Category: Computers

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I keep saying I need to post more…..

Its been months since I’ve actually posted consistently.

I have my reasons as my life has been one thing after another… but, I am going to try to get back to this at a regular basis.  For one.. I’d rather post here. While facebook is an option its kind of like being in a dog park… Everyone is sniffing your ass wondering what you are doing and whether they agree with you or disagree they blow smoke up your ass if they think your position on things is not in line with theirs.  I don’t need that, I really don’t give a fuck if you find my posts on coffee or other stuff offensive.  I’m me I’ll post what I want how I want and that is all there is too it.

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I’ve always disliked facebook because if someone finds your post offensive to them they can cause trouble…. Mainly you have no creative control over your posts, No style , No way to keep your posts to your target. Sure the website is come one come call , but if you don’t like it … At least on this end of things unlike facebook it does not keep post vomit in your face.  Nor do I have to constantly fool with settings inside facebook. I am not going to make it where there is “friend system”. Facebook in it self is a disaster of code. I do not give ten fucks if you need 1023823 friends to get a chicken on your farm to fuck a leopard to get a land expansion.  I like simplicity .

As it stands with facebook it is likely everyone of the post you make are analyzed and sold off to marketers.  In reality facebook is more like test to see how you respond to certain stimuli.  If you took Pavlov’s Dogs and applied it to facebook it would unsurprisingly fit will……

In his initial experiments, Pavlov presented a stimulus and then gave the dog food; after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the bell. Pavlov called the stimulus the conditioned (or conditional) stimulus (CS) because its effects depend on its association with food.

Now lets see how facebook works on the same logic.

Facebookline

In  initial experiments, Facebook presented a stimulus and then gave the Human a like; after a few repetitions, the Humans started to Post in response to the like. Facebook called the stimulus the conditioned (or conditional) stimulus (CS) because its effects depend on its association with Liked Post.

Fucking fantastic to know facebook just wants you to be their dog to just get more information out of  you.  Privacy issues aside which are extreme. Facebook sucks, I’ve given up posting there. I will keep my postings here and if you find them and like them that’s fucking great.

Facebook is a step back in the age of the internet, Its going back to the bottleneck days of everyone has a portal and is stuck in there own prisons  like AOL / Compuserve… Mostly to keep you in there own small toxic universes until they melt down and the users get fucked with a roadcone sideways.

 

All I have too say is…

fuck-facebook-110453014618

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SD Wifi to Compact flash fun. Compact flash Adapter fix.

I bought a Wifi SD card for my Digital Camera.

I jumped at getting a slightly newer camera, while it takes compact flash I thought about finding something like an EYE-FI card or Flashair. small problem, you’d think something like that would be a higher market value to someone with an SLR camera. But, after looking around I found all the cards with WiFi are only SD.    with with the amount of tablets and phones I have. I figured why spend a ton of money on a huge Compact flash card.  So after a bit of looking around I purchased a toshiba flashair card. the next step was to purchase an adapter from SD to compact flash .  the WIFI SD/SDHC/SDXC To Compact Flash CF Type II Memory Card Adapter I bought was a generic card but, while I was not sure going into this because there was very many mixed reviews on using an adapter with a compact flash.

While the card with the Wifi SD card worked ok the range was severely limited, it was limited to about 3 feet at best. After looking at the card for a bit I noticed that there is a big metal face to the CF adapter.  I did a little surgery to the card itself.

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As you can see the two cards side by side.. Taking the CF adapter apart was actually very easy, using a razor I dug a bit under the metal face and popped it up a bit, After that It was very easy to remove the metal faceplate.

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As you can see the metal piece is pretty much decoration and has no structural value .  when I place the SD card back in a lot more of the card was exposed.  the final look of the card was a bit more open.

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With the removal with the face place my range on the FlashAir card did not only double it went up by a factor of ten. I could keep connected to the card from across the house with a max range of 40feet or so.

