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Posted on 19-06-20, 12:28 in I still HATE smartdevices
Stirrer of Shit
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Have you read Ted Kaczynski's manifesto?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Kawa
Why would you not be able to move the pointers around? Some systems may have bankswitching limitations but that hardly means you can't do it.

Also please address the part where your Japanese example sentence takes more bytes of storage than the English equivalent.

You might have the pointers indirectly computed through some hell of lookup tables and offsets, so while technically possible it'd be a lot of work.

I reckoned the developers would use something like old-style UTF-16 where everything is two bytes for simplicity. If they use a var-width character encoding, then getting the translations to fit without relocation shouldn't really be a big problem, right?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by KingMike
Also, putting two characters on one kanji is a brilliant idea, you say?
You know that games with lots of kanji (or more than a handful) usually use two bytes per kanji? So how is using two bytes to represent a two-character title saving space compared to one byte for one character?

You can put more than two characters in a kanji. Anyhow, if you're using a variable-width encoding there's not much of a point, that's true.

Also, I thought about using two characters on tile early in my "career" but I stopped when I realized it looks like shit.
(other people say they're okay with limiting it to pairs like il and ll, but I think it still looks ugly when all other characters are evenly spaced)

Even if it's consistently kerned? It should at least be readable, and better than gargantuan inter-letter spacing.
Posted by Kawa
Trick question: repointing is a lot of work regardless, even if it's as simple a format as the GBA. Maybe you have a banked system and each bank has its own list of pointers to its constituent strings. And then in one particular bank there's a list of pointers where each individual bank's list starts, and each of those pointers, unlike the GBA's 32, is only 16 bits wide.

As for variable-width character encoding, what do you mean exactly? I feel like I have to ask just so we're all clear, considering earlier revelations.

Edit: hah, didn't see KingMike's post. Again, it's not about screen real estate, but about storage space. The former wouldn't need pointer rework but UI element resizing and moving at worst. On a typical tilemap with 8x8 pixel tiles, kanji are almost always four tiles (2x2) in size simply because they're too intricate compared to kana and romaji.

Yeah, it's about storage space all right, I just used the word "physically" poorly.

By variable-width encoding, I mean an encoding like UTF-8 or modern UTF-16 where a character may be one or several bytes long, unlike an encoding such as ASCII, ISO 8859-1 (aka Latin-1), or classic UTF-16 (aka "Unicode") where one character is always the same amount of bytes (e.g. one char/wchar_t)

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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I'm not talking about any radicals or compounds, man. That sounds like something you'd want to advertise your sports drink has got lots of (or none at all, I wouldn't know - free radicals cause cancer, right?).

You can fit more than two (2) alphabetic characters in the area of the sprite that would ordinarily be used to render one (1) discrete kanji logogram.

Provided a kanji logogram is encoded with two bytes and an alphabetic character ordinarily would be encoded with one, this reduces the amount of space needed to encode a given sequence of alphabetic characters.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Kawa
Unfortunately, the amount of 90s/00s games on consoles and handhelds that use Unicode in any form since Unicode's inception (1991) can be counted on one hand, and UCS-2 (as "classic UTF-16 aka "Unicode"" is properly called) is considered wasteful.

Fun fact about dedicating tile space to digraphs: at least one Final Fantasy fan translation that I've seen did this, with about ten at most character values being digraphs like 'll', 'il', or 'th'. I'll bet biscuits to an asskicking that this was done primarily for the visual aspect, and that the actual text was still repointed to fit.

Well, yeah, then, uh, case closed. Personally, I think UCS-2 should be called either Unicode or wchar_t, but "classic UTF-16" seems like a reasonable compromise to minimize confusion.

So why is repointing so important, then? It's a slight improvement, but you sure could do without it if the ratios are as you say. How come it can preclude games from getting translated?


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-21, 12:53 in Something about cheese!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by wertigon
Yes, since it is part of college curriculum, it is per definition "highly educated".

We took it in high school, but YMMV of course. Still, it'd be early college at any rate.

Wait, the "normal" students would be the ones with an IQ above 130?

No, the normal students would be those who didn't have to retake the exam several times. They still would fare worse if given equal resources, and the claim that they're as good because they'd get almost equal results if given far more resources than the students who aren't under-performing is just plain dishonest. That's like saying, "I'd lose in a fair competition all right, but if I did tons of 'roids beforehand and drugged my opponent I might be able to draw it". Still doesn't make them equally good, now does it?

Yes, they are put to a lower standard. Which is a shame, really. Because there is nothing physically hindering them from doing as good a job as men does.

Sure, men will kick the ball harder and run faster. But strategy? Technique? Player awareness? All those are things that women could do just as well as men. If you would let the women train on the exact same terms as the men teams, they would also perform on a similar level. But we don't and they don't.

