Since it sounds like you know what you’re talking about, out of curiosity, how do you feel about SPARC?

Imagine going back in time to 2015 and showing this article to someone.

I don’t know much about photography, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would something like focus stacking help with this?

That is to say, make the lens less of a bottleneck so you could benefit from a higher resolution sensor.

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Considering the amount of Youtube react vids, it seems legal to do that for money.

Actually if anything those are illegal considering they usually contain the entire video with some moron’s face in the corner. You could argue that they fall under fair use for criticism and analysis, though I don’t think you’d be able to do so successfully given the amount of original content included and the insubstantial nature of the commentary. Its more like these videos usually copy work from creators that don’t have the resources to put up a fight.

Your emulator might be legal, the ROMs for them aren’t.

Yeah, that’s what I just said.

As far as the ROM patch fixes go … yes, selling those is technically not allowed. You can ask for donations, but the patch itself must be freely distributed.

I’m really sorry to tell you this but IP law doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about whether or not you’re making money from something. It might aggravate a company’s lawyers into action more readily than if you are not, but a company is fully within their rights to shut you down whether you’re violating IP law to make money or if you’re doing it to help underprivileged kids with cancer.

And that product relies on other people’s work to deliver its advertised experience

Copyright laws, as the name suggests, govern who has the right to make copies of a particular piece of IP. If you are not making and distributing copies of something in some way then copyright law doesn’t apply.

You are effectively arguing that I shouldn’t be able to make and distribute lists of songs I think are good to listen to together unless I get the permission of all the song creators. That is ridiculous.

If companies are able to exert legal control over anything that relies on their IP to function, not just copies of their IP, the implications would be far reaching and disastrous. For one, custom phone ROMs, even completely original ones, are usually specific to specific models of phone because they rely on interfacing with firmware that is different from phone to phone. Currently it is legal for consumers to modify phones they own (which is something that had to be fought for, by the way), but under that standard a manufacturer could DMCA ROM developers. Nvidia would be able to DMCA the developers of the Nouveau driver since it relies on their GPU firmware in order to function.

Something everyone here needs to understand is that law in general, but IP law especially, is not a set of platonic ideals handed down by god. It’s very very fuzzy and what flies and what doesn’t relies heavily on precedent. There are things that were common practice in the 1960s that would get you sued now even though the law hasn’t changed. Companies constantly try to push to expand the scope of their control while consumers try to push back. Yes I know “I like free mods, I like wholesome CD Projekt because they ran GOG, I think this is a good thing”, but you need to think of the broader implications of things like this. I don’t give a shit about this specific developer or whether they “deserve” to charge for their mod or whatever, the precedent that game companies are able to exert legal control over, and set standards for, mods of their game is very very bad. Even if you think daddy CD Projekt would be a good steward I can assure you other companies would not be.

You are not comprehending my comment at all.

CD Projekt is not the only company in the world and legal precedents affect more than just the case in which they are created. As of right now this isn’t a court case, but consider:

• Currently it is completely legal to create an emulator provided you write all the code yourself and none of its parts include intellectual property (such as firmware images or copies of games).

• Currently it is completely legal to make and distribute patches for, for example, NES game ROMs that contain none of the original information from the game, but merely consist of a list of locations where values should be modified by a specified amount.

• To give a non-game example, it is completely legal to distribute a commentary track for a movie so long as you don’t include the movie footage within it. Even though that commentary track is essentially useless without a copy of the movie. There even exists sets of instructions for re-cutting movies to create fan edits.

Now, assuming that the mod in question doesn’t redistribute parts of Cyberpunk, and is instead a completely separate piece of software that happens to be capable of interfacing with the game, what right does CD Projekt have to tell them what to do? Possibly they use the word “Cyberpunk” in the name of their mod, which is indeed a trademarked term that CD Projekt could potentially assert control of in this case, but other than that?

Yeah, assuming they’re not redistributing any content from the game, I hope everyone cheering for this realizes that the same justification could be used to forbid emulation, or modding as a whole.

Anyone interested in this concept should take a look at plan9. Everything is even more of a file there.

Taking a screenshot, for example, can be done with:

cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.png

That combined with the way that parent processes can alter their children’s view of the filesystem namespace allows for extremely elegant abstractions. For example, every program just tries to write directly to screen or audio, but the desktop environment redirects their writes to the relevant servers. Which means that, in the absence of those servers, those same programs can run just fine and don’t care whether they’re being multiplexed or not. That also means that the plan9 userspace can be nested inside itself just using the normal mechanisms of how the OS works (that is, without a special tool like Docker).

I see

In your opinion is there anything useful we can do with that part of the radio spectrum as those stations switch off, or are those frequencies going to be silent in the future? Will they be turned over to hobbyists maybe? (or would the power requirements be too high at those frequencies?)

Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

I don’t know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I’ve wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.

If you wouldn’t interrupt a stranger at a party to announce that America is doomed, don’t do it here.

Apparently the microblogging format has made people so socially dysfunctional that they’ve forgotten what a conversation is.

My mom has trust issues with computing so deep she doesn’t even do any fucking software update.

IMO software vendors have created this attitude. Don’t get me wrong, in an ideal world users would be much more technically literate, but given the behavior of the software industry this really should be the expected outcome.

Its similar to how popups on the web trained users to instantly close dialog boxes without reading them. Its not the fault of the individual person writing the CRUD app that uses a dialog box, but it is the fault of the system that collectively produced all of the things you see on the computer’s screen.

It happened to the Playstation, though not for use as workstations usually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Although Valve apparently already takes anti-scalping measures with the Steam Deck, so maybe it could work out in that way (as in, each steam account gets a limited number of purchases, TOS against trying to bypass that limit, etc).

it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that

If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay-effecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.

Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.

At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?

I didn’t bother to read the paper, but the article says the system produced “10s of nanoamps at 10s of microvolts”. I’ll just assume each of those values are “100”, since that’s the highest value you could describe as “10s” of something.

That works out to 0.01 nanowatts. For comparison the tiny solar panel on a solar powered calculator might produce 0.0075 watts, or 750 million times that amount of power.

In reality, since wattage is a multiple of volts and amps, lowering both of those figures from my highball estimate would massively decrease the wattage. The solar calculator probably produces billions of times more power than this 1 foot long cylinder.

So, i think its neat that they were able to measure an effect, but the article really should not even be mentioning power generation.

People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.

In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.

Am I allowed to complain about software bloat if I don’t have that?

It worked for me, but then again I don’t use a virtual keyboard.

Initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000

That’s not bad at all. It’s something that basically every library could have. Imagine that level of distributed redundancy for hundreds of terrabytes worth of information, in a medium that essentially lasts forever.

Assuming it really is coming out at that price of course.

A better test would be to see how it compares to previous posts on his social media accounts from, say, around 2020.