Albal_156

Locking your software behind a Patreon subscription is paywalling. The water gets muddy since they're only locking their latest versions and I don't know what the exact differences are compared to the free version. I personally view emulator devs similar to modders. Modding should only ever be a passion project. They're essentially working on somebody else's IP. Once they paywall that modding work, it's basically just getting paid off somebody else's IP. If their earnings are enough to cover their costs is irrelevant in this discussion imo. Modders asking for donations are fine, but paywalling your mods (or emulators) isn't good.
 
I don't know where exactly they screwed up legally, but it's pretty clear that they did. Otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to a settlement before this even went to court. If this really wasn't a profitable business, then $2.4 million hurts a lot. Paying a 2.4 million settlement would probably catapult most hobby developers straight into poverty, probably for the rest of their life. I certainly wouldn't give up that kind of money if I had any chance of defending myself.

This is the cornerstone of a lot of legal emulation. The people selling the hardware or software, legally, can not allow it to run commercial software without having the physical media.
 
Now, I know this sounds stupid, but bear with me. There was never anything stopping you from plugging your Nintendo Switch, 3DS, DS, or GBA/GB cart into your PC other than some kind of hardware dongle that someone has to make. They exist for the unencrypted carts (Eg NES/SNES/GB) where the console has no "BIOS" to speak of. You plug it into your PC, and the emulator sees a "rom" flash disk. Very awkward to do, but they exist. If Yuzu wanted to claim legitimacy, they should have released an open source Switch cart "USB drive" adapter, and the emulator would access it exactly how the Switch does, and thus the interoperability provision kicks in.  
 
I am over simplifying it, but that is what needs to happen with software emulators. There must be a way to play the physical hardware on the device to call it legit (Which is why the Optical media based console emulators can easily claim this.) I don't know of anyone who legitimately wants to play PS3/4/5 Xbox360 games on their PC when they still have a working console, but once that console dies (*cough*RROD*cough) you want to be able to play the stuff you paid for, and unfortunately, Microsoft in it's infinite wisdom has not yet released a Xbox/Xbox360 emulator for Windows to play the stuff you digitally paid for but the console kicked the bucket years ago.
 
And I mean this, even as someone who knows Flash carts are only ever used for piracy and zero homebrew games exist that people would actually justify owning one for. If the Console manufacturer is Unwilling to provide their own emulator on their current generation console to play the games the player ALREADY owns, then they should just butt out of interfering with emulator development unless they are going to release their own. And they should release their own instead of leaving it up to the pirates.
 
You can't honestly believe that emulator developers don't have access to dumps of every game released to test against. There's maybe 6 people on the planet that are that obsessive of a collector.

Two things I have seen other people report on, that makes this case different from other cases are:
1) Yuzu released a TOTK-optimized version of their emulator just a few hours after the official release, and they put that version behind a paywall.
2) Yuzu developers and moderators have encouraged and helped with piracy on their Discord.
 
I think it is a bit hard to take the stance of "we are just doing this to make people be able to play games on more powerful hardware" when you are doing those two things.
I think it is very sad that Yuzu is going away because I do see legitimate use cases for it, and reverse engineering shouldn't be illegal IMO. But the profit motivation, encouraging piracy, and possibly developing the emulator used leaked and pirated software makes it a lot harder to defend. Assuming those things are true of course.

nintendo has over 11 billion 'in cash assets'
nintendo's expenses for 2023 were 5.4 billion.
nintendo's profits for 2023 were roughly 5 billion.
tears of the kingdom has sold 20 million copies, even if we assume only a tenner per copy makes it to nintendo's pocket (that's a LOW estimate), that's still 100x the money they decided to settle for.
 
nintendo, for the scope of a court case against a bunch of enthousiasts building an emulator, has infinite money.

Summary
Yuzu and Nintendo have settled the case. Ending Citra and Yuzu, including a 2.4 Million Dollar payment to Nintendo
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
It may be over for emulation. You'd have to create entirely new BIOSes from scratch for any device you want to emulate or the legal precedent this may set will likely make it illegal. I feel like Linus Torvalds and his hatred of Nvidia, only at Nintendo at this point. It is a sad day for Emulators.
 