Well, clearly there must be. Either the physical differences are too great, which is I'm claiming, or they're worse at the other stuff as well. Chess is hardly physically intensive, and they're terrible there too, so it's wouldn't be unprecedented if they indeed were. They get curb stomped while playing against youth teams with far worse funding and coaches. They could play against even better teams, but they don't because they'd get curb stomped even worse and it would be an utter disgrace to the "sport". 9-0 is not very good optics already, so imagine if they'd get twice that.

The USWNT's players get $600k a year. I can't find any numbers on FC Dallas, but I don't think their 13-14 year old players get anywhere close to that.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-21, 13:47 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Screwtape
Web development is highly accessible, by which I mean it's really easy to get started. Consequently, it's not surprising that a lot of people have dabbled and gotten bored, or learned just enough to solve a problem that stood between them and what they *really* wanted to do.

Agreed.

However, there's a big gap between "web developers often solve simple problems" and "web developers can only ever solve simple problems".

No, I wouldn't think so.
There's a name for this, I think. Dilbert principle? If you have a line of work that's very easy/simple, the people in that line of work would likewise be simple people. I suppose prostitution or flipping burgers would be the canonical example, not that I wish to compare web developers to them. And the opposite. Being a doctor/lawyer/CEO is high status because the people doing it are so, for instance.


(As an aside, it's kind of hilarious how often you'll meet people who claim that "web development is simple" and also that "the web platform is too complex". What platform are the simple web developers developing for? What kind of developers are developing for the complex web platform?)

The platform is extremely complex so that it's easy to develop on. An iPhone is far easier to use than a PDP-11 running Unix, despite the latter's OS being far less complex.

So, if I have two computers side-by-side and install the same version of the same OS on both of them, it can be bloated on one and svelte on the other at the same time? Just based on whatever the hardware specs happen to be? That seems to be a pretty useless definition of "elegant and optimized".

The measure of bloat is how much resources you've got left for other stuff, I'd say. I said "by virtue of comparison," did I not?

A better definition would be "how many resources do I need to spend to solve the problem I care about". For some problems, like using unsecured WiFi, XP is one of the cheapest solutions there is. For other problems, like "storing files in a subdirectory", XP is ridiculously wasteful and you'd be better off with MS-DOS 2.0. In the other direction, there are things XP just can't do, so for somebody who needs to do those things, it's completely useless.

Well, sure. But it's much harder to compare that way. I'd reckon we can hand-wave it as such: this all goes by Moore's law. If we say the OS uses X% of available resources and leaves 100-X% to the user, and X stays constant through the ages, then computing the absolute resource usage it'd go up exponentially as time goes on. So XP and earlier's resource usages practically round to zero on modern CPUs.

What is it that XP can't do, other than artificial limitations like "run software using post-XP APIs"?

The only thing I can come up with is the RAM thing, but they did put out a 64-bit version.
I'm using it now.

No, that wasn't meant to happen!

I've ranted before about why Firefox isn't Mozilla's purpose (let alone their sole purpose) but skipping over that, I don't understand this reaction. Are you worried that Firefox will have big "UPGRADE TO PREMIUM" ads all over it?

What is it, then? Obscure pet projects in the third world?

I'm sure Google would very much like for that to be their raison d'etre, but Mozilla is as much Firefox as Microsoft is (or at least was) Windows.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-21, 15:18 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
Posted by sureanem

There's a name for this, I think. Dilbert principle? If you have a line of work that's very easy/simple, the people in that line of work would likewise be simple people. I suppose prostitution or flipping burgers would be the canonical example, not that I wish to compare web developers to them. And the opposite. Being a doctor/lawyer/CEO is high status because the people doing it are so, for instance.

Peter principle.
Dilbert illustrates the opposite of your argument, as the smartest man in Dilbert's world is his local garbage man. He just likes picking up trash, and reckons that doing what he enjoys is better than putting his intellect to work in a more glamorous job that he hates.

Please don't fuck up TWO threads with this social darwinist crap.

Yup, Peter principle is what I mean.

Anyhow, I think it's a reasonable heuristic even if it doesn't apply for everyone. A friend of a friend is pretty much the IRL equivalent of that garbageman. He does some kind of unspecified activity (exam ghostwriting I think, although I'd be interested in hearing your guesses) a few days a year, and plays video games the remaining 51 weeks.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 12:35 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by NTI
Except the garbage man DOES work to make the world a better place, even if it's to some minor extent, as just cleaning the streets.

Unlike your friend of a friend who just waits for death to come, which probably fits your vision of defeatism and a conformist world, hence the disproportionate comparison.

