| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-12, 08:25 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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 Post: #241 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Cool! Hope you like it! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-15, 04:49 in Your daily dose of processor unit vulnerabilities
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Post: #242 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Another bunch of attacks for the pile! - Intel-only - Affecting processors built since 2011 - Another kind of speculative execution attack, but not prevented by the Spectre/Meltdown workarounds One mitigation is disabling hyper-threading in the BIOS, which can be a 40% performance hit if you're running thread-heavy code (i.e. not higan). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-16, 05:26 in Super Scope cursor confusion [bsnes]
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Post: #243 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Somebody contacted me on IRC today asking about cursors in the game "X Zone". Here's a screenshot of the difficulty-selection menu, showing the bsnes green crosshair drawn where bsnes thinks the gun is pointing. Here's the same screen with the "cursor" button held down, adding a square grey cursor drawn where the game thinks the gun is pointing. Some observations: - if you play at 2× scale, the green cursor moves twice as fast, at 3× scale the cursor moves three times as fast, etc. Presumably the code is mapping mouse-cursor movement in pixels to gun movement in pixels, but my mouse is tuned to let me flip from side-to-side of a 1920px display, it's a bit unwieldly using the same settings for a 256px display. - Even at 1x and aspect-correction disabled, the bsnes cursor moves slightly faster than my regular mouse-cursor. If I hold the cursor button to make the game draw the cursor, the game's cursor moves a bit slower than my mouse cursor. - X Zone's first level makes heavy use of Mode 7. If you're using the HD Mode 7 feature, the green cursor is drawn at the HD resolution, not the SNES native resolution, making it weirdly tiny. Also, it seems clamped to 640x480, so if you're using the HD 720p mode or higher, the green cursor can't cover the entire screen. Wat do? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-16, 08:46 in Your daily dose of processor unit vulnerabilities (revision 1)
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Post: #244 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Posted by sureanem Security issues tend to be subtle, and understanding them usually requires a thorough understanding of the product in question, such as the product's designer might have. If you announce a vulnerability alongside patches and mitigation guides written by the vendor, you've probably found something cool and worth paying attention to. If you announce a vulnerability out of the blue, the best that's going to happen is that people will ask the vendor what's up, and the vendor will say "we dunno, give us a month or two to figure out whether this has any merit whatsoever". Much less dramatic, and hence much less likely to win you the respect of the security industry, or tenure, or whatever. Of course, the interesting thing with *this* vulnerability is that basically the same thing was found by many individuals and research groups, and Intel made all of them swear to secrecy individually, and strung them all along for up to a year, never letting them know about each other. If they'd been allowed to talk to each other, they might have been able to properly explore the security implications of today's CPUs, maybe even discover the *next* vulnerability-with-a-logo. Instead, they sat and twiddled their thumbs waiting for the responsible disclosure period to elapse. EDIT: Also, https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-17, 06:36 in Bsnes v.107.1 release: is it possible to use shaders?
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Post: #245 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
It definitely does support shaders, in the same format as higan. However: - You must be using the OpenGL 3.2 video driver (on the "Drivers" tab of the settings window), not the Direct3D, OpenGL 2, or any other driver - The shaders must be in a directory called "shaders" beside the .exe file, while higan 106 expects them in a directory called "Video Shaders". The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-17, 09:08 in Your daily dose of processor unit vulnerabilities
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Post: #246 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKncAFAShkQ <-- a video of the ZombieLoad vulnerability in action, recovering the first few characters of root's hashed password from /etc/shadow in about a minute and a half. This goes out to all those people who hear about timing side-channel attacks and say "I know, let's add a random, small delay to each operation!" The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-18, 01:40 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #247 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
I was fascinated to learn that Borderlands saves screenshots with "/" in the filename. I guess they're not using standard Win32 APIs for their filesystem access, then! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-18, 04:29 in Bsnes v.107.1 release: is it possible to use shaders?
