.
Any moment now we could have a horrible incident where somebody typing drunk on Facebook would make a stupid typing error, go crashing through all of the firewalls and accidentally kill five children on a Minecraft server. If that drunken-surfer was anonymous, the families might not know who to sue.
I was going to say...
I'd estimate that at the school I went to between the ages of 11 and 18, in a major UK city (and not all that far from some pretty rough areas), around 75% of the pupils made their own way there, usually via normal commuter buses (and then walking the last half mile or so). Even now (a couple of decades and a good few abduction panics later), I think the norm in the UK remains for most children aged 11+ to make their own way to school, based on what I see on the streets, train stations and bus-stops of London every morning.
Hopefully somebody is going to tell me that this Federal Law was just designed to stop one or two particular states/counties from implementing nutty policies.
I think you might want to look elsewhere for your problems. I've got an MSI z170a motherboard, an i7 6700K and 32GB RAM, which I use to manipulate large Autocad files... and I have had absolutely no issues at all.
It's not currently possible to play pirated PS4 games.
The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.
It's still a long way from being able to play pirated games, although it is certainly a first step on that road. More to the point, however, it is even further from being able to make full use of pirated games, given the extent to which the full functionality of many PS4 games is tied to online features. History (e.g. the situation with the Xbox 360) suggests that console manufacturers are pretty good, over time, at detecting consoles running pirated software when they connect to online services and locking them out of said services. A PS4 which can't access the PSN is not much of a PS4.
As for pirated games on the PS3, it was possible. Sort of. There was a specific firmware version which, if you didn't update past it, could be tricked into running pirated games (via a USB dongle, if I recall). However, you should note that firmware updates on the PS3 were mandatory both to use online services and to play games released after that firmware version was issued. So in other words, if you had an old PS3 you kept at the right firmware version and never tried to use it online, you could play pirated games which did not require a more recent firmware version. So it was of limited use for most people and was only ever really a proof of concept.
Any sane ad-broker has a very good reason to care about malvertising and to put a lot of resource into filtering it out - and you identify it in your own post.
The rise in malvertising is serving as a huge driver for the use of adblockers. Moreover, while early adoption of adblockers was mostly by well-informed home and small-business users, the rise of malvertising means that major corporate and Government networks are increasingly switching to adblock-by-default. Which in turn means that a lot of less-informed users are becoming aware that adblockers exist and make web-browsing a much more pleasant experience.
If ad-brokers don't get serious about stopping malvertising, then they may find themselves pushing their ads out into the void. Frankly, they may already have left it too late...
Indeed. The role of games in cementing MS's domination on the desktop is often overlooked. But it's games that keep the general public running Windows on their home PC (whether for themselves or for family members). And it's the fact that pretty much everybody uses Windows at home that means that businesses and Governments know that they can save a lot of time and money on staff training by using Windows, as everybody will just know how to use it.
The irony is that MS just spent more than a decade trying to downplay PC/Windows gaming, by throwing out a competitor to it in the shape of the Xbox line. What's interesting is that since Phil Spencer took over MS's gaming operations, he's swung the focus heavily back onto PC gaming (implying, I think, that he "gets it"). We hear a lot less about "Xbox exclusives" these days and a lot more about "Xbox/Win10 exclusives").
And no, Linux gaming is not even vaguely close to being an acceptable replacement for Windows gaming at the moment. A good chunk of PC gamers use the platform because it allows them to run the latest titles with better performance and visual fidelity than the consoles. Telling them to use an OS where they'll be mostly limited to older games and crappy driver support isn't going to cut it.
Valve have been trying hard to push it, as they know that in the long-term, having their platform be dependent upon a competitor's OS isn't a good business strategy. They got a nasty shock from Win8's app store, until it turned out to be shite. But the jury is very much still out on whether Valve are going to make serious headway with SteamOS. They've got a lot of work to do to convince publishers and hardware manufacturers.
