Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.

Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.

Wikipedia’s entry on Z-Lib has its Tor address on it as well, so you can avoid that link too. Massive repository of textbooks and indeed books of any kind, all just available for free download. Makes me sick.

Absolutely NO sexuality explicit content. This includes, but not limited to, images/videos/chat around sexual acts. There are other places on the internet for this.

😥

Having the suit one corner and the rank in the other is going to make these a bastard to play games with. How would you hold them in your hand so’s that you can see both?

Identity is a many-layered thing, and I’d never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let’s go!

So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.

Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)

That’s absurdly high resolution for 1994 - it should be at 320×200, although with the “slightly rectangular” pixels that you get in DOS.

I think some of the magic of Doom gets lost in higher resolutions. The odd badly-aliased pixel gives the impression of glinting light, which it obviously does not have, and some of the mysteries of the enemies is lost, since normally they’d just be a few pixels unless you’re dangerously close to them. Gives the impression that it’s more animated than it is, since it would always be shifting. Modern ports will let you mouselook and things as well, which makes it crazy fast; not that you were exactly slow at turning around, back in the day, but you did need to play it in a more considered way.

“HANA needs it for analytics purposes, so the actual purpose of your job isn’t to sell things or keep customers happy, but to gather metrics.”

Instructions unclear, now an alcoholic with dick stuck in middle manager.

I’m sympathetic to instructions like “you need to do it this way BECAUSE perfectly valid reason”. Maybe that pointless paperwork is needed for some compliance documents I’m not aware of; maybe what seems like pointless busywork in preparation is actually essential for one of our biggest customers.

Alas, at my work, it’s quite often BECAUSE someone tangentially related to the project likes a certain output, and we can never go and speak to them to confirm, nor ask if maybe there’s something else we could get them that could be even better.

Well, we’ve a single cable coming over from France that makes up about 3% (I think) of our total electricity supply. So “French Nuclear” should be a bigger entry in that table than coal, solar, hydro or bio. That’s not the only import, either, so it’s not completely impractical for the missing percentages to be imports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Cross-Channel

If it’s a Robin Hood story, then presumably it’s full of gold coins rather than dollar bills. Bag’s about the size of his head, call it four litres. Gold has a density about 20 kg / litre and is worth about $100 / gram, so ignoring the fact that you’d struggle to lift that bag, especially in one hand, it would be worth about $8M.

Still works out to about 0% of their wealth. Time to start taxing the rich.

We measure Right Ascension from the first point of Aries, which is the March equinox and one of the two times where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator. (The other being the September equinox, of course.) That’s easier to determine with a telescope than peri-/aphelion, and more meaningful to people on Earth. Might suggest that as new year, and then we won’t upset the sun either?

To be fair, compiling C code with a C++ compiler gets you all the warnings from C++'s strong-typing rules. That’s a big bonus for me, even if it only highlights the areas of your C that are likely to become a maintenance hazard - all those void* casts want some documentation about what assumptions make them safe. Clang will compile variable-length arrays in C++, so you might want to switch off that warning since you’ve probably intended it. Just means that you can’t use designated initialisers, since C++ uses constructors for that and there’s no C equivalent. I’d be happy describing code that compiles in either situation as “C+”.

Also stops anyone using auto, constexpr or nullptr as variable names, which will help if you want to copy-paste some well-tested code into a different project later.

Man alive, don’t get the managers working with audio. “Doubling the stream” might work if you’re using a signed audio format rather than an unsigned one, and the format is in the same endianness as the host computer uses. Neither of which are guaranteed when working with audio.

But of course, the ear perceives loudness in a logarithmic way (the decibel scale), so for it to be perceived as “twice as loud”, it generally needs an exponential increase. Very high and low frequencies need more, since we’re less sensitive to them and don’t perceive increases so well.

Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you’d have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.

Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn’t scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it’s instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.

Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can’t fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.

Bear in mind as well that the Scottish government rejected a lot of the privatisation that the remainder of the UK went through, so ‘government’ doesn’t just mean civil servants in offices, it means things like Scottish Forestry and Scottish Water as well. Need to manage small teams of people over very large areas who are frequently out of mobile phone contact, as well as sharing information with subcontractors who will frequently be one-man-band operators who may just have a van and a mobile phone; no laptop, no IT team.

So ‘convenient’, but also ‘almost nothing else would be practicable’.

I’d probably go with a “kitchen” metaphor here.

The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they’re exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.

Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it’s not very easy to generalise as to whether it’ll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.

If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you’d expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don’t have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you’ve got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you’ve got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.

Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they’re about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you’d expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux. https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/

Forbes article here is from this year; expect between 5% worse and 25% better when running on Linux. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/

General experience is that generally there’s no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.

Yang Tengbo; “businessman” rather than anyone particularly public.

Good news is that it’s such a bastard to program efficiently that most games don’t make full use of it and you can get away with a certain amount of approximation in its behaviour for speed. Nice work, Sony.

Compare that with z80 or 6502 based machines, where you need to be beyond cycle perfect in some cases. Need to simulate every rising and falling edge for the CPU and its coprocessors in a SNES if you want to avoid every edge case, for instance.