Cowbee isn’t just another tankie. He knows his theory and will use it to dazzle you with bullshit.

Some day, the US might be able to match the anti-corruption measures of checks notes Pakistan.

Write-once ROMs tend to be pretty reliable for a long time as long as there’s no physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can do that.

There are some old rewritable ROMs that work by shining UV light on them to erase them, and then you can write to them again. Those can go bad, especially if the sticker falls off and they’re exposed to light. They aren’t common in cartridges, but you’ll see them in arcade motherboards.

Magnetic media will lose its magnetic domains over time. A lot depends on the quality of the disk and the environment it’s stored in. Commercially released floppy disks tend to be pretty reliable, but retail blank disks were increasingly cost-optimized into hot garbage as time went on. The new-old-stock disks we get these days are terrible. That said, quality stuff properly stored can last a long, long time.

Optical discs will inevitably get scratched when you use them. Commercial pressed discs can last a long time in storage, though. Burned discs, not so much.

Modern flash memory may lose its cell charge with time without any read/write cycles being involved. AFAIK, there’s not much out there about using flash for long term archiving. Most people who are interested in archiving, especially for large corporations, use quality magnetic tape stored in a controlled environment. They aren’t interested in flash, so there’s not much info out there.

I added this in an edit, but I don’t think it’s just about rare things. Having a collection of games that just sit on your shelf is silly. Which goes for a lot of other types of collecting, too.

Cartridges tend to be reliable in the long run as long as you avoid physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can be a problem there.

Optical discs do go bad just by aging in the box.

There’s another angle to this. A while back, Metal Jesus Rocks had a video about a Switch game that had an incorrect cover, and it was going to be corrected after the first production run was sold through. Which means it would be a collectors item.

He bought it, but had a “wtf am I doing?” moment afterwards. He didn’t care about the game beforehand. Its only value to him is that a manufacturer mistake would make it valuable to other collectors. Which is somewhat circular logic.

Edit: to clarify, I don’t think it’s just about rare things, either. Having a collection at all, where you have tons of games that you don’t really care about and they just sit on a shelf, is kinda insane. I don’t have any moral compunction about pirating old games, so why bother? In many cases, I can even play on original hardware with SD card mods, and especially on optical disc systems, the experience is better.

I feel that so hard.

A while back, I was talking to a young electrical engineering student about how DACs do not produce the stairstep pattern that many textbooks and audiophile forums would lead you to believe. As the video in the link shows, you can create a sine wave with analog equipment, measure it on an analog oscilloscope, put it through a computer for ADC and then DAC, and measure the output on another analog oscilloscope. The sine wave you get on the output will be exactly the same as the input, excepting whatever line noise is introduced in the process. No stairstep at all.

In fact, if the stairstep were true, then square waves should come out perfect, not sine waves. It’s just the opposite; square waves come out as a messy combination of sine waves. This is generally fine, as square waves don’t really exist in nature, anyway.

Then the followup question came: DACs are built with a combination of voltage dividers (also known as a resistor ladder), which should produce just such a stairstep pattern. Why wouldn’t it be a stairstep?

I couldn’t remember what the hell the answer to that was at the moment, and probably came off like an idiot. The answer is that there’s a low pass filter that takes care of that, but I’ll be damned if I remembered that at the time.

Zelda 64 on the Switch was a mess at release, but the emulator has improved greatly since then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-fYXwxuFxQ

What a brilliant racket. Have people do all the work of getting a channel going, then claim the money for yourself.

I think I’m anarchist in terms of personality, but I’m not quite there politically. Like you, I’m not quite sure how to get there from here. If we do things like mutual aid and support unions, I don’t think we’ll go wrong, and that could end up leading to anarchism at some point in the future.

Where I’m anarchist in personality is that I fundamentally don’t understand why you would want to be an authoritarian. When I first read 1984 in high school, and there’s the bit from O’Brien about how the system is there for power as an end to itself, I didn’t understand why anybody would want that. I can kinda see power as a way of gaining a comfortable life for yourself–usually at the expense of others–but not as its own end. I still don’t understand it, but have come to accept that there are people like that.

Some of those people are draped in thin blue line flags, and some of those people are draped in a hammer and sickle.

Back when wr used parallel IDE, most motherboards only had two IDE connections. Each connection could support two devices, a master and a slave. If you had a hard drive and a CD-ROM, it was best to put them on separate channels. This is because only one device could talk at a time, and the slower CD-ROM would block the faster hard drive from operating. If you had to put them on the same channel, then the hard drive should be the master so it gets priority.

Then there’s scsi. My family wasn’t rich enough to have scsi shit when I was growing up, but I do know a few things. On paper, it’s very simple; give each device a unique ID on the bus, and then attach terminator blocks at each end. I’m also aware that, in practice, this description is a cruel joke.

Yeah, that’s my point.

Consistent problem with fascists who want you to hate outsiders. When those barriers fall, it turns out that most of the “enemy” are just people who want to live their lives.

This goes both directions.

Game Cube had a network adapter, but few games used it. It did let you do 8 player Mario Kart.

Compared to NASA, SpaceX is developing at a breakneck pace. The SLS has its roots in the Constellation program from 2005 which itself came from the 2004 report “Vision for Space Exploration”. That was when NASA finally admitted the Shuttle was never going to live up to its original goals and it had to go.

Ares V is a reconfiguration of Shuttle hardware into a more traditional rocket. It’s still taken two decades and has one test launch to show for it.

SpaceX is the only Musk company I’ll defend, and it also seems to be the one that’s best at keeping Elon from fucking around with them internally.

That said, the whole point of commercial launch systems is that it’s not just one company doing it. Blue Origin might finally have something to show off soon, but there’s nobody else at a reasonable development level. Virgin Galactic only seems interested in space tourisim. (Edit: for completeness sake, I should also add that ULA is a joke.) A bunch of small companies are doing R&D, but few have even a single small launch yet. If it’s just going to be SpaceX, might as well make it a government-run company like the USPS.

Each of his companies has to have a layer of management that’s simply about directing his attention somewhere that won’t hurt the company. SpaceX seems to do this best, Tesla is OK to bad, and Xhitter is by far the worst.

Even for a large amount of RAM that you’d find in a big server, it’s a few dozen watts at most. Here’s some charts showing the jump from DDR3 to DDR4 on a 16GB stick:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ddr3l-vs-ddr4-power-consumption.2012014/

DDR5 dropped the voltage from 1.2V to 1.1V compared to DDR4, which tends to make it even more power efficient. Not quite as dramatic as DDR3 to 4, but in any case, it’s better still.

In general, society spends an awful lot of extra effort just because a few percent might abuse it. Sometimes, it’s completely hypothetical abuse.

Healthcare? Someone might overuse it, and therefore everyone has to pay out the nose.

Unions? They let some people slack off at work.

Child tax credits? Some parents might use it to buy drugs (this was an actual argument from Joe Manchin, and it’s completely made up).

Reduce the military? What if China invades the US?

They are insured. It’s often the insurance company who is insisting on these measures. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if they are effective or not; the insurance company simply demands that you have them.

There’s a bit in Neal Stephenson’s early novel, Zodiac, that has always stuck with me. At a hardware store, everything has a specific purpose. The young guys working at the store can point you to that purpose. What you want is to find the old guy, who knows that everything there has a million alternative purposes.

That’s overly simplistic. Fascists and theocrats work together to gain power for all the time. See the current marriage of Trump and Christian Nationalists in the United States, for example.