Literally the only reason I keep a Windows machine around is to run proprietary software that I simply can’t replace, like games and software suites for specific hardware.
Thanks to WINE/Proton, I can’t even remember the last time I turned on that Windows machine. I think it might’ve been years. I should probably turn it on just to cycle the battery (notebook) a little and run updates.
English is not my native language
I’m sure their way makes sense to Chinese speakers.
It’s been a while, but the last time I checked, the Australian censorship board primarily limits works which can be sold in Australia. I believe that it’s explicitly legal for adults to own anything that doesn’t break any other laws (including decency and pornography laws, but those are surprisingly not terrible IMO), provided that they don’t buy it in Australia.
There are also some laws about using the postal service to transmit classified works, but I think they’re less restrictive; for decades there was a thriving mail-order pornography trade based in the ACT (which had more relaxed censorship than the other states).
You’re right, my apologies. When I saw that the SoC seemed to be similar to the MTK I had in my last phone, I thought it was less powerful, and my phone could just barely scrape through a handful of simpler GCN and PS2 games. But after reading your comment I looked more closely and the SoC in OP’s phone is actually a fair bit more powerful. So yes, PS2 and GCN should be no problem.
The writer of the video is (presumably) a paid, working writer.
Why do you think that? To me, it just seems to be a guy with a YouTube account. He’s got exactly three videos listed, all from the last few weeks, although the account was created 16 years ago.
Besides which, how is being a professional writer automatically connected with being a professional video editor?
I’m not sure that your analogy works, either. All he said was that it was difficult to replicate his existing workflow with free software in Ubuntu. He never claimed to be editing video to a professional level; that requirement seems to have come from you.
I use RetroArch for all the systems mentioned. It’s not a simple, pick-up-and-play app, but I don’t think it’s too hard to get the basics working, and there’s plenty of documentation and community support online.
RA maps physical controllers (configurably) to a logical internal “RetroArch controller”, which is then mapped in turn to the specific emulated controller by each emulation core. So as long as the phone’s mini controller pad connects to Android as a standard controller, there should be no problems, including remapping however you wish.
On the SoC in their phone, even N64 through Retroarch is a stretch for many games. PS1 will generally be OK, but I’d still recommend a stand-alone emulator for that, too. Everything earlier than that generation should be fine, though.
The most insidious part of OneDrive and Google’s equivalent (Photos, etc.) on Android is that they both treat the cloud copy as the “original” and the local copy as temporary. That is, in normal usage, if you delete the local copy it remains in the cloud, but if you delete the cloud copy it also deletes the local copy automatically. Under both systems, if you want to delete something from the cloud but keep the local copy, you have to go through a separate, clunky web interface.
I’ve heard this one before.
“This new technology has been great while the wealthy early adopters could use it to exploit the masses, but now that it’s becoming more widespread and democratized, we must regulate it carefully, introducing rules with which only the wealthy and well-established can realistically comply, to protect society.”
Trial by Fire. I just looked it up and one of the first handful of screenshots looked almost exactly like this.
I’ve never played it and never would’ve thought of it, so the W goes to you IMO. All I was confident of was that the graphics and UI screamed “early 2000s PC game”.
There’s a whole lot of math in that article, and to be honest I’m not 100% clear on what they’re trying to say. I think they’re talking about how standard quantization isn’t making full or “accurate” use of the number space, although if you read through to the end they note that there’s really nothing terribly wrong with the standard way. But here’s my take.
To simplify, I’ll use an integer range 0-4 instead of 0-255, but the principle’s the same.
So, say that we’re quantizing from a floating-point range of 0.0-1.0 to an integer range of 0-4. Doing things the usual way, that’d be the orange numbers on the bottom of this diagram:
But you can see that this doesn’t line up cleanly with a nice, regular division of the range into 5 equal blocks. If we just multiply by 4 (our integer max) and then round off to the nearest integer, the original value ranges represented by our integer 0 and 4 are half the size of the others. E.g. 0.0 to 0.49 become 0, but 0.5 to 1.49 become 1.
Now, if we want to represent true 0.0 and 1.0 simply with our integer range (0-4), we should use 0 to exactly equal 0.0, and 4 to exactly equal 1.0. And converting from integer to float by calculating [value / 4] (or [value / 255] in reality) will get us exactly that. I wouldn’t change that.
What I would suggest changing–to anyone who cares enough about it–is how the numbers are converted from float to integer. If you look at the diagram again, you can see that there is one orange integer per evenly-divided block, even if they don’t line up with the centers of the blocks. If we take a float (0.0-1.0) representation and multiply it by our integer max plus one, we’ll get the blue numbers at the top of the diagram. Then all we have to do is round down to the nearest integer and cap the result at 4 (or 255, or whatever our integer max is), and we’ll have a nice, even distribution in our conversion.
I could have misunderstood, but it seems like all of the errors and uncertainty discussed in the article come from how the multiplied floats are truncated into integers. I think that this method eliminates that cleanly.
