“Register bit twiddling.” Setting all the modes that all their various cards can operate in, with the associated code for sending the bit updates over the connection bus. Tedious stuff that’s very prone to copy-paste errors if written by hand.
At some point you have to take AMDs word for it that these codes = this functionality, but if the right graphics come out then it can’t be so wrong.
Fake mews, surely? And yeah, this looks better than my Monday.
We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.
Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.
Should have used Vim instead, that’s a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.
Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.
It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.
Indeed. Here in the UK, people can request that their water company should add it in if their water supply is low-fluoride, for instance from a reservoir, and the water company must add it in.
Back when I used to work in water, that was always the stuff that gave me nightmares. Concentrated hexafluorosilicic acid is what we’d use for dosing. We’d test all the equipment in the chemical room on plain water, drain it out and then literally brick up the doorway. Site would be evacuated during delivery - delivery guy would connect everything up in a space suit, hop in the shower afterwards. Lasted for ages and ages, since you only need the tiniest drip in the water supply to get what you need, but the tiniest drip on your skin would be enough to kill you as well; its lethal dosage is horrifically small.
Made working with all the other halides much less of a concern - we use shed loads of chlorine, but that stuff is much much less nasty in comparison.
When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.
Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.
I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.
It’s a simple alphabet for computing because most of the early developers of computing developed using it and therefore it’s supported everywhere. If the Vikings had developed early computers then we could use the 24 futhark runes, wouldn’t have upper and lower case to worry about, and you wouldn’t need to render curves in fonts because it’s all straight lines.
But yeah, agreed. Very widely spoken. But don’t translate programming languages automatically; VBA does that for keywords and it’s an utter nightmare.
If you move past the ‘brute force’ method of solving into the ‘constraints’ level, it’s fairly easy to check whether there are multiple possible valid solutions. Using a programming language with a good sets implementation (Python!) makes this easy - for each cell, generate a set of all the values that could possibly go there. If there’s only one, fill it in and remove that value from all the sets in the same row/column/block. If there’s no cells left that only take a unique value, choose the cell with the fewest possibilities and evaluate all of them, recursively. Even a fairly dumb implementation will do the whole problem space in milliseconds. This is a very easy problem to parallelize, too, but it’s hardly worth it for 9x9 sodokus - maybe if you’re generating 16x16 or 25x25 ‘alphabet’ puzzles, but you’ll quickly generate problems beyond the ability of humans to solve.
The method in the article for generating ‘difficult’ puzzles seems mighty inefficient to me - generate a valid solution, and then randomly remove numbers until the puzzle is no longer ‘unique’. That’s a very calculation-heavy way of doing it, need to evaluate the whole puzzle at every step. It must be the case that a ‘unique’ sodoku has at least 8 unique numbers in the starting puzzle, because otherwise there will be at least two solutions, with the missing numbers swapped over. Preferring to remove numbers equal to values that you’ve already removed ought to get you to a hard puzzle faster?
Obligatory www.web3isgoinggreat.com - catalogues all of the grifts, hacks and thefts, with a running $$$ total.
Now, for the best battery health, just need to only charge everything that’s used portably but plugged in every night to 80%, and everything that’s occasionally moved from place to place but only ever used when it’s plugged in to 50%.
100% charges are for those occasions when you’ll be working away from power for a few days.
That is a good read, thank you. Didn’t have procedures, had two different brokersge systems running at once because they’d no procedures to follow, lost a fortune.
I’m thinking it’s the "most expensive bug in history so far - haven’t seen an accurate total for CrowdStrike’s little faux pas, yet.
Genesis is a different style of game tho, isn’t it? Diablo-like rather than third-person hack and slash?
Love the series. Personally prefer 3 due to its more limited scope; the other two are great, but to on for a very long time, and I really can’t be bothered playing through the Portal-like bits again. Happy if 4 is the same length as 3.
