Too much money for not enough content.
When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.
...laura
The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.
The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.
...laura
I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.
The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.
When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.
The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.
...laura
If I were going to buy one so that I can play this game, which is the better choice? Which one is newer?
Out of the box, the Xbox Series X is slightly better hardware than the regular PS5. it's not really enough to matter, especially on a mutliplatform game, but since you asked...
That said, Sony offers the PS5 Pro, a higher spec version of the console that Microsoft does not offer an equivalent of. So if price is no object, the PS5 Pro is expected to be the best platform to play it on.
The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.
What part of NO do you not understand?
...laura
My employers recently signed up for a ChatGPT account and I've been seeing how it can help me.
I remain responsible for the big picture, for actually making apps that work on iOS and Android. I've found ChatGPT helpful for refining details. It saves sifting through years worth of Stack Overflow postings. It's a handy tool, but it won't replace me any time soon.
If you say "Chat GPT" in French it sounds like "chat j'ai pété" ("cat I farted"). I guess I need to get out more...
...laura
It's not that long ago that I found myself with a box of 8" floppy discs from a legacy product and no way to read them. Yes, the software on them was long obsolete. But I would have liked to be able to preserve a bit of company heritage.
The product in question (Glenayre GL-3000) had been updated in the interim to use 3.5" floppies, though with a bespoke format. I figured out how to use Linux and creative parameters to dd to write disc images. We packaged this as a bootable CD for customers to write their own disc images. After a sharp drop in floppy quality around 2005 I discussed other storage options with my boss (e.g. USB) but the business case just wasn't there.
...laura
The 757 got a new lease on life when it was certified for ETOPS. But they're old and, by modern standards, inefficient.
I'm sure the Boeing folks have considered a 757neo (sorry for the Airbus terminology there) or a 757Max, but they appear to have opted for a clean-sheet 797 instead.
...laura
Upcoming? The iPhone 16e was released last year. These are schematics for a phone that has been out for a year.
The problem with this document's release is that it's technical information that was supposed to be kept confidential forever.
I'm assuming this is just an error on the FCC's part, and that they automatically released it after a year. Though with the current administration, Hanlon's razor is getting harder and harder to apply.
Not too long. It's defense in depth; it's not meant to be outright impenetrable, just very (very) hard to get through.
Someone with enough drive, enough time, and enough resources will eventually put together an exploit chain that doesn't require an invalid tagged memory access. But if that raises the manpower requirement by 10-fold (to pull a number out of my ass), then it makes it that much more expensive to attack a phone. At some point, the Apple juice won't be worth the squeeze.
Given these changes, how does developer identification work? Is there even dev identification at this point?
My understanding is that Microsoft followed Apple for the same reason: a financial trail allows the stores to better authenticate that a developer is who they say they are, and conversely, it makes it harder for bad actors to get into the store. If Microsoft is no longer charging, do they still have an effective means to ID devs and to screen out fakes?
I feel like a lot of these same observations can be said for people that over rely on libraries and frameworks and don't actually understand or have any control over what they're doing. At a certain point, the AI is just patching frameworks together and implementing libraries without understanding them
I'm doing SwiftUI app development and upgraded one of my test devices to iOS 26 beta 4 this morning.
I don't see anything different, but I assume something different is happening under the hood.
...laura
Where I live (Kamloops, BC, Canada) the all-time high temperature record for a long time was 42C, set in July 1941. Most of southern B.C. set records that month. No air conditioning. Ugh! We demolished that record when it hit 47C in June 2021. I've never been so hot in my life...
The hottest we've been so far this summer was 36C. I expect to hit the Big Four Oh at least once, but the long-term forecast isn't promising.
...laura
I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.
Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the test of time. And then back it up with a sales strategy to match.
So much of the industry treats video games as ephemeral entertainment - something to consume, and then throw away as you move on to the next game. It's the traditional media model for TV and movies extended to interactive media. And for most of the industry it's an accurate observation: game sales are ridiculously front-loaded, and few games (especially single-player games) have a long tail. After the initial hype subsides, you need to lower your price quickly in order to keep unit sales (and thus revenue) from cratering. All the while you're already hard at work on next year's game.
But Nintendo has been able to channel the lifecycle of board games and card games. In their eyes they aren't creating media, they're creating a digital plaything. They're creating something that you'll play now, but you'll also want to play next month, next year, next decade. Case in point: Mario Kart 8 is 11 years old and the only thing that has really diminished its value (and sales) after all of this time is that it finally has a successor in Mario Kart World.
When is the last time you saw a permanent price cut on Monopoly? Uno? Settlers of Catan. The occasional sale, sure. But a copy of Catan is still going to sell for $40+, even today. That's the business strategy Nintendo is tapping into. If a game is good - like really, really good - and it's repeatedly replayable, then why does the price need to be cut soon after launch? Why can't people come along and discover it years later? Why does it need to be priced like it's a quickly depreciating asset - like a movie instead of a board game?
And that is the ultimately where the Nintendo Tax as we know it comes from. Make a game good enough, make a game gamey-enough, and don't devalue it by replacing it 3 years down the line - and it's something people will want to buy even years later.
Though this is a relatively recent phenomena. It's only after we hit the PS360U generation of hardware that systems had enough processing power and memory for games to not be constrained and do whatever they want. And that games stopped being obviously dated in terms of visual when compared to the previous generation. It's no coincidence that this was the last generation where Nintendo offered their Nintendo Selects line of discounted games.
One half large intestine = 1 Semicolon
