I’ll take DS9’s first two seasons over TNG’s first two any time. Yes, even Move Along Home. TNG also peaked around season 5, and was somewhat more mixed after that (but never going quite so low, either).
There’s a lot of fighting between DS9 and B5. The story goes that B5 series creator J. Michael Straczynski had shopped the series bible around, including to Paramount. They weren’t interested, but when they heard it got picked up by WB, they rushed their own space station based Star Trek series forward. With people coming over from TNG, they get a pilot ready faster than JMS can create a series from scratch.
Since they had the B5 series bible, there’s long been allegations that DS9 is a ripoff of B5. Indeed, there do seem to be some elements stolen out of it. For example, the pilot of B5 has a “changeling net” technology that lets people impersonate each other, which had apparently evolved out of an early draft of a changeling species, which DS9 copies outright.
What Paramount studio execs did was definitely underhanded. They were deliberately pushing out a show to make sure B5 wouldn’t get to the same level of popularity as Star Trek. They probably did steal elements from the B5 bible and pushed Berman and Piller to use them.
However, fans make more of the similarities than are really there. Berman and Piller were almost certainly unaware of why the studio was pushing certain ideas and where they got them from (and JMS said as much at the time). Most of the stolen elements are ultimately superficial. The way the central conflict unfolds is very different, the characters are very different, and the technology is all different. B5 doesn’t center around a planet coming out of a long term colonial authoritarian government, and DS9 doesn’t have humanity crawling out of a war that nearly destroyed it and which ended for mysterious reasons. B5 doesn’t have an excellent father-son relationship, and DS9 doesn’t have a wisecracking ambassador who’s very likeable despite doing some incredibly fucked up things.
They are both excellent shows, and well worth your time.
I agree on Pulaski. She could have been a great character if she had more than one season.
I don’t think there’s a truly great episode in TNG’s first two seasons, though. They range from “utter garbage” to “fine” . Season three is massive improvement. Watching it back to back, it’s almost jarring how much better it gets. Barely seems like the same show.
DS9 ranges from “I’ll watch it, I guess” to “holy shit this is amazing”. Kai Winn is a fantastic villain straight away, and would be the most talked about villain in any other show. The only reason she isn’t is because there are so many great villains in DS9 that she gets lost.
Yes. The advantage is that you can make the surface area of the air cooling part much, much larger. I had a water cooled system that could do web browsing and other basic tasks with zero fan speed (though it was better to leave it on very low speed to avoid hunting behavior).
Also, there’s some benefits to thermal mass. Short term spikes can be absorbed by the water without increasing fan speed.
I wouldn’t cite LTT for much, but IIRC, that was only true to a point. The NHD-15 is great, but a lot of cases can’t fit one. Same with many other high end air coolers. It might also cool to the same temperature, but is also running the fans harder to get there.
It’s a fun thing to do. I like my setup (O11 dynamic XL, two 360mm rads, dual pumps, both CPU and GPU blocks), but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone. It’s a lot of effort and expense for a little gain. But it’s a hobby on top of a hobby, and that’s fine if you want to go for it.
It has more points of failure, and that failure can be more catastrophic. If your air cooler falls off somehow or the fan dies, CPUs these days are pretty good about shutting themselves off before they melt. If your fittings leak, it can destroy everything.
Big air coolers don’t fit because there isn’t enough height off the CPU inside the case. An O11 Dynamic (regular size) doesn’t fit an NH-D15, for example, but it fits water cooling with at least one regular thickness 360mm rad on top just fine. (And also one on the bottom, and a thin one on the side).
A good chunk of that has to do with trackers and ads. Things forced on webdevs by management.
Not that webdevs couldn’t improve anything otherwise; there are certainly optimizations to be had. But pop open the dev network panel on your browser, clear cache, and refresh the page. A lot of the holdup and dancing elements you’ll see are from third party trackers and ads.
This sort of thing worked in the '90s. Many of the security restrictions in browsers these days means it doesn’t consider the local file to be actually local, and you have to host from some kind of server. There are mini servers that are trivial to spin up, like SimpleHTTPServer on Python.
