Slashdot Mirror


User: Sycraft-fu

Sycraft-fu's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
11,249
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 11,249

  1. The limitation of the consumer nVidia cards is double precision floating point. He may not need that. There are plenty of problems that need only single precision math, the extra precision is wasted. In that case, you don't see much benefit going to the pro cards, certainly not enough to justify the price.

  2. That's precisely the problem on Reddit Removes Communities To Address Harassment, Users Respond · · Score: 4, Informative

    They created new rules very recently about reddit being a "safe space". This is something that is, of course, extremely vague. What the hell is a "safe space"?

    So suddenly some long time subreddits are getting banned for violating that. They are all shitty splaces, but then other shitty places seem to get left alone. As such people are rightly saying "What the fuck?"

    Basically the rule is an arbitrary one. They are saying "We can ban you if you say things we don't like." Now its their site, they can do that if they wish, of course, but that is why users are reacting so negatively. It isn't a clear rule that is being consistently applied, rather it is deliberately vague and being targeted in a scattershot fashion.

  3. I think it's more of a toughguy/humblebrag thing on Ask Slashdot: What Hardware Is In Your Primary Computer? · · Score: 1

    "Oh look at me, I'm so awesome, I don't need that high end technology! I'm just so great and productive that this old stuff is excellent!"

    The reason I say that is because I've always seen it on Slashdot. Many people here seem to take pride in using old systems. Even back in the P2 days when a brand new system was still "slow" for a lot of things you'd have people humblebraging on how they were using a 486 and it was fine.

    While I'll certainly agree that machines have WAY more life these days (a 5 year old machine is perfectly serviceable at work for most things) it has always been something I've observed on Slashdot. Rather than a bunch of people bragging on the high end hardware they have, as you tend to see on gaming forums, you have a bunch of people bragging on the low end hardware they have.

  4. I dunno on Fallout 4 Will Be Skipping Xbox 360 and PS3 · · Score: 1

    I've not tried GTA 5 yet but the GTA world is generally very limited to do what it does. A great example would be GTA 3 and Vice City. Open world games that ran on PS2 hardware. Amazing... However they did it by tracking very little. Only things in your FOV and relevant to what was happening (quest NPCs, police chasing you) were handled. Everything else was not there. Turn around and then around again, and traffic would be totally different because it was not tracked off screen. Drops/pickups disappear when you go slightly out of range. Most objects couldn't be interacted with past them being damaged, which would fix offscreen.. Stuff like that.

    Fallout/Skyrim track quite a bit, some of it in a very permanent fashion. Granted not all of it is in memory or simulated at one time (there are a certain number of grids simulated at once) but it is still pretty complex. You can go in to an area, interact with things, pick them up drop them off move them around, travel far away, come back and they'll be in the same state you left them.

    Not saying clever optimization can't fix some thing, but there's limits. Also there are limits to how much time it is worth spending. Say you can engineer a clever system that uses all kinds of hacks and tricks to reduce what is tracked and how it is tracked, and then you optimize the shit out of it to reduce the space it takes... great but how many man-hours did that take? Is it worth it? Time is money in games, and you don't want to spend it on things unless it is needed.

    So if projected sales from the older consoles aren't enough to justify the development costs and/or offset the cuts that have to be made, you don't do it.

  5. That aside, Bethesda needed it on Fallout 4 Will Be Skipping Xbox 360 and PS3 · · Score: 1

    They were having real, real problems getting the kind of game they wanted in to the very limited memory of the last gen consoles. Cutting down graphics only goes so far, there are just limits to how large a world you can easily have, and how many things you can keep track of at once. They did a lot of creative things to manage that, but it was causing issues and they were reaching their limit.

    Some games scale more easily but the big open world types that Bethesda likes do not do as well. Hence it makes sense to target only the current gen stuff.

  6. Pretty much on Writer: "Why I Defaulted On My Student Loans" · · Score: 1

    If you want to university back in the 80s and you STILL haven't repaid your loans, well you are the one who is failing. Not only was university cheaper, and loan terms better, then but you've had like THREE DECADES to pay it back. Student loans are a bitch, and take a long time to pay back for sure. However unless you really fucked up, you can manage it in 30 years.