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Stick that in your “cloud” and smoke it II

Now that the cloud services are hitting the market more and more, the more bullshit things that the corporate droids are saying what it can do.  Honestly, the state of the cloud is something closer to smog.  You don’t see the problems with the cloud till you are totally engulfed in the cloud of smog, and through the “information superhighway” your creamed by some asshole in a mack truck and get your car stolen with your wallet and by the time you come out of the cloud you’re naked and asking your self “WTF JUST HAPPENED?!”

Matt Honan learned this the hard way. He got hit in by the mack truck of social engineering when someone retrieved his password than went on a rampage of deleting his accounts and spamming with other accounts.  One of the biggest problems with the cloud is there is only a single point of access, Once that’s broken it becomes fuck all and pretty much if you don’t have it backed up to solid media such as a DVD or a backup drive , you might as well just light your computer on fire in the end.  Even if you do have your media backed up on the computer that you’ve connected to the stink cloud, in all chances you may end up with your device wiped due to that single point of access and accounts attached to it.

Also with the perceived “Security” that the cloud has its really just unicorn farts and rainbows due to in part the end user.  How many people will just log into there cloud putting in the password every time or will they hit save password and screw themselves in the fact that its just “easier”, Not to mention a lost device could doom all of your information  since there is interconnectability in the toxic waste cloud.

It just makes me wonder about the security of the cloud thing.  If someone can call and pretend to be you, how many other ways is your account on the exhaust cloud vulnerable. If media is able to execute in the cloud is there any stops to malware infecting your account and possibly everyone else with an account on the server or node your clouded information is on .  Likely your information is stored like a cesspool everyone else’s shit is in the tank with yours.  If someone finds a way to gain root access, Than pretty much rather than one account being hit thousands or more could be affected in the process.  Since the security in the cloud is based on black magic , someone named tom and  a cookie with m&m’s next to the keyboard to hopefully distract the person or persons trying to gain access to the information.

Websites, portals, and social media platforms have been dealing with these problems and can be directly relatable to the possibilities of problems that are ahead. Blizzard being the most recent, Linkedin , Amazon all being hacked  With the biggest problem of you’re taking someones word for if your information is safe or not.  Sony being hacked last year left customers in the dark for days with the hacking of their servers .  So it only leaves you guessing if the “cloud” goes down for an extended time.

Also, some people are taking a liking to the cloud for other reasons security aside.  At kotaku Patricia Hernandez likens the point of the portability of the “cloud” and how her information is accessible everywhere.  Try saying that when the internet goes down , or the authentication server shit itself and you have lost complete access to the game since you cant grab an internet connection. She goes on to say…

But overall? The benefits of the cloud outweigh the drawbacks for me. Everything feels more convenient with the cloud. I can buy the games from my home, without having to go anywhere. I don’t have to worry about space, which tends to be sparse for me. And even if it wasn’t, if you’ve played games as long as I have, then you’ve accrued a sizable collection.

Having something being easy is not worth it when it comes with eroded customer rights, lack of ownership , Security issues, Likely needing to be bound to an internet connection. sure the cloud has some good things with it but, over all its just like a cloud left from a stinkbomb, It can be fun, have long lasting implication and at the same time can be your worse nightmare as Matt Honan learned. On another end is since all your information is bound to one point, if you get banned from said cloud, Your information and possibly your money with it due to any expenditures you have bought and is bound to said cloud.  Sure you don’t have to worry about scratched disks , or loosing the books with the game . but, in all its not worth loosing everything because someone decided to make a stupid decision and leave your whole account open due to a hole somewhere and everything is gone.  Also worth mentioning is if a company goes out of business with your cloud, than your cloud becomes a fart in the wind and is gone. Since you have no control of how stupid a company can be or have any control when some company decides to end its science project with a cloud saying its too expensive to maintain.  you could loose everything in a moments notice including material stuff that matters such as credit cards, memories of events due to you only having your pictures in one place or other important work when your device suddenly clears itself due to someone hacking into your cloud and hitting wipe devices.

