Can the Internet Be Saved? - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-the-internet-be-saved <comment><USER2> This is a question I've been asking myself regularly for years now. I'm still not sure. However, I'm pretty sure that the web is a lost cause.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we want to save it as it is?</comment>


Top 400 Python Projects on Github + Alpha PythonHackers - <AUTHOR> http://stg.pythonhackers.com/os/

<comment><USER2> # 527 -

sublime-text-2-ruby-tests (git) Sublime Text 2 plugin for running ruby tests! (Unit, RSpec, Cucumber)

$ 485 -

rails_tutorial_sublime_text (git) Sublime Text 2 setup used in the Ruby on Rails Tutorial

:)

<comment><AUTHOR> As you already might know, they're the interesting ones; since most of their code is in Python, Github marks it as a Python project.</comment></comment>


FCC's Pai, addressing net neutrality rules, calls Twitter biased - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-pai/fccs-pai-addressing-net-neutrality-rules-calls-twitter-biased-idUSKBN1DS2LB <comment><USER2> >"When it comes to an open internet, Twitter is part of the problem," Pai said. "The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate."

I think the implication that while net neutrality to some degree[1] ensured neutrality in carrying much data indiscriminately, it did very little to ensure neutrality at the edge (that is, Twitter could decide it wanted to silence any minority or majority with impunity). So if an edge provider can discriminate what is allowed, does that undermine the ideal of net neutrality?

With Goog-Twitt-Face being the triumvirate of gatekeepers I think this concern deserves some consideration.

[1][https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535371/five-loopholes- tha...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535371/five-loopholes-that-could- undermine-net-neutrality/)

<comment><USER3> There are two different concepts, internet neutrality, and network neutrality.

Network neutrality is "treat bits agnosticly"

Internet neutrality is "treat opinions agnosticly"

Which one "net" neutrality refers to is anyone's guess.

<comment><USER4> Both are also independently contentious battles, too. We can't treat bits agnostically; otherwise we have to accept DDoS attacks and do nothing to route around them/block bad nodes. We can treat opinions agnostically, until said opinions/speech start to infringe on the freedom of others. But we've always had a struggle in drawing that line. Likewise, what constitutes a bad node, ultimately? From the perspective of an ISP, that opinion ranges from the aforementioned DDoS, to Netflix for consuming the majority of their bandwidth. What about end users? Their opinions can differ too. A heavy torrent user can weigh down a local hub. Should an ISP just let them? The internet is far more a finite resource than some people are willing to accept.

<comment><USER5> I'd be totally fine if we were charged like datacenters. e.g.: pay for a minimum of 10mbps, but burstable to 100mbps, and if you average over 10mbps/mo, pay some fee. It's typically different, but it ends up being a few TB/mo of traffic at the most absolute 'base' plan.

Then you can pay more for "unmetered" 10mbps, 100mbps, 1000mbps, 10000mbps, etc...

There's also plans for "minimum + burst" e.g.: 20mbps->200mbps, 50mbps->300mbps, 100mbps->1000mbps, so on and so forth.

I think this is a perfectly acceptable method of billing and I really wish we could just use this. As, in effect, if you pay for the '100mbps->1000mbps,' this translates too... you get 1000mbps at all times you use the internet, but you get 100mbps/mo worth of bandwidth.

That translates to ~8.75TB/mo of bandwidth or,

      ((100*24*30)/1024)/8

(someone please correct me if I'm very wrong here. I worked at a webhost several years ago and this was basically our pricing model.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No. Censoring hate speech by banning people who are verbally assaulting others (in violation of Terms of Service that they agreed to) is a very different concern than requiring common carriers to equally prioritize bits.

If we extend "you must allow people to verbally assault others (because free speech applies to the government)" to TV and radio, what do we end up with?

Note that the FCC fines non-cable TV (broadcast radio and TV) for cursing on air. See "Obscene, Indecent and Profane Broadcasts" [https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and- pr...](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-profane- broadcasts)

How can you ask social media companies to do something about fake news (the vast majority of which served to elect the current administration (which nominated this FCC chairman)) while also lambasting them for upholding their commitment to providing a hate-free experience for net citizens and paying advertisers?

"Open Internet": No blocking. No throttling. No paid prioritization.

It would be easier for us to understand the "Open Internet" rules if the proposed "Restoring Internet Freedom" page wasn't crudely pasted over (redirected to from) the page describing the current Open Internet rules. www.fcc.gov/general/open-internet (current policy) now redirects to www.fcc.gov/restoring-internet-freedom (proposed policy).

ISPs blocking, throttling, or paid-prioritizing Twitter, Netflix, Fox, or CNN for everyone is a different concern than responding to individuals who are threatening others with hate speech.

The current policy ("Open Internet") means that you can use the bandwidth cap that you pay for for whatever legal content you please.

The proposed policy ("Restoring Internet Freedom") means that internet businesses will need to pay every ISP in order to not be slower than the big guys who can afford to pay-to-play (~"payola"). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola)</comment>


Supermicro denies Bloomberg accusations regarding a "rogue" chip - <AUTHOR> https://www.supermicro.com/newsroom/pressreleases/2018/press181004_Bloomberg.cfm <comment><USER2> I unpacked and racked many rows of those topsy servers apple says never racked up with siri. Small world.

</comment><comment><USER3> At this point it'll be hard to make a compelling argument this is all smoke and no fire. The news has been picked up by national news media.</comment>


The Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2014/05/the-internet-of-things/

<comment><USER2> > So my bet is that most "things" will be dumb and the smarts will be in the > phone or in the cloud. At least that's what I woke up thinking about today.

Only until the pendulum swings once more.</comment>


'Interface' Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/01/08/InterfaceConsideredHarmful.html <comment><USER2> This article has a really Java-specific slant to it.

Interfaces are _more_ fundamental than classes. An interface is just a contract between a client and its dependencies. This could be as simple as a function signature (callables in Python), a set of methods supported (duck- typing in Ruby/Python/Javascript/Smalltalk, interfaces in Go, or traits in Rust), a set of syntactic forms that are valid (traits in the C++ STL), a set of type-deduction rules (typeclasses in Haskell), or a common message-passing and data-structure format (like Thrift, Protobufs, or Cap'n Proto).

A lot of folks would argue that _class_ is the real mistake in Java & C++, because it conflates the notion of a common interface that can be passed around with means of sharing implementations of that interface. Now, we're obviously not going to get rid of classes in Java. But it's interesting that many of the newer languages like Go and Rust don't have this construct at all, instead promoting interfaces & traits to first-class entities and letting you specify implementation independently.

<comment><USER3> Rust traits actually do allow you to have "default" implementations of methods, which gives implementers of that trait the option to avoid defining the method themselves.

For example, the trait for overloading the equality operators `==` and `!=` contains two methods, `eq` and `ne`, but `ne` has a default implementation that simply calls `eq` and negates its output. This means you only need to implement one method to get both operators, though you retain the option to implement both manually if you'd like.

Of course, such default implementations are necessarily limited by the fact that a lone trait can assume very little about the type it's being implemented on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that the author misses an understanding of the few concepts, or at least one. This is separation of the concerns.

Even if, as author thinks, that idea of the interface was invented by accidence, it is a good invention.

Because it allows us to clearly to separate the abstract concept from its implementation(s).

Even if Java had multiple inheritance, it should have had also the interfaces to be able to become the usable language it is today.

While interface would allow us to simulate the multiple inheritance, its main benefit is clearly wider.

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer: the article is by Uncle Bob, whose articles I find harder and harder to read. If nothing else, the condescension in some of them is very annoying. I can't say I respect the guy.

That said,

> Even if Java had multiple inheritance, it should have had also the > interfaces to be able to become the usable language it is today.

I have a problem with this assertion. I don't think Java-like interfaces are required for an OOP language to be usable. What about other OOP languages that don't have them, like for example Scala?

<comment><USER4> Scala has one out of the sight interface:

interface Function { call(...); }. // of course this is a made up syntax.

For most of the cases, this is just enough (as it is also in Java).

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, I don't understand your comment. Can you clarify what you mean, using actual Scala syntax if possible? (Just so I understand).

In any case, my point is that since there are usable OOP languages _without_ Java-like interfaces, this kind of interfaces isn't necessary. That is, there are alternative ways of producing usable OOP languages. It doesn't necessarily follow that Java is successful _because_ of its implementation of interfaces.

<comment><USER4> My point was that, as functions are treated as objects in Scala, you actually have a hidden one method interface behind each function implementation.

<comment><USER5> Functions are implemented as objects in Scala, but this is an implementation detail. Scala implemented over something else than the JVM could have done first-class functions differently. Also, the notion of "interface" we're discussing here (and Uncle Bob is railing against) is the Java-like interface (i.e. using the actual "interface" keyword that disallows implementation, and not abstract classes). Those are not used in Scala. Therefore, they are not _required_ for successful OOP languages.

Note I think Uncle Bob's condescending tone in TFA is pretty useless. The entire article consists of building a strawman. He really annoys me.

<comment><USER4> You can see this as an implementation detail or also as a conceptual detail.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's conceptual. It's a technical detail. If they had been implemented differently, this would have made little difference to the programmer using Scala.

