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User: cibyr

cibyr's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 250

  1. Re:All of them great on Microchips That Shook the World · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I was about to post something very similar - why would anyone bother with a 555 these days when you can get an ATtiny for under a dollar?

  2. Re:Joomla? on Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Come on, openMoko sucks pretty hard and no SoC project is going to fix that. And if it somehow did stop sucking it would then be a competitor to Android - so why would Google fund it?

  3. Re:NYT quote is a bit unfair ... on A Layman's Guide To Bandwidth Pricing · · Score: 1

    A dollar a gig is laughable.

    My uni charges us $10/GB. :(

    But staff accounts have unlimited quota :)

  4. Re:Actually, there is an iTunes for movies on Why There's No iTunes For Movies · · Score: 1

    apple's hardware is also in my experience very easy to circumvent , its almost as if apple is "just going through the motions."

    Please tell me how to get music onto an iPhone without using iTunes. This is pretty much the only reason I haven't bought one - I can't stand iTunes and it's inability to work with anything but MP3, WMA, or AAC.

  5. Re:I'd ultimately argue... on Games As Transformative Works · · Score: 1

    Are you deliberately ignoring the "A man chooses, a slave obeys" scene or did you just not play that far into the game? It was pretty much the whole point of the narrative that the choices you can make are limited and cannot actually affect the game. Which makes the player actually empathise with their character for once, which is what makes Bioshock a masterpiece. Well, that and the incredibly immersive environment, fun gameplay and beautiful art.

  6. Prey, anyone? on Early Look At the New Wolfenstein Game · · Score: 1

    Generic FPS, slightly-outdated graphics, potentially-fun gravity gimmick, not much else going for it... hrmmm, where have we seen this before?

    Then again, iD tends to make good games so maybe it'll be good this time around.

  7. Re:I'd ultimately argue... on Games As Transformative Works · · Score: 1

    But that is exactly where games today fail at. The player isn't part of the story, he is a passenger in a roller coaster ride.

    But then you have masterpieces like Bioshock which centres its narrative around that very phenomenon, and still gives you some freedom of choice to affect the outcome of the story.

    And then you have games like Fallout 3 which give you a rich, detailed environment and let you run wild in it, giving you the freedom to make choices which affect your entire world as you continue to play.

    Yes there are a lot of games with simple, linear storytelling but that is a limitation imposed by the writers/developers - NOT the medium. And games can be a very powerful medium for linear storytelling too even if the majority (just like most of what airs on TV) is trash, or simply exists to be fun without telling a story or emotionally involving the player.

  8. Re:SO if I on Australian ISP Argues For BitTorrent Users · · Score: 1

    Several similarly silly schemes actually exist (see the OFF System, and lawyers tend to be unimpressed - they all amount to encrypting the communication and/or obfuscating what you're transferring. So if what you're transferring is copyrighted, you're still infringing on that copyright.

    See What Colour are your bits?.

  9. Re:Um, on Giving Your Greytrapping a Helping Hand · · Score: 3, Informative

    I rather pay for my own VPS than pay Google for a freaking email account and/or their App Engine.

    Except google apps "Standard edition" is free. And it's pretty much all you'd need unless you're a largish business. Pretty much the only difference is you get a mere 5GB (of which I'm using something like 200MB) instead of 25GB per mailbox, a limit of something like 50 users, and you don't get their mobile access and migration tools. You get SMTP/IMAP/POP and the best webmail interface there is :)

  10. Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass on Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance? · · Score: 4, Informative

    /usr/local/* is for you stuff you've installed manually. /usr/bin is a perfectly sensible place for a package manager to put executables it installs. The package manager shouldn't fuck with anything in /usr/local.

  11. Re:So what's wrong with this? on Sony Charges Publishers For DLC Bandwidth Usage · · Score: 1

    Racedriver: GRID. It's a high-quality production and manages to get the balance between fun and realism spot on. I really hope they make a Need for Speed clone, because they could really eat EA's lunch there.

  12. Re:But will it blend? on What Does a $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway? · · Score: 1

    I dunno about blend but if you have a look at the 18th picture, the card just above the PSU sure can bend - disconcertingly so! I would've thought they'd take more care than that on a $16,000 system.

  13. Re:Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers on Old Computers Resurrected As Instruments At Bletchley Park · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of the Big Ideas (don't get any) remix of Radiohead's "Nude".