If the cloud is to succeed, there has to be allowed user changes and changes in the accessibility of the cloud, the future of cloud gaming may kill off any user modding and free creativity.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud has its uses. but, what is trying to be done with the cloud is building a bank with a glass vault. One rock and its all over.

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Call of deluded Elite premium ? wtf.

With the advent of DLC’s game publishers are getting more and more ridiculous with content and how its presented to its user base.  I hate microtransactions with games and they are becoming mainstream to the point they are worthless to what they add to the game and making the games themselves worthless.

As publishers tap this as a primary income source games loose alot of there content because the game release often is hobbled to the point of being a few hours long and content running out in the first 5 hours.  Often now you see unfinished games released with Day 1 DLC’s that fill in holes in the game that were made by short cutting the game and putting these pieces of a game behind a pay wall.

My friend picked up call of duty MW3 and i noticed that right on the box they were pushing for picking up something called Call of Duty elite premium  and I wondered. What is it? its basically a $50 dollar limited license to the future content and a bunch of crap that was either free or was in games in the past.

Looking quickly over what you get with this “service”

3. Analyze & Improve Your Performance

Access Guides to Maps, Weapons, Killstreaks, Perks, and Equipment

Most games before COD ussaully have some sort of stats tracking , Hell Unreal tournament had this kind of stat tracking back in December 1999 . That 11 years before COD, Sure this is still on the free end of the elite but, what the hell, I know they are going to say but this costs money to track on a server etc etc etc. Not really since it takes all of ten miliseconds and a few lines of code to say l33tk4lla killed soandso.

4. Customize your load outs & sync DIRECTLY to the game

WHY? if you at work trying to think about how to kill someone in a game and you’re bored shitless likely its not going to work.

onwards to ..

7. THEATER

Free Premium

  • Upload & Share 30 Second HD Videos Online
There’s this thing.. I forget what its called. Yewtub yooboob. younoob? OH YOUTUBE, yeah thats it.
Needless function.
Than you hit the paywall

10. MW3 DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT*, INCLUDING ALL THE MW3 MAPS

Premium

  • More Content than Ever, with 20 Pieces of New MW3 DLC Premium
  • New monthly DLC released over 9 months, so you Always have Something New to Play Premium
  • More Variety than Ever, with New MP Maps, Spec Ops, Missions, Game Modes & More Premium
  • You get to keep all the DLC even if your membership expires. Premium

This is what is annoying. Likely all this material was fleshed out waaaay before the release of the game so they will keep dropping it on players to keep the “interest of players” up, there’s a tell tale sign that this content is either done or was near done when Call of Duty was released.

Read it carefully ….. 20 pieces of …. New monthly DLC over 9 months… new game  modes.  basically they announced they have this DONE and set to be dripped out to the user base as slow as possible to keep interest in the game rather than have a finished product.  Since the announcement is in finite numbers rather than speculative, which means they either cut this from the game or made a decision to leave this from the game.

DLC type content is an excuse to release a half finished game and get 3x the money for it. If you look at the cost of MW3 its pretty much over a 100$ for a complete game since the shelf life for these games are limited to about 12 months at most.

In the past games were given free content to keep interest or letting people mod the games to their hearts content . Now if you mod a game to have more fun its pretty much going to get you banned from the game. These games now come with FREE planned obsolescence .

What happened with games we could play to our hearts content and Not worry if EA or someone will shut down an aspect of the game or software that therefor makes the product unusable , They Should be forced to put some sort of patch into games that have to connect to servers that multiplayer still works on a connection without the need for servers in the middle. Direct connect games used to be common but they are hard to find these days without some sort of hoops to jump through.

Basically if this gets ground… game will continue down this bad path and players will suffer at the hands of the producers of this crap.

My guess is when COD 10 is release and you want to play COD MW3 for old time sake you will try to play and get “CONNECTION REFUSED” and be stuck with the Disc that now serves as your coffee cup coaster.

