jandrese

Doesn't FAT have the concept of "badblocks" to handle the old days when sectors could randomly fail on drives and they had to work around it? It would only be slightly more suspicious but it would allow the drive to be mounted and used as a regular drive to avoid the even more suspicious unmounted volume issue. The data in the sectors would obviously be encrypted so it looks like random noise if someone does start poking around looking at it.

The cutoff is AVX2 instructions. They were introduced one generation later.

The RAM crunch has been a quiet victory for those older cards. I have a 10 year old video card in my rig that had at the time a decent but not chart topping 8GB of RAM. Developers are still targeting 8GB because so many of the cards released today still have that. Since I'm still using 1080p the performance is usually acceptable too. Surprisingly the biggest problem is becoming the CPU, with the i5-3570k lacking a few of the later SSE instructions and being completely unable to run some titles.

Back of the envelope calculations suggest that even modest propulsion technology should be sufficient for a single technological species to spread throughout the galaxy in a geological instant

I think this is where it all went wrong. Overly optimistic assumptions from atomic age thinkers about how technology was going to overcome all obstacles in the near future based on their recent life experience. The thinkers seriously underestimated the amount of technological progress needed to produce an extremely complex machine that operates indefinitely with no outside support whatsoever in an environment where any error can be fatal and there is a constant stream of hazards to contend with.

You might be thinking: "So what, it just means it takes a few centuries longer to get started, in Geological terms that is nothing.", but the problem isn't that it is hard, it is that it makes the trip significantly harder than simply building orbital habitats in your home solar system. Once you have that, what is the point of spending vast amounts of resources in trying to colonize a mostly unknown star system tens or hundreds of light years away?

Sure there are always people who will want to climb Everest, but this problem is so big that it's unlikely that one person or even a small group will be able to undertake it. The resource investment is simply too colossal. It would be much harder to climb Everest if you had to convince the entire population of London to come with you.

The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.

It's the difference between getting a trickle of random players on the map vs. never ever seeing another player.

For Minecraft random people are more of a nuisance than an asset, but for a Roblox obby there is an expectation that other people will check it out.

I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.

While it started beforehand, it was really smartphones and especially the iPhone that gave so many UI guys an excuse to discard all of the studies of the past and start from scratch. "Oh, but it's a touch interface, these lessons are about mouse users, certainly discoverability and clearly differentiating UI elements don't apply anymore. Our users are so smart they will just know that a half swipe from the middle of the object is different than a half swipe from the edge, and they don't have to be told about functionality that is infused at birth now."

I think people were entering the SMS short code the digits were sent from instead of the digits so they wanted to make it clearer that it was 6 digits they want you to look for.

Or the input fields are provided by different widgets they downloaded from different places on the Internet.

Usually Ctrl-F still works for me, but / almost always gets consumed by the stupid search that never works properly. But then that's usually because you're on a site with infinite scroll so even the Ctrl-F search is going to be limited, even if you are in the correct thread.

One thing is really dislike about modern UI design is where you see a headline that seems kinda interesting but you don't click on it right away. Come back a bit later and it's just gone. There was some A/B testing on the headline and now it's completely different, probably now all clickbaity so I won't be inclined to check it out.

Plus, the numbers are also split by hand!

From middle-going-out:

Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468

What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by side? Maybe 0 is more likely to appear so they want it on an index finger? It just seems unlikely that the next most common digit is 9, unless this was developed by people who set prices on items.

It's been noticed, but nobody with access to the website has been told or cares. The author is almost certainly the first person to do a root cause analysis and come up with the solution though.

Watching the video linked at the end of the article my first thought was "Starfox, eat your heart out", but watching the gameplay I noted that at its core its a really basic shooter and it can be quite hard to keep track of the enemies and projectiles with the background going nuts like that.

I imagine such an engine would instantly blow itself apart in real life. Basically the simulated version of those tractor pull cars where the engine survives for about 500 rotations before it has to be rebuilt.

Imagine your vehicle is pulling a heavy load up a hill vs. going flat out on a track. Your throttle position may be the same but the RPMs are likely to be quite different, even when you account for the transmission.

There is no scenario that Iran wins a war with the USA.

My god man, Vietnam vets are still alive. You can talk with them today. There is no reason to forget all of the lessons of the past.

IIRC they accelerated rock as the reaction mass. Gigatons of rock accelerated to well above escape velocity and launched from the ground.

In the real world their scheme is doomed as it would strip the atmosphere off of the Earth, but since they were planning to leave the solar system the atmosphere was going to freeze to a solid anyway so maybe it didn't really matter. To be honest I thought the entire scheme was an extremely elaborate cover for the fact the lead ship was the actual ark and everyone else was just plain doomed. This would have mirrored one of the themes in the 3 Body Problem where interstellar space travel is strictly forbidden until everybody can participate at once. The "launch the Earth as a spaceship" concept was so poorly thought out I thought it had to be a fraud in the story, and our somewhat dense protagonists just didn't catch on.

The Trump administration forgot all of the lessons of Vietnam.

They'll be getting the Hormuz toll money.

What are you talking about? This is extremely common. Try hunting for some 15+ year old piece of obscure software or especially a driver for old hardware on the Internet and you are always hitting domain parking pages and "file no longer available".

Generally it's easier to just copy the data to each new media as you adopt it. In the past this was pretty easy to do as the hard drive held way more data than the floppy disks of old. The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on. Unfortunately this sputtered out during the SSD transition and became even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.

I'm not saying that those guys weren't corrupt, but that's a classic authoritarian pattern. Purging anybody who might potentially in the future be a threat to your rule is step two in any authoritarian playbook. Were they perchance replaced with unambitious yes men?

Or in authoritarian regimes it often means "stole from the party". As long as you only steal from the poor and give the proper bribes up the chain you are in no danger in most corrupt societies. Except possibly in the rare occasion where your corruption causes a disaster that embarrasses the people above you in the hierarchy.

Far too often when you see stories about how someone was persecuted for corruption it boils down to "he stole from rich people".

It seems crazy to me that Linksys didn't look at the success of the WRT54GL and the higher prices they commanded and decide to just keep doing that. Why every company feels the need to roll their own firmware that is buggy, slow, crashy, and doesn't implement half of the promised functionality properly is still baffling to me.

Oh, so that's where that old nugget of wisdom came from! I've heard the rule about making your swap at least 2x your RAM for ages and thought it was just some old rule of thumb from the 80s. I didn't know there used to be a legitimate reason for it.

One thing I think Slashdot got right was capping the upvotes on a post to 5. This provided the desired effect of letting quality content sit on top of the discussion without turning it into a game. They also were fairly stingy with the letting people upvote and especially downvote content. Plus there was a whole meta-moderation system that may or may not have made an impact, I was never sure about that part.

Tell that to Omar Artan.

The libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

He was a believer in the idea that banks would never act against their own long term interests in order to make money quickly because that would be an existential crisis for the bank.

Shortly after he left a bank with over 150 years of history collapsed due to exactly that sort of mismanagement, triggering a crisis for the entire banking sector.