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Comment Re:NES was shit... Master System was better (Score 3, Interesting) 28

Most Western systems suffered from a severe lack of memory bandwidth. Japanese systems tended to have two separate buses, one for the CPU and one for the video. It was necessary early on in order to display the more complex Japanese characters.

By having two buses, the graphics could be a lot better than on systems that shared a single bus between the CPU and graphics. The Famicom managed to have a decent number of colours and sprites on screen at a good resolution, while others had to compromise at least one of those things. It did mean that the cartridge needed two ROM chips, but it was well worth it.

It also meant that the CPU was faster. A 6502 derivative which most Western systems would only operate at a maximum of 1MHz, so that 2MHz RAM and ROM chips could alternate between servicing the CPU and graphics chip. The 6502 was very efficient anyway, so it was actually quite a powerful little system. The later Super Famicom only doubled the speed, but retained the 8 bit CPU with a few minor 16 bit extensions.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 2) 59

The Japanese and Chinese tracks are all grade separated. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire Chinese network had CCTV with AI to detect objects entering the track. Japan might have some solution for that too, given the speeds involved.

90% of the Japanese system is tunnels through mountains, so very difficult for people to access, and easy to monitor the few entrances.

The human body isn't much of a threat to trains, and the tracks are designed so that vehicles won't be able to get onto them.

Comment Re:Why No Price Decrease? (Score 1) 27

There was a bit of a bump, but the price per watt lower than 2021 now. I think it was mostly tariffs that were responsible.

We shouldn't be worrying about "dumping" and the like, we should just be buying as many of the damn things as we can get, and making as many of our own as possible. This is about climate change, not protecting our domestic manufacturing.

Comment Re:Kiss cheap shit goodbye (Score 1) 27

This is about automation. The factories are moving to robots and "lights out" manufacturing. Deployment of the panels is being done by drones and tracked robots too now.

Even places that are normally inaccessible or very expensive to get materials to, are becoming solar farms now. The sides of mountains and remote areas.

Comment Re:When dictators lead in innovation (Score 4, Insightful) 59

A lot of young people are disillusioned with capitalism, and quite understandably so. It hasn't delivered the benefits for them, and the advice they were giving about making it work (get educated, get a house, work hard and rewards will come) turned out to be bad.

They look at China, which provides for citizens. When they see that people are going to migrate to cities, they build big new cities with affordable housing and excellent public transport. Meanwhile in the West it's all landlords, who are also NIMBYs in case you had any ideas about easing the supply issues.

Climate change is another example. There is no reasonable metric by which China is not doing far, far more than Western countries are.

I'm not saying that the Chinese model is better necessarily. Aspects of it are, mostly the ones shared with social democracies like some European countries have. The big issue is that the model many Western countries use is failing badly, and politicians are mostly only offering more pain in response to it.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 4, Informative) 59

It must be more than just the gun silencer concept, because the Japanese tried that with limited success for their conventional high speed trains.

The Chinese seem to have applied some new materials to absorb the sound.

The Japanese must be quite worried about developments in China. Theirs was going to be the only long distance maglev system, and a lot of the financing was based on being able to export the technology. China is going to beat them to deployment and will doubtless export the technology too. Now it sounds like they have solved the only big outstanding issue.

The two systems have some interesting differences. The Japanese trains need wheels below 90 kph, but are simpler and passively safe in the event of total power loss or violent earthquakes. The Chinese trains require active management of the magnetic fields constantly, but float even when not moving.

Comment Re:NES was shit... Master System was better (Score 3, Informative) 28

The restrictions on who could make games for the NES were in response to the North American video game crash. Some companies got around it in part by having subsidiaries that allowed them to exceed the limit on the number of games published per year, but they still had to buy cartridges from Nintendo rather than making them themselves.

In terms of power the Master System was arguably better than the Famicom, but I don't think it ever out-sold it. In Japan Sega muddied the waters a bit by having too many systems. They started with the SG-1000, then the SG-1000 II, and then the Mark III. All were backwards compatible but added new features. The Mark III also got an FM sound add-on, and that combo eventually became the Master System which integrated the FM. The Mark III couldn't mix the FM and PCM audio though, so there only only one game ever made that used both.

All that lead to division and confusion in the marketplace. By the time Sega got to the Master System, the Famicom/NES was already entrenched.

Comment Advice wanted on archiving Slashdot RSS feed (Score 1) 167

I use the RSS feed reader in Thunderbird to have a local copy of things. If I don't check my email on my laptop twice a day, I tend to lose Slashdot feed items because the Slashdot RSS feed keeps less than a day's worth of items. For example, I only checked my Thunderbird RSS feed on 2025-08-04 once early in the morning and lost about half a day's worth of Slashdot feed items by the time I checked it the next day.

I did not see a mention of that short feed limit here: https://slashdot.org/faq/feeds...

What software could I set up somewhere so that I always have access to a complete local set of Slashdot RSS items? Ideally I think I'd like something so I could maybe have copies on a home server (Linux) which is usually-but-not-always running, my laptop (Linux), and perhaps even a remote server (Linux) to help with local outages -- and then perhaps somehow use a tool to bring all the feed items together now and then.

On a tangent, there are also occasional days when Slashdot's RSS feed seems to get stuck with the older feed items being hours old (when there are newer items on the site). Usually it fixes itself in less than day, although a few weeks ago I emailed Slashdot support when it had been stuck for over a day, and then it started working soon after. I know Slashdot briefly suspends RSS feed access if you check it too often (something made more likely by the short feed duration) -- but I don't think that was the issue there. Nothing much I probably can do about that other Slashdot feed issues though, but maybe people here have some insight into that anyway.

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