 

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Stick this in your “cloud” and smoke it.

Everywhere you look these days you hear about that newfangled cloud thing…. and most people ask what the hell is the cloud. I tell them its a pile of shit buzzword. Watching TV you see the Microsoft commercials about the cloud and how you can access your stuff at home…  Or your job… or the moon whatever the fuck.. Here’s and example of said “cloud”

For those whom have had there head buried in the sand or are quite possibly dead… this innovation is as old at the internet it self(of current not arpanet you silly ass).. its called network storage. Introduced in the 1980s

 

Network-attached storage
Connects to Local Area Network via:

Hard Drives via one of:
Common manufacturers HP
NetApp
Dell
Cisco
Netgear
CTERA
Sun Microsystems
Introduced 1980’s

 

 

Yes this amazing new cloud of bullshit buzzwords yay!

And this.. hmm this is not “cloud” like .. the fact these people are accessing there pc at home tells me …. Remote desktop .. YAY MORE OLD TECH CALLED CLOUD! Mind you the guy says “I just brought up our PC at home” yeah… that’s safe.. you’re flying to who the hell knows where and your leaving a PC on 24/7 while your away from the house, when the PC overheats and sets the house on fire – Your house will be a cloud! YAY CLOUD!!

This should be called the windows FartCloud technology

It’s the Cloud! ZOMG!

Microsoft’s idea of the cloud is pretty much rebranding old technology and calling it new.. Some of the other cloud innovations here are just blatantly scary , Such as software as a service .. that’s pretty much a baaaaaaaaaaaaad thing.. Your Office software you bought.. You know the 365 one … You don’t own it. at least the could portion.. also when Office 366 comes out.. and they shut down 365 … Forced upgrade… since your only paying for a service. your stuck in an upgrade cycle for money …  Also you will have zero expectations of privacy .. Your account gets hacked? your shit is good as stolen.

What companies are banking on is that you buy into the cloud without any research thinking “Hey this is cool wizbang tech!”

When it comes down to office level this is going to be a nightmare.. as to finding your document or having documents that are not supposed to be public leaking out to the public, since the information would be on the “cloud” it maybe a passworded folder and you give it out and someone cleans out the office bank account because the boss left the banking information in the “Cloud”.

Better yet.. this is all on the internet.. the office connection goes down and productivity goes to zero since no one can access the files..

All these “cloud” services are going to open a black hole when some random company hosting your cloud goes out of business and you cant access your data anymore. not to mention there will likely be a monthly/yearly price to pay for this rather than paying a one time costs.. Its Like renting a car that you have no control over and only can do simple things on like turn on the lights and honk the horn yet your paying a cost X infinity , rather than a one time license cost. These companies will at first seem cheaper than buying software outright but when you figure that over a period of months or even years . the “cloud” costs will greatly exceed the software costs.

And I’ve said it many times… the cloud is just rehashed shit with rainbow farts and ponies with glitter just to stuplify the average user into thinking he is getting something better than it really is.

The risks building a company around the cloud is just insanely risky … From buying ultra cheap terminals that can only access the cloud, to having to build a connection that can handle massive amount of data throughput. if you have a company of 100 people all using the fartcloud you need 100 networked computers that has a zero lag time connection to manipulate data. if you have a crowd-sourced project with lag you will have 50 people fixing one problem and not realized that the other 50 just did the same thing and wasted about an hours of productivity due to each person wasting 30 seconds fixing a problem that was fixed by 1 person.

The idea of the cloud is just totally not a good idea in its current form since corporations are not looking at this as a productivity tool but more as a subscription for cash run.. since they have to sell nothing and get a fuckton of money.

 

In the end I really hope people understand what the cloud is and its not anything new nor is it worth it in any means of the word.