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Post: #248 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
> the emulator automatically load the firmware needed, correct? Maybe. Unlike higan, bsnes will automatically use the same less-accurate, high-level emulation that other emulators (snes9x, older versions of bsnes/higan) use, if it can't find the firmware files. If you tick "Prefer HLE" on the "Emulation" tab of the settings panel, it will use high-level emulation even if it *can* find the firmware files. So, just because you can run Super Mario Kart doesn't mean it's automatically loading the firmware and doing low-level-emulation. I don't actually know if there's a way to figure out whether bsnes is using high- or low-level emulation at any given time. Of course, some co-processor chips don't have high-level emulation. But unless you like playing Shougi, you probably don't care. > it seems that all the games supported by Higan 1.06 are supported by Bsnes v.107.1 too, am i right? and the quality of the emulation and graphic is the same. To make bsnes exactly as accurate as higan, on the "Emulation" tab of the Settings dialog: - untick everything labelled "Fast mode" - untick "No sprite limit" - set "SuperFX clock speed" to "100%" - untick "Prefer HLE", although this doesn't *guarantee* accurate emulation, as described above If you don't do that, then bsnes still plays most games perfectly well (i.e. about the same as snes9x, for example), but it uses a lot less battery than higan. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-18, 23:31 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #249 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Posted by sureanem It's interesting that you read that tweet as an unironic example of the world-view you're annoyed by, rather than as a joke from somebody who shares your views. genuine enthusiasm for the cancer that is HTML5 (or as I've recently taken to calling it, HTML5 plus JavaScript) I see what you did there. ;) I don't get it. They have infinite money. Can't they just pay another team (in another country and language, so that there's no overlap) to re-write the whole app, have them do it properly, then fire the old team when testers can't tell the two apps apart any longer in double blind testing? That's the old "we'll work on both systems in parallel until the new system can replace the old system" trap, which generally results in both systems running in parallel until somebody notices the new system is guzzling money and nobody's using it, so it gets canned. Believe it or not, buying your way out of resource limits is legitimately the easier option: it's work for your administrators, so it doesn't cost you developer effort, and the money spent is effective immediately, instead of after a six-month hiring-and-interviewing effort, and another six month training effort, and another two or three years on-the-job experience. Because I tell you, I'd far rather use IE6+XP than this. At least with IE6+XP you're using stable and proven technologies. IE6+XP were products of exactly the same mindset that brings you Facebook Messenger today; if Facebook Messenger spends half its computrons on functionality and loses half through inefficiencies like "modularity" and "debuggability", IE6+XP did exactly the same thing, but they had less computrons to start with, so they were less inefficient on an absolute scale. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-19, 02:58 in Bsnes v.107.1 release: is it possible to use shaders?
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Post: #250 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
> if I untick "Prefer HLE for coprocessors" Bsnes could't correctly emulate games that needs special firmware if i don't have that firmware in the "firmware" folder. Correct? I'm not sure. I *think* it works like this: - if "Prefer HLE" is disabled, and you have the firmware files, bsnes will use accurate emulation (LLE) - if "Prefer HLE" is disabled, and you do not have the firmware files, bsnes will use less-accurate emulation (HLE) if it's available (i.e. CX4, DSP1, DSP2, maybe DSP3, but I don't think DSP4, or the ST* chips) - if "Prefer HLE" is enabled, bsnes always uses less-accurate emulation (HLE) whether or not you have the firmware > Bsnes has a mre pixellated (worse) grafhic thank Higan Besides the actual emulation accuracy options, higan and bsnes have a bunch of visual options you can tweak. higan has the "Blurring" and "Colors" options in the Settings menu, bsnes has "Blur Emulation" in Settings → Output, and a "Gamma" slider on the Video tab of the Settings dialog. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-19, 10:17 in Something about cheese! (revision 1)
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Post: #251 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Posted by sureanem Wikipedia says "The SAT is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. [...] It is administered on behalf of the College Board by the Educational Testing Service, which until recently developed the SAT as well." The SAT is a standardised test, so the same questions are given to everyone, from good schools or bad. The SAT is not administered by the schools, so it doesn't matter whether a given school gives out As like confetti or gold doubloons. And as for poor people scoring worse, well they'd continue being poor even if they got into college, no? So what difference does it make that that's the cause? If somebody's not academically inclined, college probably isn't for them. If somebody's poor but smart, well, scholarships are a thing, but even without a scholarship college is a good excuse for someone to get out of the environment that's holding them back. (Granted, America's student loan system makes tertiary education far less effective than it would be in other countries, but it's still better than nothing) The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-21, 13:27 in Cartoons, imported
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Post: #252 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
It's been pointed out to me that One Punch Man Season 2 is finally airing, and already 6 episodes in. I'm looking forward to it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-26, 03:15 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #253 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Seems to work fine in Firefox? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-26, 05:29 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #254 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Oh, I see what's going on. I can reproduce the problem on my 1920x1080 desktop with Firefox. If I view a thread list with Firefox in full-screen-mode and zoom in with Ctrl-+, everything's fine up to the second-last zoom ratio, 240%. If I hit Ctrl-+ once more to jump up to 300%, the icon shrinks from 15px wide (scaled up 240%, so about 36px) down to 6px wide (scaled up 300%, so about 19px). HOWEVER, if I open the Tree Style Tab sidebar, chopping about 100px off the side of the browser wind,w the icons suddenly shrink even further to 1.3px (scaled up 300%, so about 4px). Poking around in the Firefox devtools, I can restore the images to their intended size by removing the 'max-width: 100%' CSS property. That makes a kind of sense - "100%" generally means "100% of the width of the parent element", but a table cell's size normally comes from its children, and if all the cells in that column contain nothing, or a "max-width: 100%" image, that column is probably the first to be squeezed to nothing when horizontal space gets cramped - like at high-zoom levels, or on a portrait display. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-26, 07:33 in Cartoons, imported
