Posts by blcollier

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Re: Steam sucks

You will never 'own' a game unless you write it yourself, or pay others to write it for you. You will only ever own a licence to use a game that someone else 'owns'.

If you buy a CD, you are technically only buying a licence to play that recording for your own personal use, you do not 'own' the music.

This distinction seems academic, but understanding it is fundamental in order to understand what it means to 'own' something.

When it comes to games, however... Steam isn't a subscription service, but if what you want is to be free of Steam's DRM, then your only real alternative is GOG. Even then the game itself may contain its own implementation of DRM, especially if it's a multiplayer title. And unless you download offline installers for every game you buy and store them permanently in a secure location, you're still reliant on CD Projekt Red providing the GOG service if you want to download your games ever again.

FWIW, Steam is quite possibly the best and most trouble-free games storefront I have ever used. I've been using it since it was a digital distribution platform for Half-Life 2, and buying games on it for more or less as long as it's been selling games. I can still download the very first game I ever bought via Steam, and even when a game is removed from sale you can almost always still download it. It's quite rare that games are removed entirely from Steam; it happens, but not very often at all. You'd have to work pretty damn hard to have your Steam account revoked and lose access to your games.

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

So this is why my RAM is more expensive

What would have cost me £110 3 months ago is now selling for £300 to £415. In return I get a complete failure to re-invent the progress bar.

How do I load an earlier save file, I think I made all the wrong choices in this game...

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Back in the Long Long Ago, my granny had an upright Kirby vacuum - one of those really old-school maroon-plastic-and-chrome things with a headlight. It was clunky as all hell and weighed an absolute ton. But it lasted well over 30 years, from as far back as I can remember into the mid-to-early 80s through to somewhere in the 2010s.

I'm not gonna stand here in a tinfoil hat screaming incoherently about 'planned obsolesence' or 'late stage capitalism', but it is true that appliances don't last long any more. And $deity help you if you should have the arrogance and temerity to try and repair something without calling the Authorised Service Provider...

That's why we got the cordless Henry, albeit for slight different (and largely irrelevant) reasons. Easy to lug around, actively powered brush bar, no filters to keep perfectly clean, powerful enough to stick itself to carpets, and because the damn filters aren't clogging up every 10 minutes, I rarely need the battery-killing high-power mode. I've probably changed the bag in that maybe 4 or 5 times this entire year, compared to previous 'bagless' models I've had which had to be (messily) emptied every single time or they'd lose suction power. (And I'm talking £200-£300+ 'bagless' models, not some £14.12 AliExpress jobbie with an Explode-O-Matic battery or £30 Argos Special.)

Honestly, the cable in the 'traditional' Henry is quite generous. More than enough that I can lug it upstairs without having to unplug from the mains.

Henry ftw.

I've gone through all manner of 'bagless' vacuum cleaners, both battery and mains wired. All have ended up in the bin responsibly recycled. The batteries wore out quickly on the portables and, no matter the power source, the filters need regular cleaning (or replacement) to keep their performance optimal.

We bought a 'regular' Henry a little over 5 years ago and it's never missed a beat since. Changing bags is an absolute doddle - it's easy to do, far less mess than emptying a 'bagless' bin, and doesn't even need to be done very often. We used to change/clean filters in bagless machines far more frequently than we change Henry's bag.

We also bought a battery-powered Henry ('Henry Quick Pod Cordless') earlier this year, and that's also been absolutely fantastic. I can count on one hand the number of times I've changed the bag, and if I use the highest power mode it'll stick itself to carpets and rugs.

And all Henry vacuums are still made in the UK.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

Is it in the dictionary?

It could be, if you're reading in the nude and you close the book too fast - JOZXYQK!

Classic MacOS for non-Apple PowerPC kit rediscovered

Re: "vast 10 MB of RAM"

And give up my modern conveniences, like needing over a gigabyte of RAM to read a single webpage...?

Preposterous idea - the mere notion is madness, sir!

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain

Re: Don't forget the Steam Frame!

I think you're missing the point somewhat.

For starters, I specifically mean a _desktop_ Linux distribution, i.e. not Android. Out of all those devices you linked to, I'd be willing to bet that only a single digit percentage could run a distro such as Debian or Arch.

The Steam Frame will run SteamOS, the same Arch-based OS (ARM vs x86-64 compilation notwithstanding) that runs on the Steam Deck. Not Android. SteamOS can currently be installed on any x86-64 machine with an AMD CPU & GPU.

I think the OP misunderstands the fundamental nature of ARM, given the 'if [...] Arm settles on any kind of stability in their platform' comment. ARM _is_ stable, from the point of view of the instruction set and core design, there is no fragmentation or 'instability'. But I don't think it's fair to say that this is 'breathlessly hoping for miraculous things like ARM changing how their chips work'.

But that really is nit-picking, because the wider point the OP and I are making is that: the effort on the software that the Steam Frame will rely on has a great deal of _potential_ to drive wider ARM adoption.

I brought up Proton in my last reply because I still think that was the real boon we got from Valve's latest hardware efforts, and not the actual hardware itself (although it _is_ really good hardware). But in this context Proton is irrelevant - it'll be one part of the Steam Frame's software stack, yes, but it's not really what we're talking about.

