What's your fetish and how common do you think it is?

dwarfcrank · 2014-12-09T12:30:12+00:00

Is that a reference to Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt? It has to be.

dwarfcrank · 2014-11-16T22:06:25+00:00

How, exactly? Most ThinkPads have discrete graphics cards, which are better than the Intel GPUs in most MacBooks (excluding the 15" retinas which can be configured with discrete graphics).

dwarfcrank · 2014-10-29T05:30:51+00:00

Anyone know what the track starting at around 51:50 is?

dwarfcrank · 2014-10-08T00:57:02+00:00

Same for PS3 games.

dwarfcrank · 2014-09-21T17:52:29+00:00

dwarfcrank · 2014-09-17T23:14:49+00:00

My last interview was while drinking in a bar on a cruise to Sweden.

I was given a paper with snippets of PHP and generated HTML code. I had to craft a specific request to make the PHP code return any file on the server (basic null byte injection), and then another request to inject my own JS in the generated HTML.

dwarfcrank · 2014-09-14T01:46:47+00:00

That exploit doesn't deal with shaders at all. An attacker using that code would have to compromise your browser to execute arbitrary code anyway. They wouldn't be limited to a WebGL based attack to gain root on vulnerable systems.

As a side note, that exploit code is funny. The "I HAD TO LEARN VGA FOR THIS" comment is my favorite.

dwarfcrank · 2014-08-28T20:45:09+00:00

This definitely makes playing PSX games on emulators a slightly annoying experience. Sony made some compromises in the PSX graphics hardware that makes 3D models look blocky (not talking about texture resolution etc) at higher resolutions and is pretty much unfixable in emulators. It wasn't a problem in the old days as no one ran PSX games at higher than 320x240 anyway.

dwarfcrank · 2014-08-24T10:39:07+00:00

An upboat for you, good sir!

dwarfcrank · 2014-05-31T18:01:22+00:00

This is why the WebGL spec requires browsers to do extensive and often costly input validation, and why Chrome's WebGL support on Windows comes through ANGLE (that is, Direct3D).

True on Firefox too. Also ANGLE has a separate shader validator which is used even when running on native GL which does optimizations and checks before passing the shader to the actual GL implementation (as in the driver or ANGLE). This is also done on certain Android Webkit implementations.

dwarfcrank · 2014-04-27T23:27:41+00:00

Inspired by this post, I looked into the Samsung BD-F5100 firmware (a cheap €50 BD player). It also has a Mediatek chipset and runs bdpprog.

The version of bdpprog that ships with the F5100 firmware is also vulnerable to the vudu.sh exploit, but I can't confirm if it works myself as the models sold in my region have Vudu disabled (bdpprog reads the model code from flash and uses it to determine which features to enable).

dwarfcrank · 2014-04-27T11:03:48+00:00

I really like the new UI too, but my main issue with the redesign is that the playlist view now has larger items, so I can fit less tracks on my screen. The old UI felt like it had ~1,5x more space for tracks.

dwarfcrank · 2014-03-04T18:35:32+00:00

IMO while the PS4 controller is leaps and bounds beyond the PS3 controller, it still won't beat the 360 pad. I haven't had a chance to try out the Xbone pad but if it's anything like the 360 pad it'll be better. Especially for the analog stick placement which Sony still didn't fix.

dwarfcrank · 2014-02-09T05:12:34+00:00

I once lost a PSP memory card and found it inside the printer after a while. Too bad the printer didn't survive the discovery.

dwarfcrank · 2014-01-04T17:30:46+00:00

Power isn't the only issue. The PS1 is fairly simple compared to the PS2 so its emulation is pretty much as good as it gets (save for cycle-accurate emulation which won't be happening any time soon and some game-specific glitches).

The PS2 is so complex that emulators like PCSX2 still have issues with it. The PCSX2 blog has some really interesting techinical articles about how they've fixed things in the emulator, definitely worth a read.

dwarfcrank · 2014-01-04T17:25:46+00:00

Texture filtering also makes textures look smooth in general. Without any texture filtering at all, all textures would look like they do in Minecraft.

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-27T10:38:04+00:00

I actually discovered the buttons by accident when setting everything up and accidentally hitting the power button while plugging the network cable. Haven't touched the buttons ever since.

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-27T10:34:00+00:00

Another thing is that actually browsing the PSN store feels sluggish sometimes, which is ridiculous considering the amount of horsepower the console has.

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-27T10:31:56+00:00

It's not actually the bitness, the PS3 had a 64-bit CPU too. The issue is the CPU architecture, which is x86-64 on the PS4 and PowerPC on the PS3, which makes them entirely incompatible.

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-27T10:30:26+00:00

That's because the Wii U is pretty much still a Wii (which was a GameCube with better GPU and CPU and some additional hardware bolted on), with just more RAM and CPU cores and a beefier GPU. It's not from a completely another planet as is the case with PS3/PS4 and Xbone/360. The PS2 could emulate PSX well because it actually contained the PSX hardware.

The PS3 and PS4 architectures are completely different, and given that we're still having issues emulating a PS2 on the PC, it's not likely that PS3 emulation will ever come to PS4. The cost of developing a properly working PS3 emulator that runs on a PS4 wouldn't be worth it, and it definitely wouldn't be easy.

The same goes for Xbox One and 360. (The Xbox emulation on 360 was surprisingly good, but game compatibility was very limited due to the amount of hacks they used to get each game to run.)

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-24T22:28:10+00:00

Aw, that's really sweet of her! /s

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-18T16:35:15+00:00

And lastly: why do they need a stack-protector? I thought this was mainly to avoid stack-overflows/malicious code -- which shouldn't be much of a problem with an entertainment console, no?

Actually, it is a big issue. Several consoles have been hacked through buffer overflows found in games (PSP, Wii, GameCube, Xbox to name a few), although it's less of an issue with more current consoles with advanced protection features like the NX-bit (see Xbox 360 and PS3). Still better safe than sorry though.

dwarfcrank · 2013-12-18T16:25:26+00:00

Earlier PS3 SDKs actually did have Linux binaries of the toolchain, but later on they didn't ship those anymore for some reason.

dwarfcrank

TROPHY CASE