Again, Objects aren't Java interfaces, so I guess the whole discussion is moot :)

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is conceptual as you can conceptually regard functions as objects and it may have great benefits as a tool to communicate the idea to the other people.

There are of course other abstractions with their own benefits.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. Regardless, Objects aren't Java interfaces, so what are we even discussing?

Uncle Bob wasn't arguing against the general concept of an interface, but about its specific meaning in Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who spent a few weeks looking at how the JVM really works, interfaces and super classes are not a compiler constraint but a JVM one. Sure, you could l could probably generate a lot of bytecode to get around this constraint. Or rewrite the specification for the JVM, and the JVM, and the compiler.

Frameworks like OSGi offer great exetensions to the humble on interface as well.</comment>


This is the way Facebook ends - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/5/29/this-is-the-way-facebook-ends

<comment><USER2> One fatal flaw with geeks is that we all think that the rest of the world thinks just like we do.

'tain't necessarily so. Most of the objections he raises in the article (e.g. Facebook making improper use of personal information) don't even _register_ on the rank and file user's radar. Maybe they should, but they don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll bite. Facebook is not a social network like MySpace. For a long time it seemed to outside users like myself that the site had stagnated. It was a the Wild West of CSS, GIF backgrounds, and auto-play Spice Girls music embeds. For all the bad karma Facebook has accumulated, it has constantly driven the site toward a refined UX. I think the site is better than it was three years ago.

Vice wants to criticize Zuckerberg for calling FB users "dumb fucks," but you know what? Any public site will have a lot of stupid users. When your site tries to cater to almost everyone, half of your users will be below-average. It's a statistical eventuality. Allowing these users to control the experience of the site is a bad idea. MySpace gave users far too much control, and the site became a synonym for untasteful.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nothing is forever. Facebook did great and will be around for many years to come but history strongly suggests that it will go the way of AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.</comment>


Minimal single-board computer based on Motorola 68000 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/74hc595/68k-nano <comment><USER2> Designer of the rosco-m68k (which was mentioned in another comment - thanks!) here, always good to see another 68k SBC on the block. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves, would be especially nice to make it so $0 isn't permanently a ROM address (to allow interrupt vectors to be changed). Even on 68010 I had to do some magic in the address decoder to make ROM be temporarily at $0 at reset.

<comment><USER3> Most of the boards I've seen that solve this have a shift register that counts the first 4 bus cycles. The data in pin is tied to 5v and the reset is tied to the reset pin on the 68k. IIRC, the clock pin is connected to the AS signal. If the 5th bit is zero, the ROM is selected. The addresses written into the first 8 bytes of the ROM are the initial (supervisor) stack pointer (typically the end of your RAM for embedded systems) and the ROM entry. At the start of the 5th bus cycle, the 5th bit goes high and the ROM is no longer mapped to the lower addresses and the CPU has jumped to the true ROM entry point.

You could also of course have a register to flip the ROM being active in the lower addresses (default selected) that you later disable.

You can also make a nifty DTACK generator by using another shift register. The clock is attached to the system clock, the data in pin to 5v, and the (synchronous, active when AS is deasserted) reset pin to AS. You then just AND'd the output of your chip select generators and an output bit of this shift register. (N)OR all the AND gate outputs together and wire that to DTACK (active low for the DIP parts).

The first rising edge of the system clock after AS is asserted is the exact clock phase that DTACK should be asserted for a 0 wait states. Anything AND'd with the first bit of the shift register is a 0 WS peripheral, the second bit is 1 WS, third bit is 2 WS, etc. The DTACK de-assert at the end of the bus cycle also works correctly. AS deasserts in S7 (which is a falling edge of the system clock). The next rising edge of the system clock is in S0, which is when DTACK is supposed to be deasserted. (since the reset is synchronous, the clock edge will cause the shift register to reset and all the outputs will go low)

My current side project is interfacing a 68010 (12.5 MHz) to an FPGA. Most of the issues are the bus voltage-level translation since all the FPGAs are only 3.3v tolerant these days. I have machinations to build a paged MMU for it that can address more than 16 MiB. I'd like to use a bigger m68k (68030 / 68040) in the future, but I'm starting with what I'm more comfortable with. the "Texas Cockroach" chips have fewer signals to worry about. Also, learning KiCad and how to use PCB-Way assembly since I have trouble with small surface mount parts (high-speed/density bus translators, currently designing with the 74LVC16T245).

It's a bit hard to stay motivated when someone with a bit of patience and motivation (and have taken a decent computer architecture course) can build a 100+ MHz 32-bit RISC-V system in verilog on a ~$100 FPGA devkit.

<comment><USER2> You're right that's how most boards handle having ROM low for the first four cycles, and that's how mine does it. I use a 74LS174 hooked up just like you say.

Early in the project I did a DTACK generator similar to what you describe, but now it's handled by a GAL which allows it to be zero-wait-state in certain address spaces while supporting external DTACK for IO devices. This also allows me to easily tri-state the signal do expansion boards can generate their own DTACK.

Your side-project sounds interesting, I'd love to take a look :) is it online anywhere?

<comment><USER3> I've got to actually start writing things down about my personal projects :)

At this point I've still just been learning about the bus timing. I've got an m68k hooked up to an 16 MHz Arduino Mega which is running the m68k at 4 MHz so I can get 4 samples per clock of the m68k ([https://imgur.com/CxSlIHL](https://imgur.com/CxSlIHL)). I can actually drive the CPU with the arduino since I can manage DTACK just quick enough with some inline AVR assembly.

Hit a small snag though. Turns out the 68010's I ordered are fakes.

Ended up with the same parts you did (saw your post at [https://hackaday.io/project/164305-roscom68k/log/175626-fake...](https://hackaday.io/project/164305-roscom68k/log/175626-fake- mc68010s)) (what I received: [https://imgur.com/WCwRpHJ](https://imgur.com/WCwRpHJ)).

I was fairly naive to the fakes when I started ordering parts. I've basically ended up with all fakes. Got some Harris 80C286-25s which are fakes (internet seems to suggest they are rebadged 20 MHz parts, so at least they are the same base part (static core 286)), but I don't have the capacity to test them quite yet. I've also ended up with a 50 MHz 68030 that seems to actually be a 33 MHz 68030. Again, I can't test it yet so I'm _really_ hoping it's not an EC part rebadged. I wanted the MMU.

<comment><USER2> Awesome :) I've played around a bit interfacing Arduino to mine too, and found I had to use AVR assembly to get the timing right.

Yep, those are exactly the same as some of the fakes I have here. Adeleparts definitely rings a bell as the source of some of mine too.

Sadly it seems to be quite common to remark the "lesser" 030/040/060s to suggest they are the fully-capable ones :( Fingers crossed yours isn't like that!

<comment><USER3> If you don't mind me asking, do you know what the fan-out capability of the "big DIP" m68k's are? I've not noticed a hobby board built around one that has bus transceivers or line drivers, but all of the boards built around things like the 8088 and 8086 have them. I know those required latches to de- multiplex the bus, but the datasheet for the Intel parts recommend line drivers and bus transceivers except for simple "minimum-mode" systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The memory map hurts.

68000 doesn't have a vector base register like 010+. Instead, the vector base is always 0x0, which here is in ROM, which is too much of a restriction. Installing a 010 instead should allow for getting around this.

Also blatantly missing is a NMI switch.

Still, it always makes me happy when I see open SBC designs based on the 68k family. Retrobrew[0] has a bunch of them, and they are less restrictive, or use 030 instead of 000/010.

[0]: [https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/](https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/)

<comment><USER5> Project author here, I agree. This was a toy project that I allocated a fixed amount of time to, hence the cut corners. I'm working on another design that uses programmable logic to handle multiple interrupt sources (yes, including an NMI button) and allow either ROM or RAM to be banked into address 0.

<comment><USER4> I'm looking forward to that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also worth checking out: Bill Shen (plasmo) has his Tiny68K (in a number of variations including '020) system and one for the RC2014 eco system. The original:

[https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:sbc:ti...](https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:sbc:tiny68k)

More recently: [https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=builderpages:...](https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=builderpages:plasmo:cb030)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Due to the minimal address decoding circuitry, accessing certain memory > regions will cause multiple devices to be selected. This should be avoided.

Two bus drivers enter, one bus driver leaves!

</comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h Clarification on the "Forbidden (multiple devices selected) " bit - Am I reading correctly that the memory addressing is, essentially, a little buggy as a side effect of optimizing for simplicity, and that results in mapping multiple things to certain addresses?

Also, I somehow didn't realize that you could buy what appears to be a new 68000, and for $8.95 ([https://www.jameco.com/shop/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&l...](https://www.jameco.com/shop/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&langId=-1&storeId=10001&productId=2288039)). In my defense, last time I searched it wasn't obvious, mostly because nobody labels it as a "68000"; it's a 68HC000P-12, which only in the details is listed as a "6800" (sic) family - I assume that's just a typo. And to be fair, I'm sure most people looking for a 68000-series know how to look for it; it's like expecting people to know that a 80486 is an x86 usually called a 486. Just a bit of friction for a newbie.

<comment><USER8> This was quite common. You only decode out as much as you need and if that results in phantom appearances of devices or ROM as long as it doesn't interfere with the operation of the device that is perfectly ok. Memory map aesthetics are important but sometimes circuit simplicity is more important.

<comment><USER9> I think it's still 'buggy' if the result is a bus fight (that might actually damage chips)

<comment><USER8> It shouldn't, normally unless you designed the map wrong. That would be a real fault. In some systems it was possible to use dynamic map changes to position ROM over RAM and then to do weird things like getting the CPU to write to ROM but I've never heard of that actually damaging anything though speculation that in a tight loop that should be possible was rampant. We sure tried ;)

But when decoding banks of addresses you'd typically decode just one chip at the time, but possibly in multiple locations, otherwise vacant.

<comment><USER10> They are probably using A[19] as chip select for one device, A[18] for a different one, etc.

So if you read from 0x000c0000, you get a conflict.

I wouldn't call it a bug if it's done deliberately to save some gates. :-)

<comment><USER8> Heh, clever. But you'd be even smarter to hook A19 to ~CS and A18 to ~EN to get the same effect without the conflict.

<comment> compiler-guy That would require two additional NOT gates, which, in turn, would require an additional chip, which given the layout of the board, would require additional board space.

But what would the benefit be, other than a somewhat cleaner address space? You don't get to actually use the space that isn't mapped in this scenario-- RAM, or whatever, doesn't magically appear there. You also end up having to worry about additional gate delay.

So, from the software's perspective, you go from, "Don't use these addresses, unpredictable things will happen." to "Don't use these addresses, nothing will happen."

Either way, code that uses these addresses is buggy. So you are paying extra hardware for very minimal benefit.

<comment><USER11> _> So, from the software's perspective, you go from, "Don't use these addresses, unpredictable things will happen." to "Don't use these addresses, nothing will happen."_

If the address decoder allows certain address ranges to select _more than one device_ (which appears to be the case), the problem is far more serious: don't use those addresses [even for reads!] because it will literally fry the output drivers of the conflicting chips.

<comment><USER12> Bus conflict damage is largely a myth, at least for modern ICs. Output drivers are a lot more robust than you think. More likely the extra current will cause a reset or glitch if the power supply circuitry/decoupling can't keep up with the current spike.

<comment><USER11> Really? So a CMOS driver that's driving a high logic level which is connected to a CMOS driver that's driving a low logic level won't get destroyed by the resultant short circuit?

As far as I understand (and I admit that I might be wrong here) a typical CMOS driver outputs a high logic level by connecting the output pin to Vcc (via a low-resistance FET) and it outputs a low logic level by connecting the output pin to GND (also via a low-resistance FET). And the circuit traces on the bus are also fairly low resistance. Wouldn't this short circuit result in dangerously high currents flowing?

Certainly high enough (>100mA) to violate the device's "absolute maximum ratings", the ones that you aren't supposed to exceed even momentarily?

I'd be very interested to hear more about the robustness of output drivers and the amount of abuse they can tolerate.

<comment><USER12> You're correct about how the outputs work, but the practical reality is that currents end up limited enough by the FET's on resistance that nothing gets damaged. Yes, it's outside the spec, but exceeding the AMRs doesn't mean your chip dies. I had a 5V microcontroller survive being put across 12V once. And I had a Threadripper motherboard die by shorting out its CPU Vcore FET, which would send the PSU's 12V rail into the CPU, and the CPU survived (PSU shut down before any damage was done).

If shorting a pin to the opposite rail destroyed your IC people would be destroying Arduinos left and right with trivial mistakes while experimenting, and they wouldn't be able to get away with having no I/O protection :-). You usually don't get >100mA out of a single IO line short - maybe 50mA. Having a bunch of paralleled bus contention can cause more damage (not to the drivers, but to power routing and other shared resources), but at that point you should be hitting PSU current protection limits (which are more important for overall design robustness).

Console modchips of olde (PS1/2/GameCube/etc) worked by overdriving bus lines with a stronger driver (often multiple lines ganged together). No consoles were hurt by this.

I did part of the design and board layout for Glasgow revC, an FPGA-based USB interface board, and I stress tested our IO level shifter chips for short circuit robustness. Leaving the outputs shorted hard to the opposite rail overnight did no apparent harm (bypassing the protection resistors), other than getting the chip nice and toasty for the duration of the test.

Edit: just remembered a personal anecdote. I only recall ever killing an output driver with a short, on a typical microcontroller, once in my life (could've been a fluke). And I've done _many_ stupid experiments. Shorting outputs briefly for experimentation or unorthodox workarounds is solidly in the "no big deal" category in my mind, and it's practically never been a problem. E.g. "I don't know which side is TX and RX in this UART, so I'll just try both" "This device is bricked so let me short out the flash to force it to fall back to bootloader mode", etc.

<comment><USER11> _> I stress tested our IO level shifter chips for short circuit robustness. Leaving the outputs shorted hard to the opposite rail overnight did no apparent harm (bypassing the protection resistors), other than getting the chip nice and toasty for the duration of the test._

That's impressive!

Thanks for the reply, sounds like I can be a bit less cautious without fear of blowing things up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just needs a frame buffer and you almost have a Sun-1.

<comment><USER14> I was just about to say that. More to the point, though, you'd need an FPGA for the custom MMU, which might be a sticking point these days, although there is a Sun-2 emulator:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22350986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22350986)

[https://github.com/lisper/emulator-sun-2](https://github.com/lisper/emulator- sun-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another new 68k board that came out recently is Rosco:

[https://rosco-m68k.com/](https://rosco-m68k.com/)

It's for sale on Tindie and the person who made it seems to focusing a lot on making a toolchain available etc. If you want to actually programme the 68k it looks like a good bet.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great. At 12MHz and 1M RAM that's still above an Atari ST or Amiga 500.

There used to be plenty of such computers based on 8bit to 16bit discrete CPUs (Z80, 680x, 8255, etc), with schematics in electronics magazines.

This was great because everything was simple enough that you could fully understand and use 100% of the hardware yourself and code 100% of the software yourself. And all components were standard discrete ones (like this project), not SMCs, so there were also very easy to handle.

You did not even need a PCB. I once built such simple computer based on a Z80 using good old wire wrap [1] on a prototyping board, which was quite a common thing to do, but quite a torture to be honest and I would not want to try with a 68000...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap)

<comment><USER8> Having worked on a fairly large 68K board that was wire wrapped I would not recommend it.

<comment><USER17> I built one with graphics floppy and scsi. Wasn't too bad mind you I was 19 so had infinite spare time and I worked the summer for a defense contractor so had unlimited wire wrap wire and gold plated sockets.

<comment><USER8> I worked on a prototype board that was getting a little older (I did not wrap the original), apparently the tension of the wrapping tool was off or something else did not go according to plan during the original build because quite a few of the connections were flakey and had to be redone. This can be pretty tricky if there are sometimes 6 wires running to one pin and the whole thing is a rats nest of identically colored wires.

I did get it all sorted out and working again but that wasn't my idea of having fun. Fortunately I got into software from hardware or I would have likely given up. You know you have a nasty problem when tapping the board can make it crash. Shades of Gollum and Coke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So what are the options for proper digital video (DisplayPort/HDMI) generation on retro systems like this?

Other than the typical (and ugly) "duct-tape a Raspberry Pi to it" and/or "software composite video to a converter dongle" approaches.

<comment><USER4> The OSSC[0] is my go-to. OSHW, it takes component input (RGB, VGA, YCrCb) and audio, and outputs HDMI. Its line by line processing means virtually no latency is added.

[0]: [https://videogameperfection.com/products/open-source-scan- co...](https://videogameperfection.com/products/open-source-scan-converter/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We were taught on the newer Coldfire processors which use a modified m68k instruction set.

I never understood the reason for the split address and data registers, it also seemed like the address registers had a few bits intended for segmentation?

Anyone know the rationale behind the split address vs data registers design and architecture? Most other instruction sets use the same registers for both data and addressing, what advantage do specialized address registers give.

<comment><USER17> Two ALUs?

<comment><USER20> Yup. The Signetics 68070 that was used in CD-i was like a 68000, but slower because it didn't have that second ALU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r I wonder why they used a 68000? The 68020 was a significant upgrade, and other than not being a DIP package it made a great SBC.

<comment><USER21> He did mention through hole being desirable. A DIP 16Mhz 68010 could be an easy upgrade. And you would get virtual memory addressing.

<comment><USER22> 68010's still need an MMU for virtual memory. So do 68020's, now that I think of it.

<comment><USER21> I see some evidence that an MMU is optional: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7684824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7684824)

<comment><USER2> MMU is optional, unless you want virtual memory. The 68010 fixes a bug in the 68000 whereby it didn't stack enough information to recover from an address or bus error, but you still need an MMU if you want to actually do virtual memory in any performant fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm just wondering if it wouldn't be easier to do without the ROM and map the 16MB to RAM, and then carve out the last 64KB at the 16th megabyte for IO space for devices, using an AVR as a bootloader to download code into the RAM? That would make it easier to manage the memory and interrupt vectors, yes?