The potential advance in this case is FEX, an open source x86-to-ARM translation/emulation layer, and Valve are putting a lot of effort behind it in order to make the Steam Frame run as intended. But unlike Proton, FEX is _not_ Valve's software - it has existed since at least 2021 - and nor is it _strictly_ specific to gaming. Running games _was_ the original goal, but the very first post I found on the project's blog states that '[it] can already run full fledged applications like GIMP or clang'.

Yes, application compatibility is only one piece of the puzzle for wider ARM adoption; yes, there is already a great deal of Linux software available for ARM; and yes, there are still many hurdles to overcome.

But a seamless and performant x86-to-ARM translation/emulation layer is absolutely not a meaningless endeavour.

Re: Don't forget the Steam Frame!

Liam, I rarely have cause to take issue with any of your comments on articles, but I'm afraid I do with this one.

Yes, the Steam Frame is a device intended for playing video games. And let me diverge from the main point for a moment to address 'It is a literal *toy*. It's a fancy Viewmaster.', which comes across as rather disparaging and dismissive.

My desktop computer can play games as well as do 'real work'. The Steam Deck handheld can play games as well as do 'real work'. It's clearly a handheld that's designed for playing games, but it can also be hooked up to external peripherals. It can also switch to a 'desktop mode', where your primary interface is no longer a gaming-oriented UI, but a much more familiar 'desktop' interface. External peripherals aren't a requirement for that desktop mode either, it works handheld.

If you're _truly_ sadistic, you can even run Windows on the Steam Deck. (Although please make sure I'm not around when you do, because it's likely to make me want to vomit.)

So at what point does a 'computer' become a 'toy'? Where is that dividing line, the 'market segment' the device is targeted at, or the capabilities of the device itself?

The Steam Frame is a head-mounted display for playing games, yes, but it has built-in compute and isn't dependent on a video feed from another computer. You _can_ feed video from another machine if you wish, but it can also natively run those games on the built-in hardware. It runs a version of SteamOS, the same Linux-based OS used by the Steam Deck, and it will be similarly capable of running Windows-native games on that Linux-based OS. It'll also have a single-lane PCIe Gen4 port, albeit with what will likely be a custom/proprietary connector.

And it'll do this on an on an ARM Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC.

No, they're not _intended_ for you to write articles or code on. But they probably _could_ do that, and to disparagingly dismiss it as a 'toy' seems very short-sighted, especially coming from you.

The real reason the Steam Deck has enjoyed the (admittedly moderate) success it has is not the hardware itself, but the software - specifically the Proton compatibility layer. Without Proton, the Deck would be a total flop. In fact Valve tried 'Steam Machines' with a Linux-based OS some 10 years ago, and the initiative was indeed a total flop - there were few Linux-native games available at the time and Proton did not yet exist.

Once again, it's software that will be critical if Valve is to make a success of an ARM-based device running a Linux-based OS that can play Windows-native games. This time the software in question is the 'FEX' x86-to-ARM translation layer - that's the basket in which Valve is placing its 'make the Steam Frame a success' eggs. It's progress on this front that I'm personally most looking forward to: just as Proton has driven gaming on x86 Linux, FEX has the _potential_ to drive greater adoption of ARM. And I believe that was the same point that Czrly was making.

For what it's worth... you can bet your sweet bippy that people _will_ complain if storage bandwidth on the Steam Frame is not sufficient - not for USB4, but for MicroSD cards. One of the 'design goals' (for want of a better term) is to be able to install games to a MicroSD card and swap that same card between: Steam Deck, (2026) Steam Machine, and Steam Frame. You can already install to MicroSD card on the Steam Deck, and in most cases the difference in load times compared to an SSD is quite small (at least at the resolutions and detail settings that the Deck is capable of).

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: Not smashing..

To extend, and therefore torture, your metaphor even further...

The best generals are the ones who have been there themselves, who have experience of being in it right up to their necks in the trenches. Because those are often the generals who will trust their front-line troops to do what they're best at, and will support them when it's needed without even being asked.

I've served under a couple of generals like that, but they are quite a rare breed.

Excel is three sheets to the window on iOS as update borks everything

Re: "iPhone and iPad users vexed by denial of spreadsheets"

It also boasts that, of 3.84 million apps on its walled garden "store", over a million are games. So more than 26% of its apps are time-wasters. What a great excuse to crow about. Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy store totalled over 10 million downloads in 2010.

You're comparing the number of available apps in App Store A to the number of downloads from App Store B, which is not a fair comparison. Apple's numbers from January 2010 put the number of downloads in the prior 18 months at three billion. My maths lessons were an awful long time ago, but last time I checked, 3,000,000,000 was a bigger number than 10,000,000.

This site also declares that "In Q2 2024, iPhone sales accounted for 50.46% of Apple’s revenue". And ? The Apple share of smartphones in Q4 2024 is 10. Meanwhile, that site totals over 100 for Samsung. Yet, it has the balls to state that iPhone 16 "remained the world’s best-selling smartphone ". Um, really ? The most expensive, certainly, but 3 lines lower the Galaxy A16 is outselling the iPhone 16 by a factor of over 7 to 1. Talk about the Cupertino reality distortion field . . .

Gonna need a source for that 'the Galaxy A16 is outselling the iPhone 16 by a factor of over 7 to 1' claim, 'cos that isn't what the chart in your link shows. The chart shows rankings, not volumes of units sold. They do link to their source data, but it's walled off behind a subscription - screw that.

