Category: Overlooked Pop Culture

The A-Team was an 80’s show about a team of mercenaries wanted by the government.  One of the more prominent characters of the show was B.A., played by Mr. T.

The show brings back many memories.  Chief among them were the numerous overturning vehicles and big explosions.  What was your favorite show growing up?

This week’s links involve a plethora of technology updates and some geek and movie culture.

Unix

• Fedora 20 Released (LXer): Carla Schroder talks about the new release of the OS sponsored by Red Hat.  What’s interesting to note is the improved support for the ARM architecture.
• Steam OS Review (Muktware): Swapnil Bharttiya takes a look at Valve’s new OS, currently in beta.
• HP Chromebook 11 Chargers Recalled (MaximumPC): While Chrome OS can be seen as stable, the hardware can be another matter.  Certain chargers for HP’s Chromebook 11 are overheating and as a result have been recalled.

Overlooked Pop Culture

• Lords of Salem SUCKED!! (Promises Are Kept): Mitchell Brown offers his take on Rob Zombie’s latest film.
• The Stone Tape, a 1972 film, reviewed (An American View of British Science Fiction): Stephen Kelley takes a look at a 1972 film from Nigel Kneale.  This is apparently the final script accepted by the BBC before he went to ITV.
• Tone Deaf NSA (Foreign Policy Magazine): This article offers insight into the thinking of those who work for the NSA.

Hat tip to the Good News Network for this tidbit.

As we head deeper and deeper into Winter, more people are going to stay indoors to avoid the cold weather.  Eventually, people will get bored and will start killing time on the Internet.  To make things a bit more pleasant for those who happen to be bored, never fear!

Our weekly links will have you laughing, crying, and cursing multibiollion dollar corporations all at the same time.  With that said, here’s this week’s links.

Unix

• KDE Desktop in Need of Desktop Search Overhaul (Blog of Helios): Ken Starks argues in favor of improving the search experience on the desktop so that files are found quickly and accurately.
• Valve Joins the Linux Foundation: Gaming was such a contentous issue on operating systems other than OS X and Windows until Valve came along to port their Steam Client.  The company that brought one of the most successful game distribution services is now an official member of the Linux Foundation.
• Samsung PR Move on Galaxy S4 Catching Fire Backfires (MaximumPC):  In an attempt to do damage control on a problematic product, the problems of said product go viral instead.  Remember kids, preventing one from suing and broadcasting the fact that defects in a product exist is not good PR.

Overlooked Pop Culture

• There are people who are here to help you poop: We aren’t making this up.  There is a product called Squatty Potty that helps the person squat instead of sit on their toilet.  Something about making it all come out easier…….
• Foolish users brick their XBOX One consoles (Daily Dot): Thanks to a convincing looking image via 4Chan, a number of uses enabled the developer mode on their XBOX One consoles in the hopes that they’ll be able to play their XBOX 360 games.  Unfortunately, the instructions rendered said consoles inoperable.  Remember, kids…. never follow instructions from an image board, and for crying out loud, stay out of /b/!
• Martial arts demo curating (The Stick Chick): A martial arts expert explains why it’s best to practice certain things in a dojo before demonstrating them to the public.

It’s amazing what can happen when one takes a bad situation and makes the best of it. Winter has finally hit, and North Texas seems to be taking it quite well.

What we have here is an example of how pro wrestling used to work, especially in regards to the WWE. The interview segments are absolutely classic, and show how emotions combined with improv-acting can set up the story along with the match itself.

As the holiday sales season kicks into high gear, we learn about some cool things in the technology sphere as well as an update in regards to an earlier podcast episode.

Hopefully, this week’s links will help blast things off for the most intense part of the year.  For those who are studying for finals in college and/or going through finals week, we at The *Nixed Report wish you all the best of luck.  Happy studies.

Unix

• iBuyPower plans to put out their own Steam Machine (The Verge):  The current prototype has a 500 GB hard drive, multicore AMD CPU, a discrete Radeon R9 270 graphics card, Wifi, Bluetooth, and Valve’s Steam Controller.
• The City of Munich Has Walked Away From Microsoft (TechRepublic): An entire German city has walked away from Microsoft and is relying on free and open source software instead.  In the process, the city discovered that their IT infrastructure also needed an overhaul.
• Malware can spread via rogue networks utilizing the sound system of an OS for transmission, but Linux-based systems may already have a defense against it (Journal of Communications): Research done by Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz indicates that creating a rogue mesh network may serve as an opportunity to spread malware in unexpected ways.  As it turns out, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) and Linux Audio Developer’s Simple Audio Plugin API (LADSPA) may already have the ability to defend against such attacks via configuration of audio filters.  Yet another reason why Linux-based systems may be more secure than solutions from Microsoft.

Overlooked Pop Culture

• Bitcoin theft occurs in the dark web yet again (Layfield Report): Stephen Kelley talks about Sheep Marketplace and how bitcoins have been stolen from individual participants.  Though the marketplace has claimed that emergency procedures were in place to return the remainder of bitcoins to users, Kelley speculates as to whether it was a ruse by the site operators.
• Government chemist tampered with evidence in 40,000 cases (Filming Cops): Though this item of news isn’t entirely new, it’s here to serve as a reminder that though the justice system in the U.S. is by far among the most sophisticated, it doesn’t guarantee that cases will be 100% accurate, especially when evidence is altered.
• Dragon Con co-founder Ed Kramer Avoids Prison (The Atlanta-Journal Constitution): He will serve the remainder of five years confinement under house arrest.  For the remainder of his 20 year sentence, he’ll be on probation and must register as a sex offender for life.  He also has to pay $100,000 USD in restitution to the three individuals who claimed he molested and abused.  Furthermore, it appears that he will no longer profit from the Dragon Con convention.

Thomas Holbrook II | The *Nixed Report

Growing up, we all had our favorite past times.  Some played baseball, while others played video games.  My favorite activity revolved around the latter, and one of my favorite consoles was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Super Castlevania IV were among my favorite games.  The bad news is that the older the hardware becomes, the more likely it is to fail.

This is where emulation comes into play.

As it turns out, most console emulators will only be just accurate enough for the games to be playable.  According to Byuu, who wrote quite an informative piece on Ars Technica:

These days, the most dominant emulators are Nestopia and Nintendulator, requiring 800MHz and 1.6GHz, respectively, to attain full speed. The need for speed isn’t because the emulators aren’t well optimized: it’s because they are a far more faithful recreation of the original NES hardware in software.

Now compare these to the older N64 emulator, UltraHLE, whose system requirements were a meager 350MHz Pentium II system. To the casual observer, it can be quite perplexing to see Mario 64 requiring less processing power than the original Mario Bros.

My experience in emulation is in the SNES field, working on the bsnes emulator. I adored the ideal behind Nestopia, and wanted to recreate this level of accuracy for the Super Nintendo. As it turns out, the same level of dedication to accuracy pushed requirements up into the 2-3GHz range, depending on the title.

Considering the hardware inside the SNES, requiring a high end computer makes sense.  After all, one is mimicking an entire system in software.  Byuu has since merged bsnes into a new project.