I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.
Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.
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The whole thing is vaguely and noncomittally worded, it promises basically nothing.
Take this bit for example:
taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it
In other words: talk to the individual publishers of each game and get their permission :P At which point GOG’s involvement is almost irrelevant, if you have the publisher’s consent then they might as well give you a copy.
Title of PCGamer’s article is misleading, they want a court order to do it. Proof of death is not enough.
“In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen. We’re willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system.”
They have to do that anyway. Court orders overrule a company’s policies in most (all?) legal systems.
I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?
Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.
I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.
(Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)
Dear Take Two,
If you want to port GTA3 and VC to mobile then I would recommend looking at the re3/revc project. Fans have already put lots of effort into making the games work on modern systems, patching many bugs and making things more portable. Last I checked there already was a Nintendo Switch port.
Oh wait.
There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.
The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).
FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.
My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:
This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.
“holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.
Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.
This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?
Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude
Only for ideal resistors.
Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.
A few things to add to this:
(1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.
(2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.
(Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)
learned from experience the differences between using a standard jack and an XLR, and I can say that the sound is vastly cleaner with XLR (at least on a set).
Your experiences were correct, don’t doubt them. That would have been ground-referenced equipment, ie plugged into wires that eventually join a wall. RF interference would interact with that quite differently, unbal vs bal would be quite different.
This could end up competitive.
Invite people to your house, give them a tour and briefly mention the shelf before scurrying them on. Watch their faces contort but don’t give them the opportunity to ask any questions.
EDIT: I have a vague guess at what could have gone wrong with your adaptor. It might have had OK L and R contacts but a broken G contact. You would then hear the difference between the L and R channels, which most often sounds like garbage. Music would be weird (entire instruments/vocals disappear) and mono audio would be silent or near-silent (so you’ll have to turn it up a lot and will hear noise).
Balanced will reduce noise (in terms of RF noise, of course) significantly better than unbalanced,
In this situation I don’t think it will at all.
I don’t think that balanced vs unbalanced is actually electromagnetically that different in this particular configuration (see my edit at the end of above). Things like where the wire is sitting on your body and what pose you are in will probably affect RF noise pickup levels on the headphone wires much more than changing between bal & unbal signalling.
but the source of noise does need to be far enough away from the capturing device to not affect it directly and, therefore, be able to be negated by the balanced cable.
I didn’t get into near-field and far-field effects. I’m not sure that it really matters here, but I might be wrong.
That’s really weird o.o The adapters should just be metal and plastic, same as the cables.
Maybe they have a really weak connection internally, ie high resistance? This might lead to both lower volume in the headphones and (in some circumstances) higher noise, especially if it’s an unstable resistor.
I recommend starting a shelf of cursed items :)
I wouldn’t say placebo. It’s definitely doing something.
I would say this is still a placebo. Placebos always still do something. A sugar pill tastes sweet and modifies the sugar levels in your blood. The important questions are validity and effectiveness, not whether or not it does something.
Balanced audio will not eliminate noise in most of the circumstances where a headphone user hears noise. There are far more likely sources (the source file itself, DAC limitations, audio amp limitations, external sound from their environment, etc). It will help in some very specific circumstances, but that’s like trying to sell snow chains to all car owners on the planet because you can claim that they improve traction.
If you do work in an environment where changing to balanced headphone signalling helps… why are you working with your head inside an RF hazard zone?
(From page): However, balanced audio does a better job of eliminating noise, should it exist in your signal. In a case where extraneous noise is present
Misleading.
Noise exists in all signals. Balanced audio only “does a better job” in circumstances other than what this product is being sold for. Discussing this at all gives it false merit anyway.
EDIT: Giving this some further thought: balanced and unbalanced signalling is mostly moot when you’re an isolated device with one cable attached. From an RF standpoint you’re not forming both halves of an antenna (dipole or monopole+ground). Electrically they both look extremely similar in this scenario. Your partially conductive human arms waving around will probably couple to RF noise better than the headphone cable.