  7. Most work fine though on Debunking the Batteriser's Claims · · Score: 1

    A good way to tell is with nickle metal hydride rechargables. They have a 1.2v cell voltage. So does a device work with them? Then it'll work on less than 1.3v. Of the things in my house that take batteries, all but one have worked with them. That device, a swifer wetjet, specifically says no rechargables so I haven't tried.

    NiMH batters work well in devices including, but not limited to, remotes, wireless microphones, EOTech sights, laser pointers, cordless phones, headphone amplifiers, and wireless mice.

  8. Oh get off it on Fallout 4 Announced · · Score: 1

    They are different for sure, but that doesn't make them bad. I enjoyed Fallout 3 and I loved New Vegas. Are they the same kind of game as 1 and 2? No, not at all, but they are enjoyable all the same. Not everything needs to be the same all the time, you can have different things in the same universe and it can be fun.

    By the same "things can never change" logic, Fallout 1 and 2 were no good because they were different from Wasteland, which was their predecessor (the universe was made because Interplay couldn't get the rights to Wasteland from EA).

    Evaluate a game on its own merits. Don't demand that it be just like its predecessors.

  9. Those don't bother me, if done well on Netflix Is Experimenting With Advertising · · Score: 1

    I mean you need things like computers, cellphones, beverages, etc in a show. I'm not bothered if those have logos, or if they don't. In fact, it can look more natural and realistic if they do. A Good example is Dell in V for Vendetta. Nothing in your face, the logos on the cop's monitors just aren't covered up. They are just part of the set. When it is done like that, I'm quite happy.

    An example of it being done poorly that bothered me was in I Robot, when Will Smith puts on some brand new Converse shoes released in sync with the movie and talks about them. It was very clearly something shoehorned in there, not a fluid part of the script.

  10. There are reasons for 12-TET on Android M To Embrace USB Type-C and MIDI · · Score: 1

    It is a good balance between getting a good 3rd, 4th and 5th and not getting too complex. You have to go to 29-TET before you get a better perfect 5th and 41-TET to get a better major 3rd. Gets a little complex musically to represent and deal with all that, not to mention design instruments that can play it back.

    So remember that ultimately music is all math, and as such some things do end up being "better" than others musically. I'm not saying we shouldn't have the capabilities to use other scales, I mean computers are more or less unbounded in their capabilities and samplers can microtune to any required setup, but 12-TET has a reason for its prevalence.

  11. It is also still what computer music uses on Android M To Embrace USB Type-C and MIDI · · Score: 1

    If you compose music on a computer, you almost certainly still do it with MIDI. All the new highly advanced synths and samplers still use MIDI as their input for data. Everything from big dollar stuff like Native Instruments Komplete down to freeware. MIDI goes in, sound comes out.

    In some ways it surprises me since you'd think they would get around to improving it (there are some things MIDI leaves to be desired) but on the other hand it does work well for nearly everything and there's something to be said about keeping things standard. You can literally take one of those old General MIDI songs and feed the data in to a modern sampler. I do just that all the time to remake old game soundtracks because I enjoy it.

  12. All the time on Greece Is Running Out of Money, Cannot Make June IMF Repayment · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The US always pays its debts when they are due. I think perhaps the problem is you don't understand how US debt works, and why it is a bit special:

    So the most important thing to understand is the US doesn't go and beg people to give it money, rather it auctions debt. People come and purchase the debt. You can do it yourself on their Treasury Direct site. The US sells debt instruments to interested buyers. They are bid on, and whoever bids the lowest interest rate wins. The upshot is the US sets the terms of the debt instruments sold. They have a variety, some are as short as 4 weeks, some as long as 30 years. When you buy something, the terms of repayment are stated up front: What it'll pay, and when. There is no provision to cash out early, and you don't get to dictate any terms, you just choose what note you want to buy (if they are available).

    This is how public debt works in a lot of countries, but it isn't how things go when you are getting loans from the IMF.