So, I'm happy that you can afford a month's salary for your latest iThing, but you can fuck off if you think that you represent an actual force in the market.

Frankly, words are inadequate to describe how much I do not care about being "an actual force in the market"; if you paid me to care even less about that than I already do, I'd have to give your money back because it just isn't possible.

For most people, their "phone" is possibly one of the most important devices they will possess, it contains the keys to their entire life: friends, family, deeply deeply personal and private information, finances, etc. It's a literal goldmine for scammers and fraudsters, and falling victim to those scumbags can make your life a living hell. Some of us who own iPhones don't own them because we want shiny and fancy, we just don't want the risk of that incredibly important device becoming a big security risk when the manufacturer drops support for it like a stone in a couple of years. I did the 'load a custom ROM when a phone goes out of support' dance many many times in my Android days, and frankly I got a bit annoyed by having to rely on community volunteers zor bored teenagers in order to keep my phone's OS secure and up to date. Android is getting better, but it's becoming more and more like iOS by the day. Meanwhile, on 29th Sept Apple released security patches for devices that were released seven years ago.

When I get screwed by Apple they at least usually have the decency to tell me they're going to screw me, instead of Google's surprise shaftings.

For what it's worth.... Frankly, anyone buying any phone that costs them a month's salary is a moron, no matter whose badge is on the phone. When my current iPhone was still the brand new top-end model it was less than a third of a month's salary; the top-end iPhone as of now is more expensive, certainly, but still far less than half of a month's salary.

The only thing you are is a valuable idiot in Apple's eye. And Apple is an expert in making you believe you are important.

And what exactly do you think you are to Samsung and Google?

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

> Steve (and his boss) were performing unapproved change work in a datacentre without informing anyone of what they were doing, when they were doing it and why. This is no longer the wild west of the 1990s - the story happened this decade - and you can absolutely guarantee that they broke a shedload of company rules designed to prevent people doing cowboy stuff like they did.

The box in question did not even have a power cable plugged in. If it was PoE powered you would almost certainly see blinkenlights on the front or hear/see fans whirring - both of which would give pause for thought when it comes to unplugging it.

How on earth is any reasonable person supposed to assume that an unpowered piece of equipment in a rack actually provides a critical path for internet connectivity? Don't forget that the entire escapade was at the suggestion of his boss, with the express purpose of removing unused kit (and presumably save on rack space costs as a result).

The *real* problem in this situation is the management/leadership culture that was exposed. Questions could - and should - have been asked as to why they were making unscheduled & unnanounced changes. And questions could - and should - have been asked as to why the internet connection was solely reliant on a box that wasn't running and didn't even have power connected. But the response was instead to fire Steve, and... honestly... in many ways that did him a favour by getting him out of such a crappy environment.

Re: However...

The problem is when you can't find *anyone* who understands it. Or the people who *do* understand it have all either left, retired, or "moved on" (metaphorically speaking).

Sometimes the only way to know what some unknown software service, hardware, etc, does is to "pull the plug" and see who starts shouting. You can try to do that in as controlled a way as possible, but you can't let perfect be the enemy of the good - because sometimes there isn't a "good" way to go about it.

There are perhaps better ways that it could have been handled - such as giving notice that there may disruption, yanking kit out on the weekend instead, additional monitoring/alerting for critical services, etc. But eventually *someone* was going to come along and unplug that box, whether they've done any 'due diligence' or not.

But, as you say, the response that ensued was the telling part. Had Steve not ultimately lost a job over it, he'd have done well to find another job elsewhere and steer clear of such a toxic culture.

It is sadly all too common to throw people under the bus rather than address the challenges and issues head on, but there are people in senior leadership positions who will take the latter path. People who genuinely value you for more than just how you contribute to profits; people who wouldn't even countenance using you as a scapegoat and would instead throw themselves under the bus first; people who would offer themselves up to the chopping block ahead of you when it comes to redundancies. I've worked for a few people like that and it's genuinely transformative.

No job/workplace is perfect, but good leadership makes all the difference.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: I've seen that type of manager before

Too soon…?

His first ousting was in 1998, this is the third time he’s been ejected - or “asked” to eject himself - from a governmental position.

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

Re: >Sigh<

It’s interesting, deal with it.

I’m subscribed to Dave’s Attic, but I don’t always watch the videos. I’m subscribed to quite a few interesting channels and I don’t have unlimited free time.

This article has given me a rough idea of what the video is about. It has sufficiently piqued my interest that I now actually *want* to spend 41 minutes of my extremely limited free time on a video about a relatively obscure bug in a long-defunct piece of software.

The article has informed and educated people, directed them to the appropriate place if they wish to learn more, and driven more views, however meagre the actual numbers, for Dave’s Attic.

