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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Its all about how an application goes from “I would like to display X on a screen” to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It’s then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There’s a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that’s the general idea.

    Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to “look at” what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn’t focussed).

    Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we’re at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there’s still odd bits of software that either haven’t been ported, or that still rely on some features that don’t exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.







  • Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

    Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

    I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.


  • There’s a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group’s recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2’s for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.

    The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you’re neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.





  • samc@feddit.uktoGaming@lemmy.mlSoftware Emulators vs FPGAs
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    7 months ago

    I guess the argument would be that software fixes need to be implemented for each ROM separately. Which also involves the pain of decompiling. Yes FPGAs are probably a pain, but they potentially offer perfect emulation of every game.

    One thing I’m not sure about is how portable FPGA logic is. If I write a NES emulator in verilog for one FPGA, can that code be reused on a later model if, for example, my FPGA goes out of production?







  • This seems like a false dichotomy. Maxwell’s equations don’t say anything about where the charge comes from, only how the electromagnetic field behaves if charge (be it electric or magnetic) is present.

    And if you’re talking about the standard model, well we’ve known that that’s incomplete since its inception, but I’m not aware of any argument that says anything beyond the standard model must have either monopole or a fundamentally different conception of magnetic dipoles.