Recent Comments

Is that your own photo? If so, it's brilliant. Slashdot in the background is the icing on the cake.

I used to play things like card games on IRC back in the early 90s. That seemed to be more popular than MUDs as it was social as well as competitive.

One single continuous piece of tape, no spool, all zig-zaggy inside the case, that was quite literally shoved back into the cartridge as fast as it was being tugged out. 85KB capacity, IIRC. Innards of the drives visible here: http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/scripts/picshow.php?image=qlmicrodrives.jpg&folder=/Museum/Sinclair/ql&back=/Museum/Sinclair/ql/index.php . Although initially developed for the BT Merlin and the Sinclail QL, I had one on my ZX Spectrum as I splashed out on Interface 1.

Dire is the only word for them.

However, the drives were significantly lighter than the 40kg unit which I used to read these: http://fatphil.org/images/im_floppier.jpg

Hey, I saw the new Godzilla movie and Walter White's collection of Zip disks survived an earthquake, an EMP, a nuclear meltdown, and 15 years of neglect in an evacuation zone!

Because, you know, everything you see in movies is absolutely correct.

Pick a good plain color background. This used to be a much bigger issue when you had a 133Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, but performance is still important for low-end systems, like atom. Although your chosen photograph may be JPG, the desktop will likely have to store the full uncompressed 24 bit color data in memory. For 1920x1080 this is at least 6.22 MB of wasted RAM + enough memory bandwidth and CPU cycles to composite the image to the screen all day.

Goo. Damn autocorrect.

this was a John Carpenter movie. One could throw in some "gray too" theory for good measure.

Don't trust Cisco to lead the way on anything important. They are not big thinkers over there.

I really never see the desktop. Who does?

On a phone or tablet I end up returning to a home screen with cute animated wallpaper for fun and to pick the next "app". But it's completely unnecessary to make that intermediate stop on a real computer.

And yet you still cried a bit. :)

Still not enough cooking shows OTA IMO YMMV.

My butt is like a series of tubes? Yikes.

That's indeed one of the things that annoys players: a game advertising itself as free to play, but not actually being playable in a practical sense unless you pay. In the shareware games it was completely impossible to progress beyond the first episode unless you paid, but you were told that before you started to play.

I think the difference between shareware and freemium is that shareware is up front about it's model. Most freemium games advertise them as being free, with the payment as a hidden gotcha (and very nagging).

Bladerunner would be a pretty awesome dystopia too, except for the homicidal replicants. Los Angeles could use a facelift anyway.

Never saw any need for it. Distracting, usually at least partially (and more often almost totally) obscured. I used to use a simple tiling pattern that sort of resembled leather, but in the end just switched to a plain greyish-blue that I switch to a neutral ~18% grey when I'm editing images or videos.

The Apogee/ID shareware model from the 90's was also a kind of freemium: episode 1 is free, episode 2 and 3 are sold. The problem is not in having a free/paid combination, the problem is greed. Game development costs money, so there should be money coming in or the development can't continue. But in some companies bringing in money becomes more important than making a game and the game play suffers as a result.

I agree with the patching problem: the nice thing about consoles used to be that you could just pop in a cartridge or disc and start playing, without having to worry about system specs, drivers, hard disk space etc. Nowadays game discs are just a workaround for people having slow net connections, because you can't play from the disc anymore: you have to install the game and then patch it.

The patching is mostly a problem with the AAA titles though: indie titles tend to be much smaller in size and scope, if only because of smaller budgets. They also tend to be released when the developer considers the game ready, instead of at a time set by upper management. Since I get most of my games from Humble Bundle and Kickstarter nowadays, I mostly know the patching problem from friends who do own recent consoles.

About online harassment: yes, that's a problem, but in 1994 there was hardly any online gaming except for MUDs. I'm not convinced that gamers from 1994 would have been kinder to each other if the masses had been online then.

Don't forget that you can make it yourself. Plenty of stuff I found from random sources and downloaded straight to my "wallpapers" folder.

Does anyone know any cross-platform wallpaper switchers that aren't filled with crapware?

Dagnabbit, I skimmed the options too quickly and voted "Bladerunner" because I didn't see the "1984" option. Obviously, it's 1984 and yes, we are very nearly there as a whole, and either currently are or have been there in parts (thinking N.Korea, the former E.Germany (which I had a chance to visit while it was still very much DDR)).