Don’t forget its fork, https://soylentnews.org
Lethal company, I’ve been joining random people online and seeing how it goes. I got some good tea advice from a random New Zealand tweenager, that has turned out to be worth the price of the game alone (continues sipping rooibos).
I was playing SWAT 4 until recently, but I don’t feel a need to finish it as the gameplay didn’t seem evolve or change much after about halfway through. Voice acting is great, team AI is great, but once you discover non-lethal weapons the challenge disappears (and higher difficulties are impossible if you give your teammates lethal weapons). The popular Elite Force mod makes some nice changes, but sadly everyone overall now feels even easier and more repetitive.
Todo:
- Cruelty squad because it was on discount.
- Anthology of a Killer. Autofishs’ game opinions tend to be good.
- Bitfighter, I think I recall a friend playing this once.
A good search term is “SSD over-provisioning”
The file size discrepancy is usually due to 1000 vs 1024
No, that’s something else entirely. It doesn’t matter what measurement system you use, the drive juggles more sectors than your OS can see.
but filling the drive with random data until its full should wipe the drive.
Only if you assume people can’t access the reserved/unallocated/over-provisioned sectors. If you are only worried about small thieves then this might not be an issue. If you’re handling sensitive data (like medical records for other people or anything with sensitive passwords) then it’s completely inadequate to leave any form of data anywhere on the disk.
I assume you’re joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.
The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).
Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that’s vendor specific, not documented and I don’t think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).
Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.
I did this previously by using MultiMC (now PrismLauncher). Make a mix of mods, send them the zip of the whole game instance and ask them to drag and drop it onto MultiMC. The biggest issue I encountered was one family member having a black ingame world until they changed a setting in the graphics mod, otherwise it didn’t seem to be too hard.
By comparison Minetest is much easier for playing mods with family. Everyone downloads the server’s mods when they join. But the interest is lower.
My case for it was dealing with proprietary sensor devices with ethernet ports and garbage firmware. They could work if your server was on a different subnet, but a bunch of stuff broke (including the config tool) if you were not on the same ethernet LAN. The L2 tinc VPN allowed us to fix things without needing to walk around to the dozens of devices in a building with an ethernet cable, laptop and a ladder.
The firmware (& vendors) of the devices that we spent over 100K on were garbage in so many ways. One product’s proprietary server software would misbehave (read: open files but never close them, after a time running out of file descriptors) which would then cause its fleet of individual sensors to all start SYN flooding it. Another brand’s device model required us to spend lots of time manually updating them through every version of firmware because you were not allowed to jump straight to the latest version. I think it took an hour to complete the process for each unit (during which they’d get really hot and presumably throttle).
A bonus of tunnelling things back to our server over tinc was that everything was now encrypted. I used cheap GL.inet “mango” routers running OpenWRT to backhaul the sensors over the existing shared wifi network (rather than needing dedicated copper or wired VLANs). They worked almost like magic – a weird wifi stack reliability issue required me to write a watchdog that rebooted them, however, otherwise we were back on ladders every few days :| But once that pain was over things overall worked much better.
Aside: Don’t buy ANY off-the-shelf sensor product without first:
- Confirming that you’re not tied to their proprietary server software. Them claiming that they speak an open protocol is NOT enough.
- Buying a few to actually test the above AND reliability over the span of at least a week’s operation AND that they’re not just outright lying about the device’s accuracy/reliability/usefulness/etc
I made the mistake of being on holidays when the decisions on what to buy were made :P I ended up designing and building some of our sensor devices (somehow at a cheaper price even including my labour) that worked better for us, but shortly afterwards the funding ran out and I got a job elsewhere.
Comedy prediction: SD2 releases overseas, but Australia is used to sell remaining stocks of SD1s for a few years before the SD2 is released here.