Shacknews LoL

New The Last Jedi post since that thread is about to expire. Film Crit Hulk does a fantastic job articulating the points some of us were making in the prior thread: https://filmcrithulk.blog/2017/12/15/the-force-belongs-to-us-the-last-jedis-beautiful-refocusing-of-star-wars/

Its a fantastic read whether or not you liked the film, and its short! Jettisoning the Mystery Boxes, upending 40 years of the Star Wars world view, "Fuck Skywalkers", many of the points some of us made in the old thread are covered and presented really well here.

The more I chew on it the more it confirms for me that this is the Star Wars film I've wanted since the credits rolled on Empire Strikes Back way back in 1980. Can't wait to see it again.

>Observer_ is the game I have been waiting for my whole life.

I know I've been hyping it already, but I just watched a tiny gameplay clip that made me break my usual rule of not watching gameplay demo vids. So I watched the full E3 demo:
https://youtu.be/dg-NxEXBemw

You're a future cop who jacks into minds for your investigation and are losing your shit over what your new case uncovers.
Ultimate Dark Cyberpunk Mind Detective Psych Horror

It's out by the end of summer. I am so pumped I am exploding.

High resolution, textless movie posters: http://designyoutrust.com/2017/05/someone-uploaded-an-amazing-collection-of-hi-res-textless-movie-posters/

Some good desktop bg fodder.

neil degrasse tyson posted a four-minute video on the importance of scientific literacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MqTOEospfo

and the decline of it

I offer this four-minute video on "Science in America" containing what may be the most important words I have ever spoken.

As always, but especially these days, keep looking up.

Rachel Maddow doing her thing: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-commerce-secretary-at-nexus-of-lucrative-trump-russian-deal-886220355575

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So, I recently decided to replay Alien: Isolation, but the aliasing was driving me crazy; even supersampling didn't help due to the way they rendered their specular highlights. Frustrating as otherwise the game looks great.

A bit of searching and I found this:
https://github.com/aliasIsolation/aliasIsolation/releases

It's a mod that adds tune-able temporal antialiasing, and it works great. It completely got rid of the aliasing I was seeing, has virtually no performance impact, and doesn't seem to negatively impact the visuals in any way.

Just a heads up for anyone else that wants to try out the game.

GUARANTEED FIX for Windows 7 right here. i had to automate this at work, so this is 'people paying us to specifically fix the problem' solid.

1) download https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3172605 - it contains the june 2016 windows update agent, which is the *only one* that solidly works. the fix for windows update being broken itself comes only as a windows update, so you have to trick it into installing so it doesn't take hours.

2) stop the windows update service
3) delete or rename c:\windows\softwaredistribution. if the folder is still there or any errors about files in use, make sure the service is stopped and try again.
4) start the windows update service
5) IMMEDIATELY run the .msu file downloaded at step 1. it will spin for a few seconds, then ask if you'd like to install it, with an OK/Cancel prompt. if you made it here, you're good to go

6) it will need a reboot, and after that you can hit windows update normally again!

now backing up a bit. if 5) gives you an error...
a) it will give you a 'this package is not applicable to your computer' error. you either downloaded the wrong version between 32/64 bit, or (more likely) you're missing a prerequisite hotfix from April 2015 - yes, that's how long your windows 7 hasn't been patching.
b) download it here - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3020369
c) follow the same steps above with 2-5, except you're installing kb3020369 instead of kb3170265
d) this one does *not* need a reboot, so you can immediately go back through #2-5 again to install the first one and it will work now.

I work at an MSP, and troubleshooting + automating the fixing of this across all of our clients' windows 7 machines was my responsibility. it was a royal pain in the ass, something like 60% of the windows 7 machines out there quietly started failing mid-2015 and nobody fucking noticed because it stopped being able to successfully query that it was *missing* hotfixes. fun facts:
- the problem started around 3/2015, where essentially there were so many updates for Windows 7 to check against that the agent crashed trying to itemize them.
- microsoft didn't have a fix for it, hence the monthly attempts to patch the WUA (unsuccessfully) from 2015 through summer 2016.
- you can check the 'version' of c:\windows\system32\wuaueng.dll to see your current WUA - if it's anything older than 7.6.7601.23453, you've been failing patches and didn't notice, probably for a year or more.
- depending on the WUA version you had (up to 7.6.7601.18804/18979, roughly - august 2015), the failing scan would also peg one CPU core at 100% and run up to ~1.5-2GB of RAM and about 5MB/s of random I/O (all under svchost.exe, which was specifically the windows update service - wuauserv). it would noticeably impact the performance of any Win7 machine, even i5/i7's. especially ones without SSDs, though.
- it also runs up huge amounts of text in c:\windows\logs\cbs - you'll likely see multi-GB CBS.log or cbspersist_...zip archived logs. they're normally like 5-20MB.

- the windows 7 update agent is single-threaded, more or less - if you have a patch trying to install or an update scan trying to run and you try to interact with the agent a second time while it's 'busy,' it will make both interactions silently fail without an error message, and the agent just spins for hours not actually doing anything anymore.
- you can also see a pretty plain-english log in c:\windows\windowsupdate.log, BUT!!! - remember how i said it's single-threaded? opening that log file makes the WUA assume there was a change and immediately restart itself, interrupting any patch-install-taking-hours you're trying to troubleshoot. yes, and making it silently fail.