You can actually just search for "wallpapers" and then filter the results with google's advanced search features to only show you images with the exact resolution you set.

Sky Captain would be awesome though: all that retro chic, robots with tentacles, Angelina Jolie with an eye patch and a hovering airstrip near a secret island with an underwater passageway to an island mecca of lost creatures? That's way more interesting than me in front of this Win7 box at the office, slowly watching my soul decay...

... so, dead.

Surely we can agree there are people with varying levels of addiction? Cigarettes are the same - some people have an occasional smoke, others reach for the cigs as soon as their eyes are open in the morning. I've got an aunt who has smoked since she was 16, so going on 60 years now. Amazing she's still alive, is all I can say.

Gaming can be addictiveness.

Lenovo now owns Iomega http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1693

Right, because we live in an all-or-nothing world, and moderation doesn't exist.

1984, we are almost there. In the long run a terminator scenario doesn't seem too unlikely either

If you are just looking for high resolution wallpapers, try a google search for "high resolution desktop wallpapers" .
The first hit is wallpaperswide.com and I actually like that site.
But since that is so easy to find, maybe you are looking for something special?

I got out of gaming in 2005. I haven't bought a game since (or game console). Life is much better.

Gaming is not much different than being an alcoholic. I know so many youth now that do nothing but game. They barely pass through school. They have no time to put any thought into a career path. And when they finally graduate they are perfectly happy with working at taco bell (or not working at all) and spending 80% of their time in front of the TV 'gaming'. Finally when they are 30, they realized that they have wasted most of their life. I was in the same boat once, but I managed to give it all up and go back to school for a degree in CS. I have also effectively banned all games from my household, with one exception, you can play the game if you are the one that made it. At least then you will have accomplished something somewhat productive. "Gaming" is a blood sucking time waster.

The default background I have is the company logo with a fairly simplistic pattern. It looks fine. I usually have applications open so only really see it when starting/shutting down the computer.

Am surprised that a PAN, WAN or LAN wasn't mentioned. Soon we will all be walking 'personal area network's and lots of devices (the internet of things) will be able to sense what is around them and respond. Looks like some parts of sci fi movies, Minority Report for a start, will be just another part of life.

Thanks, thought you'd never ask! Let me just get the truck ...

stored in MY butt, no?

That's an interesting comment. I have a fondness for them too, sort of, but for no really well-justified reason. That was back when IOMEGA was a pretty darned good company, making good things. I've still got a CD burner from IOMEGA that is well made, solid, durable, and doing a great job burning CDs (quietly and reliably) and it's about 10 years old now! I later bought a DVD burner from another company and the thing is flimsy, loud, and cheap-feeling. I was kind of sad when IOMEGA pulled the plug. Or did they get bought out by somebody? I forget now.

Anyway, that's the thing about the zipdrives too. Those zip disks were much more solid-feeling than the 3.5" floppy disks that they helped retire. Solid little things. I was writing a book at the time and used a zip drive to do a daily backup of the manuscript. The whole thing fit perfectly on one zip, which I stored offsite.

I was an early adopter of Zip drives. They weren't terrible devices, although they did have problems, largely stemming - I think - from quality control issues down the line. They gained a bad reputation because of this but in most cases Zip drives were quite decent.

Of course, looking back we wonder how we ever managed. Putting aside the reliability issues, Zip's now-laughable 1MB/s transfer rate, 100MB storage and price of $10/disk seem too slow, too small and far, far too expensive. But it has to be remembered that - when released - most computers had hard-drives measuring in only hundreds of megabytes, and the primary method of data-transfer was still floppy disks. CD-ROM burners cost thousands of dollars and flash-drives were just a gleam in some mad inventor's eye. As a replacement for the notoriously unreliable 1.44" floppy drive, the Zip drive was a god-send. Even when CD-burners started coming into the market, Zip retained its usefulness; for a long time, it was faster to write to Zip than to optical, and it had the advantage in that you could erase and re-write to the media as many times as needed. But Zip was never really designed to compete with optical; it was intended as a replacement for the floppy and - in my eyes - it served its purpose admirably.

Eventually I too gave up my Zip drives (just as I gave up cassette tapes, floppies and CD-Rs); technology marched on and better alternatives became available. But I still look fondly on my little blue drives.

I agree. It depersonalizes the costs of waging war - makes it into a video game, and a damned expensive one, at that. There was a good article making the rounds at Reddit not long ago where they are trying to personalize it by making a huge picture visible to a drone 'pilot' of some kid who got killed by another drone - make the pilot really think about it.

