I don’t want lithium-ion alternatives for better range. Quite the opposite, I’m actually okay having slightly less range if it means my car won’t spontaneously combust. This one apparently improves the safety of lithium-ion batteries too, so it’s great, but I hate when headlines focus on one thing that matters the least.
> Quite the opposite, I’m actually okay having slightly less range if it means my car won’t spontaneously combust.
Modern LFP LiIon (LiFePO4) batteries are pretty damn safe now, and is also the dominant chemistry in new EV batteries and energy storage systems. The fire risk is nothing like what it was, arguably your wish has already been granted.
The Chinese market is mandating this year that EV batteries prevent fire or explosion for a minimum of 2hrs after a cell enters thermal runaway, and LFP is the main driver to achieve it.
Is this true when adjusting for vehicle age? The average age of an EV is quite a bit lower than the average age of an ICE vehicle, and I assume there is at least some correlation between a vehicle's age and how likely it is to explode (based on degradation, type of use, type of owner, etc.).
Neither EVs nor ICE cars spontaneously combust unless there's a design flaw. Even when this happens it tends to be very rare, but the Chevy Bolt fires for example were fixed with a recall. Similarly a Ford recall last year fixed a problem where fuel injectors could leak and cause an engine fire.
EVs and ICE cars can both catch on fire in a bad enough accident, but this is true regardless of the age of the vehicle, and tends to be more sudden and violent with gasoline explosions vs battery fires.
Exactly! The C64 could control where the beam started painting. To move the screen a pixel you just wrote the the x and y offsets to two 8-bit I/O registers. Only after scrolling 7 or 8 pixels you had to copy memory around. I was relatively easy to get this right smoothly and since everything was in sync with the beam it was easy to make tear free.
Shaking effects that did not require memory copy were even easier.
I was green with envy, when I saw how fast and smooth a C64 scrolled some text (iirc it was some machine code monitor). My Amstrad CPC464 had no text mode and the Z80A CPU was clearly overwhelmed with shifting the whopping 16KiB RAM of the graphics buffer or even just rendering a line of text.
Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.
The term "disc" for storage predates optical media. "Disc" was the common spelling for a disk (like a floppy disk) on British 8-bit computers like Amstrad CPC or Sinclair Spectrum.[1][2]
It seems like the distinction simply comes from British and American preferences.[3]
I have no idea how Apple jumped to such an arbitrary conclusion.
Disk was already the standard spelling in the UK by 1984 (in a computing context), just as program was used in preference to programme. But Amstrad mistyped it as disc on the plastic mouldings for their first CPC, and were too cheap to change them. Consequently CPC 3in disks were always called discs even into the 90s.
Taycan relies too heavily on touch. Not even vent directions are manually adjustable on a Taycan. BMW i4 interior is much better in that aspect: many physical controls. I hope Porsche fixes its mistakes soon.
Of course it used to be simple in the earlier days. It got way better and fast with HASP and alike in the mid 90’s. I specifically remember software that kept a portion of its data in the dongle memory with good anti-debugging techniques too. But even the hardest protection would take a week to break at most.
Tell that to the crackers who worked for over a year to simulate a social network in order to finally crack the game Red Dead Redemption 2, which had a very custom game protection implemented by Rockstar. Also to this day there is no crack to Diablo 3, famous for being single player but with online verification. You can create very hard to crack protections quite easy if you employ self-modifying code techniques. Do you have any idea how hard is to debug code that overwrites itself in memory and that cannot be patched by modifying the existing code from disk? The reason why this is not more common is because the more iterations you do, the harder is to create those iterations, which means you add a lot of time to create the protection which means that you need to have a finished code, and code is always modified by production team, so managers see this overtime unnecessary.
> Do you have any idea how hard is to debug code that overwrites itself in memory and that cannot be patched by modifying the existing code from disk?
Even the protection code in the 90’s had self-modifying code. It’s not novel or specifically hard to work with when you’re used to it, especially with modern tooling.
What makes some games harder to crack is that testing that they work okay throughout. That might mean playing all the game from the beginning to the end, and trying all the scenarios, and fixing all the issues found. Assuming that RDR2 takes at least 20 hours to finish, and close to 100 hours to fully complete, that’s a huge undertaking of course. It’s no surprise that it took that long.
The real reason is that executable modifying its own code is often flagged by AV, or the OS itself, as an "insecure" activity. Since self-modification is used in attacks and exploits, good protections rarely use it now. It's impossible to use codesigns with self-modified code.
Looking into Issues, reading 48 and just scrolling at beginning: "Local and LAN systems talk, but will not authenticate" / "Multiplayer Game Problem" / "cannot restore DB" / "Items stats do not reflect the game class"...etc, just to name a few.
Yeah, I really like to get frustration when I am gaming due to unsupported and canceled project /s
Out of curiosity googled for Sentinel (which was one of the other dongles back then), seems somebody is now providing a bypass/emulation service: https://sentineldongle.com/
(not affiliated with this, just googled Sentinel like 5 minutes ago and this showed up).
> "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'"
I somehow got interested by quote and searched it (as is?) on duckduckgo to find a relevant reddit discussion where people were (are?) discussing trains and many other things.
Interesting quote to say the least. Here's the relevant reddit discussion
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