Category Archives: News

Article note: Oh boy, you can stream rented games at whatever shit latency (and, less importantly, bandwidth) your asshole ISP deigns to provide, until google abandons and then kills the service as they inevitably will. That sounds ... completely undesirable, like every other iteration of this idea.

Enlarge / The Google Stadia controller, which includes a few custom buttons. The service will also support wired USB controllers and mouse-and-keyboard controls. (credit: Google)

SAN FRANCISCO—At the Game Developers Conference, Google announced its biggest play yet in the gaming space: a streaming game service named Google Stadia, designed to run on everything from PCs and Android phones to Google's own Chromecast devices.

As of press time, the service's release window is simply "2019." No pricing information was announced at the event.

Google Stadia will run a selection of existing PC games on Google's centralized servers, taking in controller inputs and sending back video and audio using Google's network of low-latency data centers. The company revealed a new Google-produced controller, along with a game-streaming interface that revolves around a "play now" button. Press this on any Web browser and gameplay will begin "in as quick as five seconds... with no download, no patch, no update, and no install."

Article note: I don't agree with all his positions, and I'm not sure how viable he really is on the national stage (dude lost to _Ted Cruz_), but frankly affiliation with CDC indicates, to me, a surprising amount of wherewithal for someone that deep in politics.

Enlarge / WATERLOO, IOWA - MARCH 16: Democratic presidential candidate and former Cult of the Dead Cow member Beto O'Rourke greets voters during a canvassing kickoff event with state senate candidate Eric Giddens March 16, 2019, in Waterloo, Iowa. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman and Senate candidate and recently declared Democratic candidate for president in 2020, has been outed as a former member of what has been described as America's oldest hacking group—the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC). O'Rourke admitted to his membership in an interview for an upcoming book, as Reuters reported in an exclusive based on the book.

O'Rourke's role in the group, starting in the late 1980s, was more focused on writing screeds for the CDC's text-file essays than hacking. O'Rourke, like other teens of the time, did find ways to avoid paying for long-distance dial-up phone service time to connect to bulletin board systems (BBSs) of the day across the country with his family's Apple IIe computer and 300 baud modem, which he often used to search of pirated games.

He eventually launched his own bulletin board system (BBS) called TacoLand, which Reuters' Joseph Menn reports was largely about punk music. "This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll [magazine], buying records by catalog you couldn't find at record stores," O'Rourke told Menn.

Article note: The author (an economist) oversells their case a little, but I don't fully disagree. My bad attitude about credentialism is both the source of most of my problems in academia, and the reason why I find teaching so compelling. I don't generally expect a lot of correlation between credentials and competence (Too many dumbasses with degrees and highly competent people with no formal credentials in my areas), BUT that isn't because of a _fundamental_ problem with college. Also helpful teaching at a school I have degrees from, it keeps me in the "If I let dumbshits through, it devalues all the other degrees from this program" mindset. A worthwhile college education is teaching you: - Intellectual and practical fundamentals in a field (underlying principles, terminology, etc.) - How to learn in a field (ties to the first) - Exposure to a field (what parts do you like working with. Enough of the other parts so you can work adjacent to them without being a menace. Etc.) - Buying you time when you can focus on self-development. - One last attempt to impose some general educational grounding to give you enough context to not be a goddamn idiot. - Demonstrating a minimum level of drive, follow-through, and social competence. Often, programs fall short, and higher ed as it currently exists deserves to die when it really does only serve as status signaling.

Article note: That's pretty much how I feel about it. This particular round of greasy behavior doesn't seem out of place except it was just ham-handed enough to be technically illegal. I had classmates from high school where I'm pretty sure their parents spent more on standardized test coaching and application consultants and similar just-this-side-of-legitimate legs up than I spent on college. My contempt for prestige games and credentialism gets me in trouble enough without having it validated all the time.

Article note: Nvidia got a taste of that HPC lucre and needs to keep the gravy train rolling as their primary product gets less relevant? They're both well-known for ridiculous self-aggrandizing opulence, and price gouging high-end customers, so I suppose it's a good match.

Article note: Hnnng. Consumer DRAM pricing has been excessive for years, I'd love to see another cheap-RAM era.

Article note: Neat. I've taught myself a little radare2 for taking things apart, but when I get some time I'd like to poke through this, it looks like the decompiler is considerably more powerful and user-friendly. I'll also let others look over it and find out if/how it calls home...

Article note: I shouldn't look at the comments. I shouldn't look at the commen...GET THE POPCORN, I'M GOING IN!

Enlarge / Google's main headquarters. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Google has given raises to thousands of men after an analysis of Google's pay structure found that the company would otherwise be underpaying those men relative to their peers, The New York Times reports. The analysis also led to raises for some women.

Google determines annual pay raises in a three-phase process. First, Google adjusts every employee's compensation based on standard factors like their location, seniority, and performance ratings. Managers can then seek additional discretionary raises for their best-performing employees.

Finally, Google performs a company-wide analysis to determine whether these raises are biased in terms of race or gender. If biases are detected, the disadvantaged workers are given additional raises to eliminate the discrepancies.

Article note: I've been listening to The Prodigy whenever I could have music on today since I saw this this morning. Damn they were a force. Liam Howlett was the musical genius, but so much of the aesthetic came from Keith Flit, and that aesthetic destroyed genres, and birthed others, and colored everything for those of us who spent the 90s immersed in "that computer shit." I hope he at least went out on his own terms.