Posts by regadpellagru201 posts • joined Monday 31st July 2006 16:07 GMT
> why there were never any further outings for the space flight sim Star Wars games after, I think, > Rebel Alliance. I used to love the dogfights in X-Wing and Tie Fighter games and the stories
> were usually pretty solid, too. Definitely a place for them in the marketplace these days.
Because, I think, rebel Alliance is where Lucas Arts began to screw up very badly.
It was full of bugs and missions that couldn't complete, geez, what a load of bollocks,
even after the last patch. I still have it, but this was the last Lucas Arts product I ever purchased.
Company went straight to the toilet drain as far as I'm concerned, after that terrible game.
Tie Fighter was the last one really good from Lucas Arts, indeed superior to X-Wing.
Lucas Arts is history now, good history, but history.
Yeah, indeed, Tie Fighter >> X-Wing.
Yes, exactly that !
And if my memory is still ok, this used to run on MS-DOS. Where is my DOSBox ?
"As a result, South Korea will complain to UN agency the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as well as the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), warning that its northern neighbour is breaking UN rules and endangering the safety of passengers."
Is beyond me why SK bothers to complain to ITU about a nation whose bonkers leaders give the 2 fingers salute about everything including nuke tests to the whole planet since so many years.
"It could make you look a little daft that way, but if you're fitting the walls of your home with Wi-Fi blocking wallpaper, how ridiculous you appear to your fellow peer(s) is probably the least of your worries. ®"
LOL. Exactly that. I vote this for the most pointless product of the year.
As said above, paranoid people are fine, they just need to use optical fibers only. Really tricky to get the signal if not inside your home. Great security. Oh, yes, and they need to read the interweb to know how to disable WIFI on the box/router, which apparently didn't come to the poor minds of the manufacturer of this wallpaper.
Only marginal use of this would be exams rooms or similar places where mobile phones or WIFI are/should be prohibited, but this is a niche market. And that's apparently not the selling point they're betting on ...
"... numerically illiterate Greens and journalists."
This is one part of the problem. Many journalists can't add 2 and 2 without any mistake. So understanding a business case for a water plan, forget it. That's why anyone can persuade them of any number (including numbers in the trillion as they have no idea what they are) without a blink from them.
The other part of the problem is ... follow the money. And see how it may very well lead to big water companies which sole financial interest is to pressure consumers at 0 investment of any kind. Then, throwing a couple of grands to a political big mouth does the trick of keeping their interest safe.
Well, it's not even an austrian funny name !
In france, you have (uncomplete list):
- Froidcul (cold ars)
- Pisse en l'air (piss in the air)
- Longcochon (long pig)
- Saint-Vit (Vit is a very obsolete name for penis)
- MontCuq (can be read "my ars" even if spelling is not OK)
I don't think people are doing a lot of fuss about that ...
"On the proprietary side of the IBM midrange house – as if the Unixes were not as proprietary as z/OS, OS/400, OpenVMS, and Windows, but this is the language we inherited from the 1980s ..."
Ah ah, kuddo to the author for this good one, indeed very true. Decades after the last common trunk of Unixes (SYS V R3, if memory is not totally gone), what's left of the "standard", as a common denominator between them would probably fit on one A4 sheet of C source code !
Maybe something linked to "/" as a directory/file separator ....
Industry loves to split up integrated things ...
To be honest, it was really borderline to put references of such a brilliant system as ZFS
side by side with anything coming from Redmond, the firm which keeps discovering things
invented in the 60s, only later during the 21st century !
When/if they come up with a meaninglfull progression bar for files copy, yes, they
may address advanced storage technology. Meantime, they have plenty to fix.
Hmmm, that is coming faster than expected. Other boffins (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect) wrote 50,000 years before
the reapers wipe the whole galaxy.
Anyway, other sources say this war is coming march of 2012 ...
Whatever, bring them on, my Shepard is ready !
/me go write something terrible will happen in 5055, somewhere
in an old cave of the countryside, just to make sure some folks in the
future will have something to think of.
Yes, I'm with craigi (and also AC above). I don't feel particularly good at reading this and I'm positive this was entirely unneeded.
Would you like whatever sound comes out of you to be reported when you die ?
