This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

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.

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

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

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

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.

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

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.

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

Half a million in time for the weekend, then? Slava Ukraini! Keep at them.

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

Think you're understating it there. Network call takes milliseconds at best. Function call, if the CPU has correctly predicted the indirect branch, is basically free, but even if it hasn't then you're talking nanoseconds. It's slower by millions of times.

addie ,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use "Given Name" "Patronym from father" - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she's not a "double". There's quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, ... - that write their names as "Family Name" "Given Name" as opposed to the other way around, if that's what you mean?

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines