• 0 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldIs Matrix cooked?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    19 days ago

    AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment’s notice. We’re communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it’s what Lemmy’s licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they’d choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.



  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldwindows update
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    Variations of this meme get posted every week, but I’ve never experienced it, despite having had tens of grub updates murder-suicide the Windows boot loader and grub itself across five or six different machines. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to rebuild a Windows boot partition, but the frequency that I’m hit with this problem is one of the major reasons I avoid using Linux. Eventually I’m going to have to switch, but that’s driven mainly by Windows getting worse rather than any of the pain points I’ve had when trying to switch full time in the past having been fixed.






  • Thermal problems are much less likely to kill hardware than they used to be. CPU manufacturers have got much better at avoiding microfractures caused by thermal stress (e.g. by making sure that everything in the CPU expands at the same rate when heated) and failures from electromigration (where the atoms in the CPU move because of applied voltage and stop being parts of transistors and traces, which happens faster at higher temperatures). Ten or twenty years ago, it was really bad for chips to swing between low and high temperatures a lot due to thermal stress, and bad for them to stay at above 90°C for a long time due to electromigration, but now heat makes so little difference that modern CPUs dynamically adjust their frequency to stay between 99.0° and 99.9° under load by default. The main benefit of extra cooling these days is that you can stay at a higher frequency for longer without exceeding the temperature limit, so get better average performance, but unless your cooling solution is seriously overspecced, the CPU will be above 99.0° under load a lot of the time either way and the motherboard just won’t ramp the fan up to maximum.


  • The last time they had plenty of stock and cards people wanted to buy at the same time was the RX 200 series. They sold lots of cards, but part of the reason people wanted them was because they were priced fairly low because the cards were sold with low margins, so they didn’t make a huge amount of money, helping to subsidise their CPU division when it was making a loss, but not more.

    Shortly after this generation launched Litecoin ASIC mining hardware became available, so suddenly the used market was flooded with these current-generation cards, making it make little sense to buy a new one for RRP, so towards the end of the generation, the cards were sold new at a loss just to make space. That meant they needed to release the next generation cards to convince people to buy them, but as they were just a refresh generation (basically the same GPUs but clocked higher and with lower model numbers with only the top-end Fury card being new silicon) it was hard to sell 300-series cards when they cost more than equivalent 200-series ones.

    That meant they had less money to develop Polaris and Vegas than they wanted, so they ended up delayed. Polaris sold okay, but was only available as low-margin low-end cards, so didn’t make a huge amount of money. Vega ended up delayed by so long that Nvidia got an entire extra generation out, so AMD’s GTX 980 competitor ended up being an ineffective GTX 1070 competitor, and had to be sold for much less than planned, so again, didn’t make much money.

    That problem compounded for years until Nvidia ran into their own problems recently.

    It’s not unreasonable to claim that AMD graphics cards being in stock at the wrong time caused them a decade of problems.



  • As someone else said, installing things outside of Program Files is generally only necessary if they were made for XP or older, and the developers didn’t test on Vista or newer or read the bit of the Windows documentation that said not to write to an application’s installation directory because it might not work on future versions that was there since the early nineties. Regular Oblivion works fine in Program Files (although it makes it more of a pain to mod) and the Remaster was obviously made post-Vista.

    All that said, none of this is relevant because you’ve got the Windows App version, which uses a completely different system and works in a partial sandbox so doesn’t interact with the rest of the computer like a traditional program would.








  • People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

    The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.


  • That’s misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won’t notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there’s no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it’s not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.