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want the same instruction set and and even smaller board you could use the 68008: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68008) they're going to be hard to find though.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's been too long since I last played around like this. This put a bee under my bonnet and has me wanting to try something similar. It'll be a disaster no doubt but I'll learn from my mistakes. Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER25> 68K single board computers are fun. Here's the one I did in college in 1982 [1][2]. 6 MHz 68K (I think). 4K 16-bit words of EEPROM. 1K 16-bit words of static RAM. Two RS-232 ports.

The way the class worked was that they would supply the processor, and I think they may have also supplied the RAM, but everything else you were on your own for. Anything you see in those photos that makes you wonder "Why the heck did he use that!?" probably has the answer "It was cheap".

That's why it is on an S-100 bus prototyping card--I found that at a surplus store. That's why the reset button says "CLR"\--the Caltech EE stockroom had for some inexplicable reason a box full of cheap buttons from some old calculator. That's why the power connector is weird--found that and its mate at the same surplus store I found a power supply.

I put a nice feature in the RS-232 connections. Note that the cable between the RS-232 connectors and the board plugs into an ordinary DIP socket, which is _not_ a keyed connector. The way it is wired up is that it works both ways, but one of the ways is like using a null modem.

There was one very amusing incident when I was writing software for it. The 68K cross assembler ran on Caltech's IBM 370. There was some HP workstation in the lab that you could enter your code on and it could submit it to the 370 for assembly and retrieve the output.

The HP workstation was a few years old, and no one really knew much about it. It ran some weird OS and nobody had bothered to learn much about it--they just all knew enough to edit, submit stuff to the 370, and do simple file manipulation.

The thing was full of several years accumulated projects from students, research code from professors, and who knows what else, so space was tight and no one really knew what was safe to delete.

One day I'm using it to submit my code to the assembler, and I notice that in a lot of the file command there was some letter or digit (I forget which) that you had to include but didn't seem to have an obvious purpose.

So I did the obvious thing--I tried one of the commands but with that letter or digit incremented.

It turned out that was the drive specifier, and I was now using the second drive in the workstation--a drive that nobody else knew it had and was completely empty. They had been struggling with lack of free space on this thing for years, and all that time there was a second drive in it just sitting there empty!

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/Ts9wcfW.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ts9wcfW.png)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/3D4rvdC.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/3D4rvdC.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER26> It's funny how much this looks like the internals to my original Palm Pilot which I disassembled not too long ago :)

</comment><comment><USER27> no pdf diagram is a poor form :(

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone who has done a fair bit of tinkering with stuff like Arduinos, NodeMCUs, ESP32s, etc. along with Pis and similar, what sort of itch does this scratch for people that those wouldn't? From looking at the Rosco version, it doesn't seem like it's a cost savings or anything, and the hardware is certainly much weaker than modern options.

<comment><USER28> To be clear, I'm genuinely curious - this isn't intended as an insult to any of the folks who have worked on these projects.

<comment><USER11> Most of the "modern" embedded stuff comes as a complete system-on-chip these days, i.e. all the peripherals and memory are integrated into the CPU on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It's also rare for chips to offer an external parallel bus interface (the classic A0-A15 and D0-D7 pins), which means that any extra peripheral devices need to hang off an I2C/SPI port where the CPU core can't access them directly.

And the available chips (AVR, ESP32, LPC2xxx, etc.) are all proprietary designs with a single manufacturer. Even the ARM chips, which generally use some variant of a Cortex-M core, have wildly different peripherals. So migrating between families is difficult/impossible.

In contrast, "classic" chips like 8051, 6502, x86 and 680xx all have external parallel bus interfaces and are (or were) produced by multiple manufacturers (often as part of "second source" agreements).

So when building a system using these chips, the designer has a large degree of flexibility and freedom to design the system architecture. Whereas building something using modern embedded chips is mostly an exercise in parametric search trying to find an existing chip which offers exactly the right set of peripherals for the intended design. It reduces the system designer to a mere consumer of off-the-shelf SoCs instead of being a true builder/architect.

<comment><USER28> That's helpful; thanks. I guess coming from much more of a software background, having the ability to write C code (which feels like an acceptable veneer over the hardware to me and works well across chips) and having programmatic access to the pins feels pretty empowering and all-encompassing. However, it does make sense to me that someone coming from a hardware-first view of the world would feel those barriers to direct hardware access much more acutely and recognize the limitations that I don't.

I appreciate the thoughtful and detailed response.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Idle chit chat can make you unhappy - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7379561/Idle-chit-chat-can-make-you-unhappy.html <comment><USER2> It's always annoying when the article doesn't define exactly what qualifies as "idle chit chat" and what qualifies as "deep discussion". How about gossip? Is it in a category of it's own or does it fall in "idle chit chat" because I know plenty of happy people that just gossip.</comment>


Japan Fund on $10B Quest to Discover the Next Elon Musk - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-16/japan-fund-on-10-billion-quest-to-discover-the-next-elon-musk <comment><USER2> The Japanese have a saying: The nail that sticks up gets pounded down.</comment>


Twitter Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://dashboard.twitter.com/i/landing <comment><USER2> Odd, I'm getting a 404 on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't most people want a service like hootsuite that works across multiple platforms? Seems a little late. Guess they can close their API to competitors... laff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a sad day for buffer.

<comment><USER5> Buffer still have some advantages - Dashboard is currently US Business only and the app is iOS only. If you're outside the US and/or an Android user, there's still reason to use Buffer (or Klout, etc), for now.

<comment><USER6> Hmmm? Seems to be working OK for me here in the UK

<comment><USER5> Huh. I was going by the disclaimer at the bottom of the page: "Twitter Dashboard beta is now open to all US-based businesses."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> wither buffer?

> Schedule Tweets</comment>


JPMorgan is poaching developers who work on video games - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-has-been-poaching-video-game-coders-2018-11 <comment><USER2> Trading firm makes most obvious trade possible in the software talent market, tonight! on Business Insider.

It would be funny if over the long term, going to work in the games industry actually became worth it financially simply as a signal to more lucrative firms that you're a strong, machine-sympathetic systems/performance developer that can thrive even in the most toxic imaginable environment.

We're not there yet though so, on the off chance that you're 17 and thinking about getting an entry level job at a game company: pick something else.

</comment><comment><USER3> "In November 2013, JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, agreed to pay a then-record $13 billion fine to federal and state authorities in order to settle claims that it had misled investors in the years leading up to the financial crisis."

I guess when you're a top tier 10x developer you get to either destroy the social fabric of the world or destroy the world economy.

Link: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/jamie-dimon- billion-...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/jamie-dimon-billion- dollar-secret-jp-morgan)

<comment><USER4> That is a very univariate understanding of what happened.

I highly advise a more multivariate approach where the causes and effects are more deeply understood than spinning a story against one company, much less everyone who works at that one company. I'm not sure anyone would survive that scrutiny.

<comment><USER3> Sure thing, send me over some links of things you think frame the 2008 Financial crisis in a better light.

I pasted a quote from an article, provided the source and gave my opinion of JPMorgan, staring with the words... "I guess..." If that is spin to you, I don't know what to say.

The funny thing is that I gather you didn't read the article. The last paragraph actually talks about how Dimon was spinning the whole thing all along:

Dimon had harsh words, of course, for the Obama administration over his belief that his bank was treated unfairly by the Department of Justice in the $13 billion settlement. Instead of penalizing the bank for its bad behavior, Dimon argued, it should be celebrated for helping to save the financial system from its further free fall. That may be true to some degree, but Wagner's 92-page draft complaint puts the wood to Dimon's spin machine and shows that he and his colleagues at the bank were no different than the rest of the Wall Street banksters who received big bonuses for packaging up mortgages they knew would not be repaid into securities that they could sell to investors for big fees. Dimon's pay package for 2013, the year of the big government settlement, was $20 million—a raise of 74 percent from the year before.

So, sure, enlighten me friend.

<comment><USER4> >Wall Street banksters who received big bonuses for packaging up mortgages they knew would not be repaid

Who underwrite the loans? Who recommended the loans be written?

The whole thing is complicated. A single article is nothing more than a start.

I'm ony phone, but I highly suggest researching each party and their justifications for their actions and make your own conclusions rather than expecting some external source to spoon feed it to you.

<comment><USER3> It's my opinion that big banks are good for nothing. yes, I do believe people should take a little moral inventory before joining an institution that has a history of penalties like this:

Top 10 Primary Offense Types toxic securities abuses $13,450,500,000

mortgage abuses $5,411,600,000

banking violation $4,012,350,341

anti-money-laundering deficiencies $2,161,000,000

False Claims Act $614,000,000

foreign exchange market manipulation $550,000,000

consumer protection violation $520,500,000

investor protection violation $434,054,000

securities issuance or trading violation $427,324,210

energy market manipulation $410,000,000

this is the top 10. That is around 27 billion in penalties for non-trivial violations.

You can download every one of these records here: [https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/jpmorgan-c...](https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/jpmorgan- chase)

<comment><USER4> So you agree with Steve Bannon. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying you're over generalizing. And you would never accept other generalizations like the one you're making.