So… deal with it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Limit based monitor Hz instead

> Surely the latency is due to the display frame rate

It’s part of the overall latency, sure, but in terms of what the user experiences as “input latency”, the monitor is only the final step in the chain. Before the frame is displayed on-screen you have: user input, input read, input decode, pass input to relevant process, game engine calculates effect of input, pass new information to graphics engine, graphics engine renders new frame (in conjunction with graphics API & video card driver), frame is passed to framebuffer. Obviously massively simplified, but the point is that the monitor displaying the frame is the very last step in a much longer chain. And, again, obviously Windows Pinball is not exactly a complex 3D game with high resolution textures, complex geometry, lighting, etc… :D

You’re right in that you can certainly get visual “tearing” artefacts when displaying frames at a different rate to the monitor’s framerate. But this can be compensated for, and the primary means of doing that (until recently) was “VSync” - lock the framerate to the monitor’s refresh rate. The drawbacks with that are that there is significant frame stuttering if your hardware cannot render the game at that native refresh rate, and it can add noticeable input latency if your hardware can render the game far faster than the refresh rate. With a sufficiently high framerate and VSync off, the tearing becomes imperceptible - it’s still happening, but it’s happening so fast that we can’t notice it.

But. This is something that’s largely been solved with variable refresh rates. 120Hz to 144Hz is considered “standard” for “gaming” monitors these days, but it’s not unusual to see 240Hz displays. Even 500Hz displays are relatively affordable, though you’ll be spending a hell of lot more on a GPU in order to drive a 500Hz display at anything close to that refresh rate. The limitation in performance now is the GPU, and it’s quite common for people to be running games at 80-100fps on a 120Hz or 144Hz display. It’s a smoother experience than 60Hz, and dipping below the “native” refresh rate doesn’t cause visual stutter because now it’s the refresh rate that gets locked to the framerate. Honestly I’d even recommend at least 75Hz, preferably 120Hz, for non-gaming purposes. The user experience is a lot more “snappy” and immediate; your PC isn’t running any faster, but it *feels* like it is.

Speaking of VRR…

> Speaking of frame rates, do these new fangled variable frame rate systems work for video playback yet?

Yes… and no :D.

It’s a lot easier on a TV, so long as your source device supports it (4K BluRay player, Apple TV, Android TV box, etc - not sure about thinks like Sky or Virgin Media boxes). Whether it actually adds anything to the experience is really up to the user to decide. Personally I find that it does make a difference at the high and low end. 23.976 films look more “cinema-like”, you don’t notice the lower framerate quite as much, and you get the full benefit of higher framerate content.

On a PC however… it’s very much a mixed bag, that’s entirely dependent on software. You’re better off with “media centre” software like Kodi or LibreELEC, but I’m not so sure about standalone video players like VLC or MPC-HC. And, outside of the aforementioned Kodi or LibreELEC, I have *no idea* about support in Linux.

Re: Limit based monitor Hz instead

You’d think so, but rendering a game at a higher framerate than the monitor’s refresh rate does actually make a difference. The main one is input latency. 16.6ms to draw a frame at 60fps doesn’t sound like a lot, but that doesn’t take into account all the other processing that needs to happen before the result of your input is drawn on-screen. In a fast-paced game, a 60fps framerate can definitely add up to a perceptible lag in input latency, which only gets worse if the framerate ever dips. But when a game is rendered at 120fps, or 200fps, the time it takes to draw the frame now only adds 8.3ms, or 5ms.

Though we *are* talking about Pinball here, not a competitive online game being played on a 240Hz display, where every millisecond counts! :)

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

WHDLoad. Honestly, it’s a lot easier.

I can’t say for AROS… But it is possible to image from real floppy drives and/or hook them up to UAE (and its derivatives such as Amiga Forever). The catch is that you need additional hardware between the floppy drive and the computer. The leading contenders are the Greaseweazle (which also allows for imaging disks at the magnetic flux level) and the Drawbridge.

There are people who will still argue that the real hardware is always better, but ask yourself what’s more valuable or important to you: keeping the old hardware running and preserving/archiving old data, or just playing the games. The latter is easy - WHDLoad - but the former is a very deep rabbit hole.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Requirements

Late replies, we love ‘em!

And I don’t disagree with your overall sentiment: the more people use it the better. I do, however, have a great deal of skepticism as to whether it can ever actually be achieved. Maybe this is just early onset “Grumpy-Greybeard-itis”, but I can’t help but think that if “voting with one’s wallet” was sufficient to move the market then we’d have been using Linux by default a decade ago.

It’s sad that we need to rely on one unfathomably wealthy corporate entity to “save” us from another unfathomably wealthy corporate entity, but we really do need Valve pushing back against Windows. In the PC space, there’s no one else who has sufficient clout in the market. Competition is already dwindling rapidly: Nvidia utterly dominate in GPUs, AMD just aren’t competing in budget price brackets, and despite their efforts Intel’s GPUs aren’t making much headway; Intel are being toppled in the consumer space, but AMD are starting to pull the same kind of monopolistic tricks that Intel did when they were on top.

Bleh, it’s too much of a sunny Friday to be so depressed about this. Who’s driving us back from the pub then?

Re: Requirements

> With Steamplay/Proton, Linux is more than viable for most gamers, and doesn't require a new purchase to move away from Windows.

In general you’re not wrong, but there’s definitely some nuance there.

There are still issues with anti-cheat systems running under translation/compatibility layers, where you run the risk of being banned. It’s all well and good to say “we’ll just don’t buy those games then”, but people have already invested time and money into these games (sometimes considerable amounts), and that isn’t something you can throw away lightly.

Then there’s performance. In some cases this is actually better under Proton, but it can very much be lacking when it comes to support for more modern features like ray tracing or upscaling technologies. And, again, as much as RT might be derided as useless frippery, it’s become a lot more prevalent- some games now even *require* hardware RT acceleration. While frame interpolation is still dubious in my view, some of the upscaling technologies are very good indeed.

And finally we have the elephant in the room, drivers… Intel & AMD are definitely better in this regard, but Nvidia still has a hell of a long way to go, even with their proprietary drivers. Simply avoiding Nvidia when embarking on your Linux gaming voyage isn’t an option: like it or not, and for better or worse*, they are the dominant GPU manufacturer for PC gaming.

I don’t want to sound like I’m being overly negative, so I will somewhat temper these criticisms/caveats by saying that the progress made in the last 5 years is *incredibly* impressive. For the most part, it does “just work”.

*Worse. It is definitely worse.

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

I suspect you already know this quite well, but that answer is no.

I suspect that you already know quite well everything else I’m going to say, so take this as more of a general statement in support of your post, rather than a direct reply/criticism/troll/etc.

Part of the reason manufacturing electronics in China works so well is that *everything* is there. The capacitors that go on the board are made in a factory down the street. The capacitor factory needs metals and other raw materials in order to make their products, and the factories that make those raw materials are down the road from the capacitor factory. And so on. You simply cannot get that kind of supply chain integration at that scale anywhere else in the world right now. Chinese manufacturers can literally walk to a local market and buy half a million components for a production run there and then.

You *can* absolutely make iPhones in America. Of course it’ll take a while to get the facilities built and recruit & train people to work there, and unless you produce *all* the components and raw materials needed domestically, you’re still going to have to import from abroad. And it’ll still cost a *hell* of a lot more.

The Raspberry Pi proudly claims UK-based manufacturing, and while I don’t want to detract from their success in this regard, it’s perhaps more pedantic/accurate to say that they’re “assembled” here. The Sony plant in Pencoed still has to import all the components & materials needed, most of which comes from China (though IIRC some materials do come from India).

But, of course, it’s rather a tall order to expect Drumpf or his lackeys to understand this. He’s acting like exactly what he is: a (failed) real estate developer from the late 80s & early 90s. He cut his teeth on extortion; at the time, the mafia and organised crime had a serious foothold in New York labour unions & construction. Ex-mafia dons have even openly said that they had met Trump, along with many other (unnamed) high profile politicians & business leaders. It seems that the lessons he learned then are the only lessons that ever stuck in his head.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

macOS Terminal Pedantry Ahoy

I know this was a largely throwaway line that was somewhat tangential to the article, but… I am a pedantic nerd, and someone is wrong on the internet ;)

> There is a terminal emulator, but like on a Mac, you can ignore it

As a developer whose daily driver is an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro… hard disagree on this. I’m regularly working in a terminal prompt. I *can* manage without the terminal, but by ‘eck it’d slow me down.

Arguably I’d be much better off using Linux as my day-to-day work machine - aside from the rather impressive hardware and stellar battery life, there’s nothing special about macOS that makes it particularly suited to what I need. However corporate policy rarely aligns with developer preference. I can have a really flexible and powerful MacBook or a heavily locked-down Dell-something-or-other running Windows.

Getting back to the wider article however it’s good to see progress on Haiku, however glacial it may be. I remember being utterly blown away by the original BeOS - running an entire multimedia OS from a single floppy disk was unheard of for the time.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: Strikes me...

> more useful functionality could be dynamically assigned by replacing the microcode on demand

You mean like... some kind of array of gates, that can be re-programmed... in the field... Huh, what a cool idea, a Gate Array that's Programmable in the Field - maybe we could call it a GAPF.

Wait... Hang on... That already exists, doesn't it...

I am indeed gently poking fun, the fact you used the term 'soft CPU' already tells me you know what an FPGA is ;). But I do remember when FPGAs were supposed to be the Next Big Thing in server silicon, being reprogrammed on-the-fly to execute specialist tasks.

But FPGAs did give us cycle-accurate replication of classic computers and console systems, without the need for software hacks/workarounds or interpolation layers, so there's that to be grateful for :).

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

> If I remember correctly it was very easy to do, it just required a basic computer, a radio capable of receiving the correct frequency and some small software that (from memory could fit on a floppy &) was available on the internet.

I was talking about this exact thing with my other half yesterday.

Back in the very late 90s, me and a friend did exactly that. All you had to do was hook up the audio output from a radio scanner to a computer’s sound card, tune to the right radio frequency (or frequencies, I can’t remember), run the appropriate POCSAG decoder software, and hey presto. My mate already had the radio scanner, so all it needed was a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm minjack cable.

It was laughably trivial even back in 1999; I’ve no idea if similar radio systems are in use now, but if they are I imagine it’s even easier with cheap and freely available SDR dongles.

I hasten to add that I only did this once, and it was out of pure curiosity with no malicious intent. We only actually captured a handful of complete (and utterly mundane) messages, because a handheld radio scanner that a 17/18 year old could afford in ~1999-2000-ish didn’t exactly have the best antenna.

The Register's 2023 in gaming had one final boss: Baldur's Gate 3

Honestly... If Larian had incorporated so much of the lore and backstory that you're describing here I would have regretted buying it. If I'd needed to know the ins & outs of Bhaalspawn lore, or what happened to Viconia, or this character, or that character, I'd never have played it.

