I’m not sure where you’re getting that Nintendo sells at a loss. They don’t have amazing margins on hardware, but they don’t like selling at a loss. IIRC, commodity prices and a price drop meant the GameCube was briefly sold at a loss, but it wasn’t long, and it wasn’t by much.

Whatever else you can say about Nintendo, they are really good at managing manufacturing costs.

There’s a little wiggle track burned into PSX discs that’s impossible to duplicate with burners, and it won’t boot up unless it sees that. There’s workarounds that eventually came out, but console copy protection doesn’t have to last forever. It only has to last most of its primary life until the next gen comes out, and PSX managed that.

There was a project where the next console would have been the Genesis, 32X, and CD in one box with a new name. I don’t know if that would work, or if it’d be viewed as something of an in-between generation, like the Turbografx, and people ignore it.

It’s probably be easier to develop games for, unlike the Saturn. It’s not the only thing that held the Saturn back, but it didn’t help.

They have x86_64 models.

Yes, everyone forgets them. Mostly for good reasons.

Arm is better because there are more than three companies who can design and manufacture one.

Edit: And only one of the three x86 manufacturers are worth a damn, and it ain’t Intel.

Edit2: On further checking, VIA sold its CPU design division (Centaur) to Intel in 2021. VIA now makes things like SBCs, some with Intel, some ARM. So there’s only two x86 manufacturers around anymore.

Nope. There is an industry standard way of measuring latency, and it’s measured at the halfway point of drawing the image.

Edit: you can measure this through Nvidia’s LDAT system, for example, which uses a light sensor placed in the middle of the display combined with detecting the exact moment you create an input. The light sensor picks up a change (such as the muzzle flash in an fps) and measures the difference in time. If you were to make this work on a CRT running at NTSC refresh rates, it would never show less than 8.3ms when in the middle of the screen.

If you are measuring fairly with techniques we use against LCDs, then yes, CRTs have latency.

He mangles some of the pros and cons of CRTs towards the end.

They aren’t going to be indefinitely reliable. The phosphor goes bad over time and makes for a weaker image. Doubly so for color phosphors. Some of them are aging better than others, but that’s survivorship bias. We might be looking at the last decade where those old CRTs can still be in anything close to widespread use. Will probably be a few working examples here or there in private collections, of course.

CRTs do have latency, and this is something a lot of people get wrong. A modern flatscreen display can have better latency than CRTs when the hardware takes advantage of it.

The standard way of measuring latency is at the halfway point of the screen. For NTSC running at 60Hz (which is interlaced down to 30fps (roughly)), that means we have 8.33ms of latency. If you were to hit the button the moment the screen starts the next draw, and the CPU miraculously processes it in time for the draw, then it takes that long for the screen to be drawn to the halfway point and we take our measurement.

An LCD can have a response time of less than 2ms. That’s on top of the frame draw time, which can easily be 120Hz on modern systems (or more; quite a bit more in some cases). That means you’re looking at (1 / 120) + 2 = 10.3ms of latency, provided your GPU keeps up at 120 fps. Note that this is comparable to a PAL console (which runs at 50Hz) on CRT. A 200Hz LCD with fast pixel response times is superior to NTSC CRTs. >400Hz is running up against the human limit to distinguish frame changes, and we’re getting there with some high end LCDs right now.

When talking about retro consoles, we’re limited by the hardware feeding the display, and the frame can’t start drawing until the console has transmitted everything. So then you’re looking at the 2ms LCD draw time on top of a full frame time, which for NTSC would be (1 / 60) + 2 = 18.7ms. Which is why lightguns can’t work.

It’s definitely a movie cut from the same cloth as Catcher in the Rye. You love it as a teenager because you vibe with the main character. Then you grow up and see how self-polluting and obnoxious the character is.

I did love the exchange between Mary McDonnell’s character and the fundie lady. “Do you know who Graham Greene is?” “Please, I think we’ve all seen Bonaza”. It has a layer of humor that couldn’t have been intentional. The fundie lady is mixing up Graham Greene with Lorne Green, and Mary McDonnell would go on to play the political half of Lorne Green’s character in the Battlestar Galactical reboot a few years later.

I thought the first one was at least fun, but had some obviously annoying parts that should have been cut from any sequel.

Then the second one comes out, and the annoying parts of the first are the entire movie of the second.

IIRC, the International Criminal Court. They accept judges that would be qualified in their home country. With the US stepping out of it, one of the ICC’s biggest funders is Japan. They have a history of paneling judges who are just people of the community with no specific legal training . Maybe that works for them, but it meant some unqualified judges were sent to the ICC from Japan. The ICC isn’t in a position to stop them, given the funding situation.

IIRC, the International Criminal Court. They accept judges that would be qualified in their home country. With the US stepping out of it, one of the ICC’s biggest funders is Japan. They have a history of paneling judges who are just people of the community with no specific legal training . Maybe that works for them, but it meant some unqualified judges were sent to the ICC from Japan. The ICC isn’t in a position to stop them, given the funding situation.

Plenty of counties in the US will elect you to Sherriff without any experience at all. Just say the right Tough On Crime rhetoric and you’re good to go.

Yeah, that’s kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it’s all managed by corporations, not individuals.

Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don’t have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.

Not really, I just have trust issues with my ISP, and I’m willing to spend three bucks a month to work around them.

I’m hoping my makerspace will be able to do something like that in the future. We’d need funding for a much bigger internet connection, at least three full time systems people paid market wages and benefits (three because they deserve to go on vacation while we maintain a reasonable level of reliability), and also space for a couple of server racks. Equipment itself is pretty cheap–tons of used servers on eBay are out there–but monthly costs are not.

It’s a lot, but I think we could pull it off a few years from now if we can find the right funding sources. Hopefully can be self-funding in the long run with reasonable monthly fees.

IIRC, it’s nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you’re sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you’re stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.

That’s on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.

We need something better than email.

I agree, and I think there’s some reliability arguments for certain services, too.

I’ve been using self-hosted Bitwarden. That’s something I really want to be reliable anywhere I happen to be. I don’t want to rely on my home Internet connection always being up and dyn DNS always matching. An AWS instance or something like that which can handle Bitwarden would be around $20/month (it’s kinda heavy on RAM). Bitwarden’s own hosting is only $3.33/month for a family plan.

Yes, Bitwarden can work with its local cache only, but I don’t like not being able to sync everything. It’s potentially too important to leave to a residential-level Internet connection.

Jake prefers Linux, too. He rolls his eyes all the time at Linus’ insistence on running Windows servers, and he’s the guy that maintains a lot of that side of the business.