Actually, we've seen something vaguely similar before on the PS3, via its short-lived PS Move accessory. Remember that? The Wii-mote knock-off that nobody bought because it shipped with an unutterably shit Wii Sports knock-off as its launch-title, which required the controller to be recalibrated roughly every 3 picoseconds.
Thing is, there were (at least) two FPSes which had an option to use the PS Move: Killzone 3 and Resistance 3. The latter, despite being a great game, suffered from a poor implementation of the Move controls and is best played without them. However, while Killzone 3 is a fairly shit game, it did the motion controls very well indeed and using them was an absolute revelation.
See, the PS Move used a camera/light system to augment the motion sensing, which meant that the tracking was much more accurate than the Wii-Mote (even with the Wii-Mote+ upgrade) and it had much lower input latency than the Kinect. What this meant in an fps which did the controls properly was that you had a device which basically gave you rapid fine-aim which, once you adjusted to it, was basically as good as mouse control. It still fell behind mouse controls for large, rapid turns, but for lining up shots and picking off headshots in most battles, it was far ahead of a console controller. Combined with the nunchuck thingy in the other hand, you actually had a pretty decent control system for console FPSes. Certainly, Killzone 3 gave me the impression that I was playing two difficulty levels lower than I actually was when using the Move rather than a controller, which is on a par with what I expect when comparing the same game on mouse and keyboard vs controller.
Sadly, the Move was badly supported by Sony, sold badly and developers quickly lost interest in it. Which is sad, because it could have been a big step forward for console shooters.
Believe me, it was nothing like as sophisticated as "we can't tell the difference between IT/CS/Computer Literacy". It was more "all of a sudden these computer things are everywhere, there are qualifications in them, universities are offering courses in them and fee-paying parents are starting to expect us to teach them".
As a private school, they tend to recruit from outside of the usual teacher-training pathways (though they were never above poaching good state-school teachers who wanted to spend more time teaching and less time on crowd-control). They had some long-standing industry links they used to recruit some of their science and technology teachers, but those were in the "old" industries, not in the emerging tech sector. That's likely to be how they ended up with a chemical engineer (though I later picked up suggestions that he'd been less than honest about his experience in his job application). Of course, when you have nobody on your staff who knows anything about "those computer things", it's that much harder to make sure you're recruiting the right people to teach IT and/or CS as your interview panel will be operating blind.
Don't forget, we're talking about the mid-1990s here. While we were reaching the tipping point where most people had a computer in the home, internet connections remained a rarity (and were almost invariably 56k (or less) dial-up. The UK educational establishment was particularly crusty; most subjects at GCSE (exams taken at 16) and A-level (exams taken at 18) level still required coursework to be submitted hand-written.
Most of the lessons that the school delivered were firmly in the camp of "computer literacy". Basic use of Windows 3.1, MS Word and so on, taught from worksheets by staff who were themselves computer illiterate. Hell, one of the earliest problems I fixed for the school came around when one of the teaching staff was unable to install a new piece of software (required for the next module) on one of the PCs... because the hard drive was full. He didn't even know what a hard drive was, let alone how to free up space. They also started to offer a GCSE qualification in "IT" (which I didn't take, as it seemed pointless and it was clear universities didn't respect it), which was even more shambolic.
Actually, the slightly shocking thing was that when I went to university in the late 1990s (to study an arts-subject), none of the CS students I knew had qualifications in IT or CS at GCSE or A-Level. They all had maths and science subjects (by and large, the UK educational system forces students to narrow their subject choice much earlier than the US one, going for depth over breadth), combined with extensive self-teaching and participation in open source development.
Back in the mid 1990s, my (otherwise extremely good) private school found itself caught off-guard by the need to provide IT teaching. With no existing staff with computer science experience, it went about trying to rectify the situation in fairly horrible ways. First, it recruited what it thought was an IT specialist from industry, only to find he was a chemical engineer with no more than a basic level of computing literacy (and no teaching qualifications). He lasted a year.
