Yeah FPV drones have massively increased the cost of invading a country. It's basically a return to WWI style trench warfare, except no man's land is the size of the range of the drones (20+ KM).
Yeah the 7800 library was basically a bunch of ports of early 80s arcade games that GCC had done for the initial 1984 release date, then ports of whatever computer or arcade games the Tramiels could get cheap licenses for, done by external contractors. Their strategy with the 7800 was competing with Nintendo on price rather than the quality of the game library. Tramiel led Atari wasn't willing to put a bunch of money and effort into pushing video games forward like Nintendo was, they were mainly focusing their internal efforts on the ST computers.
> Nintendo was about to release a next-generation console, the Famicom, in Japan. They wanted to export it to other markets, but didn’t want to do it alone. Nintendo really wanted to license the Famicom to Atari and have Atari distribute it in North America. Atari CEO Ray Kassar was going to sign the deal at CES in June, but delayed due to the spat over the Coleco Adam version of Donkey Kong. Then the deal fell through the cracks after Atari forced out Kassar as Atari CEO on July 7, 1983. Atari’s next CEO, James Morgan, never revisited it.
There's a leaked memo about this deal available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080327135150/http://www.atarim... . Atari had already paid General Computer to design the 7800 when Nintendo reached out to them about distributing the Famicom. Atari viewed the 7800 hardware as likely being superior to the Famicom, so their strategy was to string out the negotiations for as long as possible until the two systems could be directly compared. The Coleco Adam dispute was probably just a convenient excuse to continue delaying.
When Ray Kassar was forced out due to insider trading (he sold a bunch of Atari stock around half an hour before Atari reported much lower than expected earnings), the business press was generally dismissive of the idea of introducing a new console into an already oversaturated market. The 7800 ended up getting delayed into 1984, then Jack Tramiel bought the company and didn't want to pay General Computer royalties on the consoles or software so they sat in a warehouse until 1986 when Atari finally paid up.
If Atari did end up going with the Famicom instead of the 7800, I imagine it would have ended up delayed and hamstrung the same way the 7800 was. If anything, maybe this would have left space for the Sega Master System to take over in the US.
StatCounter uses browser tracking as its data source, and it seems like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all froze the OS version they report in their user agent at Mac OS X 10.15 in order to avoid breaking sites that have poorly written parsing code by bumping the major OS version. I imagine that browsers that expose enough information to identify the actual OS version get shown as "macOS" and browsers that don't get shown as "OS X". See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216593 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1680516
> When Xbox launched its Game Pass subscription service in 2017, executives set a goal of reaching 77 million subscribers by fiscal year 2026, which ended last month, according to a document published during a lawsuit contesting Microsoft’s 2023 purchase of Activision Blizzard. Today, the platform has just 30 million subscribers, according to a person familiar with the matter, 4 million fewer than it did when the company last publicly shared data in 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the subscriber numbers.
> Employees had been growing concerned that the number of Game Pass subscribers had peaked, according to two former employees. Later, millions of customers canceled their subscriptions after Game Pass announced last October it was raising prices by 50%.
> Underlying Game Pass’s problem was a central flaw, according to the people. While consumers might be willing to pay a monthly fee to Netflix Inc. to stream thousands of TV shows and movies, most gamers don’t take the same approach, preferring to stick with a handful of favorite games they play on repeat. Research from Circana shows that the majority of US gamers buy two games at most per year and a third of the market doesn’t even purchase one.
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
A non-Edge browser would give the OS the domain name from the HTTPS connection and the page title because that's what it sets the window title to. I think that would be enough to identify the URL in a lot of cases (i.e. the sign-up URL sets the title to "ngrok Sign Up".
Topre keyboards feel nice to type on and are quiet. They're rubber dome but they have the thing most mechanical keyboards have where you don't have to have a key pushed all the way down for it to count as "pressed".
Any sort of reform that would successfully get money out of politics would require a constitutional amendment. I have little faith that the current Congress would pass any sort of amendment that would eliminate the system they benefit from unless there was at least a reasonable possibility that the states would call for an Article V convention, but the state legislatures also benefit from the current corrupt system so I don't see this happening either. You can't wholesale replace Congress either because the lack of term limits and the staggered terms means that the special interest groups that benefit from corruption will try to primary candidates before you can build up a critical mass (see what happened to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush).
