Compared to Arena, which is infinitely large, then Daggerfall is only 0% as big. But despite being however many hundred thousand square kilometres it is, it seems empty, since it’s all just meaningless procgen. Morrowind feels much bigger, because it’s actually full of stuff.
You’re right about it being legendary - Ubisoft certainly seem to have been inspired by the enormous map filled with really repetitive quests. But there are more important things than size.
It’s how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.
But yeah, if you’ve got a computer that’s old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.
I think the detailed description of this vulnerability described it as non-persistent in UEFI, but that you could install something that runs before secure boot that would be persistent. I think that’s splitting hairs, though - if you’ve been compromised by someone that has the skills to pull this exploit off, then they can probably chain something else into it now that they’ve got basically bare-metal access.
You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target’s local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.
If it was just “Fortnite but a bit better”, then very few people would play it, as having a lot of people to play against is important and network effects would keep them on Fortnite. (See also every other “X-killer” - Facebook killer, WhatsApp killer, e-Bay killer, etc. A slight improvement will not do.) Also, Fortnite wasn’t really the game it is until they cloned PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds into it, so it needs to be:
something with a really compelling gameplay loop that’s good with a few people but gets better with more people
not a Fortnite clone, nor something that could be introduced into Fortnite as a game mode
Like you say, just a clone will not do. Need some really exciting innovations in gameplay, which is not Ubisoft’s thing, to put it kindly.
An NVidia GB300 fills a whole rack on a server, doesn’t have display outputs, draws 1.4 kW of electrical power, and requires mandatory liquid cooling capable of dissipating 1.4 kW of heat. Not a good match for a standard desktop system. I understand that they’re also optimised for churning through huge amounts of low-precision floating point, aka. an AI workload, rather than being truly general-purpose cards.
If you have any use for eye-watering amounts of CUDA calculations, then they might come in handy. I remember back in the day, if you had two graphics cards in SLI, that the Batman: Arkham Asylum game gave you the option of either using both cards for rendering, or one card for rendering and one card dedicated to PhysX calculations. You could use one of these GPUs for amazingly good-looking fog effects, assuming you had another GPU capable of rendering the graphics and outputting it? Not very sensible, tho.
I suspect that unless you work in a very compute-heavy industry (AI research, but maybe aerospace?) then you won’t have a use for these cards that would justify how expensive they are to run.
With my ‘security hat’ on, I’d have to say you shouldn’t use anything that’s no longer receiving updates. But that would create a lot of e-waste for no reason.
To see if your phone’s browser is still receiving updates, you can browse to:
https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
That has a grid showing whether your browser was willing to connect to sites using the compromised keys. If your browser is using its own cert style and still receiving updates, should be all green ticks. If so, then you can still use the phone for browsing internet. Be aware that using other apps on your phone (like eg. your email app) could be read easily by third parties, especially if you’re connected to unfamiliar wifi.
If it’s all red, maybe try another browser? Or relegate that device to being a dumb phone - switch off its data connection, phone calls only.
Rogue Trader is pretty damn good, uneven difficulty aside. Their Pathfinder games were a bit too much of a combat grind for my liking. Excited to see what they do next.
Assuming that the device hasn’t been updated yet, yeah, this is what it allows you to do.
If you connect your device to a ‘fake’ router that’s completely under your control, then when the device attempts to connect to its remote server, you pretend to be it, and provide a certificate signed by this ‘trusted’ authority. Device will accept it. Make another connection to the real remote server. Decrypt what the device sends you, and send it on to the remote server; it’ll believe that you’re the android device, and respond with a message that you can decrypt, store, reencrypt with your fake key, and send it to the device. Repeat.
You’ll only be able to impersonate the API until the keys are revoked by an update. That’s maybe not so useful. However, any other connection that can be MITM’d and include other personal information - your bank card details, say - can be read, too.
As regards the data centre equipment; the SSDs and hard drives used for storage would be reusable by regular people. Those will be nice to have.
The memory is the high-bandwidth kind that is not be usable on consumer motherboards. The ‘graphics cards’ are the size of filling cabinets, require external power supplies and cooling, don’t have video outputs, don’t have drivers for graphics output. If you don’t have a requirement for serious parallel computation with a very high uptime, then it’s not worth the cost of powering them up. If/when the bubble bursts, all that shit is going to landfill.
Latest version of Unreal engine plus a fully slop game on top? Reckon you might get 13 fps to go with those 13 fingers.
It’s correct if they’re talking about multiple different kinds of psychological harm - depression and psychosis, say. Much like if I go and buy both full-fat and semi-skimmed, then I’m buying milks; or if I’m checking the hardness of river and tap samples, then I’m testing waters.
Yeah. Most big games tend to be on a five-year turnaround, and Godot got a massive investment in extra resources in September 2023 when Unity shit the bed and changed their licensing terms. Indie games don’t tend to take so long to develop, but then as you say, all the indie developers need to have a little trial run so that they know how to use it before committing to it for a project.
I’m thinking that there will be a lot more high-profile Godot releases next year, and into 2028. All of the “higher profile” indie stuff that would have used Unity before.
You don’t have to do anything fancy, I don’t think. Initialise your RNG with the seed that you have stored, shuffle the list, and then rotate the list to get to the ‘first song’. Every RNG seed will give a correct result.
If you shuffle using eg. Durstenfeld/Knuth shuffle, which is O(n), then you can make a note of the ‘first song’s position’ and do the rotation at the end of shuffling straight to the first song, in a single pass.
You’ll still get a repeatable ordering if songs are added or removed from the playlist - the order will be different, of course - and it takes a lot less storage to write down the seed and the ID of the ‘first song’, which might matter if you’re using a crappy old music player with very limited storage space.
If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.
Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.
Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.
Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.
A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.
A shame. I liked Enslaved, loved DmC, and really liked Hellblade. They made quite a big thing at the time they were making Hellblade about wanting to be ‘double A’ publishers - making highly polished indie games on a sensible budget, basically. And then they sold out to Microsoft, which has screwed them over - all those publishers needing to make a non-stop stream of big budget megahits or they’ll be hung out to dry.
Consolations to all affected. It has been an absolute bloodbath in games development recently.
It’s one of the best ones, get playing it. Lots of shooting up Nazis, zombies and death robots; a little bit of stealth, lots of Quake 3 bunny hopping, plenty of action.
Not like the new ones, which make you watch 45 minutes of torture porn before letting you do five minutes of corridor shooting, and which just can’t commit to deciding whether killing Nazis is bad.
Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.
My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.
Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.
It has the best gameplay in the trilogy, and the companion quests are excellent, but it completely shits on the lore established in ME1 and the change in direction of the story set up ME3 to fail. It’s a great game, but in the wrong place.