Then it decided to use non-specialists to teach IT classes, having basically bought a bunch of mail-order courses. I'll emphasise that this was a private fee-paying school with high academic standards that would never have considered this approach for any other subject.
Anyway, the level of teaching was predictably disastrous. The teachers drafted in to cover the subject (including a number of elderly Catholic Priests) lacked any kind of background in it. Not only couldn't they teach the subject, but they couldn't convey why they were even trying to teach the subject. They would spend each lesson reading from one of those mail-order worksheets, with no idea how to either advise a pupil who was having problems, or how to recover the lesson if something went wrong.
The fact that the school's computer lab functioned at all was basically down to the volunteer efforts of a few of the more IT literate students (self-included), who would fix things after the latest balls-up and be called on during free-periods to get an IT lesson back on track after a teacher encountered an error message he hadn't seen before. I didn't particularly mind at the time; I wasn't taking any qualifications in IT, so the quality of the teaching didn't matter to me and helping out earned me a few perks. In particular, it got me out of the compulsory (but non-academic) religious education classes from ages 16-18.
But for those who were actually taking the subject formally (admittedly only a tiny handful in my year-group) it was a pretty catastrophic situation. In any other subject (including the practical ones such as design and technology), my school expected its teachers to be in command of their area. IT was just seen as being different somehow.
It's starting to feel a bit like the end of an era for the advertising-based business model for the web. Almost everybody I know now uses an adblocker on their desktop/laptop PC. My employer recently switched on adblocking-by-default on our office PCs, due to concerns over the number of malware-spreading adverts. Meanwhile, adverts while mobile browsing have become so disruptive (it's virtually impossible now to browse certain websites on an iPhone) that I'm strongly considering adblocking on my phone as well.
The web-advertising industry is on the verge of suicide. Few people had a problem with the static banner ads and most tolerated the animated .gifs, but the video-ads were a further intrusion and, for many people (self included), the auto-playing video-ads were the tipping point. The increasing prevalence of ads as a means of pushing malware and the failure of the advertising networks to screen them out seems to have been the tipping point for a lot of Government and corporate networks as well.
So the question is, what comes next and what does it mean? The strangulation of advertising income is going to fundamentally change the way a lot of sites operate. The pace at which newspapers and magazines are paywalling formerly free content is accelerating. In other cases, the content is free but subscription plans are available for an enhanced service, or even required if users want to leave comments or participate in forums. Are we moving towards a world in which only sites with a product to sell and small-scale operations will be free to browse?
If so, there might be upsides as well as downsides. One product of the advertising model has been the clickbait-culture. That's not just about "10 shocking things you won't believe" and "this one neat trick" headlines, it's also about deliberately provocative content. Stories which get people riled up are great business, if your business model is based on page-views and ad-views. Give people an interesting article that they enjoy reading and they will view the page once then move on. Give them something that makes them angry and they will leave an angry comment, then refresh the page 30 times over the course of the day to argue with other people leaving angry comments. Just look at the stories on Slashdot which get the highest number of comments...
Slashdot is a long way from the worst offender (even though, in the DICE-era, it undoubtedly is an offender). The advertising web model has turned the angry fringe voices, whether the ultra-conservative demagogues of the right, or the "ban everything I don't like" Angry Campus Narcissists of the left into a profitable business model and in doing so has arguably coarsened public debate and poisoned the wider political sphere.
So maybe the death of the advertising model and the move to a subscription-based web might be a good thing.
And a Merry Christmas to you, too...
Require all of the videos to be played back at 150% speed, with the musical accompaniment of the Nyancat song, with all voices replaced by audio clips of 1980s children's television shows and subtitles in the style of the doge meme.
Just about as practical to implement and probably more effective.
The coverage I've seen of this today has emphasised that the Venezuelan Government's filing has essentially no chance whatsoever of success. That's undoubtedly true, but I suspect it misses the point.
This is unlikely to be about the law, or even about an attempt to stifle the website in question. Rather, it's likely to be gesture politics aimed at a domestic audience. Maduro, like Chavez before him, keeps his political base motivated by constructing elaborate theories to show that almost the entire world (and particularly the US) is conspiring against them. The sense of victimhood and isolation this creates is a useful political tool.