Sources
IGN
The Verge (quote source)
 
[PROPOSED] FINAL JUDGMENT AND PERMANENT INJUNCTION
JOINT MOTION FOR ENTRY OF FINAL JUDGMENT AND PERMANENT INJUNCTION

Umm that literally makes Glassdoor a pointless product. Wonder if some large company was getting bad reviews and wanted to pressure Glassdoor? Maybe everyone should drop a review for Glassdoor on their site.

It is very much the node that is the limiting factor. They've been making great designs on a not so leading node. That doesn't make it a bad node, but when push comes to shove, that difference shows.
 
Unfortunately I don't own either a recent Intel CPU nor Zen 4, so I can't do my own testing like I did in the past. Following is Zen 2 vs Skylake. Intel 14nm vs TSMC N7. Zen 2 takes a slight lead in IPC from being a newer design, but they're not so different. Note I consider Zen 2 as the point when AMD managed to really overtake Intel in the Ryzen era as earlier Zen was more lacking and only offset by throwing cores at the problem.
I can't find it right now, but I separately did testing of Coffee Lake vs Zen 2 at various power limits. Zen 2 was clearly superior there at normal operating points for both. IPC could be considered indicative of the microarchitecture design, and power efficiency from the node. Of course, the two are related so they do factor into each other and are not totally isolated.
 
I did that because I didn't want to end up looking up prices for someone else to say in their region it is something different. My point remains, I do not feel that buying new today 5800X3D + mobo + DDR4 ram makes any sense when you can buy 7600X + mobo + DDR5 ram for what is likely not that different a total, assuming the mobo chosen is comparable in quality. The newer platform performs similar or better in gaming while leaving the door open to future upgrades. I did acknowledge that someone upgrading on existing AM4 platform might see more value in 5800X3D.
 
The 5800X3D is still a great CPU, for gaming or otherwise. But out of today's offerings it is unremarkable and nothing special.

I hope intel dont become a fab for AMD. not because they are rivals, but because i know for a fact that any time AMD releases a product that might not be as good as people hoped it would be, the argument would be "well clearly intel sabotaged it at the fab level".
 
But yes, we do need more foundries across the world, the reliance on TSMC is quite scary

Summary
Optical Disk are BACK! At least they might be if/when this type of disk becomes a commodity product.  125,000 gigabytes on a single DVD-sized disk.  125 terabytes of storage in a DVD like disk.  UPDATE.  In very related news from the same lab and as reported by Ieee  they now have a 1.6 petabit version.   
 
Quotes
 
Abstract of the Nature Paper. 
NEW IEEE Spectrum
 
 
My thoughts
My internal reaction was like. 
 
I think we have all had time to get used to clouds and downloading data however, we have also seen the drawbacks of this.  Things like not really owning your data.  The lack of an easy way to make a long term archive of your data etc etc.  

For example, I can reach for an old DVD I made in 2007, put it in the drive and watch a rip of a TV show first produced in 2003.  If I relied on cloud services that show is just gone.  I can watch old Anime or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that I downloaded off Lime Wire in 2002 or 2003 if I have it on CD or DVD.  CD and DVD type disk have proven with time that they can retain data as an archive that will last at least 20 years if stored correctly.  The biggest change the return of optical disk would bring is giving people a way to store their own data, and keep it basically forever with proper storage and maintenance. 
 
An equally big change will be a return of watching certain very VERY high-definition content.  Consider a 3D VR movie where you the viewer can view it from any angle.  You can explore the whole scene around it as if you are there.  Imagine a Forrest Gump 2 movie where you can talk to Forrest, and he reacts driven by an AI made to talk like him.   It's so much storage space ... imagine movies recorded in a  RAW format.  Pro Res Raw or Red Raw or whatever and not even having to encode things.    It's hard to imagine what would even fill such a disk. 
 
This is so much binary data it is hard to imagine how we might surpass it.   Maybe when we can store a 1 kilo qbit in a USB key sized device somehow?   

This is so much data it makes every other way of storing data that does not need to be overwritten obsolete IF and only IF it comes to market.    Right now this is just a research project but so was everything we are using right now. 
 