Well yeah, sure. But in the sense of "there exist people who lack ambition and are content to do low-wage low-status low-effort jobs". I'd still say most people end up roughly at their level of incompetence.
Posted by Screwtape
I bet lots of CEOs started out flipping burgers. How many doctors waited tables or worked as janitors to put themselves through medical school? Saying "people who do low-status task X are inherently low-status" is not just a dick move, it's a tactical error.
The doctors weren't technically working with medical school, but it was their full-time occupation.

The CEOs, were they high status when flipping burgers? I can't think so.

It's not that they're inherently low-status, but under the assumption that people want to earn money and get ahead in life they'd do whatever (simplified) earned them the most money, which also ought to be the hardest thing. This heuristic falls apart under a lot of special cases, in particular going from person's job -> person's status, and a lot of jobs which are desirable but poorly paid (art anything, game development) but to gauge whether people doing a more difficult job are more apt than those doing an easier one, it seems fairly reasonable. I wouldn't think people feel more passion for web development than programming, if anything the other way around. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey says front-end devs likewise earn less.

There's another VERY, VERY crude way way we can attempt to gauge this: gender weighing. Since more web developers are women, and more women are web developers, we can assume that since weighing by gender increases the share of women, it would also increase the share of web developers.

Under these assumptions, we get that web developers are less helpful, less interested in coding in their spare time, etc.

Obviously, you'd need the real dataset to draw any actual conclusions, so the statistical power is near nil.

There's also the good ol' anecdotal evidence: when people are hired for reasons of nepotism/company politics/legal reasons, they seem more propense to me at least to end up doing front-end than back-end stuff. And you've got more people who give off that impression in the front-end branches too.
What is it that MS-DOS 1.0 can't do, other than artificial limitations like "run software using post-1.0 APIs"? Heck, MS-DOS is *more* extensible than XP, since any software can provide its own hardware drivers, instead of being limited by what the OS kernel provides.

Touché.

Still, I don't get what actual shortcomings Windows XP has. Some minor security issues which don't actually matter, and they didn't bother porting DX12, but is there anything intrinsically wrong with it? As in, if Microsoft had just not released Windows 7, would I be noticing any downside if I were writing this post on Windows XP in 2019?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 16:16 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Kakashi
It doesn't support ancient logograms?

You're clearly trying to compare Windows NT to Windows XP, which is just hilarious scrambling considering how XP works. This isn't MS-DOS, buddy.
Posted by Kawa
Jokes aside, this is probably true in some sense.

Well, Windows uses UCS-2 internally and makes the same kind of assumptions you'd make under Latin-1 or similar in earlier versions. So to delete some characters discrete kanji logograms, you need to hit backspace twice.

I actually think this is a reasonable idea. Because otherwise, you have to buy into the Unicode racket ("only use libraries written by Competent Experts - get a U+202E? glhf"). So it's better to drop/Han unify/transcribe everything above the BMP, normalize text (e.g. Cyrillic -> Volapuk for identical letters, remove zero-width spaces, reverse RTL text and make it LTR, replace funny spaces with real ones, strip out "Zalgo" diacritics, strip out Emoji), and then assume you're dealing with UCS-2 classic UTF-16.

In fact, things could be made even easier by just transcribing all languages. I suppose you'd want something like Latin-1 or Windows-1252 for Chinese, but then you can adequately represent all languages of note. As a bonus, you can escape troublesome characters without using backslash escapes: ‹a href=’https://example.com’›click ”here”‹/a›.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 20:26 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
Stirrer of Shit
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Dumb? I don't know. It's better to take real people into account than to think well somebody might have a use for this at some point, better throw it in and end up with bloated software. But the realer the better, of course. Big companies have focus groups and stuff for that, the open-source projects can only afford the discount focus group known as the peanut gallery.

If the crypto folks had used more of dogfooding ("how can we make this user-friendly enough that we can comfortably use it") and less of the odd mentality that permeates GPG (use ALL the ciphers, write ALL the documentation, we'll just use unencrypted IRC ourselves), we might have had decent software for that right now.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 20:28 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
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Posted by creaothceann
Well, how much of a solution is VirtualBox (et al)?

Emulation already works for DOS games.

Not at all, I'd say. Slow as molasses, at least in my experience.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 22:29 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
Stirrer of Shit
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Holy shit, what?

I get that Ubuntu would kill off 32-bit if it only affects anyone still using 32-bit computers. But Steam and Wine? That's like their killer app: Linux for people who are dissatisfied with Windows but don't want to get any trouble.

Statically linked executables are not a non-option. And applications including their dependencies is a good idea. So it will get solved. But still, WTF?

the large amount of users still running 32-bit games and OS

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

That's 1.35-2.09%, judging from OS info. Probably closer to 1.35%. But at the very least, 97.91% of their users use 64-bit computers. You can use CPUID info to try and get a bit more information about how new their CPUs are. For instance, AVX (2011) is at 88.83%.

Also consider how the people on 32-bit XP with P4's probably aren't those with the most money to spend on Steam (e.g. in your case, $0)

If anyone wonders why I post this after several other posts: I thought I posted it but really I just typed it out and then left the tab open.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 22:42 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Kawa
Wait, no. VirtualBox, not DOSBox. Still my point stands because I have in fact played Doom on VirtualBox and it ran about as well as it would've on a lower-end supported PC. And other games that aren't as complicated? Perfectly fine.

Yeah, that might work if you get lucky with hardware acceleration. But modern games? No.
Posted by Screwtape
The big problem with virtualisation is that since the late 90s, games have been designed for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. VMs could include a software emulation of a GPU, but that would be so slow as to be impractical. On the other hand, VMs could virtualise the graphics hardware and provide their own OpenGL/Direct3D drivers, but there's a few problems with that: ...

You can supposedly do GPU passthrough, and that's quite fast, but you need a separate GPU for it. I suppose you could (automatically) disconnect the GPU, connect it to the VM, give host only the iGPU, and play. Could even use VirtualBox' "seamless mode," and have it give back the GPU when it doesn't need it. It could even emulate a low-performance version of your GPU for minor desktop rendering. But good luck getting any of that to work in practice. Simply way too many interlocking parts, some of which are actively hostile. I think it's completely impossible. In practice, you'll have to settle for assigning them at boot and having them stay that way.

But in theory, you could do 100% seamless virtualization, if Murphy's law et al wouldn't exist.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-22, 22:49 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Posted by funkyass
win2k and later use UTF-16 internally.

Yes, but they kind of pretend it's UCS-2.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-23, 00:21 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
Stirrer of Shit
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Yeah, the games themselves can be 32-bit, but a 64-bit client could run them.

I'm torn on this dropping 32-bit thing. On one hand, technological progress must go forward. On the other hand, this will enable developers to assume they're running on 64-bit platforms. And because of local politics in a backwater shithole I have never even set foot in driving up developer costs, FOSS following "industry best practices," and said best practices revolving around trading CPU time for developer time/ease and then using this to hire incompetent developers who only know Python, this means that faster CPUs makes my software go slower. And because everyone profits from this, there's no incentive to change things.

I think the best way to solve this problem would be if we could all collectively agree that there's a giant market segment of users in some faraway place who all use Windows XP 32-bit on Celeron laptops and are willing to pay top dollar for your products.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-24, 02:47 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
2) Maybe nobody runs Steam from 32-bit only OS. But how do you fix the games? Anything that is not a $60 AAAAAA++++ blockbuster, that hasn't been updated in years, and that you can still buy and there are plently of people still playing those. Visual novels and most Japanese games fit the description nicely.

A 64-bit launcher can't run 32-bit applications? We TempleOS now?
The runtime will of course have to keep shipping with 32-bit libs, but that's neither here or there. If "libraries" is a touchy word, just bundle it up into one giant mystery meat .so .bin file that all the 32-bit games get LD_PRELOAD'ed, problem solved.
Or, well, I suppose they could build 64-bit libraries with 32-bit pointers and then ship tiny shims for 32-bit libraries, but it seems like a terrible idea that will inevitably cause something to go horribly wrong.

I'm glad I don't use Ubuntu, but such boneheaded decisions because "32 bit is OOOOOOOOOOOOLD because I live at Silly Valley and just bought a overclocked Threadripper with my VC money" are an easy way to get your users to have an axe to grind with you. Almost Mozilla-tier garbage.

Well, it is a decidedly niche legacy product. I hate to say it, but the Venezuelan market segment really does not represent a financial threat to ... anything, really.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-25, 12:59 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Stirrer of Shit
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Well, this is how hate speech legislation works already: you have a responsibility to remove it, even if you didn't see it.

On one hand, that's a terrible idea. On the other hand, they could just move it to the US like any sane organization would. Even the ultra-nationalist publications do it, and it stands to reason they would otherwise not be very keen on moving abroad.

In other words, that people are getting prosecuted at random is a decisive improvement from the status quo and something to celebrate. God willing, this will finally put an end to the perverse order of non-US Internet publishing.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-25, 13:05 in Ubuntu: x86_32 is dead because WE SAY SO!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
Maybe it's time to... y'know, bring a notch or two down to the bloat? Nah, who am I kidding? BRING ON TEH JAVASCRIPTS!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
A program expands until it eventually appears to have been written by someone with Parkinson's disease. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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You get ELTS after that. So until 2022, possibly later.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
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