    The other important thing is that all US debt is denominated in US dollars. A US debt instrument specifies how many dollars it'll pay out and that number is NOT inflation adjusted, except in a few very special cases. Well the US government also controls the US mint, which makes US dollars. So the US government can literally print money, and inflate its way in to payments. There are negatives to that, of course, but it is perfectly doable. The US controls its fiscal and monetary policy regarding its debt. Since all its debts are in US dollars, and since US dollars are the world's reserve currency, the US cannot face a crisis where it can't pay, unless such a crisis is internally generated (via the debt limit).

    Not the case with Greek debt, it is in Euros and Greece doesn't control the Euro.

    Finally, there's the fact that the US has great credit. Doesn't matter if you disagree that it should, fact is it does. Investors are willing to loan the US money for extremely low interest rates because they see it as a very safe investment. 4 week T-Bills have been going for between 0%-0.015%. 30-year bonds have been going for 2.5%-3.75%. Investors bid the interest rates very low because they desire it as a safe investment.

  13. Incorrect on Huawei's LiteOS Internet of Things Operating System Is a Minuscule 10KB · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is easier with something simpler, not something smaller. When you start doing extreme optimization for size, as in this case, you are going to do it at the expense of many things, checks being one of them. If you want to have good security, particularly for something that can be hit with completely arbitrary and hostile input like something on the network, you want to do good data checking and sanitization. Well guess what? That takes code, takes memory, takes cycles. You start stripping everything down to basics, stuff like that may go away.

    What's more, with really tiny code sizes, particularly for complex items like an OS, what you are often doing is using assembly, or at best C, which means that you'd better be really careful, but there is a lot of room to fuck up. You mess up one pointer and you can have a major vulnerability. Now you go and use a managed language or the like and the size goes up drastically... but of course that management framework can deal with a lot of issues.

  14. Well, perhaps you should look at features on Huawei's LiteOS Internet of Things Operating System Is a Minuscule 10KB · · Score: 1

    And also other tradeoffs. It is fashionable for some geeks to cry about the amount of disk space that stuff takes, but it always seems devoid of context and consideration, as though you could have the exact same performance/setup in a tiny amount of space if only programmers "tried harder" or something. However you do some research, and it turns out to all be tradeoffs, and often times the tradeoff to use more system resources is a good one. Never mind just capabilities/features, but there can be reasons to have abstractions, managed environments, and so on.

  15. Given that I didn't post the summary on Yubikey Neo Teardown and Durability Review · · Score: 1

    There is little I can do in that regard.

  16. That's why they didn't do it on Why Apple Ditched Its Plan To Build a Television · · Score: 1, Funny

    Because they couldn't overcharge. I'm sure they researched the industry and discovered that it is highly price competitive and that just putting an aluminium frame on it would justify a doubling or tripling in price. So they weren't interested. Apple only likes markets where they can overcharge to a massive degree. They don't want to just make money, they want to make stupid amounts of money.

  17. A two factor device on Yubikey Neo Teardown and Durability Review · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know, only because where I work is using them. Idea is it is a general two factor token. Can be programmed by the end user or their org. Also in theory a lot of companies could all use their platform and you have one two factor device for everything but in reality you use it for whatever your company does and nothing else.

    Once programmed it acts like a HID class keyboard. You push the button, it spits out a string of characters, that being the two factor code for your account at the time.

  18. Oh come on on Court of Appeals Says Samsung's Legal Payments To Apple Should Be Reduced · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I had never seen a black rectangle with rounded edges before the iPhone! ... ...well unless you count the TV I had as a child. And the TV I have now. And probably half the electronics in my house.

    The whole "trade dress" concept seems a bit silly to me in the first place but ti is beyond stupid when they can claim something as simple as their rounded rectangular design as being "trade dress".

  19. Re:Anecdotal evidence on How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nothing rigorous that I've found. I've seen some things like a Mac user posting on a forum asking why Cubase was hitting harder on OS-X than Windows along with screenshots of the overall load meters that it has, but little in the way of details on methodology.

    While I haven't done extensive looking, I haven't come across anything and it is something I'm interested in.

    Sadly, there seems to be little interest in testing. People who own PCs can't really test it, outside of building a hackintosh, and Mac users are not very interested in testing particularly since many of them have a real need to believe their money was well spend and do not wish to do something which might challenge that idea.

    If someone gave me the hardware and software I'd love to try it, but I own only a PC, and the DAW I use (Sonar) is Windows only.