That said, since I've got kids, I'm glad the robots can go kill each other now. Leave my kids at home, thankyouverymuch.

The problem with things like drones and robots is they make war too easy to wage. When you don't have to worry about the political fallout of your young returning in body bags, it's much easier to start a war. This is already happening with the drone attacks.

I dunno about good guys and bad guys, but it's certainly true Russia and China do a hell of a lot of spying. You don't hear about Ugandan spies much because regardless of how well the country is doing as a nation, they just don't have many/any spies. Russia and China meanwhile, are putting money and effort into their spying divisions (and in Russia's case, that spectacularly good looking redheaded spy), and it's probably bearing fruit. I don't think it's about reminding everyone China/Russia are the bad guys. It's about reminding everyone China/Russia have spies.

I can't be sure, but I always thought this was a slam on Slashdot. When they first rolled out their mobile site, this is exactly what they did. I got asked "want to go to the mobile site?" on every goddamned link ... very annoying.

I cut it 4 tears ago, and it is amazing. I don't care about cable tv. I will not go back. I don't care if they even start to offer a-la-carte. They've lost me for good.

With all the spy and antispy stories lately they have to tell us a success story again and make sure we know China and Russia are the bad guys... yawn

My vote is for Sleipnir
Just disable the gestures, and add a Custom Button >Close Current Tab :)

If I have a decent web browser why do I need specific apps? At least the browser does not broadcast my imei and contact list
How exactly can you block ads from a native app? Without root plus firewall that is

That nails it.. so many sites plaster a message about their app every. single. time. Just so frustrating. Perhaps they are trying to get people to install their app through sheer frustration?

ROFL

.. long live not reading the article?

Try this then .. other obligatory xkcd .. http://xkcd.com/1174/ ;op

Oblig xkcd, even though TFA already includes this xkcd? :P

Thanks. Should be good now.

I prefer replacing "Cloud" with "extra-judicial servers", but some would argue that's just high definition web browsing ..

The skeevy Google tracking prevented me from falling in love with the Nexus 7 (and from using any stand-alone Google products on my computer). I really wanted to love it. It's a nice piece of kit, but I felt so icky-sticky with how very much Google was getting its fingers all over me that I returned it within a week. That was my first and, so far, only Android experience (I'm still cheesed off at myself that I wasn't clever enough to set up a throw-away Google account before trying it out). We're getting an Acer C720 on Tuesday and I'm planning on immediately putting some flavor of linux on it.

On the Firefox memory issue, I just read that a major contributing culprit could be my won't-live-without-it Adblock extension . The linked post explains briefly why that's the case, but also points out:

Of course, it should also be noted that Firefox (and Chrome, let's not leave anyone out) can also be a pretty big memory hog on its own without any extensions.

I'm hearing a lot of hatred over the new interface. My comments are:
1. if the only 'innovating' you are doing is aping someone else's UI, you are in a bad place. Nobody won by copying the other.
2. essentially the same comment, but: considering how many ways there are to improve browsers, is the widget set the only thing you could find to fix?

What keeps me off Chrome is all the skeevy Google tracking. What keeps me on Chrome is this new Chromebook :( It's also a decent browser. But Google is increasingly creeping me out. Firefox should be scooping up disaffected Chrome users. But they're not, because increasingly Mozilla Foundation's browser really sucks balls. And I am so fed up with the constant plug-in is out of date stuff, or checking plug-ins on boot time, etc. Find a better architecture! And fix those memory leaks! You are the Titanic, guys!

I was pretty much forced to install the Classic Theme Restorer extension to get things back to what I consider useable. I don't know if it's the extension or simply v29, because I installed the extension immediately after updating, but Firefox has been quite crashy ever since. If it is the extension, then I'm kinda boned, because I don't much feel like using Firefox without it.

There seems to be a bug which appears related to such a change:

Notice: Undefined index: last_time in /var/pipedot/lib/tools/tools.php on line 768 error: sql [insert into story_history (sid, zid, time, last_time) values (?, ?, ?, ?)] arg [183, fatphil@pipedot.org, 1400437667, ] msg [SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column 'last_time' cannot be null]

I don't know, that new interface is kind of breaking it for me. There's no firefox anymore: there's chrome and a chrome knockoff. I'm probably going to switch to something else.