Posts by Paul Shirley 2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Depressingly, showing empty cases at game industry events is common, though usually the box redirects cabling from the badly hidden, high end developer PC running an emulator or prototype boards that won't fit in the real case. If they couldn't even be bothered hooking up a PC running a VCS emulator behind a curtain...
Bring extra sleaze to a sleazy business.
In another forum we had a discussion about the many times politicians have interfered with the education syllabus and how much it looks like deliberate attempts to ensure UK citizens know almost nothing about the constitution, their own history or their place in the world.
It's infinitely easier to trick people out of rights they never knew they had. Or in the case of Britain, never really had, in it's 'Democracy in Name Only'.
Luckily contempt of parliament does not need illegal or criminal actions. By ruling on the basis he has interfered with parliaments business, that's automatically contempt of parliament. Parliament can arrest him the moment he sets foot in the house if they don't feel like involving the police.
...and if he hides from parliament, that is also contempt of parliament ;)
The slightly weird thing is 3 offer existing customers slightly better deals than they offer new customers! Which takes a lot of the aggravation haggling with them away with the backstop of cancelling and replacing, must less painful in the time of number porting by SMS.
So their claims about end of contract are even more bullshit than they seem.
Modern batteries have an impressively long lifetime, or if you're a mobile seller a depressingly long one. Apple seem to have found a way around that failure of built in obsolescence though ;)
The problem of getting through a whole day even with a brand new battery remains for many.
Virgin Media used to be pretty easy to negotiate with, they even had a direct menu path to retentions skipping all the upselling, didn't even need to threaten to leave unless you wanted to squeeze the last few £'s out of them.
Recently Liberty Global have really applied the screws. Just getting to the real retentions dept pretty much requires actually cancelling the contract, no-one before that can offer decent deals. Most don't seem to want to either. Got so pissed off with the runarounds and ludicrously unrealistic offers I finally walked, after being with them (and the companies they took over) since the dial up days.
Virgin have been protected from real competition for far too long. Despite that for most of their existence they actually competed and really did embrace haggling. Now they seem determined to be crushed by the competition.
The one time I abused net send on WinXP to wind up one of the company graphics guys was slightly spoiled by inability to keep a straight face while talking him through the "piracy detected, the Microsoft security team are on their way" popup. The panic was real though, since he was the biggest pirate in the office!
The 1541 wasn't slow because of the serial bus, the software driving it was deliberately run in a slow cpu intensive mode reputedly because one machine the drive could be used on was bugged and wouldn't run any other way. Drive accelerator cartridges simply loaded new driver code that ran the same serial interface in the faster, uncrippled mode on the C64.
I was a very happy bunny when my accelerator cartridge arrived and the 1541 finally ran faster than my own tape turboloader!
Apple would only have handed it back if they thought it was fixed, the 'bug' they couldn't find is why it was repeating . If scripts say reset as a first step then the screen brightness problem disappears before before they start looking for the problem and doesn't get noticed. Very hard diagnosing a problem if it's no longer present!
Still an idiotic design decision.
Its just that old that switching power supplies weren't a thing yet
I need to rebuild my "I, Robot" machine's 1982-3 switching PSU after it went bang a while back. To be fair they cheaped out a bit and wired it slightly differently for 240/110V so not fully auto-ranging and it's bigger than some PCs but they've been around a long time.
..certainly is in the games industry! We'd laugh at the verbal gymnastics marketing use to explain away each delay if it didn't create so much crunch time for the poor sods building the product. Seems to take at least 3 months, usually much longer before marketing will admit reality doesn't take orders from them.
A few lines of calls to the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library will run an awful lot of ops for very little typing...
On a modern OS you can probably just issue async transactional writes to dump incremental results, with negligible effect on performance. Rotating the dump files might be the bulk of the code. At startup ask the OS for the last successful transaction and do no other checking than whether it exists, perhaps throw in a cheap checksum.
Can't even see why restarting the calc would be a chore, just let it autostart with the PC.
I will be getting my age id so I can continue using beer porn sites when the "are you 18 yes/no" popups start demanding proof. You know it's coming with the current war against drink.
Pictures of gushing beer taps, frothing head (on pints) and mixed groups of Belgian beer bottles jostling in crates will continue to be mine!
Very convenient...
The huge flaw in this is they still need to get graphics resources to the users machine for the render command stream to work on. Stream them without caching and you'll risk sending more data than a rendered video and no internet connection available would keep up. Pre cache and you might as well just install and run the whole thing locally.
This scheme seems designed to only benefit owners of badly configured gaming rigs, great if the CPU (and only it) is a bottleneck. I'd bet on Microsoft's gaming cloud computing becoming usable long before this is.
Most drinks designed to drink with ice are sickly sweet and only the dulling of your tastebuds make them palatable at all. The widespread use of corn syrup in barely fermented American 'beers' would make them undrinkable without super cooling. The alcopop abominations should only be consumed frozen on a stick, with a bowl ready for the vomit.
Optane memory also features hardware-based encryption – something no DRAM device is capable of
If you go dumpster diving for DRAM there won't be much data there to decrypt...
Presumably persistent DIMMs are a problem for encrypting data before it leaves the CPU, if you ever have to read the DIMM somewhere else. Have Intel opened a whole new set of security 'opportunities'?
Detail seems to be thin on the ground but the original DiMagex periscope zoom squeezes a longer movement length for its optical components than the depth of the camera body by reflecting 90deg and mounting the components vertically. My Dimage20 is still going strong, only the internal backup battery has failed, still zooms nicely after many years.
The P30 looks like it does the same, making it a real optical zoom. It's been suggested it's happened now because the KM patents have expired.
My LG G4 is about as fast to take pictures from standby as my bridge camera in standby, including whipping it out of my pocket. Point, double tap the button, find out if it shoots instantly or buggers around for a second focusing.
Faster if you include pulling the camera out of its bag because I don't always walk around with it in my hand or bouncing dangerously on a neck strap and there's that pesky lens cap to remember!
There's probably an element of less tracks per inch on larger formats making radial positioning error less of a problem. Unless you were using the C64 5 1/4" drive, that bastard just loved ramming its head hard against the endstops even in normal use. I think it's recalibration routine depended on doing it!
They did make specialised mining cards. The main specialisation was removing all the video outputs from standard GPUs! Which is going to be part of this problem because while they do still work as GPUs its a PIA involving passthrough to another GPU to make them work.
So that's a pile of GPUs rendered worthless. Doubt they'll do that again.
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