    The only thing I can point to with some newer data is a Sonar benchmark, conducted by their lead programmer, showing improvements in Windows 8 vs Windows 7. They found basically an across the board improvement, with no code recompile http://blog.cakewalk.com/windo... . Now that says nothing of cross platform (as I noted, Sonar is Windows only anyhow) but does indicate that MS continues to improve Windows' performance with regards to intensive time critical tasks like audio.

  20. Re:Anecdotal evidence on How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook · · Score: 5, Insightful

    True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.

    Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.

    None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.

  21. So I guess Japan isn't civilized either on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty In Boston Marathon Bombing · · Score: 1

    Or Malaysia or Thailand and so on.

    Be careful when you get on the American hate high horse, you overgeneralize and you risk looking racist. ...

    or maybe admit it is a bit more nuanced than "not a civilized country."

  22. Defending women is often based on sexism on A Plan On How To Stop Sexism In Science · · Score: 2

    It manifests differently, but it is sexism all the same. Many of the "defender of women" types really do see women as weaker, inferior. These poor little flowers just can't, CAN'T stand up for themselves. They need guys to help them out so that things can be fair! So don't worry, fair lady, they'll protect you from the evil men... unless of course you disagree with them in which case they'll attack your fiercely for having "internalized misogyny" or some such. After all, you can't be strong enough to have your own opinions!

    They don't believe they are sexist, but then people who are sexist/racist/etc rarely believe they are. Make no mistake though, that's what it is. While it might manifest as seemingly good intentions, it is actually a view of gender inferiority. I mean after all, if you truly believe that women are equal to men, just as capable, then you aren't going to think they need special champions. They can, and will, handle it themselves. It is only people who view them as weaker in some way that would think they can't handle themselves. It is pretty insidious.

    I think people need to start calling them out on their bullshit. Sexism under the cloak of "equality" or "justice" is little better than sexism in the form of harassment.

  23. It's also just stuck in the past on Psychologist: Porn and Video Game Addiction Are Leading To 'Masculinity Crisis' · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In particular with regards to gender roles.

    So, time was women were for making babies and raising said babies. Men were for protecting and providing for the women. That was the roles society prescribed and there wasn't a lot of deviation from it. You did see outliers that didn't conform, but by and large that's how things were basically due to necessity. You notice many animals follow a similar structure. It is what is needed for the survival of the species.

    Well that all changed, of course. We now have the problem of too many humans, not too few. Also many of the household tasks that used to take a ton of time are now automated (try washing clothes by hand, it is a full time job almost). So society changed. Women didn't need to place their worth in their offspring anymore. They could choose to be what the wanted, do what they wanted, and still be valuable. It wasn't about popping out babies.

    Well, this is the other side of that: Men's value now no longer needs to be in providing for a family. They can have a family, or not, they work, they can stay at home, etc, etc. For some men, that means staying single.

    However, some people, like this dude, have a problem with that. They think that men should be required to be providers to be considered "real men", should be required to fill a particular role in society.

  24. Any skilled labour basically on Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career? · · Score: 1

    Mike Rowe has given some good talks about the shortage of skilled labour in the US and what a problem it is. This kind of thing can't be outsourced since, well, the labour is needed in the US. I suppose it could be replaced with H1Bs but that doesn't seem to be happening.

    Most of it is stuff like plumbing that isn't glamorous, and even can be dirty, but it is necessary and will continue to be necessary. Eventually robotics may advance to the point of replacing it, but not in the foreseeable future.

  25. Not sure where you live on Photobucket Hackers Nabbed, Face Serious Charges From US Authorities · · Score: 2

    Here manslaughter is a Class 2 Felony. That means 4 years minimum sentence (or 3 years minimum if there are mitigating circumstances), 10 year maximum (12.5 if there are aggravating circumstances). This is presuming first time offence, and only one count. A repeat offence can bring it up to as much as 35 years.

    So no, doesn't look higher to me. Remember there's a difference between maximum and minimum. When a sentence is "up to" that means "the absolute maximum a court may sentence for a given offence." Usually, there's a fair bit of range in a sentence since the idea is a judge will consider the factors of the individual case.