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Mini review: Racing games (agravations in racing games)

As a Semi fan of racing games I tend to pick up a racing game or a kart game now and than.  I used to pick up every need for speed game in the past but as the quality of the programming slipped into oblivion I stopped picking up those games. Need for speed was fun in the terms of you could Race your cars around Smash things and generally just play the way you wanted .. After hot pursuit 1 they tended to close alot of doors with the game.  Gone was Car editing and adding your own cars. Things really went downhill with Porsche unleashed.  Signs of bad programing and shoddy programing were starting to appear than in hot pursuit 2 it seems EA just gave up the ship and decided that shit was good enough to send out, Sure it looked like a Need for speed game but it stunk badly in ways that just piss people off to no end.

My thing with racing games is if the AI is good the game is good, with poor AI the game severely takes a hit. the AI in Hot Pursuit 2 was an abortion.  The developers seemed to never thought through the whole process and shortcutted the AI massively in some areas.  Since the game had stats at the end of each race it showed how poorly the AI was done. If you raced as an Enzo Ferrari you’d thing you’d leave a ford Fiesta in the next area code, not so much, there was a chance that fiesta would win against you – since the game once the opponent got off the mini-map would engage nothing short of the enterprises transporter and rubber band to just outside of the mini-map.  At the end of the race it would create some pretty funny statistics such as.

Enzo: top speed 202MPH – Average speed 168 MPH
Fiesta: top speed 72MPH – Average speed 142MPH

WTF? Not only has that car just broken laws of physics but it manages to do something impossible unless the car managed to actually teleport to another dimension and have Time/space/speed laws revoked, If you did not run the perfect race it would also give the computer opponent A chance to win since the AI was magically rubberbanded to behind you.  Using that kind of trick in programming a racing sim should be a HUGE NO NO. Even though that the need for speed series borders on not being a racing sim these days, More over it plays like a quarter eater you find at an arcade.

You don’t need a game that has shortcomings that affect the outcome of the game due to poor programming versus the outcome based on your driving. with the advent of consoles I know programmers are under pressure to port games to each system as fast as they can but the quality takes a tremendous hit.  The console specific games tend not to suffer as much as games that are whored around.   Most Mario karts always have a sound racing game, Gran Turismo has a sound racing game. Even Test Drive unlimited had a sound racing game since it was based around the PC than ported down to the console level, there is one exception that should be noted- burnout paradise was a “racing” game that was on every system just about without much problems but they thought round some of the issues and made the game based on fun.

As more companies take to the “Open World” concept of racing it comes to mind that the open world needs to be open. With burn-out paradise the openness just was not there, Test drive unlimited had a extremely open world but a poorly implemented system where aggravation would set in trying to find your friends in the game even though you were actually on top of there car but due to the server running multiple sessions you’d spend 20minutes trying to get into the same play area.

Originally I was going to say something about one racing game but i changed my mind to a critique rather than a one game review.

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The state of gaming.

Ever had one of those days where you look at something and say hmm.  Well, I’ve been doing that for about a few months.  For awhile Now I’ve been wanting to spread out my gaming more than just between the WII and the PC.  Both platforms in my opinion are suffering from bad development and bad companies.   Well, After long thought and wondering if I’d be better off with a Bluray Drive for my PC or Some other upgrade I finally decided against both and went with the black sheep of the decisions.

Continue reading “The state of gaming.”

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Review: The Sims 3 & the state of EA games

I’ve written about EA games in the past and every now and than I will pick up a game from EA just to see where they are at as far as quality. I purchased the Sims 3 On sale after Christmas, since in January there are not many A level games around this time that appeal to my gaming sense.

Out of the box the sims 3 is very familiar in terms of game play. Its one of the few games that EA was smart enough not to change the core game play unlike any EA sports game.

Most EA sports game needlessly complicate the fuck out of the controls. I bought NHL 2009 out of the bargin bin for $4.99 for one reason on the box it listed “Play with classic controls”. After installing the game I played the game for about a week. The game itself is barely passable, but the game itself has some very poor coding. for one you can not play widescreen, you are stuck with standard 4:3 resolutions. If you try to change the control options theres no real way to customize the controls.

