kano

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/ This is what we refer to as a "dick move". Not illegal, but very anti-social. It makes me think of when I was little and I went to a Pizza place that had free peppermints; I would jam quarter after quarter into the arcade and play Street Fighter 2 while eating them. But I was nice; I only took one or two at a time. If I were to just take multiple hand-fulls of them, or perhaps all the contents of the bowl, that would not have been very nice, and similar to what they are doing here. Remember that they themselves got this software under free and open source terms, and so if someone had done to them what they are doing to others now, they probably would not exist today. Hopefully the community will just dump them and join forces behind Debian. Charging for the software = fine. Terminating people's contracts for sharing it, when the original authors of the software, like the kernel, explicitly published the software to be shared, is slimy as fuck.

UEFI is such a train-wreck. Instead of less ways to have our systems compromised, now we've got more. Good job, industry. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/22/blacklotus_nsa_guide/ https://thehackernews.com/2023/05/critical-firmware-vulnerability-in.html

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/21/amazon_prime_ftc_lawsuit/ What's the big deal? Cable companies been doing all of this and more since Dino's roamed the earth, and government doesn't care. Big cable literally "wrote the book" on this sort of predatory behavior.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_allegation/?td=rt-3a The cloud strikes again! I.e. You can be instantly locked out of an entire ecosystem at any time for any reason, even if you have done nothing wrong at all.

Apparently it's opt-in though. I don't have a problem with features like this, as long as they are opt-in and clearly explained. Recently I got a smart TV and I was stunned and amazed how non-hostile, straightforward and user-friendly the setup process was. It didn't try to force me to do anything I don't want to do, like connect to the Internet. Instead of saying "let's connect to the Internet", it said "Would you like to connect to the Internet?". And there was a "no" button, not a "maybe later" button. Also it boots up to the HDMI port extremely quickly; even faster than my ten year old dumb TV. It takes 3 seconds at most. So yeah, there's doom and gloom in my mind about TVs eventually not letting you use the inputs until you opt in to all the tracking, and perhaps coming with a cellular radio for spying that you can't disable, but we are fortunately not there yet. https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/

Even the pro-MS sites aren't pulling punches and reporting stuff like this now. https://www.neowin.net/news/edge-sends-images-you-view-online-to-microsoft-here-is-how-to-disable-that/ The simple truth is that today, there are two types of people; those who expect this behavior, and those who don't care. And there are vastly more of the latter than the former.

Not hardware related, but I upgraded to Debian 12 and I swear the system feels faster and more responsive now. Quite a bit, actually. I know for sure that the AMD drivers were improved between Linux 5.10 and 6.1. But it really feels like other optimizations and improvements were made as well. And it's not a fresh install, it's an upgrade, so there's none of that "you started with a clean slate so of course it's faster" that you get when you first install Windows and the registry hasn't gotten filled with crap yet. It's just too bad that Linux 6.2 did not make it into Debian 12 as standard, because I think that's what you need for good Intel Arc support. I was this close to buying an A770 last week, but then the price went up overnight from $329 to $400. I guess Intel saw the announcements just like we did. But I think I'm gonna just sit on current graphics hardware for as long as possible to teach the industry a lesson. EDIT to be clear the desktop is faster and more snappy not just with AMD graphics, but also NVidia as well. Also the web browser too. They must have done something to improve scheduling in the kernel. Now that more consumer devices, e.g. Steamdeck are running Linux, and not just servers, one should probably expect more improvements of this nature.

The mystery is solved, because I just tested it on the Bafford mission. I only engaged with one guard; clubbed him to death with the blackjack, and then knocked him out while his death animation was still playing (this is slightly qwerky to pull off and is generally more likely to occur in dark areas). But it registers as both a KO and a kill on the stats screen, in spite of the fact that it was the same guard and he was killed before he was knocked out! lol

One has to appreciate the attention to detail in these games. Not only is there (obviously) a difference in sounds played when a guard is knocked out vs killed, but there is also a different type of sound when a guard is killed unexpectedly, vs. being killed in battle. The question is whether the louder, more drawn out sound when they are defeated in battle also travels further than the sound when being unexpectedly killed. Also I love how they react differently to small noises, vs a really loud unexpected noise, like smashing your sword against a door. Like I said, attention to detail. A lot of players might not even notice these small things.

Right, so there is this one weird qwerk of classic Thief. If you beat an AI to death with the blackjack (I know, I know, but sometimes it's fun to fight this way because it's more of a challenge than using the sword) as though Thief was a Quake clone, the guard will scream and begin to drop. But if you quickly wack him again, he will pop up and play the "knocked out" sound, and then collapse again. So basically you killed him, and *then* you knocked him out! The natural question at this point, is how the stats would reflect such an oddity. I guess there is only one way to find out, but the problem is, there's usually more than one dead guard on the map when I play. Especially on Thieve's Guild. I go straight-up Doom on that one, and use the corpses to trace my steps around the confusing layout. The classic Thief guards aren't great fighters; they are especially vulnerable to circle strafing and lots of pelting. You can even get them completely turned around and facing the other direction! As long as you're in a relatively open space you can own them by doing this quite easily. This strategy will not work on TDM guards. Try this with them and you are the one that gets owned. lol

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-Ray-Tracing-December So apparently hardware ray-tracing is landing for Intel GPUs in Blender 3.6, which is in Beta now. The release notes page says that this feature made it in. I'm very surprised and disappointed that nobody has demonstrated the performance uplift this brings yet on e.g. the A770-16GB, since Intel's competitors in the market are currently offering "crap ala dog-shit GPUs" at mainstream prices. Before, the A770 was almost as fast as a RTX3060. Maybe now, with proper hardware RT support the A770 will be able to smash the RTX3060 at a lower price while having more memory too, because if the performance uplift is anything like going from Cuda to Optix, it will be epic.

Biggest disappointment so far is the melee combat. As others have said, it's hard to tell when you score a hit. There really is no "thwack" sound, be it a fleshy one when fighting mutants, or a metallic one when fighting bots, and they don't recoil. This is one aspect that id games always got right. You always knew when you scored a hit on their monsters.

On the bright side this is probably the one and only game of 2023 that RTX4060TI users can run at anything above 1080p with high quality settings. Hahaha... zing.

Of course you're free to not play it if you don't want to. Personally, I would have given it the Resident Evil remake treatment; with graphics that would absolutely blow the mind, new areas to explore, surprises and changes for people who think they already know the game just because they played the original one five times over, etc. What we got here is not really that, and yeah, that's disappointing. But I don't think these people were working with a big budget. Also I like the way Doom 3 fleshed out the story and the environments, with those little videos playing on the wall which were there to explain the purpose of each location. I would have also done something similar to that in this remake; because it makes the game world feel more "real" and "lived in". Of course most people went into Doom 3 just wanting another action-packed Doom experience with minimal story or none at all, but I feel that it would have been more appreciated here.