It’s a gorgeous game experience. Not to mention they put so many other gamedevs to shame with their technical accomplishments (especially in the expansion – flooding waves in a ringworld!).

Don’t look up spoilers. Get yourself a copy and play it. Find somewhere to land your spaceship :)

Comedy prediction: SD2 releases overseas, but Australia is used to sell remaining stocks of SD1s for a few years before the SD2 is released here.

The whole thing is vaguely and noncomittally worded, it promises basically nothing.

Take this bit for example:

taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it

In other words: talk to the individual publishers of each game and get their permission :P At which point GOG’s involvement is almost irrelevant, if you have the publisher’s consent then they might as well give you a copy.

I would assume that court orders and proved wills have different levels of coercion when you present them to someone like GOG? Dunno. Each country probably has its own rules, including fun complexities like whether or not GOG was a party to the process or not.

Title of PCGamer’s article is misleading, they want a court order to do it. Proof of death is not enough.

“In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen. We’re willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system.”

They have to do that anyway. Court orders overrule a company’s policies in most (all?) legal systems.

Appreciated Minty :)

Suicide Squad: Less interesting than discussing linguistics xD

A lot of phone modems ship with their own SoC (processor) running its own OS. It’s much smaller and slower than the main phone SoC but, depending on its implementation, it can have full access to all of your main processor’s memory through DMA.

We rented our technology and could not read nor write.

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

Dear Take Two,

If you want to port GTA3 and VC to mobile then I would recommend looking at the re3/revc project. Fans have already put lots of effort into making the games work on modern systems, patching many bugs and making things more portable. Last I checked there already was a Nintendo Switch port.

Oh wait.

Bad bot. Several of your selected sentences are verbatim repeats.

I wouldn’t know, but it’s totally not on there, or so I’ve been told.

There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

“holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.

Only for certain types of capacitors. In practice they can overlap quite a bit, especially with common aluminium electrolytic capacitors (these form & dissolve complex aluminium oxide & hydroxide layers on the plates).

Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude

Only for ideal resistors.

Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.

A few things to add to this:

(1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.

(2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.

(Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)

learned from experience the differences between using a standard jack and an XLR, and I can say that the sound is vastly cleaner with XLR (at least on a set).

Your experiences were correct, don’t doubt them. That would have been ground-referenced equipment, ie plugged into wires that eventually join a wall. RF interference would interact with that quite differently, unbal vs bal would be quite different.

This could end up competitive.

Invite people to your house, give them a tour and briefly mention the shelf before scurrying them on. Watch their faces contort but don’t give them the opportunity to ask any questions.

EDIT: I have a vague guess at what could have gone wrong with your adaptor. It might have had OK L and R contacts but a broken G contact. You would then hear the difference between the L and R channels, which most often sounds like garbage. Music would be weird (entire instruments/vocals disappear) and mono audio would be silent or near-silent (so you’ll have to turn it up a lot and will hear noise).

Balanced will reduce noise (in terms of RF noise, of course) significantly better than unbalanced,

In this situation I don’t think it will at all.

I don’t think that balanced vs unbalanced is actually electromagnetically that different in this particular configuration (see my edit at the end of above). Things like where the wire is sitting on your body and what pose you are in will probably affect RF noise pickup levels on the headphone wires much more than changing between bal & unbal signalling.

but the source of noise does need to be far enough away from the capturing device to not affect it directly and, therefore, be able to be negated by the balanced cable.

I didn’t get into near-field and far-field effects. I’m not sure that it really matters here, but I might be wrong.