    Thoroughly worth watching, but feel free to skip to the beginning of the music at about 1:10.

  14. Re:give it a fucking break on RIAA About to Transform? · · Score: 1

    Because sometimes you don't have anything useful to add. If you did, you wouldn't be modding to start with.

    Ironically, further down I have a post modded to +4 so I guess your point is valid.

  15. Re:give it a fucking break on RIAA About to Transform? · · Score: 1

    You're thinking of MP3's joint-stereo messing up Dolby Pro Logic (as described here). Not really important to me, I recently ditched my 5.1 setup for a nice pair of stereo speakers.

    No, I can't hear the difference. I can't even hear the difference between FLAC and 128kbps MP3s from a modern encoder on most samples.

    But I might want to transcode to a lower bitrate for a portable or network player. Or maybe I want to use some funky DSP which has the unfortunate side effect of showing up MP3 artifacts. Who cares? Disk space and bandwidth is just SO FUCKING CHEAP why would you want anything but lossless when it's so damn easy? Sending the actual data is probably the smallest cost of selling music online, so why is it even an issue? Lossless just seems like a no-brainer to me.

  16. Re:give it a fucking break on RIAA About to Transform? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That said, I do appreciate Trent Reznor providing FLACs, both in CD-quality format -- 16/44.1 -- and in 24/96.

    I wish everyone did this. Even if I didn't like the music I would've bought Ghosts anyway just to support people selling music in good format.

  17. Re:give it a fucking break on RIAA About to Transform? · · Score: 1

    Replying to undo mis-clicked mod. Meant to click "Informative".

  18. Re:A Memory manufacturor on Supreme Court Sides With Rambus Over FTC · · Score: 2, Informative

    Really? I thought it was more like:

    Rambus makes RAM.

    Rambus has some patents on some RAM technology, and got this technology included into various standards - without telling anyone that they held the patents.

    When everyone started making RAM to meet said standards, Rambus suddenly started asking for royalties on the patents that they hadn't mentioned earlier.

    Everyone else got pissed off by this and got the FTC to agree that that's not cricket, but the courts apparently don't agree with the FTC.

    The lawyers have been slapping their cocks together for about 17 years, several of which have been in relation to this case.

    There were decisions, there were appeals, and now the end of it is the Supreme Court ruling that lets Rambus get away free and clear.

  19. Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid" on S3 Graphics Fails At Delivering Linux Driver · · Score: 1

    He accidentally the whole printed programming.

  20. Re:Violence, maybe, but not gore on Study Finds Gamers Prefer Control, Competence Over Violence · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Portal is not an FPS, it's a puzzle game played from a first-person perspective and with traditional FPS controls.

    For an FPS without violence, digital paintball comes to mind.

  21. Re:Snakes on How To Keep Rats From Eating My Cables? · · Score: 1

    Thanks to the global interpreter lock, you can't have one python hunting more than one rat at a time :(

  22. Re:Why perl? on February 13th, UNIX Time Will Reach 1234567890 · · Score: 1

    Or if we're still playing golf:
    watch -n 1 date +"%s"

  23. Re:Finally on Valve Takes Optimistic View of Piracy · · Score: 1

    Considering that there's no shipping, no manufacturing and no middle-man, buying games on Steam should be *much* cheaper than buying them retail (they don't even pay for bandwidth, all the big ISPs here host Steam content servers) - and for me, here in Australia, Valve games are much cheaper on Steam. The orange box cost me AU$55 on Steam, when it was AU$100 in stores. It's just the other publishers that screw this up - COD4 was $90 in stores and ... $90 on steam. FAIL. So I bought it for $40 from asia - for the US version, including shipping. Why on earth is it less than half the price to have it shipped to me indirectly than for me to download it at basically no cost to the seller?

  24. Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? on Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's · · Score: 1

    It doesn't matter if windows 7 isn't worth upgrading to; Vista was bad enough to be worth actively avoiding - I still get people asking me to install XP on their new laptop that came with Vista. If 7 is good enough that people stop searching for XP I'll consider it a success.

  25. The "Story" So Far on Electronic Medical Records, the Story So Far · · Score: 1

    I find it rather amusing that "Electronic Medical Records, the Story So Far" is a complete non-story.