Cheaper for now, since venture capitalist cash is paying to keep those extremely expensive servers running. The AI experiments at my work (automatically generating documentation) have got about an 80% reject rate - sometimes they’re not right, sometimes they’re not even wrong - and it’s not really an improvement on time having to review it all versus just doing the work.
No doubt there are places where AI makes sense; a lot of those places seem to be in enhancing the output of someone who is already very skilled. So let’s see how “cheaper” works out.
PS3 most certainly had a separate GPU - was based on the GeForce 7800GTX. Console GPUs tend to be a little faster than their desktop equivalents, as they share the same memory. Rather than the CPU having to send eg. model updates across a bus to update what the GPU is going to draw in the next frame, it can change the values directly in the GPU memory. And of course, the CPU can read the GPU framebuffer and make tweaks to it - that’s incredibly slow on desktop PCs, but console games can do things like tone mapping whenever they like, and it’s been a big problem for the RPCS3 developers to make that kind of thing run quickly.
The cell cores are a bit more like the ‘tensor’ cores that you’d get on an AI CPU than a full-blown CPU core. They can’t speak to the RAM directly, just exchange data between themselves - the CPU needs to copy data in and out of them in order to get things in and out, and also to schedule any jobs that must run on them, they can’t do it themselves. They’re also a lot more limited in what they can do than a main CPU core, but they are very very fast at what they can do.
If you are doing the kind of calculations where you’ve a small amount of data that needs a lot of repetitive maths done on it, they’re ideal. Bitcoin mining or crypto breaking for instance - set them up, let them go, check in on them occasionally. The main CPU acts as an orchestrator, keeping all the cell cores filled up with work to do and processing the end results. But if that’s not what you’re trying to do, then they’re borderline useless, and that’s a problem for the PS3, because most of its processing power is tied up in those cores.
Some games have a somewhat predictable workload where offloading makes sense. Got some particle effects - some smoke where you need to do some complicated fluid-and-gravity simulations before copying the end result to the GPU? Maybe your main villain has a very dramatic cape that they like to twirl, and you need to run the simulation on that separately from everything else that you’re doing? Problem is, working out what you can and can’t offload is a massive pain in the ass; it requires a lot of developer time to optimise, when really you’d want the design team implementing that kind of thing; and slightly newer GPUs are a lot more programmable and can do the simpler versions of that kind of calculation both faster and much more in parallel.
The Cell processor turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. The resources needed to work on it (expensive developer time) just didn’t really make sense for a gaming machine. The things that it was better at, are things that it just wasn’t quite good enough at - modern GPUs are Bitcoin monsters, far exceeding what the cell can do, and if you’re really serious about crypto breaking then you probably have your own ASICs. Lots of identical, fast CPU cores are what developers want to work on - it’s much easier to reason about.
Yes, because it doesn’t do as much to protect you from data corruption.
If you have a use case where a barely-measurable increase in speed is essential, but not so essential that you wouldn’t just pay for more RAM to keep it in cache, and also it doesn’t matter if you get the wrong answer because you’ve not noticed the disk is failing, and you can afford to lose everything in the case of a power cut, then sure, use a legacy filesystem. Otherwise, use a modern one.
Yeah. Unless they’ve some ulterior motive for porting their RE engine to iOS, then this is insane. That kind of cash will barely fund a senior engineer for a month once you’ve paid out overheads as well.
If they’re planning to have some kind of phone tie-in to the next Resi game, then maybe it might have made sense to work the compatibility issues out. An app that runs on your phone that makes it “your phone in game”, so you can receive texts from the president’s daughter while shooting some definitely-not-Spaniards on your Playstation, bit of an augmented-reality thing. Could be a laugh to have your phone be in control of a drone so that you can see round corners, while juggling the other things you’re doing? But probably mostly so that you can get dinged for microtransactions.
Oh yeah. Partying like its 1989 and I’ve booted up my Amiga. Let’s get some unicycling friends in here and do some hacking in 3D.