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Post: #255 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
I've watched up to episode 4, and I have noticed the animation is a bit lower-budget (making the occasional 60fps CGI even more jarring), but I am having a great time. It's worth pointing out that the the manga was in some respects even nicer than series 1, so I'm not going to complain about that. I am a little disappointed in the pacing so far, though. The first series started off with a bunch of smaller plotlines so we got to meet all the different characters individually and see them interacting with each other before the big crescendo at the end. By contrast, this season feels like it's spent the first few episodes rushing through the cast list to give them each a basic introduction, then repeating "Garo Is Bad" and "Saitama Enters The Super-Fight Competition" over and over. I assume Garo is this season's villain and he'll finally fight Saitama in episode 10 or 11, but I'm worried I'll be bored of the Garo and Super-Fight plotlines by then. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-27, 07:19 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #256 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
> That's how you do your fish-out-of-water video game movie. That's totally not how Detective Pikachu goes. We've had videogames that use traditional hand-drawn pen-on-paper animation, when will we have a movie created entirely in Deluxe Paint? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-27, 08:49 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps"
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Post: #257 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
Posted by sureanem I don't really understand what the sign-in restriction is about. I can understand preventing *comments* without an account, but preventing *views* is a bit weird. My only guess is that GitHub are somehow afraid that somebody will post something horribly offensive, and then post the link to Twitter so that people who don't know what a GitHub is can click the it and be outraged; forcing people to create an account in order to be outraged is more work than most people are willing to do. Of course, there's a bunch of reasons why that's a weird thing to defend against, so maybe it's something else. I suppose it's part of their "diversity and inclusion" initiative - of course we have to enable developers to hide all criticism because this is a fundamental human right. Sometimes criticism can be helpful and constructive, but 90% of the time it's just noise from entitled assholes, and that's even more true on the Internet. In an ideal world, this would all be federated, and each person could configure their user-agent to silently drop as much or as little incoming traffic as they wished. As it is, for economic reasons people are stuck using centralised systems like GitHub and GMail, so it's nice that those systems allow *some* level of filtering control instead of locking everybody together in the same echo chamber. I... I don't get why these comments are 'disruptive'. They're not even rude. They have constructive and calm feedback. They're generally calm, but I wouldn't call them "constructive", "GNOME's a horrible joke of a desktop", "Gnome standard theme is horrible", "Come up with a SANE theme API and we'll talk", these are not the words of people who are approaching a problem with an open mind, they're the words of people who have an axe to grind. Their concerns may be quite pressing and legitimate, but ultimately not relevant to the topic at hand. ------ A graphical user interface is like any other language - there's a vocabulary (buttons, text fields, sliders, ...) and a grammar (buttons on the bottom, things above and to the left affect things below and to the right), and sometimes the best way to effectively and efficiently communicate a new idea involves a new word or a new pattern. Unfortunately, although the language of GUIs is written and read by humans with general intelligence, sometimes it's rewritten by a theme engine with no intelligence at all, just global search/replace rules, and that can make quite a mess (as any Google Translate user will tell you). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-27, 13:50 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps"
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Post: #258 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
> Even inane criticism/death threats still reflects a dissatisfaction with your actions and should be taken seriously, if not at face value. Let's say you have a goal you'd very much like to achieve, so you carefully plan out a course to get you there. When you mention your plan publicly for the first time, you discover a million anonymous Internet users are very unhappy with you. What do you do about it? Are they annoyed about your goal? Are they happy with your goal but annoyed about your plan? Are they pointing out a problem with your reasoning, or just disputing your basic assumptions? Maybe they just misunderstood something? Perhaps there's different factions who each have different concerns, but how many people are in each faction? What if different factions disagree with each other as well as with you? There *is* positive information content in such comments, but I would estimate their total worth as: - Ctrl-F, "Comment deleted by moderator" - Count number of matches - Divide by two > I'd definitely argue they're constructive. The point is that there's a conflict between the idea of theming, which requires a rigidly-defined list of standard widgets, and the idea that application authors should be allowed to customise widgets or invent new ones if they think it's appropriate. The design of GNOME's desktop (or any desktop) or GNOME's default theme (or any theme) or GNOME's theme API (or any theme API) are not relevant to the discussion, because this conflict has affected every desktop based on every GUI toolkit. > It's definitely possible you could make a theme that broke everything, but that can be dealt with in accordance with the old adage "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". No need to prohibit it explicitly. The actual claim is that certain Linux distros are shipping with a non-Adwaita theme that breaks third-party applications in various subtle ways. Sure, end-users can set up whatever crazy theme they like, and if they break things they get to keep both pieces, but Linux distros should be more responsible than that. If you'd written application and got regular "bug" reports from users of Distro X because of Distro X's custom theme, you'd be annoyed too. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-29, 02:49 in Super Game Boy on Higan/Bsnes (revision 1)
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Post: #259 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
In case people are worried that mGBA is an inadequate reference for what a Super Game Boy game *should* look like, there's more screenshots of KoF '96 in the classic Fuck The Super Game Boy article. I have no idea what emulator(s) they used to get those screenshots, but given that it's an entire article about the quirks and subtleties of Super Game Boy features, I expect those screenshots should be an accurate representation. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-30, 23:34 in Upcoming game announcements/news
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Post: #260 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 885 days Last view: 82 days |
What happened to the sales & giveaways thread? Or was that on the old board and I'm mis-remembering? Anyway, Obduction (a surreal adventure game made in 2016 by the creators of Myst) is free for 24 hours on GOG. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