I wouldn't, and I do believe Jobs wouldn't either.
Not being myself a big fan of consoles (as their games are too expensive) except for the WII, that is, I find it largely appaling that MS, as their sole response to piracy is gonna:
- come back to the solutions of the 80s (proprietary FS, allegedly readable by no OS except the xbox FW) with for sure the same success: no stop of piracy, and breakage of legit. game media
- kill one of the only pro I reckon for game consoles: you don't have f***ing MS pushing patches to it on a daily basis, turning your computer into a chaotic mess
Well done MS !
/me notes to never envisage to purchase an MS console
largely cheaper and less power hungry:
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/fit-pc2-specifications/
And the box is all in aluminium !
The first time I saw one occurence was on an Amiga 500. Something like 1989, a funny message saying: "you have been infected ... by a virus !"
Quite uncommon malware time by today's standards ...
Anyway, it's a bit sad that some people still think autorun, in whatever OS and for whatever type of executable content, is a good idea.
/me fires up my Amiga emul to play Lemmings
I'm with Guus on this one (Hi Guus, by the way, long time no see :-).
HP has only been capable of meta-integration in the storage area, so far. Look at all their tapes libs: all of the market manufacturers (Overland, Quantum, STK etc ...) with an HP sticker and some HP-stamped software to give a marketing point that it's "integrated", where it is not.
The XP has never been any different: one layer of HDS SW, one of HP, the goal being to be able to get rid of HDS at any time to buy from another shop.
You simply can't build storage nowadays with the assumption you can change HW vendor at any time.
That's the difference between EMC/Netapp/IBM and HP: the focus.
Now, maybe it will change, but as far as I'm concerned, I'll come back to assess this in 5 years time. After they've bought a dozen new storage companies and will still struggle to put all of the pieces in place.
"Thieves drive off with 10,800 Western Digital drives"
That'd be EMC, for sure !
"Until we can work with China to respect intellectual property ..."
Good luck with this one. Kingdom will have come long before ...
"Shadowserver has identified 315 websites that are the recipients of the SSL assault. In addition to cia.gov and paypal.com, other sites include yahoo.com, americanexpress.com, and sans.org."
Let me see: CIA, Paypal, yahoo (with their infernal webmail system).
They're targeting the most evil web sites of da Internet, maybe ?
I have to say the King's College London team's research methodology is appaling to a very high degree.
Research on sexuality using polling on women *on their own perception of their body* is probably some kind of scoop !
It's just like asking "do you have big breasts" and concluding all women have small breasts !
I suggest them to draw conslusions on what to eat tonight by a large study on flies and the ratio of them having apetite for excrements.
Like they say "Eat sh**, billions of flies can't be wrong".
Like I say "Whatever a given point, there's always a statistical study to prove it"
IT angle ? Many IT studies are conducted in the same way ...
"Opera was quite clear on how it sees the matter: "Security issues continue to plague Internet Explorer users, and the latest recommendations from the German and French governments against using the browser are in line with what the security experts have been saying for years." "
Indeed, what to say on top of this ? It's been written all over the place, in El Reg and elsewhere: Drop the *darn thing* !
"VOSA said MOT failure rates: "do not necessarily reflect on the ‘reliability or longevity’ of the particular make and model of car concerned – and very often say more about the owner and the way the car has been used and maintained.""
Hmm, political talk, here. It does say a lot as most owners won't waste their investment due to no servicing, right ?
And by the way, it's totally in line with what I've seen over the years and in cars forums:
- Peugeot 307: You realise after 50 000 km the price you paid it is in fact a tiny portion of the total cost. Gear boxes can die at 80 000 Km under normal usage, large parts of the body will fall off unexpectedly, plus the famous recurring clutch problems etc ... Possibly the worst reliability record in Peugeot's history, largely accountable for the problems the firm is through. Gone is the longevity of the 205 ... Better rent such a car ...
- Renault Megane: A lot better than begginning of the last decade, when engine accessory belt would snap and take with it the timing belt (geez, have they heard of timing belt protection ?) but still many issues, in pure Renault style: windscreen joints problems, brakes problems, tires wearing out at mad speed, ...