The sims 3 after playing for awhile is almost refreshing in the sence of quality from EA. But there are a few glaring things. In order to patch the game you’re almost forced to install EA’s Download Manager. The EA download Manager is pretty much a useless version of steam. Steam is Extremely well thought out but the EA download manager just feels like its an advertising program more than a game content client.

Manual patching for the Sims 3 is possible though but its incredibly aggravating.  Since you can’t Patch to the current version from the retail disk without some hunting around. Since the EA support site does not have the patches on the site you have to go look around for patches, As i’ve found the patches.  You can’t patch directly to the latest release version  and have to download a few patches to get to the point of the patch you want to be at.

The game however is an improvement over the sims 2, although when I play the sims its not exactly in the sense of playing the sims its more like How to drive your sim mad in 3 easy steps.  Theres less micromanagement in the sims3, unlike 2 where you cant just let it run all night to see what chaos comes about.  to me its like an ant farm  you give it a shake once in a while to see what the hell happens.

I think the most annoying fact of the sims 3 is it feels unfinished out of the box, and i didnt figure out why till I actually read the insert that came with the game. EA gives you 10$ to buy random stuff at the sim store, truthfully i find this annoying. its worse than a DLC. Why would you go online to buy a chair for a game or some other virtual furniture the prices are a little high in terms of value per dollar, most stuff is 75cents or a dollar but still, The online store should be a place to buy items and not to finish a game that is missing items.

as for the sims its ok with a few glaring issues that bug me. Patches/Unfinished feel out of the box / and no way to let the sims run on there own for a long period of time.

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EA … Its not in the game anymore and the PC and the $$$$$ (for .99 cents you can buy the letter z in this post)

EA for years has been known for abysmal games of poor quality, although they have improved in some matters but, its really false positive in my mind.

Sure there are a handful of good games from EA as of recently – Crysis, burnout paradise,the sims 3(I guess) *orange box doesn’t count because its a repackage from steam

Continue reading “EA … Its not in the game anymore and the PC and the $$$$$ (for .99 cents you can buy the letter z in this post)”

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bing? bing.. Its just uhh.. yeah..

Microsoft has been flapping there PR mouth over there new search engine bing. After the failed livesearch and another companies shit fest of a search engine.  It seems like Microsoft has learned a thing or two about search engines but, not much. It was more like “lets just rip off another popular search engine. ” Microsoft has been smearing there new Bing.com everywhere, Hulu is running ads , likely there is ads on TV . but, it appears that bing will be not ignored like cuil was, Microsoft will likely force bing down our throats every way possible.  Just to give an idea how microsoft will pull is.

  • Windows update will force some update as “critical” to internet explorer forcing bing to the front
  • Update MSN clients to have bing built in
  • Windows 7  will likely have it forced on the desktop
  • Come out with some goofy firefox plugin (maybe already done mystery plugin for firefox had come out *cute stealth install too*)

hemantm writes “A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.”

Looking into the name  bing the first definition that comes up on dictionary.com is

bing

1 –noun British Dialect. a heap or pile.

As funny  as that is , Bing is almost an identical ripoff of  Google.

binghere’s the same same search in google .

googlethe result pages look almost EXACTLY the same.  Microsoft has made an attempt to make a search engine but, its a blatant ripoff of Google.  Playing around with Bing it seems alright but, again looking at the search engine there’s no fucking difference. The supposed Smart search engine that bing is just tries to give you the same results. Yes there are features in this search engine but Google already does 99.99% of bings search results.

Do we need another Google? NO, if Microsoft actually made something unique it would be one thing, At least cuil made an attempt at being unique.  In order to do something better with the search engine Microsoft should try something different than work from there with a dynamic interface that takes opinions from users.

But my vote on this search engine is no , its a shamefully blatent ripoff of google.  Its insulting, microsoft has billions of dollars yet they can’t come up with there own search engine?