Factories are being built for sodium-ion batteries right now.
Every battery breakthrough you’ve heard of in the last 30 years contributed something. It might have shown a method of what not to do, or it might have contributed a 1% boost. Stack several of those 1% boosts on top of each other, and you get a workable EV.
Because we don’t know for sure what will work. It makes sense to pursue multiple lines of research with the expectation that only one needs to work out.
They’ll probably never get there. Those small towns are losing population.
That said, more people should consider e-bikes. It’s OK if you come to the conclusion that it won’t work for you, but do some research. It might be that your objections aren’t as insurmountable as you think.
Unless you buy the most extravagant and silly EV on the market (the Hummer), EVs are still a win over ICE when powered by coal plants.
And yes, it would be incredibly difficult for these towns to transition to usable public transportation. There are decisions literally set in concrete. You’d have to tear down perfectly good buildings and replace them with higher density housing. The concrete you would need is itself a major CO2 emitter. You could basically let everyone drive ICE cars for an extra decade for the amount of concrete you’d need.
CO2 neutral concrete (or even CO2 negative) is out there, but it’s not scaled up enough yet.
Ironically, towing capacity is something that EVs have the potential to be better than ICE. They have the torque, and you don’t need a complicated transmission in the drive train being a limiting factor.
You can also put extra battery in whatever you’re towing. It’s extra weight, but if we’re talking highway travel, the weight doesn’t matter much. Air resistance matters more, but you’ve already paid that price by having a trailer at all. High power connection does need to be worked out, though.
I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.
I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.
Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently....
Rooftop solar is the most expensive way to do it. The graph above is for utility scale systems. Roofs are always custom jobs and they’re priced accordingly. Utility scale uses racks that are all the same for an entire field.
If rooftop was priced alone on the chart in OP, it’s be around the price of nuclear.
Further lowering panel cost isn’t going to significantly cut that price. Cost of labor is the major part of that.
People always focus on rooftop solar, but it’s horribly expensive compared to a field of panels. The economics of scale will almost certainly keep it that way.
What we should be looking at is community solar, where neighborhoods invest in a solar field together.
Wind and solar complement each other. The sun often shines when the wind isn’t blowing. We have plenty of historical weather data on how long the lulls where neither would work for a given region. That tells you how much storage you need to fill the gap. Pad that out, and you’re good.
Nuclear does nothing to help this calculation. It’s just expensive.
Not only that, but we don’t have to do this all at once. The math often works out that getting to 95% renewable is far easier than shooting for 100%, with existing fossil fuel plants making up the remainder. This is fully achievable by 2030, by which point we want to drastically reduce emissions. Then we can worry about the last 5%.
There is no such plan for nuclear. If you had all the permits signed off and dirt being shoveled right now, then you would not have a single MW of new nuclear feeding the grid by 2030. They take too long to build. Budget and schedule overruns are the norm, and it’s a wonder that anyone is investing money into them at this point.
In fact, they aren’t. The US federal government has shown a willingness to sign permits for new nuclear plants. Nobody is buying, and there’s no mystery as to why.
Even if that’s true, it’s not something we can change without more than a decade of investment. Good batteries will be here before that, if not here already.
Because it doesn’t help. Renewables want to be paired with something that can easily be spun up and down as needed. Nuclear doesn’t fit that model. It tends to make it worse, because cheap energy we could be getting from solar or wind has to give way to the nuclear baseload instead.
It’s something of the opposite problem of the sun not shining at the same time the wind doesn’t blow. At times where you have tons of both, you want to store them up for later. Nuclear forces a situation where you have to do that even more.
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
Development paradigms spearheaded by MySQL and PHP, where it was discovered that you can be really fast if you don’t care about getting the right answer.
I once saw a little blurb at a sandwich shop stating that tomatoes are fruit, but if you pair them on a sandwich with jalapenos, you’re getting both fruits and vegetables. I demand better scientific accuracy in restaurant marketing signs.
SNW is probably what you want. There are some longer arcs, but for the most part, you can take things episode by episode.