As far as I understand it, the missing cycle at the end of the pre-render scanline means that the first scanline will start a cycle early every other frame. When this happens, that scanline will be drawn one pixel to the left of where it should be. In practice, this typically causes the first few scanlines to get skewed slightly (you can see this at the top right corner of your Mighty Bomb Jack screenshot) but I don't know enough about NTSC decoding to explain why this happens. This is more noticeable if you can get footage of the system displaying tiles on the top of the background, rather than the plain blue background at the top like your Mighty Bomb Jack screenshot has.
> U.S. officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal, according to current and former American officials.
> Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate cease-fire negotiations that began in April.
> Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States, according to some of the officials, went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials.
> In April, Mr. Ghalibaf was set to travel to Islamabad to meet with Vice President JD Vance. But Iranian security officials were concerned that Israel would use the opportunity to assassinate Mr. Ghalibaf or Mr. Araghchi to derail the talks, the officials said.
> Iranians sought guarantees from the United States, through Pakistani and Qatari intermediaries, that Israel would not carry out any covert operations targeting the Iranian delegation, the officials said.
> Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.
> But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.
> Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.
> Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mr. Mohammadi and the two officials said.
As far as I understand it, the main problem with keeping Xorg going isn't anything inherent with the code itself (although that's definitely a factor), it's the sheer amount of functionality Xorg clients can access, including viewing and manipulating global state and other clients. When you combine this with X11's ability to remotely view clients from other devices, and the fact that most of the main Xorg maintainers are paid employees of various commercial Unix and Linux vendors, it makes change extremely difficult. You can't try to do things to modernize Xorg, like making the server multithreaded, changing how the graphics work to better fit modern display hardware, or adding a permissions mechanism, if you then have to deal with a bunch of urgent support tickets from large customers complaining that your changes have broken some 30 year old software they rely on that they have running in a VM somewhere.
It gets installed when you install iTunes. If you don't want to install iTunes, you can pull out the codec installer by opening an old version of the iTunes installer in 7-zip and extracting the MSI. Here's a copy I keep around for whenever I have to do a screen recording on a new computer, it's signed by Apple so you don't have to trust me. https://www.infochunk.com/obs/AppleApplicationSupport64.msi
The biggest advantage for having a good AAC encoder isn't efficiency, it's that for nearly the past 2 decades the de facto standard for live streamed video has been RTMP with H.264 video and AAC audio. There is basically no support for any other codecs. If you want to send a video stream to Youtube or Twitch, you will be sending H.264 and AAC. If you want an idea of how ubiquitous this is, I just checked in OBS and it will not even let you select different video and audio codecs in streaming mode, it just (correctly) assumes that anybody who's streaming will be streaming H.264 and AAC.
Nice, I'm looking forward to seeing how this performs in practice. FFmpeg's previous AAC encoder produced poor quality output and often had irritating chirping artifacts, so I've always had to install Apple's Core Audio encoder on any computer I do video recording on to get decent sound. I've done A/B/X comparisons and found that a 320kbps MP3 sounds better than a 320kbps AAC encoded by FFmpeg, but about the same as a 256kbps AAC encoded by Core Audio. If installing Core Audio is no longer necessary, that'll be a huge improvement and people who use something like OBS to do screen recordings or streaming will get a massive sound quality boost the next time they update.
There's a link on the bottom of this post to another post from today announcing that Sony will be discontinuing physical disc production for all Playstation consoles in 2028. I guess the combination of the two announcements means that going forward, you'll only be able to purchase games for as long as Sony cares to keep selling them.
It's not intended for a normal person to use. If you're a normal person making something as a hobby project, you'll get a much nicer development experience by using a microcontroller that costs a few dollars rather than a few cents. For hobby purposes, I recommend either the Raspberry Pi Pico or the STM32 blue pill. A part like this is intended for inexpensive, high-volume consumer electronics that need some sort of simple control functionality. For example, let's say you're making an electric toothbrush. All it needs to do is turn the motor on, wait for 2 minutes, then pulse the motor to let the user know they're done brushing their teeth. This can do that. Or let's say you're making a promotional keychain, and you want it to blink a few LEDs in a specific pattern when the user presses a button. This can do that. If you take apart basically any piece of cheap (< $5) electronics that's been designed in the past 10-15 years, you'll usually see a tiny unmarked 8-pin microcontroller doing the control work. This part competes in that market.
> And have Microslop banging on my door with lawyers because I show how modern versions of AI-slop-coded Windows are actually slower than older versions coded by actual humans? I'm good on that one boss.
I highly doubt they care about anything people do with old versions of Windows. The full XP and Server 2003 source code has been on Microsoft owned Github for years now.