- Toyota Corolla: you can have problems with it, but very rarely withour jumping off a cliff. Unbreakable. I drive one from time to time as a replacement in the garage. Has been the same for years. Is probably 350 000 km now ... Still driving solid.
As for pre-1999 Alfa Romeo, I'd like to say any statistics here are inaccurate. There are how many of them still able to drive ? 100 ? 80 ? Rust have burnt them since long :-)
"Hell, I could barely find my way around it. The trashing of the classic "File Edit View" menu structure is likely the #1 reason for the slow utilization rate of Office '07."
I'm with you on this.Took me a while and a lot of blood pressure to find how to print and how the f*ck to undo something !
I instlalled OO one week after :-)
Change of UI for the sole purpose of having the user locked into its ill logic is going to backfire at MS. Probably as usual, on the second issue, when Office 2010 hits the shelves ...
Drop MS, join the militia !
"Previously, on 30 December, the Los Angeles Times had informed its readers of a rectum bomb."
[...]
"This was flabbergasting - and wrong. But in the US, and for the mob journalism which accompanies every domestic terror story, careful thought has no place."
Right, so now that the US is gonna make body scanners mandatory any time soon, I think anytime one will be asked to come here for a minute, at an airport security gate, he'll meet a staff with latex gloves ...
Geez, I'm not flying to the US during the next decade !
Are they genuine, I wonder ...
The paper one, probably, I've seen once a tape library jammed with paper, so this one is not too far.
But the second, I hardly believe the mice would nest here ...
Anyway, very good pictures !
"Over the last few years I have 3 Vista laptops in the house and a big fat gaming machine that the eldest built and have had no problems. You do have to kick it around a bit first, ruthlessly remove any AV, turn off UAC, disable auto updates, stick in a hosts file, shut down more than a few services, etc., but nothing beyond the capabilities of the average Reg reader. A bit like moving the seats, mirrors and steering wheel of a new car, peeling the plastic sheet off a screen, just those things that you do."
Actually, funny you mention this, but even if doing all of the service on my cars alone, I've never moved the steering wheel. Just because I like it to work *all of the time* and dislike re-engineering a product (after all, if that was necessary, I could have built the product myself, without the flaws).
Vista is actually the only OS apart from WIN95 I've ever seen killing itself totally with no user action, just by auto-patching (remember, user nod is not important to patching, in MS land)
and f***ing itself entirely for good at next reboot, with BSOD. Worst than 95 since 95 would just lock up and any reboot would be successfull.
User was very baffled, OS was f***ed, user was lost to MS cause.
Nice article, looking at how things used to be and are now ... different,
for MS.
Good step back.
I'd like to see more of this at El Reg.
Thanks.
"This would culminate on Saturday 17 October 2009 with "an offensive spiritual warfare attack on the demonic strongholds over the nation"
*shake head* See what happens when you leave some utter wackos play WoW for the whole night ?
Seriously, whatever they've taken, I wan't it to stay the other half of the planet.
"Disappointingly for any wouldbe kimono-clad combat mystics out there, the handheld energy cutlass isn't intended for hand to hand combat ..."
Shame, really. 2 of these and a protoss suit, they would be really fearsome against the Zerg swarm.
I bet they missed the moon, because the darn thing was GPS piloted, and it went out of the sphere of operation.
"We know the game plan of our adversaries. They will keep twisting the doorknobs and picking the locks until they find a way in. But we must not let them in. We must change the locks. We must bar the doors. And we must sound the alarms when we notice anything out of the ordinary."
Yeah, stay at home, you loonie, bar the doors, shoot at anyone knocking at the door, never get out, die alone, paranoid and as stupid as one can ever be.
Is it really that difficult to do online banking with your password only in your brain, and no compulsive click on whatever shite comes into your mailbox ?
Geez, I'm glad my security has nothing to do with the FBI. No way I stay in a country which security is even remotely influenced by a moron told by his wife: "It is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more internet banking for you!"
"it is expected that the 2068 encounter will diminish in probability as more information about Apophis is acquired".
I very well understand how one can evaluate probabilities of an encounter, but how they can state this probability *will* diminish when more data is available is beyhond me.
Why more data wouldn't raise dramatically this probability, even to 1 ? What's the probability of this ?
I really don't feel secure anymore, all of a sudden.
Balmer knows, probably by reading through smoking remains of smashed furniture, that MS shot its one bullet per 5 years ammo with Vista.
Consequently, except for the one who has a really obsolete PC (>5 years), noone will spit off the cash for a new one, even less the ones recklessly raped by the Vista debacle, who, by now, has noticed a top-notch PC with Vista runs as a P75 under Win98.
So PC sales will remain flat and apart from the "me first" crowd, who spend all of their cash anyway on whatever new bells and whistles, the rest will just wait until W7 is proven, to envisage it as an OS.
"Recommendations from tech savvy friends were one of the main reasons consumers latched onto AVG in the first place. AVG lost a lot of goodwill in this area with the traffic-spewing fiasco that attached to version 8.0 of its security scanner."
I think mostly this was the ridicule false positives that got people either mad as dogs (would be me), or seriously doubting it would ever catch a brontosaurus in a one way corridor.
"Maybe the bankers and Stock brokers will be standing in line anxious to get Windows 7, but in this economy, the average consumer who still has a job and a computer aren't likely to be in a big rush to get Windows 7 any more than they were anxious to get Vista. Good Luck Microsoft."
I've actually been surprised of how many people rushed to Vista and its new GUI, forgetting, possibly because win98 is so behind us now, any element of prudence.
Taking this, plus the ripoff policy of Vista only on new PC and the no-install disk of integrators, what I'm curious about, is how many of those folks, having crashed into the Vista wall, will spit so many bucks again for the service pack, while their neighbour having stayed out of Vista, will happily enjoy XP running at the same speed, with the same features or more.
Most of Vista sales were poor captive Joe Average sold a laptop with Vista. They won't be buying yet another one for win7 ...
The point I'm trying to make is eating horse is not at all common in this country.
3 horse butcheries out of 45 butcheries in Grenoble (see www.pagesjaunes.fr) don't make horse meat common. At all.
Overall, Grenoble being a big town, horse butcheries must account for 1% ? In the 100 km around me, I can certify there are 0 horse butchery !
"TWaT did note that:
The foundation is hardly the only government agency to be embarrassed by disclosures about employees looking at pornography at work.
The inspector general for the Securities and Exchange Commission noted in a report last fall that it had recently conducted three investigations into employees who misused government computers to view pornography.
Nearly 4,000 people work at the SEC."
Yeah, and given none of them actually had a second in years to have a look at Madoff's filings (otherwise, things would have been crystal clear), guess how many have become pr0n kings ?
"The French eat horses"
Care to elaborate how you came to know that ? I've been living in this country for 4 decades and never came to meet anyone consuming horse meat. There are few horse butcheries in the Paris suburbs (north), but nothing more than a handfull, throughout the country.
Maybe another myth from someone never been in this country ?
"The Post apparently brought the related bosom-combustion issue to light, noting that bras can catch fire during combat and then "melt onto conscripts’ skin"."
Ouch, that ought to be *really* hot action, then.
Side note: those female soldier, they really must wear gov. bras by law and can't buy market ones ? I'm sure a lot of them don't catch fire :-)
"Close - Fortran (even Fortran 77) is still used because for heavy lifting numerical calculations it is fast compared to all of the 'modern' languages."
I'm amazed this myth is still alive 10 years after I left the supercomputing area ...
I suppose myth just mean that: a lie that can live for decades or centuries :-)
F77 was only known to be faster in the very early 90s, when Cray only started an optimised C compiler for their systems. Ever since, on open source platforms, Fortran and C have the same backend so the code is the same. There is 0 reason in the languages themselves why one would produce more optimised code than the other. At all.
No, Fortran 77 is a retarded language, with no syntax to speak of, and no dynamic memory allocation, only still present because many programs are still here and no one has the time/money/energy to rewrite them, and also because a number of IT people can't learn !
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.66.html
"Women breastfeed after they've been bathing in estrogen during a nine month pregnancy, so obviously it takes some time."
Indeed. How anyone bathing in testosterone and with no estrogen whatsoever is supposed to reach the same state is largely beyond me.
What a loony. He'd better prepare syringes with massive doses of estrogen as a contingency plan to his missus being out. Bottom line is his shape and mindset would change a wee bit :-)
As Rob said, "We are truly destined to become exstinct".
Paris icon, as she doesn't need more estrogen ...
""The debate should be about how you process the data," Sutherland said."
Kind of accurate, only lacking the time factir. The debate should in fact be "you get the data, *now* (if harvesting is allowed)", and you process it in the *future*.
The consequence is, then, that you have no idea *how* it's processed when you give it away !
Given some of the data is DNA samples that last from birth to death, you then get why people are worried about it, quite rightly.
PH icon, since she got it back then, and it's been put all over the place, some time after
"Christopher Hoff earlier this week arrived at the Stratford clinic stark bollock naked, provoking a fit of the screaming abdabs in the female receptionist. He then legged it, later to be confronted by police at his house."
I suppose the random female receptionist, in the US of A, has never seen a naked man, in her whole life ... Probably all lights have always been off when she's been doing stuff with her BF/husband, as well. Puritans ...
In France, recently, they shot a vid as a joke with naked girls walking in the street and singing. There's never been any complaint so far.
Google for "baby baby vid".
"One ex-Googler calls them "second class citizens."
Yeah, like all companies I've been remotely exposed to, during the last 15 years yes ? Pls name a company where it doesn't occur ?
This, plus what AC wrote just above, which can be true depending on company/contract etc ...
As many others have stated, what is the problem, here ? It all depends on the processes that need to have this inputs. In my personnal case, I don't mind at all, since those processes are limited to very unikely getting a doctor consultation on my name !
Here is mine, pls don't censor it, El Reg, I'm taking full responsability on giving it away:
1691201283454
1 means I'm male, great news.
69 means I'm born in 1969.
12 means I'm born in december.
01 means I'm born in a particular french department (the first one, pls guess).
The rest I'll leave it to townhall secretaries discretion.
If anyone here happens to have a clue how to do anything bad with it, on top of the above, don't hesitate ! I'd be glad to report any bank account problem, or tax amount leaks or anything else !
Paris icon, since she also gave away a lot of clues on her personal life.
"It was some sort of transmitter by all accounts. We’re not sure what the device picked up or whom it was transmitting to. But it did leave Paris very jittery."
/me rush to scan the usual porn torrent site.
"AMD will sell whatever it's got on the truck - just like Intel has done in the past and will do in the future."
Exactly. And no worries the customers will debug any remaining problems from rushed QA.
As AC put it above also, SW licensing has a HUGE weight in the decision, today, thus QA won't be a problem ...
On top of this, very often, those systems are redundant due to architecture or load-balancers, thus, less stress is put on the QA.
"Let us not forget that a long time ago Bill Gates reckoned the kitchen would be the natural environment for the PC."
Ah yes, but only someone with the head buried that much into his rectum like Gates would ever say that, those days.
People are asking kitchen appliances to be as cheap as possible and work flawlessly for as many decades as possible without any defect. Given that, who, even the most ubergeek of us would buy any model stating "Vista compatible", or even with anything close to a computer inside ? Prices would be inflated and there would be costly maintenance each 2 years minimum, for what service ? Knowing better than you what milk or what butter to purchase ?
MS has already taught everyone to be very suspicious about technology working for its interest rather than the user, so I don't think we'll see home appliances with an OS prior to MS disappearance from the fact of earth.
Even car manufacturers are backtracking on that ...
YES, bring back the natural keyboard, which proved MS could actually make typing one of the most atrocious torture ever:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Natural_keyboard
I still see a couple of users here with that. They all suffer severe articulations trouble, I still wonder why ...
Surely an activeX plugin in FF ?
Time to disable MS auto-update. While we still can.
Also time to put Windows behind a Linksys router. With a changed password :-)
I find the "it's up to Mozilla to fix it" very entertaining. Kiddies reading El Reg ...
"The flaw is trivial to exploit when users fail to change the administrative password that's used by default."
As best as I can try, I fail to sympathize with people that don't change the default passwd. If it's default, it's known, and it's no longer a password, shouldn't be hard to understand !
If they can't, they should really stay on the ISP's box and all the proprietary stuff and price.
On the other hand, that kind of attack is probably the proof all vendors will have to move to unique passwds, as this is the only way against Joe Average User ...
