tim--

Yes, sorry, the quotes were meant to be air quotes.

I agree that the purchase price seems a little silly. They don't really have too much IP except for the in house tools, and 3d model assets.

I wonder how these assets will get licensed for use? Will it be a free for all (awesome!) locked under a pro/enterprise license (not bad) or under a license that will require a royalty-based payment to Unity?

If royalty based, the earnings from just the assets alone could be in the tens of millions a year.

Some of the Weta software is awesome technology. Weta has a good engineering philosophy, and the ease of use for much of thier portfolio means that you don't require much training to work with it.

Weta is much more than "just" a VFX company. That part is still going to stay with Peter Jackson.

What is being bought here is the technology. Similar to any big VFX company, there is a lot of proprietary technology (renderers, modelers, engines, pipelines etc) that Unity is purchasing here. VFX tech is worth millions. Ask Autodesk or Adobe.

Wow. Weta works on some really big films, so it will be exciting to see the work that they have done become available in the asset store.

In the PR they say: > [...] the asset library we’ll inherit [...], which includes urban and natural environments, flora and fauna, humans, man-made objects, materials, textures, and more. The WetaFX team will continue their [...] work for major film and TV productions and feed into this asset library for years to come.

Peter Jackson (of LoTR fame) is one of the founders of Weta.

Sad to see another one of New Zealand's large, well known employers get sold.

Wow. Weta works on some really big films, so it will be exciting to see the work that they have done become available in the asset store.

In the PR they say: > [...] the asset library we’ll inherit [...], which includes urban and natural environments, flora and fauna, humans, man-made objects, materials, textures, and more. The WetaFX team will continue their [...] work for major film and TV productions and feed into this asset library for years to come.

Peter Jackson (of LoTR fame) is one of the founders of Weta.

Sad to see another one of New Zealand's large, well known employers get sold.

There are certified builds of CentOS/RHEL

Click 'commits' on any repo and you will see the graph.

Sure, it's a reason for the performance. But it's still not a reason for the performance to price comparison that I was making.

Surely a CPU that is on an older, more tested node (albeit an Intel node, take that as you will) should have amortized the costs of producing silicon products on that node.

The cost of an Apple CPU is cheaper than a worse-performing older CPU. The economics here are surely poor? You can't tell me that Apple of all companies are taking a hit on their new CPUs? I mean, they could be for all I know, but that would be very un-Apple like.

I mean this honestly, but what is the blue family that you are talking about. The first thing that springs to mind is Avatar, and Google isn't helping me out.

Renderman (Pixar/Disney's renderer) has only recently (~2017 iirc) started working with GPUs to do scene renders.

Still, the going price for a W-3245 is more than $2,000. That's just the CPU, no memory, motherboard or anything else. A 16" MacBook with 16GB of RAM is $2,499.

The MacBook comes with a free display, input devices and a UPS :)

One of their repos has a bunch of patches/scripts to be able to run Android on the CPUs[1]. (XuanTie C910)

The linked video (https://occ-oss-prod.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/share/risc...) is impressive! Open source Android running on an Open Source CPU.

[1] https://github.com/T-head-Semi/riscv-aosp

Australia should get something akin to the USDS (https://www.usds.gov/) that acts as a third party contractor/advisor to the federal and state departments.

Have a rolling panel built from Australians that work in the industry to publicly comment on tech projects run by the Government.

Yeah, but the amazing thing about software is that updates can arrive.

It shouldn't matter if the APIs in use are deprecated, or a new API that is designed for the use case arrives in three weeks after the application was initially released (the APIs were not ready when COVIDSafe was made available to the public).

Get the app - even if it's imperfect - in the hands of users. Admit fault for the issues that do exist, and commit to a timeline to remedy the issues and update APIs.

One of the biggest failures of COVIDSafe in Australia was that it was so heavily bashed by everyone on it's initial release. Anyone who was anyone binned it as soon as it was released.

With an app like COVIDSafe, where you require to have mass adoption of the app to work (there is no use having 10% of phones operating in the wild with the app installed, you require more like 80-90%, ideally every phone running the app.)

Instead, every techie I spoke to either hated it wasn't open source; or used the fact that the app was based on Singapore's app, but was not subsequently open sourced itself.

I feel that if the powers that be had changed the way that the source was developed, worked with the public a little closer that maybe these issues would not have existed.

But sadly, the damage for COVIDSafe was already done in the first few weeks. There was no resuscitation possible.

I liken it to how the AstraZeneca vaccine was dissed in the media. A small chance of clots was heralded as a major issue, which lead to a extremely slow uptake of a vaccine that is for the most part perfectly fine.