This peer reviewed, published research will not get the fanfare of other things but this is the real "We're Back" moment.  This is it. 2030's or 2040's your computer will have an optical drive again if this pans out. 
 
NEW thoughts.
Won't create an edit every time this advances but yeah work is ongoing.  Optical disc in the datacenter might be a thing.  That said if a type of media was created that could take advantage of all that space and Manufacuring for it can be ramped up  cheaply  ... getting tons of content on disc might be a thing again. 
 
At least for those who want to own a copy that they keep locally VS streaming.  Streaming everything, where you "buy" stuff but really only rent the right to stream it as long as they want to let you ... is just too convenient though.   

I know others disagree but not everyone, everyplace that might need access to a large data set is sitting at a workstation on campus of a college or univ or business.  There will be cases where burning a PBDVD or whatever they'll call it would make sense for at least some people. 
 
 
Sources
https://gizmodo.com/meet-the-super-dvd-scientists-develop-massive-1-petabi-1851272615
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y
NEW https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-storage-petabit-optical-disc

Genuinely who uses AI integration in the browser, and how much time does it truly save versus... going to chat.openai.com?

i'd love to have 7 trillion as well.
 
i think this man has been around big numbers he forgot their meaning..
 
SpaceX quoted their first generation of falcon 9 rockets to have cost 300 million to develop
NASA quoted that if they had developed such a platform using their own strategies, it would have been in the 3.6 billion category
SpaceX estimates that starship will cost between 5-10 billion to develop
nvidia spends 7.34 billion on R&D each year
 
so.. what this man is suggesting, is that his endavour will cost the same as:
- nvidia funding their R&D for the coming 950 years
- spacex developing starship, estimating they double their original budget at 20billion
- NASA copying SpaceX's homework and making a falcon bureaucracy edition.
- still have enough money left over for spaceX to throw away and re-invent falcon 9 not once, not twice, but 11 times.
 
please.. someone quote me to tell me that the order of magnitude got lost in translation somewhere...

Summary
 
In 1996 Fujitsu won a contract to computerize some amount of mail handling in the Royal Mail system.  Since 1999 well over 1000 post masters have been fired / sued / charged, and a few sent to jail for various "crimes" in not doing their jobs.  Turns out that the Fujitsu Software was fucking up the whole time, and was just wrong about basically all of those metrics.
 
Fujitsu has pledged to help pay "some" of the 1 BILLION UKP suit that has come out of this.  
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
 
I think Fujitsu should be on the hook for the bulk of that 1 Billion UKP settlement.  Why?  Their software was giving bad numbers for 25 years+ and getting people fired, and even sent to jail.  (And all the social / legal / political rammifications after that.)

There's no way they "just" realized this in the last year or two that it was that broken.  And if by some insane circumstances, that was actually the case?  Then there's a boatload of incompetence happening around their company.
 
 
Sources
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67985374
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67993906  (Video)

I'm sure that AV1 was on Twitch's radar for a long time, and despite it they still decided to shutdown operations in SK. Must be pretty wild over there for telecoms.

SSSTC sounds whack. Did Elon Musk buy them or something?

Summary
 The Plextor lineup of SSDs, which are formerly Lite-On now owned by Kioxia is being rebranded to SSSTC (Solid State Storage Technology Corporation). Kioxia seems to be moving out of the consumer market and towards the Datacenter and enterprise markets.
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
I don't believe this to be good a good rebrand for Kioxia. Nostalgia factor aside, Plextor doesn't  have much brand recongition nowdays. ( I personally don't know what much about Plextor). But it still has alot more brand recongition then the mouthful that is SSSTC.
 
Sources
Techpowerup
 
PS: haven't done one of the these before please tell me how I did.

Well that might be the most terrifying piece of technology invisible cameras goodbye privacy 

did you read that it supports that CPU still?.. thought the older cpu's was removed at some stage ... 
try to find the original bios and do a flashback.. 
 
you can still save your "bricked" mainboard but you will need to get an eprom writer.. and those are dirt cheap... depending on your mainboard you might have to solder some...... or get someone to do it for you.. ...... or get a newer cpu that supports those bios'es you flashed to your board. 
 

