Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.

Well, you’ve had a lucky few months off. Our three just did not stop this year.

If your cat could explain to ours how to either eat all of the mouse or none of the mouse, that would be amazing. I don’t mind them feeding on low-carbon organic meals hand-prepared by local artisans, the hipsters. But I do mind stepping in all the bits and pieces that they didn’t care to finish.

Should probably run it quite well. BB was ‘designed for 30 fps’ and you’ll get more than that. Certainly run it better than it does on PS4, anyway.

Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.

It doesn’t take too much of a graphics card to push a ten-year old game about, but you need quite a CPU to handle the emulation. I’ve just upgraded from a Ryzen 7 / 2700X (which struggled a bit, kept 30 fps though) to a Ryzen 9 / 5900XT, which does it quite well. Ironically, the RAM crisis seems to have made CPU upgrades a bit more affordable, since not so many people are buying either.

Higher resolutions need a fair amount of RAM, but we’re talking “a fair amount of RAM compared to a PS4” - if you’ve a few gigabytes of system and graphics card RAM, that should be plenty.

The licensing isn’t particularly difficult for Bloodborne - Sony own it, and their video game publishing arm is still a going concern. I doubt there’s any technical problem, since it’s on the same engine as Dark Souls 3, and that’s multi-platform. Could probably recompile it for PC and release it tomorrow, if they wanted to.

From consider it one of their masterpieces, and want to do any ‘HD’ remake themselves. They’ve had quite a few offers (I understand) by other companies who’d like to do it, but I think they’re aiming higher than unlocking 60 fps and a quick upres of the textures.

Sony have a bit of a complicated relationship with ‘primarily single player games’ and ‘multiplatform ports’. Since Xbox appears to be dying, they’ll have the only next-gen walled garden in town. Why share, when they could sell systems?

Any consolation, ShadPS4 can run BB at 4K / 60fps right now, if you want it? Need a bit of a beast of a PC, but can confirm you can play it all the way through, not too many issues.

Or that it’s the only link to the image; you just own one of the links.

I’ve installed both Arch (systemd) and Void (runit) on the same laptop as an experiment to see whether you could have them both coexisting on the same filesystem. (Which you can - main difficulty is keeping their kernel names separate in /boot.) There was very little difference between them in time-to-desktop. Arch was faster, if anything. And I run more services on a desktop than I would on a server.

Choosing init scripts over systemd is fine for philosophical reasons or if you prefer it for maintenance, but speed isn’t an issue. Init scripts are simpler, but systemd goes to great efforts to start things in parallel. Critical servers should be load-balanced and redundant anyway so that you can restart them for updates; whether they take a second longer to start-up doesn’t matter.

Maximum settings at 4K = rock-steady 144 fps. Not in power-saving mode, however! Rig is a Ryzen 9 5900XT cpu paired with a RX6700XT gpu, so probably higher-end but not top-tier.

It is a truly exceptional engine, that’s for sure. Have you seen Adrian Courrèges’ breakdown of a rendered frame? That tricks that it gets up to to keep things fast and smooth are really impressive.

Depending on the engine, some of those chunky 3D graphics have quite an appealing style. My gaming rig can render eg. Doom3 in 4K at 144 fps with no effort at all - power draw is the same as when the system is asleep. The super-smooth animations on chunky polygons look great, which was never feasible back in the day.

Shame Doom3 isn’t a better game - the strong art and engine don’t make up for the very mid gameplay.

“We’ve made a bang-average live service game that both costs money upfront and has ‘monetisation’ features built in. In addition, it’s in a somewhat niche hard-to-describe genre, has a nondescript name, and we pissed our advertising budget up the wall.”

Nice one, AWS. 100K players, easily.

Like you say, if you’re paying money upfront, you want it forever. From the initial “four player dungeon crawler” description, I thought they’d remade Gauntlet or something - I might be up for that, if it was made with love. Instead, they appear to have made an online collection of bonus levels from Spyro, with corporate-approved zaniness and 'tude that’s always asking you for your credit card details, and that they can shut down whenever they like. How about no?

That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.

AI is quite good at solving captchas; better than many humans. And it doesn’t really slow down the sloppers for them to set their machine running, come back in an hour and then solve a puzzle manually to submit it. Couple of minutes of work every day and they can still drown the world in bullshit.

Something needs to change, but I’m not convinced that would be enough…

Which is strange, because Azure’s documentation is complete dogshit.

We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure’s own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don’t exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they’ve a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it’s a cross section.)

The female ones don’t smell too bad - ‘rodenty’ but not too pungent.

The males are extremely whiffy. Very musky, akin to BO, gets into everything.

My grandad used to keep them as working ferrets, for flushing rabbits out of their warrens, and fed them on leftover rabbit carcasses. You could smell that from quite a distance.

The babies are incredibly cute - size of your thumb, very soft. The adults are also cute, but have sharp claws and a nasty bite when they’re annoyed. They’re faster than you might expect, too - can really cover the distance when they get their bounce on.

Not wearing his ring, just in case he meets a girl who wants to party later, the dog.

Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn’t be “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.