Oh, one of our customers' users deleted the /var directory on one of the servers we provided to them, because it was "taking up too much space on disk". That's where Postgres saves its DBs as well; wiped out weeks of work in production for them. This hits very close to home.

There's three regions missing here - region 0 is "worldwide", region 7 is "special purpose", Oscar screening DVDs and the like, and region 8 is "international waters" for cruise ships and things. You can set several regions on the same disk, to make a 2/4/5 and the like. Set each region as a bit, and you can store that in a single byte - that makes it very easy to flash the firmware on DVD players to decide which disks they can play. Aus/NZ will want content in English and Latin America will want Spanish or Portuguese, so the DVD consortium can still get up to their often-illegal, certainly immoral, price fixing and bullshit.

Really, fuck DVDs. So much potential in the increased capacity, and then it was mired in crap like this and "disabled user operations" so that you can't skip trailers. Time to raise the black flag and set sail for prosperous waters, me hearties.

The kernel option is mitigations=off, if you want to try adding it to your Grub command line? From the testing I've done, provides no benefits whatsoever - no more frames in games, compilation runs no quicker, battery life on a laptop is no better.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#Turn_off_CPU_exploit_mitigations

If you made memory access lines twice as wide, they'd take up more space. More space means (a) chips run slower, because it takes time for the electricity to get there (b) they'd be bigger and more expensive.

The main problem with 32-bit, as others have noticed, is that that's not really so much RAM. CPUs do addition and subtraction the way we were taught at school - 'carry the one', they've an overflow bit that's set when your sum doesn't fit in the columns. On 8-bit CPUs, we were always checking back when adding up large numbers. On 64-bit CPUs, we can deal with truly massive numbers anyway, it's not such a hassle. And they're so fast at doing sums anyway and usually waiting for memory, it's barely a hassle.

Moving to 128-bit would give us a truly minuscule, probably unmeasurable, benefit in exchange for significant downsides. We could make them, but it would be pointless.

Yeah; as a native and fairly well-educated speaker, I'm fucked if I can form the past participles of some of our verbs

If I swim across a river, is it now the swimmed river? Swum river? Swam river?

If I sneak into a room, have I sneaked? Snuck? Both sound wrong.

Didn't find anything ambiguous about 'costed', it works for me.

I think we owe it to the billionaires to let them have the inaugural ride; they've done so much for us.

Got this installed on all my work machines - if you're wanting to stick a screenshot on Jira or Slack with a couple of arrows, wavy lines, or a bit blurred out then it's dead quick and has just the functionality that you need. Yes, it's simple and lacks a lot of 'power tools'. Sometimes that's just what you need, tho.

Thought the text said that they were going to do Grimes. I'm up for some crimes, tho.

Nah, that there's an armsadillo. You can tell, because he has two.

Glad to see that "social media influencer" is a real job.

emerges from a brand you've probably never heard of

Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 / gen 3 as we speak. Great little laptop. I'd wanted something with a few more pixels than my previous machine, and there's a massive jump from bog-standard 1080p to extremely expensive 4K screens. Three megapixel screen at a premium-but-not-insane price, compiles code like a champion, makes an extremely competent job of 3D gaming, came with Linux and runs it all perfectly.

"Tuxedo Linux", which is their in-house distro, is Ubuntu + KDE Plasma. Seemed absolutely fine, although I replaced it with Arch btw since that's more my style. Presumably they're using Debian for the ARM support on this new one? This one runs pretty cold most of the time, but you definitely know that you've got a 54W processor in a very thin mobile device when you try eg. playing simulation games - it gets a bit warm on the knees. "Not x64" would be a deal-breaker for my work, but for most uses the added battery life would be more valuable than the inconvenience.

btw

Finest advice possible for any Linux sysadmin.

Any decent conductor is going to to vary the beat based on how long it takes for sound to fill the venue in question. Beethoven's choices for the music halls in Vienna might have made sense then, but not so much today.

One of the things that's always annoyed the conductors that I've worked with is that we always ignore the dynamics in his music. Beethoven's markings are expressive, subtle. And we always play his stuff louder than indicated.

Agreed. JSON solves:

• the 'versioning' problem, where the data fields change after an update. That's a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
• makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
• very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
• actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you've done the fast serialisation, anyway.

For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I'd probably never consider anything else.

I thought that it was encrypted if your home directory was encrypted? The impression that I got was that it was just a SQLite database stored in the clear. The user must certainly be able to make queries of that database in order for it to work, so even if it's hosted by a non-user service, malware running locally will still be able to exfiltrate the data.

Nice insight, thank you.

I can see that there will be a range of markets for these. Installing them in the desert (efficiency not as important as pure cost-per-watt, long-term stability very important) is not the same as installing them on your roof (limited space but fairly easy access, payback time dominated by efficiency) and so the 'customer' sweet point for these will not be the same as the 'industrial' one.

Stephen King's books tend to be both very long and contain a lot of internal monologue. That's very much not film-friendly. "Faithful" adaptions tend to drag and have a lot of tell-don't-show, which makes for a "terrible" film. Unfaithful ones tend to change and cut a lot, which makes them "terrible" adaptions. For instance, "The Shining" film has very little to do with the book, but is an absolutely phenomenal movie. King hated it.

"IT" the Tim Curry version has Tim Curry in it, who was absolutely fantastic. A lot of material from the book was cut out - I'm thinking it could be 80% or more. That includes the scene where the children have a gang bang in the sewer. Out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing, and it's never mentioned again if I remember correctly. That might make it a "terrible" unfaithful adaption, but you know something? I'm alright without seeing that.

Sorry if I was ambiguous - it was me that received a spectacular number of downvotes for a comment that I'd not think controversial in any way, and then realised that I might as well ignore all that because it doesn't matter here.

There's a few arseholes running bots that seem to downvote every post on a topic sometimes. Don't let that get you down - no point putting more thought into it than they did. Your opinion matters, dude (-ette), don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Once you've posted a comment that implies that China is imperfect in some way and received a truly spectacular number of downvotes, and then realised that it makes no difference whatsoever because Lemmy votes only affect your ego and nothing else, then you can move on. We aren't "the other website".