Summary
AMD has officially introduced its latest Ryzen 8000 APUs codenamed Hawk Point, which refreshes the existing Ryzen 7000 "Phoenix" APUs while simultaneously retaliating to Intel in their table


 
Quotes
Strix Point
 
Ryzen Series Rumoured Overview 
Hawk Point
 
 
 
AMD Ryzen 8045HS "Hawk Point" APUs - 35-54W SKUs
 
AMD Ryzen 8040HS "Hawk Point" APUs - 20-30W SKUs
AMD Ryzen 8040U "Hawk Point" APUs - 15-30W SKUs
 
My thoughts
Loving the then offensive but now humorous retaliation to intel (due to their recent marketing against AMD), it might seem childish but it's always nice to see corporations fight back in an amusing way (at least to me)
Back to the chips, they look quite promising with the 5.2GHz boost on the 8945HS with 8 cores, it'll be a great gaming cpu with decent onboard graphics too (better than a desktop 1060 afaik)
 
Sources
AMD announces Ryzen 8045HS, 8040HS and 8040U "Hawk Point" series powered by Zen4, RDNA3 and XDNA - VideoCardz.com
AMD next-gen "Strix Point" series with XDNA2 NPU to offer 3x performance boost for generative AI - VideoCardz.com
AMD Ryzen 8000 Hawk Point APUs Official: Zen 4 CPU, RDNA 3 GPU, & Upgraded XDNA AI NPU With 16 TOPs (wccftech.com)

Summary
Steam is dropping support for Windows 7 on Jan 1st of 2024, as well as macOS Mohave and older on February 15th, 2024, putting access to games you have purchased in jeopardy, particularly older games which run only on these older OS's. Since steam auto-updates on launch, this implies you may no longer be able to install new copies of Steam on these OS's as of these dates, meaning you would have no way to download and install the games in your library anymore.  While transferring from another newer computer might be an option, if the OS it is too new, installation may not be allowed, may fail to install, etc.

This change will also likely affect games which are already installed, and may prohibit them from launching.  Since Steam regularly updates itself on launch, and games rely on Steam DRM, this means the Steam client must be working and logged in (in most cases) in order to launch. Thus if it does not, this update may lock you out of all installed apps, both old and new.  Steam does not offer any official way to downgrade or download older versions of Steam.  This will affect retro computing enthusiasts and macOS users the most.  I propose some solutions below Valve could use to allow users to retain access to their library without significant effort.
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
I have combined the contents of both announcements into one in my quote, based largely on the macOS announcement.  I found this announcement in two places, both of which are overly hard to find, almost intentionally so it would seem.  Only by browsing and thoroughly reading Steam client updates did I notice the macOS sunsetting, hidden at the bottom of a long list of boring client updates (linked below).  I also happened to see the Windows sunsetting article on a Steam discussions post from a user, which I only happened to read because I was already troubleshooting an issue with the client.
 
This move demonstrates a lack of care and doesn't make sense to me considering SteamCMD is a Steam commandline client which is able to download tools like dedicated server apps from the Steam network, sometimes without so much as logging in, and sometimes (seemingly) without any DRM attached.  Regardless of the Steam UI OS requirements, older games are still something you have purchased, and something Valve may be contractually obligated to provide you access to.  Since Valve DRMs games, and also does not patch them to provide support on forward OS's as companies like GOG sometimes do, Valve in some cases would effectively lock customers out of their purchased licenses, even the latest up to date titles, simply because they chose to build their clients on aging browser technology rather than being true native apps.  Something else to consider - devs may have intentionally put significant effort into providing support for older OS's, even on new games.
 
On the macOS side of things, this move, combined with how Apple handles OS updates - specifically that they deny any machines 7 years old or later from installing the latest OS, may mean you are forced to buy a new computer entirely to access your games, and even then may have to emulate the older OS in order for it to run, depending on the title.  Applying this to another sector - imagine if you could no longer access your bank account or your stocks unless you purchased a new Mac at minimum every 7 years, and even then, possibly had to spin up a VM to do so.
 
