frik

Exactly, emulator are good for archiving. It allows on to play decades old games. Even some museums use emulators.

Yuzu Switch emulator is made by devs of a 3DS emulator Crita: https://citra-emu.org

3DS is unique with its 3D display that doesn't need a 3D glass. The "New 3DS XL" is especially great, as it has a stable 3D effect because of infrared eye-tracking. While most gamer got a bad impression from the first gen 3DS 3D effect without eye-tracking. I would pay premium for such a 3D PC monitor. Unfortunately Nintendo Switch doesn't feature such a 3D display nor does any other device available.

That's the related list of completed tallest building: http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/buildings?list=tallest100-co...

At the moment Shanghai (China) is the cities with most sky scrappers in the world.

Win 7 is basically Vista Service Pack 1. Several minor things like the slow-as-hell copy-routine of Vista got reverted back to almost XP level-speed with Win7. Unfortunately the Advanced Search dialog of Vista got removed in Win7. Most Vista problems were third party device drivers (blue screens), first (still new) mainstream 64bit OS and the related issues w 32bit and lack up 16bit support, and the vastly increased memory usage because wrong vision (consume all memory while idle is okay).

To this day the Win7 is arguably the best OS (supported til 2020), followed by the aging XP.

Yes, we need a many-core CPU. Then every program can run on a core. And we can use MPI, CILK, etc to run parallel programs. Each CPU could run its own small operating system, or using a micro kernel OS.

Writing algorithms in parallel manner isn't as complicated as make to believe you, a lot can be rewritten based on cookbooks/patterns.

Intel developed a many-core CPU (72 CPU cores) called Xeon Phi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

Unfortunately they drifted of the target (instead of making it the successor of x86-64).

For Javascript engines, it would help if the offer an optional fallback "Javascript interpreter" instead of JIT. A JIT is basically at the moment insecure, especially when running untrusted code. The same goes for WebAssembly, let the user deactivate execution/support of it. Please allow end user to enable an alternative JS interpreter for high security things like online banking.

From a safety point of view, I take a 747 or A380 any day or a (now defunct Trijet) to a twin engine 777 or A350. Guess were flying hours over the open sea (Atlantic) is safer because of redundancy, the more engines the more can go out and it still can land.

The 777 is way too crammed. The washrooms are on the side instead in the middle aka mini-washrooms (but with window). In general it feels like the first computer designed airframe, they forgot about the size of humans, it's made for short people. I take a 747 or even better A380 any day over the 777. I mean who seriously prefers to sit in a narrow long can for 12 hours, when you can choose a double decker A380 were you can stretch your legs, walk around and have big washrooms were you can stand even upright. And don't get me started on the entertainment system of the 777 - needs a serious upgrade.

The 757 will go out of service next, United still has some 757 from the 1980s - sure the seats are super comfortable because in the 1980s the were bigger and softer, but the airframe is old and the entertainment system was added as addon, meaning a computer box is below every other seat and gives the unlucky guy (who doesn't know about seatguru) little leg room.

Why is the very very odd 737 still going? It's older than the 747, I wonder when they finally design a new smaller airframe.

UTF-16 is one of these ill-fated developments that curse some languages & platforms (WinNT incl Win10, WinAPI32, Java, Flash, JS, Python 3) to his day.

  compareTo uses 0x19, which means doing the “equal each” 
  (aka string comparison) operation across 8 unsigned words 
  (thanks UTF-16!) with a negated result. This monster of an 
  instruction takes in 4 registers of input:

As I understand the microcode updates get installed by Linux distros and Windows by updates. Microcodes are loaded by the CPU at every boot.

The question is, how can one check if the CPU already got the microcode update?

Can a OS running inside a VM (over Intel VT ring-1) patch the CPU's microcode? (e.g. Linux host, and Win guest patches CPU's microcode) Nothing seems impossible anymore.

Okay, so how can we deactivate ASM.js and WebAssembly? (in the light of Meltdown and Spectre)

The config in Chrome is broken, WebAssembly cannot be deactivated anymore with chrome://flags/#enable-webassembly , setting it to "deactivated" and it's still active.

Thanks for the confirmation and inside info!

Yesterday we only guessed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16069740 based on ARM CPU list,

the RPi 1-3 CPUs

  ARM11, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A53

aren't in the list.

Affected ARM cores:

  Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex A15, 
  Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73, Cortex-A75

https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update

(I tried to post it 3 hours ago, but HN is rate-limiting my posts, oh well)

The last thing we need in hindsight to Meltdown and Spectre is running untrusted binaries in the browser aka WebAssembly.

Btw deactivating WebAssembly support in Chrome 63 (up-to-date) doesn't work anymore!!

  chrome://flags/#enable-webassembly

Setting it to "deactivated" does nothing, WebAssembly is still active.

> mini VMs for every process using CPU ring protection

Yes. We should really start to learn from history, MULTICS operating system had already 16 CPU ring support back in the early 1970s. MULTICS is the mother of UNIX, its smaller child. MULTICS had so many advanced features that barely got implemented (often reinvented) in newer OS. It's time to read old docs and ask the old devs who are still alive. (Another such often overlooked gem is Plan9, but it's better known thanks to Go lang devs).

Older Intel CPUs only supported 2 rings. Modern Intel CPU supports only 4 rings. Windows and Linux use ring 0 for kernel mode and ring 3 for user mode. And Intel introduced a ring -1 for VT.

  "To assist virtualization, VT and Pacifica insert a new 
  privilege level beneath Ring 0. Both add nine new machine 
  code instructions that only work at "Ring -1," intended to 
  be used by the hypervisor

It's time for modern operating systems to use more rings, and modern CPUs to correctly protect between different rings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_ring

It does not affect Raspberry Pi devices to my knowledge. Please provide source for your claims!

The CPUs in Raspberry Pi 1-3 are not affected.

  ARM11, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A5

Raspberry Pi 2 v1 use a Broadcom BCM2836 SoC with a 900 MHz 32-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor.

Raspberry Pi 3 (and Pi 2 v1.2) uses a Broadcom BCM2837 SoC with a 1.2 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor.

According to ARM website https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update it especially says

  "*Only affected cores are listed, all other Arm cores are NOT affected.*" 

and it lists only

  "Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, 
  Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73, Cortex-A75"

Intel should now recall the affected CPUs and ship new fixed CPUs without Intel "ME" for Management Engine, another well known open flaw.

In the end, hardware and software devs in the 1970s were right. Operating systems like MULTICS and computers like PDP-11 got it right. MULTICS supported 16 rings and has many advanced features that almost everyone forgot and never implemented in newer OS - shame on all of us!

Intel CPUs barely support more than 2.5 rings (if you count the VT that just blowed up). Also operating systems need to now focus on supporting more rings too. Just 2 rings aka kernel and usermode (and VT supervisor as third) is NOT enough in 2018.

Typical for HN, the article got hidden. It's well known YC alumni have some additional HN mod permissions and Docker is YC S10 (Summer 2010 batch of YCombinator).

This shadow rate-limiting is so disgusting. The user doesn't know about it, she writes a comment or submit a news and sees a info message "slow down" which makes no sense at all (2 comments per day displays it, yah). A rough mod rate-limited my account, some years ago to only 2 comments per day. And there is no way to recover the account.

HN doesn't support free speech, very unfortunate that pg isn't around anymore to sweep up. It turned from startup, SV and VC news to a popular but unfocused news site, sponsored by whoever.

I cannot upvote you enough, it's true.

A380 is in its own league, super comfortable, super low noise. No 747, 777 or 787 can match the comfort. They are noisier, or have downsides.

3DMax, Maya, SketchUp, FreeCAD, SolidEdge, SolidWorks, CREO, CATIA, etc all have a traditional Win95 style UI with menu bar, toolbar and/or ribbonbar.

Only Blender is the ugly swan, that still has this inhouse-style homegrown UI from the early 1990s UNIX where Blender originated. Nothing in a Blender works as expected, the mouse buttons are opposite to everyone else, the toolbars go all over the place and spam the workspace, no tabs, weird floating windows, keyboard shortcuts from hell, camera controls like coded by 5 year old kid, and so on. Even GIMP has a more sane UI, it's actually not that bad at all. But don't get me started on Blender. Blender needs a complete new UI, otherwise it would be such a shame, the program is good but it's very user hostile and the interface has a step learning curve for no reason at all, and the devs see no reason at all to get over their pride and will never change Blender's UI, which is unfortunate. So maybe someone forks Blender and scraps the old UI and adds a sane UI comparable to industry alternatives - it would help adoption of Blender a lot. Sometimes it looks like they get paid to keep Blender lower key, so that Maya and co still can be sold.

I succeeded in installing the discontinued "Windows Live Photo Gallery" on Win7, despite M$ efforts to burn down all old pre-Win10 tents.

On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4.

The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.

I may try out VLC 3 again.

I had moved to MPC-BE (Media player classic home cinema black edition) due its superior UI and 4K hardware support and dual-device audio-output (PC 5.1 speaker plus over HDMI to TV). And MPC-BE allows one to quickly skip through a movie by dragging the mouse. And MPC-BE can play partly corrupt files too, one can even skip around such files. VLC 2x sucks at all these things, yet it's still better than traditional Windows Media Player or iTunes. VLC 1x was quite good back then, but 2x was a let down and MPC-HC and MPC-BE are simply better for several things. But let me try VLC 3 again, maybe things improved.