For VHS, it was much more common to record things from broadcast. Even if someone had multiple machines, copies using standard consumer VHS degraded noticeably even in one generation.
For DVDs, writing drives were expensive and uncommon for a long time, and most early players didn’t like burned discs, so you were limited in how you could watch them anyway. I know that some people got into the mindset of physically cloning the discs, but I feel like it was at least as common to rip, re-encode just the main title with a more modern codec to shrink the size, and store that smaller copy electronically.
Ragebait, pure and simple.
Most of us interpret “a hill I will die on” as holding an opinion that we know some people disagree with, but that we believe so strongly that we’ll fight for it.
Many of the articles in this series seem to interpret it as knowingly taking the stupidest, pettiest opinion that has ever occurred to them and deliberately overstating it so that others want to kill them.
Also, even as an Aussie who prefers Vegemite to Marmite, that last article in the list can burn in a dumpster fire for multiple reasons. So job well done, I suppose.
Surely it shouldn’t be surprising that a technology which literally can only regurgitate bits of things which others have already made, when put into the hands of people whose imagination is limited to what already exists (or alternatively, is not meaningfully directed) precisely because they lack an understanding of the underlying principles, results in only slight variations of the things we already have.
I can’t immediately give you a smartphone app concept that completely breaks an existing, arbitrary taxonomy, but there are two good reasons for that. One; anything that can still run on a smartphone can almost certainly be shoehorned into any existing taxonomy by carefully-worded arguments. Two; by the time a break with tradition is clear enough that such arguments become impossibly tenuous, smartphones will be things that our great-grandparents used to use.
To counterpoint the author’s smartphone analogy, think of how people looked at their TVs in the early 1970s. It was a society-changing but by that time relatively established technology with high growth. And people had all sorts of ideas for “new” things to do with it. You could’ve made arguments regarding most of them in the same vein as the arguments in this article. Most of those ideas were half-baked and failed at the time… only to resurface decades later, altered, refined, and successful, on PCs and smartphones. But PCs and smartphones are not, in any real sense, TVs.
Which surprisingly, once I hunkered down and pushed my way through this lengthy essay, is essentially one of the points that I think the author is making (although obliquely): That by the time this technology has evolved beyond its current limits, it will no longer be something that we recognize as “software” in the current sense.
I suggest trying to keep the concepts of “integrated system design” and “algorithmic process definition” separate from “digital computer software” in a similar way. Which, funnily enough, are the parts of all of this at which humans arguably still beat LLMs.
“Of course, consoles are important, but the proportion of people who play on PCs is steadily increasing. Even in areas where consoles are not widely available, there are many people who say, ‘I can play it on PC.’”
This quote hits a little different when you know that Sega sells almost everything digitally for PC in the Americas and Europe, but virtually nothing within Japan and other selected countries.
They do not care about making their games available to customers. They care about profits. Overseas, the PC segment is big enough to be worth pursuing. In some countries it outstrips the console segment. But in Japan it’s small enough that it makes more sense not to support PC, but rather to try to keep customers locked in to consoles, where they have tighter control and less competition.
This made me laugh out loud.
“Click or tap on all pictures of ARMED INSURGENTS TAKING COVER IN RUINED BUILDINGS until no more are left.”
We bought a new car a few years ago that came with a whole suite of sensors and warnings. I’d like to turn them off, but my partner insists on turning them on again every time I do, so I need to deal with them. In the first six months with the new car, I think I had four or five near-accidents caused by the “safety” system suddenly making some loud noise when I was already partway through a manoever. But after a while I became able to tune out the stream of beeps, boops, and buzzes that come about half a second too late to be of any use, when they’re not false alarms.
The car also has a “safety” feature I don’t think I can disable, that restricts acceleration when proximity sensors are triggered. It was not a pleasant feeling to be in the path of a multi-ton truck, flooring the accelerator, and having the car slowly mosey forward at the pace of a quiet afternoon stroll down a country lane. Worse, I believe that it was the barrelling behemoth itself which caused this reaction. Fortunately, I found quite by accident that if you keep pumping the accelerator in a blind panic for a couple of seconds, the car decides that you might really be serious about accelerating, and that maybe it should defer to the actual human intelligence that’s nominally in control of the vehicle. That, or the idiot software finally clocked that I was already in the truck’s way, and needed to get out of it. But subsequent events have lent credence to the pedal-pumping theory.
I feel like new, automated “safety” features are going to kill and injure at least as many people as they protect.
Great! Let’s put 24/7 webcams in his house, so he’ll perform spectacularly and we can get many more absolute banger ideas like this one!
I’m just doing what the man himself says: “Fighting for a world where the watching goes both ways.” But then, I suspect that when he said that he was thinking it’s “us versus the government”, and not “regular citizens versus billionaire tech-robber-barons”.
Why do these tech-bros always seem to act like the problem is government, and they’re somehow “fighting the good fight” no matter what they do? The problem is any powerful group with the power to steamroller others. And big business is at least as bad as big government.
Welcome to the kids’ table!
Regards, Australia & New Zealand.