For instance the democratic party is good for nothing because Anthony weiner is in jail for soliciting sex with a minor.

You could make that argument. Still too one sided.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does code documentation work in your company? - <AUTHOR> Do you generate code documentation at work?
Do you use sphinx or doxygen? (other alternatives?) or you use a separate wiki? How does code documentation kept in sync with the code?
Any other methods? What are the problems (with doxygen for example?).
Does your company have a good culture to encourage code documentation? <comment><USER2> I work in an academic setting and have contributed to a number of open source projects (GROMACS [1], LLVM [2], ns-3 [3], CP2K [4]), so I might not fit in the sample you are trying to ask. Regardless, here are the answers:

> Do you generate code documentation at work?

Yes.

> Do you use sphinx or doxygen? (other alternatives?) or you use a separate > wiki?

All three. :-) Sphinx is used for the tutorial-like documentation (including lectures intended for students [5], seems to be a quite common practice in the recent years [6]), but not for the API documentation; Doxygen is used for the API documentation. Sole exception to this combination is CP2K (which uses custom solutions for both).

Wiki is used like an internal notebook, and sometimes we clean up our notes and publish them for everyone to see (e.g. from my former lab [7]). The documentation migration effort in GROMACS [8] is another example of clean up and publish, where the content accumulated over the years in the wiki is being cleaned up and included in the documentation processed by Sphinx.

> How does code documentation kept in sync with the code?

With Doxygen you can't avoid not keeping it up to date since it prints the warnings while producing the documentation. With Sphinx, it's manual and far more tedious, but usually code reviews catch "you didn't document your new feature and/or UX change" situations. With wikis (at least in our case) it's even worse, since it's far away from the code and mostly just written down notes.

> Any other methods? What are the problems (with doxygen for example?)

Regarding Doxygen, CP2K maintainers decided against using it because the resulting look of the documentation for Fortran was sub-optimal. For C/C++, the project maintainers/contributors (including myself) are quite happy with the result. Haven't used it for other languages so far.

> Does your company have a good culture to encourage code documentation?

I would say yes, it's encouraged through code reviews on the projects.

Hope this helps.

[1] [http://www.gromacs.org/](http://www.gromacs.org/)

[2] [https://llvm.org/](https://llvm.org/)

[3] [https://www.nsnam.org/](https://www.nsnam.org/)

[4] [https://www.cp2k.org/](https://www.cp2k.org/)

[5] [https://lab.miletic.net/en/teaching/](https://lab.miletic.net/en/teaching/)

[6] [https://becksteinlab.physics.asu.edu/pages/courses/2013/SimB...](https://becksteinlab.physics.asu.edu/pages/courses/2013/SimBioNano/)

[7] [https://www.svedruziclab.com/wiki/Software](https://www.svedruziclab.com/wiki/Software)

[8] [https://redmine.gromacs.org/projects/gromacs/wiki/Documentat...](https://redmine.gromacs.org/projects/gromacs/wiki/Documentation_migration)</comment>


Six: Python 2 and 3 Compatibility Library - <AUTHOR> http://packages.python.org/six/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why you can't mix and match Python 2 and Python 3. I mean: Python can link C libraries and it can't link libraries from a different Python version? Having different languages coexist and call each other in an application is not a thing from the outer space.

Have an declaration at the top of the source file that states what Python version the source file is and/or use a versioned file extension and be done with it. If you want to take advantage of Python 3 features in a Python 2 source file, you'll have to upgrade the source file, that would be a given.

Maybe a Pythonista here will answer. But then, I've seen this mismatch between versions of other languages, too. Either language designers or I are missing something here.</comment>


How the Curiosity rover will land on Mars from a sky crane - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20013105-239.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheSpaceShot

<comment><USER2> Why use a sky crane when they've already proven they can get a great landing from one of those bouncing-ball type things? It seems like they decided to introduce additional points of failure for neat-o-ness.

<comment><USER2> Read further and answered my own questions ...

"Airbags were never an option for MSL, which is the size of a car and weighs 1,950 pounds, almost five times as much as Spirit and Opportunity (also known as the Mars Exploration Rovers). Airbags cannot be scaled up enough to support MSL and still fit inside the launcher. And previous airbag-equipped landers made unsteered, ballistic entries, resulting in a relatively large landing zone "footprint," or error ellipse, limiting the number of possible landing sites."</comment></comment>


Show HN: Touchables – your smart daily helpers - <AUTHOR> http://www.touchables.io

<comment><USER2> Some comments:

I have 2 children who need to take meds and would want to buy 2 x medmanager.

\- Maybe allow customers to choose more than 1 of the same touchable type.

\- Can these be mix/matched across multiple devices ? Can touchables pair with multiple clients ? Can you change the pairing ? More info would be useful

Love the video!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :) It works with multiple stickers of the same type. You can simply assign them nicknames.

Basically once a touchable is used for the first time, it is assigned to one person. If another person taps it, the first person then can add the other person as friend and they can jointly use it and see the status in their dashboard.

If a person has an iphone, they can also be added via an email address and get email infos about the status. All text is done in a sweet and humourous fashion.

The video was so much fun to create. Many companies in this space are big telcos, so we thought we have to do something that noone else can do :)

As tech we are using NFC, which we are not highlighting, because it will be ubiquituous like Bluetooth sooner than later and the name itself scares off many people. The interesting part is that non-geek people who have tried them, believe they are the same value as 'Tile', etc...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This all started as the winner of a Google and Allianz insurance sponsored hackathon in Munich and won us flights and tickets to San Fran and I/O.

At the time it was a solution for elderly's people safety, but it kind of pivoted a few times towards becoming a more gadgety solution. It's all bootstrapped, we have had lots of fun with things such as the video and now we really want to know what people think about it. The biggest lesson we have is that the hardest thing is to communicate it without getting too complicated. When people try it out, they get it right away.

<comment><USER3> Two things immediately jump out at me - you need English localization, and your carousel is currently broken (no matter which touchable button I select, the text is always for the car button - running Chrome on OSX.)

As for the idea: I think it's quite neat, I think physical things people have to deal with 'in the real world' work better for behaviour modification than just notifactions which are easy to dismiss.

Is this out 'in the wild' yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. I need to check my localisation with a proxy. It's a bit tricky with Appengine. It is live and ready to ship, but we have made the touchables mostly for some company trials, but wanted to try out if we can convince some consumers :)

<comment><USER3> You might get a lot out of Nir Eyal's book, Hooked: How to build habit forming products[1]. It would be interesting to see how the lessons there apply to physical products like yours.

[1][http://smile.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming- Produ...](http://smile.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products- ebook/dp/B00NW01MKM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423687064&sr=8-1&keywords=Nir+Eyal)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vs Code Hypnotize - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/97529 <comment><AUTHOR> just recently discovered while looking at vs code diff. if you look at those lines, they do not seem to be straight, unless you look at small part of it due to optical illusion. you can also fixate your look at that area, and move your head towards screen and back, look what happens! hilarious.</comment>


Chrome-like Moving Highlight With CSS Gradients - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/moving-highlight/

<comment><USER2> Please don't start using this. It already bad enough with the Chrome. It's a nice effect but I don't consider it particularly nice nor user friendly eye candy.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea has been around in game user interfaces for a while. The mouse-trail dhtml animations were a plague, but this pertains to single elements, and may help elevate their importance in the visual hierarchy.

<comment><USER3> The element highlight has a purpose. It tells the user: You are currently hovering _this_ and your next mouse-click will activate it.

How does highlighting only part of the hovered element help to "elevate" anything?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's the point?

You either apply this affect as subtly as chrome; then it does nothing for usability (neither positive, nor negative).

Or you apply it as visible as in this blog post; then it's distracting and hurts usability.

Either way I can't see why you'd bother. Unless you're a bored google chrome engineer...

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't notice it on Chromium

<comment><USER5> It doesn't work for me on the article page itself, but it you view the demo (link at the bottom of the article) then you can see it working.

<comment><USER6> I think he's referring to the effect in the UI itself. I don't see it either, so it's probably limited to some platforms.

<comment><USER5> Ah fair point, I don't use Chromium so hadn't noticed whether or not the effect was present.

The page itself confused me though as I thought the inline images were meant to be working demos and they did nothing for me until I went to the demo page itself.

[edit] fixed typo</comment></comment></comment></comment>


1Password 7 Is a Paid Upgrade - <AUTHOR> https://support.1password.com/explore/whats-new-mac/ <comment><USER2> Just checked the App and it looks like you can't sign-up using the free option anymore.</comment>


The People's PRISM - <AUTHOR>

This is a call to all U.S. and international internet companies, internet services, and websites to make public the browsing habits of anyone in the U.S. government.
We know the source of a web request based on the IP address.  We know what IP blocks are owned by the U.S. government.  The collective global internet community should publicly publish the logs of all requests originating from U.S. government IP addresses.
Imagine if pornhub.com made public a list of all URLs browsed where the requests originated from IP addresses used by the U.S. government.  Imagine if wikipedia had a realtime public feed and log of URLs being browsed by IP addresses from the Pentagon.  Imagine if email relays publicly published the "meta data" of all emails that went through their system that originated from or went to any @.gov address.
If we can't prevent them from looking at our "meta data", we can collectively do the same to them by making their "meta data" public.  Maybe then, they'll understand why this is a bad idea.
Collectively, we can be the ones who watch the watchers. <comment><USER2> This is done in Sweden by the project Creeper[1]. People embedd images on their websites and the site list all the ip adresses, belonging to the state, that visit those websites.

There is also a similar project, mediacreeper, for IP belonging to the press [2].

[1] [http://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste](http://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste) [2] [http://mediacreeper.com/latest](http://mediacreeper.com/latest)

<comment><USER3> Something similar exists in Germany, I forgot the name though.</comment></comment>


Adblock Plus offers workaround to block Facebook ads again - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/11/adblock-plus-offers-workaround-to-block-facebook-ads-again/ <comment><USER2> Any word on when uBlock will have it?

<comment><USER3> According to the article right now, if you use EasyList?</comment></comment>


How much does it cost to start selling your indie games? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tametick.com/2012/09/how-much-does-it-cost-to-start-selling.html

<comment><USER3> I upvote to get this discussed even if I think the article .. lacking

* the 30% the 'stores' charge needs to be given a lot more scrutiny

* you can go do other ways e.g. PayPal, Moneybookers (credit cards etc). And the big fish Minecraft went that root when it started small

Ludum Dare October challenge is:

Finish a game — Take it to market — Earn $1

[http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/09/27/announcing- october...](http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/09/27/announcing-october- challenge-2012/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right about the 30%, luckily first commenter on the blog mentioned that.

About selling direct - that's exactly my point w.r.t. the new stuff on mac (gatekeeper) & win 8. If you give the user an "uncertified" exe a popup appears telling them it's dangerous & you can't even easily dismiss it - <USER2> only buttons on win 8 are "close" and "delete". To get to "run anyway" you need to drill into "more options"!

<comment><USER3> what about steam?

<comment><AUTHOR> They take an undisclosed amount rumored to be %30-40. I never managed to get my games on steam so I don't know exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What the World Can Learn from Hongkong [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10933-what_the_world_can_learn_from_hongkong <comment><USER3> There is a lesson here about the push for privacy laws. If you can't trust the government, why trust that they would uphold any law about your privacy? Privacy has to be established from a technological perspective - <USER2> encryption, don't put information on the Internet if you don't want it compromised. Laws require a government that will respect them.

<comment><USER4> There has to be a multi-pronged approach. The central prong is organized public will, without which neither laws nor appropriate tech will be adopted. Governments may violate people's privacy in spite of laws, but without such laws governments will absolutely do so with impunity. Visible evidence of a government breaking its own laws to harm its people draws more citizens to the fight and helps move regime change forward. That being said, everyone should still use the strongest encryprion available for all communications, including boring and unremarkable communication.

<comment><USER5> This posts seems to assume laws and government are separate.

In reality, government makes the laws. They're an expression and codification of the ruler's will.

<comment> shaki-dora The quickest way to autocracy is pretending there's no difference between it and democracy.

This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.

Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens _not to be corrupt_ : why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?

<comment><USER6> That may have been true in the past, now it's one more fiction. The real three powers are: the rich (which decide laws in the background), the politicians (gov+parliments that use the existing institutions to push laws decided by the rich) and the media (that create and drive public opinion and chose the politicians). The first two classes are not truly separated anymore, and one may pass from to another (best example is being France's president Macron).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Youtube link:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jobckq4USM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jobckq4USM)

TBH myopic analysis that doesn't acknowledge subsequent protests from around the world have tried to incorporate HK tactics are getting crushed left and right. Military intervention, hundreds dead, media and internet black outs, to the utter indifference of western media or public sentiment. There's a slide acknowledging other protests at 1:25:30, "If you care any of these things, then you should care about it in more than one place". But we know this is demonstrably not true.

Operationally, there's not much to learn except that HK police and the mainland has been forced to be extremely lenient and permissible (by most relative standards) due to structural factors like HKs unique geopolitical position, the geographic strengths of a city state, or other political constraints that put comprehensive crackdown off the table for HK. The operational lessons, which this talk is about, will be clearer over the next few years. I surmise the the government will be able to exploit the massive data collection on the ground after things settle down. Retaliation will come in a variety of ways i.e. employment opportunities and other algorithmic biases. Multinationals in HK are already reluctant to hire locals because it may jeopardize their operations in the mainland (like Cathay).

<comment><USER8> > _I surmise the the government will be able to exploit the massive data > collection on the ground after things settle down._

True, the deadliest enemies are invisible.

I bet that at this moment at least 10 universities in mainland China are using the massive surveillance data being collected (security cameras, phone location data, ...) to figure out how to track protestors back.

And even if there is no true leader, surely there are a bunch of people who are more lider-ish than the rest. Some networking analysis, like NSA pioneered surely can be applied here.

China has the time advantage, Hong Kong is not going anywhere. A brutal Chinese intervention would be the worse possible mistake for China to make, it will be hard for the West to ignore that. But keep the policing relatively low key, and the other countries don't have an in angle.

<comment><USER9> The operational tactics and technological tools China develops by experimenting on HK are probably going to be packaged and sold to foreign governments. If HK is pacified successfully, a few years later there'll be Chinese consultants selling their services around the world, and exhibit A of their marketing decks will be HK. This could be a massive cash cow that'll give China a high tech product they could sell that Western democracies can't or won't develop. In fact, they might even be customers. Imagine being able to maintain a veneer of democracy while using data analysis and surveillance to select dangerous individuals to disappear. Or passing laws to restrict the liberties of citizens secure in the knowledge that the resulting protest intensities can be predicted and managed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I enjoyed the part where all the different types of protestor 'classes' were explained like it was a video game.

</comment><comment><USER11> can't China gov just watch this and use it against the protesters?

</comment><comment><USER12> This talk should also have a Mandarin translation.

<comment><USER13> Translations are contributed by volunteers: [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2019/wiki/index.php/Static:Tr...](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2019/wiki/index.php/Static:Translation#As_a_Translation_Angel)

I don't think they usually add translations after the talk, but I guess they wouldn't outright reject it if someone provided a Mandarin translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Add note that the actual content is an audio clip.

<comment><USER13> It's actually a video of the talk. If you only get audio, something's going wrong on your end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Where's this girl from? Intrigued about the accent. Is it a German accent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Somehow. Her grandfather was from Hongkong but she was born in Germany. As far as I know she has been living in Asia for a couple of years and studied in Oxford and at the MIT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The lesson I learned from Hong Kong is you will never take the 2nd Amendment from me. Just come and try and take them. Take a cursory glance at what is going on in VA right now to know what is in store for you if you do.

<comment><USER8> This line of thinking never made sense to me.

How are you going to defend against SWAT teams with whatever guns you have?

Organize a militia? Then how do you defend against the army?

<comment><USER17> We've run this experiment several times and gotten the same result every time. Hence the forever wars. Hillbillies with guns and IDEs have shown to be pretty effective against militaries.

<comment><USER8> Against foreign militaries.

Even if you are right, that would imply that the US would enter a protacted civil war that would impoverish everyone. I have a feeling popular support would swing away from the millitias very quickly, just how long do you think millenials will survive without their avocados, yoga classes and fair trade locally brewed artisanal beer.

<comment><USER17> > Against foreign militaries

I'm not sure why you started with this. Your odds are way better if it's against your own military, especially in the West. There's going to be a ton of defectors. Have you met anyone from the South? Those same people who are extremely anti government are usually vets. This isn't just speculation either, there's very clear examples.

But something people constantly forget is that you can't rule the dead. People are a resource. You need them to produce your economy, make your food, tax, etc. But there's also an argument here on the converse side, to make your people rich to make your ruling class even richer. But short term thinking...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What the world can learn from Hongkong, is that overpopulation kills democracy. It is the same story, all over the world.

<comment><USER19> I really don't think that people in Hong Kong get their democracy taken away because there are too many people on the planet, or in the area around HK. Why do you believe that overpopulation is the cause?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's in French :(

<comment><USER21> It isn't. There is a German, a French and a English version of the talk online and the original Audio seems to be in English (note the gear icon on the lower right corner of the video).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> that the government is not your friend?

(That I can do even without understanding any German)

<comment><AUTHOR> The talk was held in English. The website seems to push the wrong audio track in some cases but you can change that with the little gear icon at the bottom of the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If anyone has tips on how to build privacy-preserving social media without being marked a Nazi, a terrorist, a pedophile or a totally regular suicide I'm listening.

Edit: I'm totally serious, even Signal barely manages to exist, is blocked from federating for reasons of the preservation of the developers' personal safety and has publically been compared to the KKK by FBI officials. It's not a fun or bright situation but it is how things are right now.

<comment> shaki-dora Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship.

Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.

As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.

<comment><USER24> It would really be great if privacy and anti-censorship advocates could solve the problem of extremism! Seems like a bit of a tall order, though.

What you're really proposing, IMO, is this:

Privacy and anti-censorship advocate (PA): I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we're trying to curb extremism by requiring messaging services to police their users. The problem is real, but the methods being used to address it are completely antithetical to the fundamental principles of free societies. I want to let people talk to each other on-line without anyone listening in on them or stopping them from saying whatever they want to say.

You: OK, you can do that if you can make sure no Nazis can use your service to further their agenda.

PA: That seems impossible, given the goals I've stated. Furthermore, this is precisely what I meant with "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

IOW, I don't think there's a technical solution to be found here. This is a fundamental ideological divide, and needs to be dealt with as such.</comment></comment></comment>


Garage opens doors for self-service auto repairs - <AUTHOR> http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_14167285

<comment><USER2> Tom and Ray Magliozzi (from NPR's Car Talk in the US) did that in the early 1970s with a place called "Hacker's Haven." As I recall, they found it wasn't profitable. Most people needed help in fixing their car, and it was better to be a garage than to be a DIY repair shop.

</comment><comment><USER3> These types of shops are pretty common in the bicycling world.</comment>


Starlite – Unknown material that withstands 10,000 Celsius - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite <comment><USER2> Wow. With this material we could create satellites to orbit the sun and not burn.

Also cool that it's 90% organic material!</comment>


Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/fallout-76-day-one-patch-largerthe-game-itself-54gb <comment><USER2> The original version is apparently 45GB. I have no basis for saying this (I have not ever worked in the game industry), but my guess would be that this "patch" is really just the complete version that happens to be 11GB larger (which is still significant, but much less than implying there's 54GB of _additional_ content).

Put another way, let's say the actual delta between original and "patch" version is 20GB (11GB new + some changed stuff). There's two ways to ship this:

(1) Create a delta patch file that can be applied on top of the 45GB base version (20GB)

(2) Repackage the entire thing into a complete install (54GB)

If you do only (1), anyone installing for the first time after the "patch" version is released is downloading an extra 9GB and going through a longer installation process.

If you are expecting that only a small percentage of your total install base has downloaded the base game (45GB), it also really doesn't make sense to produce both (1) and (2): You're incurring extra dev and testing time to produce a package that saves you a tiny fraction of your overall bandwidth usage. You also end up with an install base that is partially installed fresh (2) and partially patched (1) which means subsequent updates also have to test _both_ scenarios -- and if you had a bug in applying the patch, you have an even harder time later to try reconcile it for the same reason.

If you do only (2), which is what I suspect this is, then anyone downloading _after_ its release just downloads the 54GB version. The small percentage of people with the initial version have to download an extra 30-ish GB, but it saves you (as the developer) a bunch of testing time and risk.

<comment><USER3> It's always amazed me how downright inefficient patching is, even though better algorithms have existing for literally decades. The typical implementation is that you have to re-download every single resource that's changed, even if the resource is gigabytes large and only a bit in it has changed.

Someone should calculate how many petabytes of Internet transfer capacity are wasted annually solely due to bad algorithms used in performing software updates. It'd be a surprisingly large figure.

<comment><USER4> One important issue is that if the patch program goes wrong, you can easily end up with customers having broken installations that you _can 't fix_. The patching software is how you distribute updates, so it _has_ to work. So there's strong incentive to deploy simple techniques with fewer failure modes as opposed to optimizing away every last byte of network traffic.

Firefox has historically shied away from complicated patch algorithms for this reason among others. (To be fair, of course, we're also dealing with several orders of magnitude less data than AAA games are...)

<comment><USER5> _you can easily end up with customers having broken installations that you can 't fix_

I sometimes wonder if games were distributed on cartridge again if they would be more thoroughly tested before being released.

Plus, they'd load a brazillion times faster.

<comment><USER6> TBH, I think that cartridges in this case could be replaced by USB thumb drive keys... effectively a 128GB USB drive with a hardware key, and maybe even an embedded OS. Updates download and apply into the Key. Take it with you, run on any common x86 system, it could be great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rule of thumb with ANY Bethesda game is just wait 6-12 months after release, and MAYBE it won't delete your saved game. No one ever learns with these guys. Cool games, horribly buggy for most of its early life.

<comment><USER8> They patch some bugs[0], but they don't patch the shallow characters and mediocre writing.

I played Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 side by side. By the end of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been mostly playing the same game for 10 years (all of Todd Howard's games since TES4[1]). I almost stopped playing near the end. Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played. Todd Howard has lots of work to do if I'm going to get another one of his games.

I'm watching Cyberpunk 2077 intently.

[0] They leave the "entertaining" ones in. It's usually up to modders to fix what they can. [https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-S...](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda- Sometimes-Doesnt-Fix-Entertaining-Bugs)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works)

<comment><USER9> What did you think of Fallout 3 and New Vegas in terms of writting? It's been a long time, but I found them very entertaining. Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator.

Then again, there was a large gap between trying Fallout 3/NV and Fallout 4, so maybe my perception changed.

<comment><USER8> > Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator.

Not quite. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas.

Fallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. The main quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a pathetic boss fight. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as one dimensional with only one purpose in life. There are some cool side stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part.

New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. Who's good or bad is murky. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. Take for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor. There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you significantly participate in them. The main story branches off into about 4 very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4.

Back in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas[0]. I remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet!

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Breath of the Wild has a huge open world and was, in comparison widely bug- free when it came out. Same goes for most Nintendo games. Also when it comes to _pure gameplay_ they are much more polished than all the GTAs and RDR2s. What are they doing differently?

A little insight here, not sure whether this is the full story: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda- br...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-breath-of- the-wild-avoided-a-lot-of-unnecessary-bugs-through-careful-planning/)

Did the other recent big open world games (Witcher 3, Horizon) have similar issues when they were released?

<comment><USER11> In what ways do you feel BotW was more polished than RDR2? Genuinely asking. My only real gripe with RDR2 is the sluggish controls (by design in a Rockstar game) and the lack of fast travel late game.

RDR2 definitely has more going on than BotW. BotW is large, but mostly empty.

<comment><USER10> I believe we are on the same page and think you have just missed my "when it comes to gameplay" here. The overall gameplay (of which controls and control flow are a huge element) of Rockstar Games titles always had a lot to wish for. Been wondering for some time how a AAA company got away with it for so long, it rarely ever gets mentioned in reviews.

<comment><USER11> On that note, if Bethesda releases yet another TES with that God awful first person battle system I am going to... well I suppose I just won't buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I get that this is singling out Fallout 76, but this is not that uncommon of a practice in the modern era of console gaming. Heck, I think even the new Black Ops 4 PS4 game only came with a small portion of the game on the physical disk, and you had to download the rest.

For what it's worth, Playstation does have stuff in their policy that says something along the lines that games that don't have online have to be on the blue ray console physical disk, but since this is an online only game, it's okay for the disk not to have everything.

I don't love this policy, but as someone who rarely even buys physical versions of the game anymore, I don't really think it's that big of a deal. The game is online only, it's not that crazy that you have to download stuff on day 1. /shrug

EDIT: Plus, a lot of this comes from the publishers breathing down the game devs necks to get the game out ASAP, esp before the holidays. So they put super tight deadlines on the games, and then that requires the devs to work out all the bugs and final code pretty much all the way up until the launch date. It's not like the past where you had to get it right on the first try for the physical copy because there was no way for a user to download a patch.

<comment><USER13> That reminds me of a recent Visual Studio 2GB patch just to change all branding for VSO to Azure DevOps.

<comment><USER14> They should build a patch to update their documentation online, because they change the names of services so often and rarely go through and update docs, so you'll find confusingly outdated instructions and references without links when troubleshooting.

I love VS Code, but I'm really happy I'm mostly off of MS for development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Almost 20 years old, and still relevant: [https://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21)

<comment><USER16> A reference to Half-Life 2 perhaps? That 120MB mandatory launch day patch was painful on dial-up!

<comment><USER17> Half-Life 1, you mean? 2 didn't come out until 2004, I think, and this comic's from '98.

<comment><USER18> A comic shockingly ahead of its time. While there were an increasing number of games that were borderline unplayable without their Day 1 patch, I think that comic was just extrapolating the trend. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that game boxes came with nothing more than a CD key in them.

Back around when that comic was written, Computer Gaming World had a policy of only reviewing the unpatched versions of games. That became increasingly untenable and they eventually had to scrap the policy.

The parent probably figured it was Half-Life 2 because the HL2 launch was a disaster. It was one of the first games requiring online activation and the servers were completely overloaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> ah the bloated fix. As an engine mechanic, it reminds me of the nearly criminal level of disposability in japanese cars.

I once had to service an acura with a recall for failed half shaft seals on the drivetrain. no big deal, about an hour of labor and a trip through the carwash but the computer in the service tech office kept telling me the part was on order 2-3 weeks.

2 weeks go by and there is an enormous fragile package on my workbench. It is an entire carbon fiber driveshaft assembly for the vehicle im working on, with a replacement axle shaft. Both are required to be installed, with old parts sent back to the guys at the factory. now my labor is 4-6 hours with an alignment, balance and a test drive because some factory worker decided picking up a final product was simpler than picking out a part from that assembly.

I bet the Fallout 76 change is the same. Massive CI, its already being tested at the final assembly level, just reinstall everything and dont worry about it.

<comment><USER11> >now my labor is 4-6 hours with an alignment, balance and a test drive because some factory worker decided picking up a final product was simpler than picking out a part from that assembly.