> SMPLayer

It's a light GUI over ffmpeg library, so the video playback is great, but the UI looked like a fisherprice toy and it was a rough experience two years ago. On Win64 MPC-BE is a lot better.

I am all for video-on-demand, as long it's free. So YouTube, Twitch, etc are great value.

In case I need to spend money, I prefer to own the thing I pay for. So Blu-ray/DVD/CDs discs for me. The gathered video/music can be played on all my devices from car to phone, even in flight-mode offline. I trade a bit of less convince upfront to really own it, but then I can play it as often and exactly when and where I want.

Anyway every few years one could get a higher resolution version, unfortunately the films aren't sold in source versions, but downscaled, but the video-on-demand at always lagging behind and stream worse bit rates.

Are there plans to add sane UI idioms to Blender?

3DMax, Maya, 4DStudio, SketchUp, FreeCAD, ...basically all other 3D tools nowadays (since Win95 btw) have common UI with normal menu bar and common shortcuts and mouse-control.

Blender is still stuck in the early 1990s Unix UI chaos. Even Gimp has nowadays better UI than Blender.

Blender might be the best open source 3D modeler, etc. but it has a nightmarish completely non-standard user interface.

Why can't Blender devs add an UI and mouse control similar to 3DMax/Maya/4DStudio/SketchUp/FreeCAD??

> AMD does not have this restriction

But AMD/ATI cards are heavily bought by crypto miners, so it's almost impossible to buy one, even at an insanely high prize. And NVidia cards are compatible with all games made between 2000 and 2017. AMD driver were very bad several years ago. So if you are playing GoG games or older games occasionally there is only NVidia. Yes, both NVidia with their spyware-driver and now this shit, and AMD driver sucks. For CPUs everyone suggests now AMD which are now better than the crippled Intel CPUs with their plastic pads inside the CPU so that a new Intel CPU will last only about 3 years.

NYT websites looks ugly on iPad. Doesn't someone test changes these days? All photos of the article have a white 50% transparent rectangle over them, make the photos look like really washed out. Fix your site...

Yes, and rather ironic that the maker of scanners, all-in-one printers, and backup solutions is incapable of preserving its company history by not even scan or take photos of its museum inventory.

SoundForge and Vegas used to be great software tools in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unfortunately you had to sell them. Thanks anyway for your story.

Recently Sony sold them to Magix from Germany. Unfortunately the software is lagging behind, basically stayed for decades in low maintenance mode, and Magix software is known to be a cobbled together buggy mess. Their other own video software Video Deluxe is still 32bit buggy unstable piece that relies on decade old dlls and can't be installed on up to date Windows 7/8/10 without deactivating security functions, changing registry settings by hand and renaming the Windows cert folder. Nowadays the open source Audacity is a great alternative to SoundForge, and Premiere/etc are better alternatives to Vegas/VideoDeluxe.

Why every insightful news gets hidden on HN?

Has HN been run over by corporate guys? Only their news are left, and many other news stories per day that got many upvotes and/or comments get hidden from the frontpage very quickly.

How is the performance, how good does it scale horizontal/vertical?

Could it be used as a replacement to Kafka message queue/ring?

(me is still looking for a Kafka-like piece coded in Go)

Chrome is not the standard, BUT WebKit is!

About 90% of all users worldwide use a WebKit(/Blink/KHTML) based browser on all platforms (and mobile is a lot bigger than desktop).

Firefox/Servo, M$ IE/Edge, Dillo, Link, etc are minor browsers, I hope sites will continue to work almost okay with them too.

For traditional enterprise the new IE6 is IE11, it's still going strong in Win7-Win10. You can thank M$ that they forked IE11 trident engine and named it Edge instead of IE12. And IE11 is supported until at least 2020.

I like the 3D animation movies of Pixir with non-realistic rendering (especially from 1990s, 2000s).

Though like many I dislike the CGI movies that started with the first Transformer movie (with blue screen action) and now with the dozens of super hero boring fad. Action movies of the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s were so great. Nowadays thankfully they use more real stunts again, though this mass of boring super hero and hundreds of TV series that no one has time to see. All we want is new high value Hollywood movies.

Yes true. What I meant:

Safari 5.1 (Win32 version, discontinued) comes with several MacOSX user mode libraries ported to Win32 DLLs.

Older iTunes and QuickTime (like 5 years ago) came with MaxOSX libraries ported to Windows too - at least from what I recall.