FordPrefect
0
67
FordPrefect

@startrek.website

Sorry I'm a bit late

FordPrefect 16 points 3 years ago

Them: "The WiFi is down."
Me: '... No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.'
Them: "I can't connect to Flipboard."
Me: 'Ohhh, the internet is down. It's probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.'
Them: "Yep, now the WiFi is back."

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FordPrefect 11 points 3 years ago

The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.

Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it's not FOSS (& won't run on any of my machines anyway).

Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that's some sort of perennial "gotcha!" joke, at this point?)

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FordPrefect 10 points 3 years ago

^ This. 💯

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FordPrefect 7 points 3 years ago

I'm just waiting to hear about someone trying to charge their escooter via POE.

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FordPrefect 6 points 3 years ago

Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.

I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it's become so widely unsupported that I can't really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there's a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there's just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.

Win ≥8 is awful; I've helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I've ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don't see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.

So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?

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FordPrefect 6 points 3 years ago

Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.

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FordPrefect 5 points 3 years ago

802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we've become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.

After the usual "Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals" reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.

Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?

Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they're about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

+1 to those who said DHT.

There's no tagging support, but I'm not sure why I'd need tagging.
DHT crawling reveals pretty much every active public torrent, & finding what I want is just a matter of including it in the search terms.

"s04e10 2160p x265" brings up every torrent containing a file with s04e10, 2160p, & x265 in its filename.

I could foresee plenty of situations where tagging for quality, & for metadata beyond filenames & sizes, would be useful; I just haven't actually had it come up.

Everything I need shows up on DHT search.

Well, except .STL files, but that seems to be because they're given away for free so often there's no impetus to make torrents of them?

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

Godot is not bad for 2D & 2.5D, & it's a lot better at true 3D than it used to be, but as far as speedy usability, I'd compare it to UnrealEd 2.1 in many ways.

I really think the main reason anyone uses Godot, is the licensing & cross-platform support.

If Unreal 5.1 would run at all on any of my machines, I couldn't even really begin to make any kind of objective comparison between it & Godot; it's like the difference between having a bunch of clever hand-tools, versus having a bunch of really well-made power-tools.

Try making a mountainous landscape, sprinkle a handful of different trees, then carve out a tunnel that loops under itself with a ledge overhead. Anyone proficient with both the Godot & Unreal toolsets, seems to get good (& stable) results in moments using Unreal compared to minutes or hours, using Godot. Unreal's interface & free assets have set such a high standard for so long, that I find Blender is the only thing I could compare it to, but Unreal's workflows make Blender look like Maya.

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that's why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.

Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people's routers nearby.

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

Migleemo a' Trois, in 3... 2... 1...

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

Aaaand the fact that a correction on this was even relevant... Oof

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

Less "not optimized", & more "not supported"; IE, accelerations that don't turn on, because companies like Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, & NVidia, have a long history of only giving preferred partner devteams, prerelease hardware access, much less any peeks at unobfuscated firmware.

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

Yeah, where my Mom lives, the food options are:

  • Walmart
  • An erratically pricey local grocery, that rents its building (which has a leaky roof, requiring them to move product when it rains)
  • Dollar General
  • A farmer's market that's open once a week for a few hours before the afternoon heat, a few months a year, if no events have pre-empted it, having an inventory of which about 30% is bulk-bought supermarket produce with the labels (sometimes) removed
  • A 90 minute drive; no trains, no buses (literally, no buses) to the next largest town

And she lives in a town people drive to, to get food, clothes, medicine, etc.

She gets as much as she can from the local grocer, for whatever that's worth; the inventory is frequently poor, & about on-par with Dollar General so far as brand-representation, goes. When tourists ask if the store has something, they get pointed to Walmart.

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FordPrefect 4 points 3 years ago

The French revolution is far from the most well-regarded outcome, & yet, I think it was preferable to no revolution, at the time... I agree that having a knowledgeable populace is essential to social stability.

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FordPrefect 3 points 3 years ago

I tried watching Macross Delta before english subs were offered; the fansubs by Deadfish, included these simple lines which in my head-cannon are a flawless translation of what the japanese characters said:

"Jellyfish chips is like crack."
'Yes.'

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FordPrefect 3 points 3 years ago

I remember running out of those at work, & intentionally crushing the cheap-ass crimp-tool in my hand, just so I could finish up the next day with pass-through connectors & my Klein tool, rather than spend the next two hours re-terminating connectors that I 'should have' gotten exactly right the first time.

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FordPrefect 3 points 3 years ago

Yeah, Sony lost me when they broke my Linux install and degraded the DVD playback functions, within six months of me buying my PS2. Similarly, the last "good" smartphone I had, was the Palm Treo (650p\680p\Centro); since then, I've never had a single phone that granted direct hardware access & allowed unloading/sideloading the OS by default.

Manufacturers want deep control these days; way beyond mere root permissions.

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FordPrefect 3 points 3 years ago

Since they said they have "5g home internet (about 10 times faster than the best wired option and 3 times cheaper)", with "shit ping", I assumed they meant 5th Gen cellular as their internet service at home.

Only a couple years ago, did we finally get a cable drop in our neighborhood, to actually give faster service than 4G LTE. (There's still no fiber here, at our location in central Denver.) Because the cable company (Comcast) doesn't offer a reasonable rate, we use line-of-sight wireless to a local mesh operator. Until then, we used 4G & 5G cellular, as our home internet. It was shit for reliability, but when it worked, the peak speeds beat any residential service available, by a pretty wide margin. Of course, those peak speeds turn to timeouts whenever the highway fills up (& our 5Ghz WiFi still flakes out too, as does the 2.4 Ghz wireless camera, & pretty much anything else that isn't shielded).

There was no point in running ethernet, with that setup; it was never going to be stable. I still had to run 2 hardwires though: one to the Sony PS2, & the other to an ancient beige switch by the IBM PS/2.

Some people in the mountains & such, are on "5 Gigabit" wireless internet, but most seem to be on even lower speed plans than that. I'm really curious which @Default_Defect@lemmy.world has, because 5th Gen cellular is literally the best internet a lot of US residents can get, despite the abysmal terms & throttling that so many providers employ.

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FordPrefect 3 points 3 years ago

Option 3 is the usual method, & it works quite fast on almost any machine that's even capable of decoding high bitrate video fast enough to keep up with its framerate, in the first place. On a HDD, that previous frame may briefly require seeking to get back to, but no such delay occurs with flash storage.

Of course, it doesn't need to be done fast; we're talking about long looks at single frames!

For best results, frame-capture apps use cross-frame interpolation with motion estimation (& these days, AI).

I don't remember the last device I saw, that would struggle with this in any way. It's basically just been dismissed as unimportant, by the VLC devs, rather than actually being all-that-difficult to implement.

I'm shocked that VLC doesn't offer reverse playback by now, given the absolutely enormous video resources & random access storage, we're all blessed with now.

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