The streaming era is favoring shows with long arcs, though. Just the opposite of where we were in the 90s, where missing one episode of Babylon 5 meant you might not understand what’s going on, and VCRs were clunky and hard to setup right.
I’ve had this theory running around in my head about followups to any series. Every person has a slightly different take on what their favorite part of the show is. For OG Star Trek, maybe you liked the banter between Spock and McCoy. Maybe you liked Kirk’s swagger. Maybe you thought Scotty was hot.
If a new production comes along years later and doesn’t reproduce the specific elements you like, then you will hate it. The producers might have been ultrafans of the original with good writing chops, a solid cast, and high production values, but if it doesn’t have those specific elements for you, then you’ll hate it.
Those elements are different for everyone, though. The list of possible elements can be very long, and no new production can possibly check off even a significant fraction of that list. Therefore, any new production is bound to have a long line of haters regardless of its quality on its own merits.
Was Star Trek supposed to be about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on a ship strutting around the galaxy? TNG changed that. Is it at least supposed to be about strutting around the galaxy? DS9 changed that. Should it at least be about interacting with the alien races we know? Voyager changed that. And so on.
JMS made a Star Trek pitch back in 2004. I like Babylon 5, but I don’t think I would have liked his version of Star Trek. The outline focused on elements I didn’t care about and just seemed meh to me in general.
This goes for any other long running series, of course.
JPEG will never die. Too many things support it at a very basic level. A random CCD camera module on DigiKey probably has an option for direct JPEG output. An 8-bit Arduino will know how to take that JPEG and display it on a cheap 4" LCD screen off Bang Good.
Formats that sprawl everywhere like that will never, ever die.
AMD is getting there by optimizing the shit out of memory access and cache. RISC designs by nature have far simpler memory models. AMD has to throw tons of resources into making the x86 pig stay in the air, and they’re already flirting with a move towards ARM.
Most of the people who know how to keep that pig flying already work at AMD or Intel. They certainly don’t work at VIA Technologies (the third x86 company that nobody talks about, for a good reason). In contrast, any given Fortune 500 could probably hire an ARM team to make a custom chip for their needs provided they had a good enough reason.
One thing you can do is translate 3d APIs. This sometimes makes 3d consoles easier to emulate than 2d consoles. PS1 emulation was basically solved when SNES emulation was playable but still had noticeable bugs.
You don’t really “tailor” hardware to Linux. You release a driver without a dumb binary blob requirement, or at least document your hardware enough for a kernel hacker to pick it up.
If the Deck can gain critical mass, they’ll be able force the issue. They’re already doing it with targeting Linux. The Switch is ARM, and the Switch2 leaks suggest it’ll be a better ARM chip, so devs are already targeting it.
Unreal/Unity already go to ARM pretty easily, so it’s not a huge deal.
What I’m getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.
There are three x86 companies, and there’s not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.
This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.
Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.
would you write web app with this? (lemmy.world)
DSC Season 5, LD Season 5, SNW Season 3.... GIVE IT TO ME NOW (startrek.website)
Air cooling is just better (usenet.lol)
Air is better than water
we are safe (discuss.tchncs.de)
"OpenAI Staff Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns" (files.catbox.moe)
wired.com/…/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/
Sodium-ion battery breakthroughs may be key to our electric future (www.techspot.com)
Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.' (www.pcgamer.com)
Price of solar dropped 89% in ten years (ourworldindata.org)
Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently....
Federation of Hold My Beer [Now with Narration!] (startrek.website)
Too long, don’t wanna read? I got bored. Feel free to listen instead.
Rant: Valve's new Steam Deck screws speak volumes about their ethos.
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
A good book can change your life (lemmy.ml)
It's true. (startrek.website)
Average TS developer (lemmy.world)
Cope (lemmy.world)
Just once I’d like a post where everyone is chill and positive about stuff instead of focusing on negative...
Every goddamn time I'm trying to make something for my DnD game (lemmy.world)
CloudConvert.com might as well be my fucking home page.
Valve says "technology doesn't exist" yet for full Steam Deck 2.0 (www.eurogamer.net)
Think we should intervene? (sopuli.xyz)