I was already somewhat apprehensive about buying the game since I hadn't played the original Baldur's Gate games, but within a couple of hours I realised it wasn't 100% necessary. I'd watched a few "recap" videos about BG1&2 which gave me some brief context, and that was more than enough for me.

When I say "writing", I'm not talking about how it weaves into or follows "established canon", I'm talking about the game in its own right. The characters we meet in the game, the dialogue we get, the story of Baldur's Gate 3 (not the BGU, the Baldur's Gate Universe), the "character" of the narrator, etc. It is leaps and bounds ahead of so many other modern games out there.

Yeah I kinda forgot to mention the player agency side of things. I won't go into detail because there doesn't seem to be a way to add "spoiler" tags here, but anyone who's played the Mass Effect trilogy will understand how disappointing it can be to have your choices rendered meaningless.

With BG3 it really does feel like they've thought of absolutely *everything*. It's refreshing to see so much flexibility in how you can approach any given quest or situation, and as a player it's fantastic that these choices actually have a meaningful impact. You're not Gordon Freeman running around the dilapidated ruins of his workplace while being bossed around by NPCs, you're completely free to do whatever you want (this is not a dig at Half-Life, not by any stretch of the imagination).

For me, one of the reasons Baldur's Gate 3 stands out from the crowd so much is that Larian have done something that other studios/publishers have consistently failed to do in recent years: released a polished product at launch. Of course there are bugs and issues to be found and addressed after launch - something I'm sure that many denizens of this site are familiar with - but on the whole it was a very well-polished game when it launched. Larian made excellent use of the "early access" period, using it to address many game-breaking bugs, much-needed balance changes, and incorporating the feedback of fans.

If you compare to just a handful of "big" releases on PC over the last couple of years... Cyberpunk 2077: 'nuff said. It ran fairly well if you had a spankingly high-end machine, but there were still major issues & bugs in the game and it's taken nearly 3 years to get it to what it arguably should have been at launch (DLC aside). Starfield has utterly dire performance on all but high-end PCs, and it's full of the same bugs and jankiness we've come to know and hate from Bethesda games. Rarely do I experience "game-breaking" bugs that cannot be recovered from, but I had several while playing Starfield; each required either losing dozens of hours of gameplay, or in some cases a complete re-start. Jedi Survivor continues to experience poor performance and image quality to this day, with frame-pacing issues being present on even the top-end hardware. Cities Skylines 2 struggles even on a 14900K or 7950X3D and an RTX 4090 - in fact some of its graphics settings were completely borked, having the exact opposite effect to what you'd expect.

I had this discussion elsewhere recently and, at its most basic level, Baldur's Gate 3 offers as much freedom and flexibility as old school text-based RPGs from decades past. But in the case of Baldur's Gate 3, it's far greater than the sum of its parts in my (not-so) humble opinion. All the core elements - animations, graphics, core gameplay mechanics, voice acting, scripting/writing, etc - are done extremely well in their own right, and they're brought together into a final product that's extremely well polished. Larian continues to put a lot of time and effort into fixing bugs and incorporating fan feedback. They even made the imp "Bing Bong" canon within the game (Context: "Bing Bong" was a character beloved by (at least some of) the party in the tabletop session that the BG3 voice actors did with High Rollers Dnd. His sole purpose was to open the door for prospective customers of a shop while yelling "BING BONG!").

Arguably no one but Larian Studios could accomplish such a massive and in-depth game, given their pedigree in D&D/RPGs, and it shouldn't necessarily be held up as a "standard" that all games should live up to. But it's a fantastic game that deserves the praise it gets.

Although I do wish the performance was a little better on Steam Deck! It's OK for the most part, hovering around 30-40fps (which is fine for this game), but there are points where it tanks right down to 10-15fps. No amount of graphics twiddling, short of making it a blurry mess, can improve it sadly.

Valve celebrates New Year by blowing off Steam support for Windows 7 and 8

So... you're arguing against something I didn't say. Software preservation is important, and I did touch on that (in a roundabout way), but that's not really what I was talking when I mentioned disingenuous positions/arguments.

What I said was that it is disingenuous to start using Steam and then stop using Steam - i.e. "ditching Steam" - if your rationale for doing so is the lack of offline installers. Steam never offered offline installers from day 1. Steam launched as a means to provide updates to Valve games and to function as DRM. Then it became a digital storefront a year or two later, and a year or two after _that_ it started offering third-party games. If offline installers are important to you then fine, don't use Steam; but making a big song and dance about "ditching" Steam over offline installers, regardless of your rationale for wanting them, is IMO disingenuous when 5 minutes of Google searches would have told you that Steam is not the platform you're looking for.

You misread my intent, because I'm not "pushing" anything. I happen to quite like Steam because I've had positive experiences with it, and it's been by far and away the most reliable storefront and digital distribution platform I've used. GOG is... fine... but in my experience, every other platform I've used has been hot garbage: Epic Games, EA Origin, Battle.net, Xbox, Games for Windows Live, etc. I pretty much always have a fast and reliable internet connection, and on the rare occasion when lack of connectivity will be a problem it will usually be a planned activity that I can prepare for (that's exactly what "Offline Mode" is for). Automatic updates are a positive for me because I play a lot of modern games; I would *not* want to play the launch versions of Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, for example.

Please leave the polarised attitude to social media where it's usually found, and stop misrepresenting what people have actually posted.

There's no simple answer to that question.

There are a lot of reasons why a game might no longer be functional on modern systems - incompatible OS features, deprecated OS features, online services shut down by publisher, reliant on deprecated software (e.g. Games for Windows Live, originally needed by Fallout 3 and GTA4 on Steam), etc. None of those problems can really be solved by having an offline installer. It's true that GOG does make older games compatible with modern OS's, but that doesn't necessarily require offline installers. Even if you did want to rely on offline installers, you need to make sure that you also have the latest patches and that you have the disk space to store all this stuff. Regardless of whether you think it's a good thing or not, modern games can be *big* - the offline installer for one of the early versions of Cyberpunk 2077 was 95GB, and since then a metric buttload of content and updates have been added. It's worth remembering that "GOG" hasn't been "Good Old Games" for quite a number of years - it's CD Projekt Red's platform for digital distribution.

Objections to DRM are one thing, but I think it's a bit disingenuous for people to ditch Steam over offline installers when that's never been a feature that Steam has offered. It's always been a digital distribution and DRM system, right back to when it launched with Half-Life 2 over 20 years ago. DRM in games is... yeah, it's pretty crappy, but unfortunately it's a ship that sailed long ago.

I'm not stanning for Valve here, it's a billion dollar corporate entity that doesn't need fanboys to step in to defend them. So is CD Projekt Red (owner of GOG), for that matter. My preference for Steam is based purely on personal experience over the last 15 years of using it. And there's no easy answer to the question of DRM in games either, because the practice is so heavily established that it's going to be impossible for customers/individuals to influence the industry. If you're a PC gamer you're going to get it shoved down your throat whether you want it or not. Things like Proton and GOG definitely help, but they're unlikely to shift the mindset of corporations like Activision Blizzard, Microsoft, EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Primarily, vegetable glycerine (VG) and propylene glycol (PG). Both are perfectly safe ingredients, even when inhaled - both PG & VG are used in inhaled medicines and smoke machines. The residue left isn't harmful, it's just sticky, unpleasant, and an utter ballache to clean.

Open your goddamn windows when you vape indoors, people!

Not... really sure what you're getting at there...

The term "hotboxing" originates from smoking cannabis, where you (and your compatriots) would smoke so much that you'd fill the room with a thick haze of smoke. The term has been appropriated by vaping to describe the same thing: filling a room with a thick haze of (exhaled) vapour. No one dies because of a hotboxed room, and if you hotbox a room that you share with your pets or unwilling third parties then, even though they won't die from it, you're a bellend.

Other than having some kind of agenda, I have no idea why you'd think it's likely that it kills people.

Lest people think this is exaggerated, I can confirm this from personal experience. I used to vape heavily indoors and I'd often "hotbox" the room with clouds. If you go for the "big clouds, lots of fog" kind of liquids/devices, it will leave a sticky residue when it condenses on surfaces. Dust and other detritus sticks to it, meaning you can no longer simply run a duster or vacuum over it - you have to wash it off.

I never had any problems with the stuff ending up in my computer, but it did destroy a keyboard. I'd converted an old IBM Model M terminal keyboard to USB and had used it for years without issue, but it stopped registering keypresses about 6 months into lockdown. When I tore it down to figure out what was going wrong, I discovered the sticky residue coating the interior and the membrane had multiple traces corroded beyond repair.

I still do vape in my "office"(/gaming room), but these days I stand next to the wide-open window and blow the clouds outside.

Also, I'm surprised you weren't allowed to simply outright reject an obviously filthy machine. It _was_ Geek Squad though, so perhaps you didn't have that flexibility. I used to work in a local(ish) independent computer store around 2000-2001, and we rejected multiple machines for repair (even ones we'd sold) because they were so disgusting. Sometimes you wouldn't discover the full horrors until the case came off, but sometimes they didn't even get as far as the workshop. I can remember a handful of occasions where my boss flat out told customers that he wasn't even prepared to *touch* the machine, let alone take it in for repair. In almost all cases they were machines from a household where people smoked indoors. All half-dozen or so people working in that shop were all heavy smokers, myself included, but even we were revulsed by the state of some of these machines. You could smell them the moment they came in the door, it was vile...

Improved Java support poured into Microsoft's Visual Studio Code – will it be enough to tempt developers?

Re: I don't understand the attraction...

You are here, and the point of this article is way the hell over there. IIRC literally one line mentioned that VS Code has a browser-based offering through Visual Studio Online, and the chances are that people using VSO aren't doing heavyweight Java stuff.

FWIW, you don't need a massive hulking behemoth of a desktop to simply write code. Personally I would *prefer* a desktop, but for the most of the work I do the disk I/O speed (both random and continuous) is far more important than raw CPU horsepower. I *could* get more I/O speed out of a desktop if my company were willing to spend a *lot* of money on hardware (putting me out of sync with every other developer); however if I ever need enterprise-grade performance then instead of trying to get enterprise-grade performance out of consumer/business-grade hardware I simply move my workloads to enterprise-grade hardware.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Re: You can pry my honorifics from my cold, dead brain cells

>But I would really have liked to be a boffin.

When you start getting called 'boffin' is when you know you've "made it".