Add to that the fact that privacy was never really enacted for the use of the data gathered by COVIDSafe (and other similar contact tracing tools, for example in Sydney, NSW https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/breach-of-trust-poli... ) and you have a perfect storm of an app that no-one really keeps installed.

COVIDSafe was dead on arrival.

I'm not sure if that's true. It's more likely that without MP3 players, Napster wouldn't exist.

> Is it possible to provide power to signal repeaters with POE to get around the ~100 meter limit?

Yes, but at that point you may as well just run fiber. These days, the SFP modules are cheap (20km SFP for ~$80).

The loss of signal on a CAT6 cable will be much greater then on fiber. When too much noise is introduced on a CAT6 cable, speeds will drop considerably. Packet loss will be quite high.

Another way to extract all of those compressed zip files would have been to use binwalk.

    binwalk --dd='.*' *.asset

Edit: should have read the comments before I posted this, because enragedcacti already mentioned this tool an hour ago.

I would suggest looking into the Dell DA310. It has all three (VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort). 60hz 4K over both HDMI and DP

That demo is _amazing_. It has to be by far one of the best uses for the terminal I have seen in a long time! Impressive what that text console can do!

While watching the demo, I got flashbacks from the talk from Gary Bernhardt, 'A Whole New World'[1].

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

It depends on your threat level.

The memfd_secret() system call is pretty exciting (https://lwn.net/Articles/836724/). Once the secretmem feature is enabled at boot time, you are hardened against kernel flaws. A userspace process (running with elevated privileges) will only be able to perform secrets exfiltration using ptrace.

A better source for these changes are the two merge window roundups from LWN:

- https://lwn.net/Articles/861248/

- https://lwn.net/Articles/861695/

What can I do to support this project?

The latest Bootcamp drivers fix this.

The Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical is an amazing mouse. I've been trying to find a keyboard and mouse combo similar to the Apple Space Grey mouse and keyboard, and there is nothing to be found like it.

It's so depressing. You pay premium prices yet everything looks like it belongs in a 15 year olds room.

If I could have something like the apple mouse, with physical buttons and a scroll wheel - I would be in my happy place.

The Apple keyboard is such a pleasure to type on.

But you are not decrypting the DRM. The software you are using is decrypting the audio stream in real time in a way that works similar to the official client. The logged in user is not breaking the TOS.

I just checked Spotify, and it seems like yes, it does now get focused automatically, not sure if it was always that way, or I just feel that I need to click the textbox after choosing the menu item on the left hand side.

That being said, it was still much friendlier to have a search box that you could click on straight away. From a UX perspective, you need to move your focus away from where you have clicked, because the textbox is in a different area of view.

Clicking back on the search menu clears the search that you were doing. It's fine, you can click the back button, but the old Spotify client (iirc!) would keep your previous search in the search box.

Again with the multiple clicks though. You need to select 'Singles & EPs' after clicking the drop down with the label 'Albums'. To see all the tracks, you first need to change the view from grid view to list.

Sadly, this does not work on the newest version of their client.

No, not at all. There are ways to implement this without making it a requirement to use the app. For example, you implement a counter for each user of the app, so they can only use a subset of the API requests allowed for your application.

Then if they go over their allocated amount of calls, or they have been a user for X days/weeks/months, you give them a guided walkthrough on how to register their own API key.

One thing that has devastated me about recent Spotify updates is that now, when viewing an Artist, you do not get to see all of the albums (or at least the first 10 newest albums) for that artist straight away with all of the tracks listed. It's now much harder to find a song that you don't know the title of, but you know an artist has sung.

It's also small changes that are extremely annoying. Pressing "New Playlist" used to come up with a dialog box asking what the playlist should be named. Now it just gets called "New Playlist". Clicking the playlist name to rename it does not automatically select the textbox to give it a name, meaning that to create a new named playlist - an action that used to take one click, is at least three clicks and two keyboard presses... I mean, come on Spotify!

The search bar used to always be visible. Now I need to click search first, then click the search bar.

To me, Spotify was the epitome of software completion five years ago. The client worked. It was perfect. It seems like every single update since they released the "Daily Mixes" has both downgraded the performance of the app, and made discoverability harder. I want Spotify how it was 18 months ago.

Spotify on my machine sometimes chews up 2GB of RAM. Reached out to support, and the best that they can give is "try restarting the app". That helps, until 12 hours later you need to do it again. A music player should not have 10% CPU usage on a modern MacBook.

Finding Psst has been a life changer.