When this filing is rejected (likely at the first hurdle) it becomes another piece of "evidence" that the US is seeking to destroy Venezuela.
I don't really see the appeal myself, but I know three people in my office who swear by them (all three of whom are at the lower end of the tech-literacy spectrum, so I doubt it's platform-fanboyism). The UI isn't bad for a mobile platform, I guess, it's just that the software ecosystem is rather poor. If you're not going to need a huge amount of third-party software, then I suppose a Windows Phone might be as good a choice as any?
The Surface tablets are becoming outright popular around here as well. I see almost as many of those now as I do iPads. Back on a "proper" laptop myself, though; my efforts to turn a tablet into a substitute for one ran into the brick wall of functionality some time ago.
I'm guessing that "electronics that burn your house down" are the must-have present here in the UK this Christmas. Just a couple of days ago, we had Amazon UK offer refunds to most customers who had bought a hoverboard from them, advising them to destroy the offending item due to fire-safety concerns associated with the plug and charger.
Are standards of cheap electrical goods with outsourced manufacturing falling to new lows? I'd have thought that plugs and chargers were fairly important things to get right - and probably not the most difficult things, either.
I've seen good discussion forums over the years which have had pretty ban-happy policies. I've also seen good forums turn into bad ones because they weren't ban-happy enough and antisocial behaviour was allowed to get out of control. By and large, if you're banned from an online forum, your freedom of speech is not being suppressed, provided you have the ability to go and say the same thing somewhere else.
Of course, I've also seen things swing the other way. I've seen forums which have become nasty, incestuous cliques because of ban-happy admins who instantly remove any user they personally disagree with. That's an increasingly common problem as a growing number of forums are administered by a category of people usually described using a particular three letter acronym (which I personally think is a bad term for them, preferring Angry Campus Narcissist). But again, it's not a freedom of speech issue (at least in respect of online forums); it's a forum management issue.
The biggest issue is generally whether or not you have decent admins.
If there's a separate problem on Reddit that users are banned for behaviours which were not previous forbidden, then their problem may well just be that they have bad admins. But on the other hand, I have little sympathy for that particular category of forum user who is determined to practice every single aggravating behaviour which isn't explicitly forbidden and expects that they should be immune from a ban as a result.
It's not really a freedom of speech issue, surely? Reddit is a privately owned and operated forum and it's entirely up to them which users they want to ban and which posts they want to delete.
Now if we got the point where Reddit was so omnipresent in modern life that it was impossible to find a job or take out a mortgage or order a pizza without being on Reddit, I might start to get concerned.
But it isn't. It's a fairly daft forum filled with a lot of people who mostly talk crap (so entirely different from Slashdot, of course). Being banned from it will not ruin your life. You want to post there, you follow their rules.
It does raise questions about how best to moderate a large forum. But not about freedom of speech.
... and I didn't think it had aged too badly. It's more or less what I remembered. A lean, fast-paced space opera, with a handful of iconic scenes and an uncanny ability to raise a smile. It's not a deep or profound movie, which is in some ways part of its charm.
For me, the Star Wars I loved growing up was never really about the movies. It was about the 1990s games; in particular X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which unlike most other space combat games of the time weren't afraid to allow their starfighters to be complex, tricky beasts, and the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games. It was also about the early novels; the Timothy Zahn ones in particular, before the later degeneration into unreadability. Those games and books showed a very different Star Wars to the one you saw in the films; darker, more complex and more focussed on detailed world-building, compared to the light-touch magical space-opera of the films.
That Star Wars is gone now; it took a body blow when the prequels ignored it and since Disney took over the franchise it's been officially retired. But that's fine, I can live with that. I'll go and see the new movie and I hope I'll like it. I'm fairly confident it won't be a mess on a par with the prequels. But it won't be the Star Wars I grew up with.
Floor-space requirements were a fairly big issue for people with Kinect. The first generation of the device in particular was a bit of a stickler for having a room with the right dimensions and, in particular, the ability to get around 10 feet distance from the sensor. That meant problems for a lot of people who had their TV along the long-edge of their living room, opposite the sofa. Their choices were to a) reconfigure the living room furniture or b) not bother with Kinect. Unsurprisingly, many just went with b). The requirement in many early Kinect titles for the player to jump up and down like a madman was also a bit of an issue for a lot of people who lived in apartment buildings with downstairs neighbours.
So on that basis, I'm inclined to side with HTC on this one. It's better to adapt to the practical environments of people's homes than to go for the "technically" optimal solution. Particularly given that Valve's approach is only a stopgap anyway; it's not much use being able to move anywhere in your living room while playing if the area your avatar is in in-game is the size of a football field. Unless, of course, living room is the size of a football field. Mine isn't.
But I am getting a bit bored of these endless VR willy-waving debates without any consumer hardware actually on the shelves to buy. I was really hoping we'd see that during 2015. Guess not...
These digital item trading systems which allow items to be redeemed for real money are, when linked to otherwise-useful gaming account systems, an absolute plague. They're the worst kind of incentive to spamming, scamming and outright criminality.
It's not just limited to Steam. If you look over at Xbox Live, you'll find there have been (and to some extent continue to be) serious issues there, despite there only being a single game series that allows these kinds of trades (FIFA Ultimate Team).
It's a funny thing; everybody knows about the Sony PSN hack. And yet very few people ended up actually being inconvenienced by that hack, save for the inconvenience of the PSN being down for a few months. What's not widely known is that there have been a number of less eye-catching but more severe compromises of Xbox Live security in recent years. The most serious exploit involved a flaw in Microsoft's phone-support protocols. It got very little publicity, because it doesn't fit with the media's perception of what a "hack" looks like, but it hit an awful lot of account and resulted in an awful lot of fraudulent credit card transactions.
And why were the scammers doing this? Mostly, it turned out, so that they could purchase and then monetise FIFA Ultimate Team trading items. Ordinarily, there was no means to get money "out of" the Xbox Live system. So you could compromise somebody's account and use it to buy games or DLC, but you couldn't sell these on and once the original owner got their account back, you were left with nothing to show for your efforts. FIFA changed all of that and created a pretty large industry in compromising XBL accounts. Worse, besides keeping a constant eye on their account, there was nothing at the time that users could do to protect themselves; there was no need to get people to divulge a password or click a dodgy link - the scammers were going straight to MS's flawed support services.
Back over on the PC, Valve have been very slow in waking up to the issue of compromised accounts. I suspect it's only the growing prospect of a number of countries' consumer protection authorities taking enforcement action against them that's prompted this recent action. The option they've gone for is slow and over-burdensome. I was disappointed to read in their statement announcing it that they had considered but rejected the idea of just scrapping these trades. Sadly, given they cream off a good chunk of each transaction, that was too much to hope for. But for as long as it is possible to launder money out of Steam, large-scale attempts to illegally access accounts will continue.
A genuine question (though possibly not one best directed at Slashdot) - is anybody actually using Edge?
I've moved to Win10 Pro on my home machine and am mostly pretty happy with it (having disabled or blocked the phone-home nastiness). But Edge in its current state seems fairly shocking. It lacks basic functionality that we've taken for granted in other desktop browsers for years. You can't even change the folder it saves downloads to without manual registry editing. All told, it feels like an attempt to do a lightweight phone/tablet browser on the desktop (and I thought MS had learned that desktop/laptop users don't like that crap after the Windows 8 start menu fiasco).
Given that there's nothing to stop you using other browsers (including Internet Explorer) on Win10, I just can't imagine why anybody would be using Edge right now.
And don't get me started about the Windows 10 mail client, which is, if anything, even more primitive than the one on my phone. Why on earth they replaced the perfectly serviceable Windows Live Mail with that catastrophe I have no idea.