addie @ addie @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

My choice as well. I do my C++ development in Vim, and the keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs were the best I'd found. The easy screen-splitting is great when manipulating virtual machines, or having a man page open when working on scripts.

I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their 'tech demos' looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.

Yeah; if I was picking the aspects of Ubuntu where they were making a mistake, 'minimal default install but easy to download more' would not be what I'd have selected - that actually sounds a good thing. Having too much out-of-date crud was starting to be a problem. 'Everything is a snap, which runs like a three-legged dog even on a powerful machine, and causes me disk space issues on less powerful ones too' - that's a problem. 'Keeping on messing with Firefox, and replacing my ppa version with an out of date snap, which means I've changed my works machine over to Mint to avoid their nonsense?' - that's a problem.

RockPaperShotgun did a performance analysis on this - long story short, a 30xx card will be good for about medium settings, a 40xx for high, and really a 4090 for ultra. According to the Steam hardware survey, that's about one-in-five PC gamers that could start this up if they wanted to; a few percent can run it with all the flashy graphics. Combine the hardware exclusivity and the distinctly 'meh' reviews, get some seriously low player numbers.

Means it has positive polarity, fixed modality, and fire triplicity. Don't you know nothing?

Do it. I did it years ago, never looked back, and it's only gotten better since then - Proton has been off like an absolute rocket lately, and publishers considering the Steam Deck a 'first class' target should mean an end to them bundling the broken anticheat that stops 100% compatibility.

Advised against in the late 90s since it was a pretty common habit from the dawn of computing through till the early 90s, and they'd finally realised it wasn't the best of ideas, even if it was very very fast.

The number of times that Windows has been pwn3d by 'legacy' formats - images, font files, crazy stuff - that it's attempted to parse for thumbnails is pretty crazy. There's a lot of programmers writing unsafe code out there.

... email conversation with Sensible Software legend Stoo Cambridge, and ...

Nice that the solution for this is so trivial, if you want it. Always a bit of a security concern though with these venerable old file formats (and certainly, no modern machine wants the colour palette in interleaved bitplanes) where the loading technique was generally 'map it into memory, and treat it like a struct'. ILBM isn't as complicated as eg. TIFF, but buffer overruns and pointer shenanigans in dusty code is something to be wary of - I wouldn't want this enabled by default

Don't think so in this case - we were all expecting him to be assassinated somehow, and the old 'sushi dinner with a nice cup of tea after' wasn't very likely. Should have had a sweepstake on his life expectancy - guessing 60 days would have been pretty impressive.

Doesn't matter what the question is, this is always the correct answer.

"We squeezed rocks and filled them with lightning, so that they can think incredibly fast but with no imagination at all."

Yeah - early measurements of the magnetic moment of a muon aren't coming out as per theory. Could be the setup, could be a fifth fundamental force, could be that someone's fucked the sums on the four that we know about, could be invisible gremlins loading up the particles with slightly charged nothingburgers to foul up the experiment.

Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you've no idea of the controls.

Once the kernel has loaded itself, it needs to start up userspace as well. This is usually (perhaps exclusively) done by starting an 'init' program as process number 1, which then starts up all the other userspace programs: systemd is no different in that regard. It solves a variety of problems that traditional inits have, though:

• rather than having near-incomprehensible shell scripts to start, stop, etc. all your programmes and services, it uses INI-style service files which are merely fiddly. They're kept in a few logical places, not 'everywhere'
• starting and stopping services is done with simple, consistent commands - systemctl enable tomcat will start the Tomcat webserver at next boot; start, restart, stop and disable do basically what you think. Shell scripts are... less predictable, especially between distros.
• rather than having to inspect all of your scripts and work out what order they start in, SystemD just lets you declare what they depend on, and it works it out for you - much simpler, much more robust.
• rather than needing a separate tool to manage scheduled events (usually a chron-like, like anachron), SystemD just lets you write a 'timer' with the same syntax as its service files. They can be set to only trigger based on other events, like start-up, so you can do once-an-hour database snapshots (but only if the DB is running) very easily. That's painful with traditional inits.
• also manages disk and network mounts, so you don't need a separate tool for those, and you can trigger other events off of them as well. That was also painful in older inits.
• and power events too, if you want to trigger other tasks before sleep or when your laptop wakes up. (Again, was painful before.)
• log files all in one place and controlled in the same way and accessed with one tool - again, traditional inits aren't like that.
• (advanced usages) works well with cgroups, so if you're looking to limit the CPU time on a web service and make sure that it only uses its share of memory, that's dead easy. Very difficult with traditional init.