In my opinion, Valve should be morally (and possibly legally) obligated to provide a path forward for those who have purchased a game, by either providing a way for DRM to continue to work on older platforms through something like SteamCMD, or removing the Steam DRM from them and allowing them to launch without it on older platforms - especially if previously installed.  They should also provide a way forward to download and reinstall them on older platforms, even if that means using a commandline tool such as SteamCMD rather than a nice UI frontend.
 
Apparently some in the Steam forums have already talked to lawyers about potential lawsuits, but were told announcements like this don't constitute a lockout - in other words, they'd have to be able to demonstrate an inability to access and play their games before legal action could be taken.  This seems incorrect to me, as addressing the issue beforehand would potentially avoid uncorrectable or expensive action on Valve's part (deleting old source code for example), but I'm not a lawyer.  I may send this to LegalEagle as well to see if he might weigh in with his take. I'm curious how situations like this work legally - especially if Valve has provided themselves a way out in the ToS somehow.  I know that, unlike other companies, I vary rarely if ever have to click Accept to Valve's TOS except upon initial install, meaning I may not have agreed to or seen it in over a decade. Other companies like Apple make you accept a new one damn year every time you launch iTunes.
 
I'd like to see Linus and/or Louis Rossman cover this so we could get some eyes on it and maybe get Valve to improve the situation.
 
Sources
Valve's Windows 7 Sunset Announcement (couldn't find it linked anywhere outside of the forum):
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-800A

Forum post where I heard about the Windows 7 announcement:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/4031347296569734477

Valve's macOS Mohave Sunset Announcement (found via the next link):
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/743F-2E0E-C9A5-C375

Steam Update where the macOS Mohave sunset is mentioned:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/3895113407856183761
 
Edited 12/3 - Updated summary to further clarify some of the implications of these changes.

I just don't get what they think they will achieve.
 
Law abiding citizens end up with an insecure browser, while criminals can completely side-step this entirely by compiling their own browser omitting these certificates.
 
I said from day one with these schemes, its only a matter of time before someone uses this to snoop on a high profile politician and THEN they may rethink the insanity.  But its scary how much damage can be done before this happens.

It is actually an anti-cheat fuck-up. How come a driver manufacturer can't touch their drivers and break stuff?
It is up to anti-cheat makers to keep up with driver manufacturers, if they touch low-level stuff they shouldn't be touching in the first place.

I'm sorry but could the user space GPU driver just do it's own fucking job and not to touch anything else?! Like WTF.
 
The shared library (".dll") of the user space GPU driver has to be loaded into the memory address space of every app that needs a graphics context. It's code runs with same full privileges as the app that loads it - i.e. the GPU driver can access every data that the app handles: passwords in a game, secrets in a browser window, banking data, everything... It is crucial trust issue that the GPU driver does not abuse it's position for any reason.
 
Just simply the inclusion of a functionality that AMD did here with "Anti-Lag+" - a GPU driver code part to messes with the host application / game - is unacceptable even without causing any issue with an anti-cheat.
 
I can't believe there are people who are seriously OK with a GPU driver touching private parts of their applications for ANY reason (not to mention for a few ms lower frame latency in a stupid video game).
 
Btw the same goes for what nvidia did not too long ago: Nvidia drivers phones home if you load an LLM
 
I'm so glad I'm on Linux now where we have open-source drivers and none of such bullshit can ever happen.

Summary
Latest Windows 11 update breaks custom user settings of AMD's Adrenalin software
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
Good one Microsoft. As if AMD isn't receiving enough flak for having bad drivers and software. I wonder how many people will blame this on AMD at the end of the day. Guess Microsoft doesn't feel the need to test with AMD hardware, even though we're still talking about roughly 20% of Windows users.
 
Sources
https://www.techpowerup.com/314383/latest-windows-11-cumulative-update-preview-breaks-amd-software-application https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-11-latest-cumulative-update-breaks-adrenalin

LOL, I literally disabled Anti-Lag just to get some new TimeSpy OC records before hopping into CS2 session and I forgot to turn it on again, lucky me 😄 Thanks for the heads up!

They already did, as this article is at least a month old.