Sounds like money in your pocket.

<comment><USER20> There is more to life than money in your pocket.

<comment><USER11> Sure... but while you're at work and being paid by the hour what does that matter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wonder if they fixed that the gamespeed is tied to the FPS [https://streamable.com/xd87p](https://streamable.com/xd87p) You look down = less to render = more FPS = you run faster.

<comment><USER22> It's not fixed. You can find videos about this on youtube.

<comment><USER21> Guess that's the price for using Gamebryo in 2018...

<comment><USER23> They're using Gamebryo for TESVI...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I remember downloading Xilinx FPGA tools some years ago. You HAD to download 14.1.0 (or whatever) first, at 6GB, and then get the patch from that to 14.1.1 (another 6GB), and then to 14.1.2 (guess how many gigabytes!). They also provided a combined download to go directly from 14.1.0 to 14.1.2... which was 12GB. Solid.

</comment><comment><USER25> This sounds like the experience my kids had when they got their XBox One last Christmas. It took literally 2 hours before we could play anything on it.

Software is now "ship it quick and fix it later" and that's wrong.

<comment><USER26> Ha! You expect that from a console, but I just bought a tv, and it had to fucking _update_ before I could use it. And on top of that it wanted me to create an account. For a TV!

<comment><USER27> burn it with fire

<comment><USER25> Totally agree. I don't actually have a Smart TV now. I've got a dumbass TV and it's actually fast and reliable for once!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And I'm still working for a patch for Fallout 4 as it just closes when I enter any key in the main menu only if I have internet connection. When I unplug my computer or disable the network card, all works. I can enable it again when a save is loaded. Internet is full of people complaining about that for over a year or two... and still nothing happens, there is even no official workaround information.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does Blizzard/Activision do their patching? In WoW, the game will go from red (patching) to yellow (playable) usually before half of the patch is downloaded and they are just modifying existing files that may be 10+GB. The patches are usually quite small by comparison. (50MB to a frew hundred MB)

<comment><USER30> 1\. Blizzard uses torrents where people downloading the patch also act like P2P seeders (you can control the download/upload speeds).

2\. Assets are bundled via the zip like mechanism, and individual "zone maps" are separated by hard loading screens. If you travel from 1 continent to another in WoW you get a had loading screen as assets are unloaded, and reloaded.

3\. Which continent you log into is the only one you _need_ data for, so as you log in the client can prioritize certain assets higher then others.

4\. Blizzard/Activision have a lot of experience with this. In 2008 blizzard had 10mil + players downloading 4GiB+ patches within 24hours so they've had a while to tune and make adjustments as this is part of their core customer experience.

5\. Large publishers don't general optimize for this, because the people who whine about it largely already gave you their money and aren't likely to refund/return (in some avenues it is impossible).

<comment><USER29> That makes sense. Thankyou! I can see why non subscription games would not bother with doing this. Maybe they just minimize their cost using CDN's.

<comment><USER31> They don't do it because creating such a system that works well is a very, very hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The 1TB SSD I bought for gaming in my new computer suddenly feels very small.

<comment><USER33> Destiny 2 was released for free a while ago.

I gave it a pass because it requires 100+ GB for a full installation.

For one game.

<comment><USER34> It's still free, and you can redeem it to your Blizzard account just by opening the Blizzard app.

[https://news.blizzard.com/en- us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-...](https://news.blizzard.com/en- us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-pc-free-on-battle-net-through-november-18)

<comment><USER33> It's also still 100GB.

I have a 500GB drive for my games. I can't justify burning 20% of it for a single game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is ridiculous, companies and developers have to start taking some pride in their software. Games and software packages do not need to be 1/10th the size of a high end SSD.

<comment><USER36> Isn't most of the size in a modern game artistic assests like textures, dialog, etc.?

That said, I don't understand how bug fixes can be so big, because presumably the aforementioned art files would change substantially in the case of software fixes.

Assuming that I'm mot wrong about the proportion of a modern game being art, that lends credence to the idea mentioned elsewhere in this thread that there was straight-up missing content in the original release.

<comment><USER37> The way that Gamebryo content files work means that as you change more bits, there is an increasing chance that you will need to download the whole content file.

<comment><USER38> Didn't Bethesda stop using Gamebryo a long time ago?

<comment><USER37> Nope, just a fork and rename

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> And this is after the first day of the Beta on PC they required players to download the whole game again. I cancelled my pre-order after I figured out I bought the Physical Disk version from Amazon, but I'm not entirely convinced to buy the digital download I meant to get anymore.

I really didn't get enough time to play during Beta (often were during times I had appointments or work), and while I would see players like Shroud having tons of fun with friends , only a small number of my friends play on PCs and few of those will get Fallout76. There were a lot of bugs which I hadn't seen, but also I wasn't convinced this game is worth it.

On the other hand some of the gameplay I saw from Shroud showed that complaints of quests being boring and enemies being too weak, while they might have been true in the beginner areas, were not problems if you simply went to the right areas of the map.

<comment><USER40> Bad news: the physical disc is supposedly just a download code, so you'll be pulling 50+GB regardless.

Day 1 patch or no, I don't like the practice of the physical media just being a Steam/Uplay/Bethesda installer with a download code for the game.

<comment><USER41> This seems like some sneaky way to push out a couple more sprints of dev time while shipping 'physical copies'

<comment><USER34> When I got Portal 2 on disc in 2011, putting it in my computer prompted me to download Steam so I could get it there. It's not like this is anything new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Today we announced the size of our new game as being around 8GB. Someone responded with 'that sounds a bit small'.

</comment><comment><USER43> Turn tape over to side 2 and press play

</comment><comment><USER44> If you're a big publisher, what's the cost for something like this?

<comment><USER45> And as a corollary - what does the cost look like considering it's being served by Bethesda directly and not by Steam, as would be typical for a AAA game?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> just a reminder: if you read the small print your ISP probably has a monthly bandwidth cap after which they start charging you more. 54GB is probably a significant fraction.

<comment><USER47> If it's Comcast Xfinity, you'll get a text, email, phone call, and JavaScript injected into non-http sites at 70%, 80%, 90%, and beyond.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> You mean they took the "BETA" event, found bugs and patched said bugs? On the first day of OFFICIAL release! NO! That's impossible! Why would they do something like that!?!? Everyone knows BETA means 5 years of an incomplete game that you have to pay early on...

Seriously, they were pretty honest and upfront about their Beta and did it in the truest sense. "There are bugs in the game! It's total trash!". Yea... that's why you run betas... to find the bugs. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

More than likely there was an issue with their patch tool too, thus it's a whole new download. Haven't bought the game yet, but I see nothing they're doing as "ridiculous".

<comment><USER49> I think the "Ridiculous" part is the trend of shipping a physical copy of the game with a giant patch of all the stuff that wasn't tested/ready in time for the disc to to go print.

If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a redemption code for the digital download version?

<comment><USER50> If you have multiple people in a household, each with their own Live/PSN/whatever account, you can buy one physical disc and it unlocks the game for everyone in the household. If you buy the digital version, it's locked to only whichever account bought it.

That's why I still prefer physical versions of games. Both me and my wife have our own separate accounts on the services.

<comment><USER51> PSN/Xbox Live unlocks it for the _console_ (as well as the user). I have 4 accounts on my PS4, and they can all access content purchased by the other accounts.

<comment><USER50> Hmm, something is not right with our setup then, because I have absolutely been blocked from playing games my wife has bought on her account on our PS4.

<comment><USER52> You have to set your particular console as your PSN account's "primary" console. When a console is set as your primary console, any other accounts on that console can use software that you have bought using your PSN account. However, I think only one account can have a particular console set as their "primary" console at a time, so if your PS4 is your account's primary console, then it cannot be your wife's account's primary console, meaning if she buys software, your account cannot access it.

[https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/act...](https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/activation.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Does it support HDR on PC? I haven't been able to figure this out anywhere online.

<comment><USER54> I don't think so. I played last night and my TV did not automatically switch to HDR mode and there is nothing in the settings that indicates it can be toggled either. Bummer. The new lighting is really nice though. Huge improvement over FO4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Day 1 patch notes:

        Replaced entire engine with a new one that is not terrible

<comment><USER56> Unfortunately, this is not the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Fallout 4 was a disgrace in terms of quality. This seems to be carrying on the tradition.</comment>


Show HN: Valence, Declarative Performance for Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://valence.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am one of the folks working on Valence, i'd love feedback on what we are doing.

Valence attempts to solve for performance management by giving folks a declarative way of setting performance objectives and having a controller go and meet those objectives. Though the Kubernetes autoscalers allow something like this, we wanted to build something that is higher level so that folks wouldn't have to worry about the details of analyzing their applications, instrumenting them, and coming up with the optimial autoscaler thresholds and configs.

Under the hood, Valence is a simple feedforward control system that learns the dynamics of an application - forecasts its load and applies the optimial controls in order to continually meet those objectives. We have found it pretty effective at reducing cost and performance violations so now we are launching it to a wider audience to get feedback and start working on extending Valences effectiveness in other operational environments and other types of performance objectives.</comment>