You can get a reasonable idea of what systemd is doing with a systemctl status at the command line; shows you the overall system status, with a nice tree view of what's running and what caused it to start. Getting that kind of overview on a eg. SysV init is much less simple.

Administrators and devops generally love it; it's very simple and straightforward and consistent and predictable. Certain devs dislike it, due to the original author, or feelings of overreach and complexity (although it's much simpler than learning everything that it replaces), or because they're attached to Bash scripts. (You can trigger Bash scripts with SystemD if you like, but they're not 'in control'.)

DNA evidence being all the blood that she was covered with when the police caught her wandering around barefoot with a knife and hammer, outside a burger joint at half three in the morning? I’m sure that if she’d just had a moment longer to rinse it off, then her cast-iron ‘I usually carry stuff like that’ defence would have worked, and she wouldn’t have had to start fighting the police. So close to being the perfect crime.

Might be biased, but that's obviously the best instance.

I wouldn't really use the pound as a comparison for anything - we decided that committing economic suicide and abandoning free trade with our closest trading block was a small price to pay for being able to be mean to poor brown people. The reviews are coming in; would you believe that that was a stupid decision, and we've a stupid currency that's not worth as much any more?

Just been replaying Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, but I very much doubt the sequel is what they're working on.

First game - amazing art, very imaginative, solid gameplay, great engine, pretty decent plot, good level design with a reasonable balance between fighting, exploration, and puzzling. A bit flawed - gameplay-wise, the camera hates you, you're a liability in the air, and it takes far too long to get given your basic equipment - and it's also far too QTE and exposition heavy, assumes that you've an attention span of about four seconds before you need a reminder. But it was the style at the time, and it's a great game, especially in the second half.

Sequel sorts out your bad air controls and gives you your weapons up-front. Retains the awesome art and design in the Castlevania sections, but contrasts them with the boring-as-fuck awful 'city' levels where you spend most of your time. Includes far too many lengthy instant-fail sections where you're sneaking about as rats, or hiding behind pillars from some dudes - I'm Dracula, for fuck's sake. Voice actors all sound bored to be there. Still assumes that you're a goldfish that loves doing QTEs. Could also make a great game by only including half of it, but unfortunately the good bits are mixed in with the shite bits, rather than having a slow start and a strong finish.

Really interested to see what they're going to do - rarely have I seen a developer that can achieve such great things, but execute on them so badly, and fail to recognise what needs to be left on the cutting room floor.

I am just disappointed that the marmot was towelled dry, rather than blow-dried for unbelievable floofiness. Otherwise, perfection - top rodent hygiene, right there.

Bungie Studios had a habit of naming their AIs after mythological French swords; Durandal in Marathon, and Cortana in Halo. Microsoft ought to name their new AI assistant Hauteclaire or Joyeuse or something else that follows the theme, but I very much suspect that it's going to be named by a committee of marketing execs. Much more likely to find scholars and poets developing software than in the C-suite.

You a non-native English speaker? I'd have thought the letter X would have made Alexa and Bixby hardest to pronounce for most people, and Siri and Cortana the easiest. Spanish stress pattern for 'Cortana' doesn't match English, making it harder to say it in a way that it recognises. But that's obviously just me - I'm Scottish, and none of these things have ever recognised a single word I say.

One of the most-requested features on these smart assistants would be the ability to rename / nickname them, but that's an expensive ask. They all offload their actual voice processing to a cloud server somewhere, and then have their 'activation sounds' hard-coded into them. Needs to be either a few syllables in a row (hay-see-ree) or some unusual sequence (bicks-bee) to not have hundreds of false positives. Giving them nicknames would require them to send their voice samples to their back-end servers basically 24/7, which would cost them a fortune to run. And also be a privacy nightmare, but I'm sure the operators would be just fine with that if they could afford it.