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

They'll still remain the market leader, despite hardware niggles. Other SBCs might be more powerful or have more features, but very few support their products like the Raspberry Pi Foundation do.

FWIW people were saying that it would never succeed because of hardware "issues" right back at day 1, nearly 8 years ago. The original launch model was *very* touchy about USB power supplies and prone to brownouts on the USB bus. IIRC, the hardware was designed with the actual USB voltage spec in mind - 4.75v to 5.25v - but many USB phone chargers simply couldn't deliver that and their voltage dropped below 4.75v when under load. Cables were an issue back then also: even if a PSU could deliver in-spec voltages when under load, poor quality MicroUSB cables often caused a voltage drop meaning that the voltage at the power connector on the board was now out of spec. There was also a hardware design flaw that caused the USB/LAN controller to draw way more power than it should do. Yet here they are nearly 8 years later with over 25 million units sold.

UK political parties fall over themselves to win tech contractor vote by pledging to review IR35

Re: More nonsense

Except in a lot of cases they don't actually receive the benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, etc. They stay employed as a contractor and retain all the risks that entails...

All of the changes to IR35 so far are a pure political ploy so that the Tories can be seen to be "doing something" about tax avoidance without addressing the *real* problems with tax avoiders like Amazon, Google, Facebook, media companies, etc. Global megacorporations who do billions in revenue/profit in this country yet pay a disproportionately low amount of tax. The creative accounting might be perfectly legal but legal != fair.

'Horndog hackers' have a Wales of a time slinging smut from UK gov Twitter account

Re: A Freudian Slip Typo?

Twitter also has likes...

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

I can go one better: the combination for my luggage is 12345.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Not quite

One of the roads on a previous commute used sensors in the road for a right turn. All the other lights were all on a rotating sequence, but the right-turn filter would only go green if the road sensor interrupted the sequence. My motorbike wasn't heavy enough to trigger the sensor either... Usually I'd get lucky and I'd be behind other cars that would trigger the sensor, but every now and then I'd be at the head of the (rapidly growing) queue. I'd have to roll forward over the line and let the car behind me drive forward on to the sensor.

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

Re: BTDTGTTS

Unless of course you forget to commit or roll-back your transaction and leave an uncommitted transaction hanging open which eventually brings down the database...

Re: BTDTGTTS

Oh yes, I experienced a particularly fun one last year which I plan to write up...

Re: I'll be borrowing this!

Ditto - I like that one.

Is Google's new cloud gaming service scalable? Yes but it may not be affordable, warns edge-computing CEO

Re: so, uh

I already practically rent access to my library of games, and that's bad enough. Many games these days require some form of back-end communication to a publisher's/developer's infrastructure simply to work; if not always-on requirements, then they're often backed by store-front DRM like Steam. Any one of those services could go offline at any time rendering what I've paid for completely useless. Someone decides that keeping the servers running for a beloved game is no longer profitable and suddenly I can't play the games I've paid for.

This halfway house idea is pointless. If I still need an expensive GPU to play games with this service then I will need a capable CPU which can deliver data to the GPU quick enough so that it doesn't bottleneck. If I have those two core components then I _already have_ a gaming PC, why do I need to let the game code run elsewhere and have my GPU render it locally? It's not like you're going to run out and get an RTX 2080 to install alongside your low-end i3. I get the argument about internet connection speeds but let's solve *that* problem instead, rather than create this weird solution that nobody needed or wanted. The GPU is by far and away the most expensive part of a gaming PC; if I've dropped £200-£300 alone on even a budget GPU then it's really not much more of a stretch to get some kind of i5 (or better) CPU, 8GB of RAM, and ~1TB disk space (you can live without an SSD for games storage)

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ support to arrive in Linux 5.1

Re: I would think ...

The SoC doesn't have the support for it IIRC. It still only supports USB2 too. Changing the SoC would be a massive massive undertaking and would break compatibility for a lot of stuff.

BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol

Re: Sssshhhhhhh!

> Beer, 'cos it's Friday, and 5 o'clock somewhere.

You wait until 5pm...?

Bright spark dev irons out light interference

Elastic band RAM retention

Your little hack from years ago is pretty much exactly how Apple keeps the SODIMMS in place in the 2018 Mac Mini. They are held in place with rubber "shoes" that fit over the end of the sockets... Little plastic or metal clips are obviously too much of a stretch on the BOM.

WLinux brings a custom Windows Subsystem for Linux experience to the Microsoft Store

Re: The only use I can think of:

Wine is not an emulator - "Wine" is literally a backronym for "Wine is not an emulator". WSL is not an emulator either.

Nit-picking perhaps, but this is the comments section so... when in Rome...

Techie's test lab lands him in hot water with top tech news site

Re: Top Boss

This. Punishing mistakes doesn't avoid mistakes in the future, it makes people better at covering them up.

Amazon and Netflix join Hollywood to lob sueball at 'Kodi' service SetTV

@Anonymous Custard

I regret that I only have one upvote to give you.

I've been a big fan of Kodi since the days when it was called XBMP (yes, even before XBMC) so I truly appreciate the hard work of all of Team Kodi.

This wouldn't be the first time that El Reg has mentioned Kodi in the headlines of a story which actually has nothing to do with Kodi itself when you dig into it: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/kodi_boxes_fail_safety_standards/. Oh look, who was the author of that story, I wonder...