Wild. Besides reading my favorite Compute! magazine and typing in programs in the 80’s and 90’s, Byte magazine was the source of computer information in that era. I was pretty young, so a good bit of it went over my head, but a lot of it was fascinating.
This website provides a visual, zoomable map that shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue to the last page of the last issue at the bottom.
Winning the lottery doesn’t seem like it would be up there in the ‘worst things’ category, but it turns out to be one of the worst thing that ever happened to most folks that win big lotteries. Even already wealthy people who ran multi-million dollar companies find their lives completely destroyed. Murder, constant lawsuits, and bankruptcy.
What are some of those statistics?
Large jackpot winners face double digit risk increases versus the general population to be a victim of:
And triple digit increases versus the general population in:
In a surprising discovery, the worst enemy is usually yourself. Winners often suffer from drug overdoes, tax issues, dissolute and dangerous living that leads to death, or simply frittering it all away. Family, friends, and acquaintances will become an ever-present risk as well. If you win the lottery, you are 120 times more likely to be killed by a family member than before you won.
Even people that don’t know you will come out of the woodwork to sue you. In one case, a man settled multiple claims because husbands in his town had their wives leave them. Even though the lottery winner didn’t even know them. The ex-husbands sued the lottery winner simply because they claimed ‘jealousy’ of the lottery winner made their wives leave them for better prospects. Instead of fighting the frivolous cases, it was simply cheaper to just settle out of court for a few $10,000’s.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a bunch of more real stories.
Articles:
Created for Exploring the Unknown exhibition at the CERN Science Gateway by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus, Round About Four Dimensions sculpture is a 4D tesseract rotating in 3D.
Articles:
Game development isn’t just about good leaders or even great products. You can do everything right, even making a game of the year, and still go under.
This is a hard lesson Mike Morhaime, a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, is learning. He just had to sent a letter to staff at his new company Dreamhaven this week announcing layoffs.
One month after Dreamhaven launched Wildgate, the company had sold just 130,000 units. The company’s other game, Sunderfolk, sold just 62,000 copies since its April debut. Despite receiving positive reviews, both titles performed below expectations, Morhaime said. He’s looking for new financing for Dreamhaven, but in the meantime the company would need to retrench.
Frost Giant Studios Inc., also founded by Blizzard veterans, released Stormgate in August. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Morten said in a Linkedin post last week that the game wasn’t getting the traffic or sales he hoped for. Their SEC filing indicated Frost Giant Studios Inc. lost $11.7 million on sales of $1.4 million last year.
There are many purported causes. There’s been too many games released at once and not enough audience. Another factor may be even great games are not drawing players away from their heavily entrenchment in existing franchises. Whatever the cause, we’re clearly entering one of the worst markets for game studios in a decade.
I didn’t know this was even a thing, but it’s cool.
Apparently Jerry Wayne knows the proper etiquette for Ethiopian jazz
I have written about how Amazon’s Graviton4 CPU is starting to out-perform x86 offerings from Intel and AMD. Now there is yet another front that should worry Intel and AMD: security.
Like many custom chip designs coming from Apple, Google, and Amazon, Graviton4 is an ARM-based architecture. While AMD, Intel, and some other chip designers have struggled with the various forms of Spectre and Meltdown attacks, new designs are defending against them at their hearts.
ARM8.5-A and subsequent security extensions have been slowly and steadily introduced to combat the vulnerabilities found in classic chip designs. These features include things like Branch Target Identification to avoid branch prediction and speculative execution attacks. Memory addresses can be accessed only if they have been marked as valid for that execution prediction. Pointer Authentication adds a cryptographic signature to authenticate memory pointers and prevents data alteration. All data sent across high-speed hardware interfaces such as Graviton memory and AWS Nitro cards is encrypted to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. All of this is enabled by default for customers that use Amazon Linux 2023.
“Many people told me it was impossible to build a chip that could compete with the x86 CPUs and didn’t use the x86 architecture,” Ali Saidi, senior principal engineer at AWS, said in an interview published by Amazon’s A to Z blog. “But 25 years ago, x86 wasn’t the dominant architecture. The innovation and economies of scale of the PC drove success in other areas like servers. Since it happened before, I knew it could happen again.”
Everyone has been going on and on about Hall effect controllers and keyboards since they made a splash on the scene just a year or so ago. I have even tried out one of the better hall effect keyboards to great effect (Corsair K70 Pro TKL with Hall effect switches). Hall effect keys can be tuned to trigger at different points in the keypress descent.
Having been using heavier brown switches in my gaming keyboard, my touch-typing was a little heavy handed at first. When I learned I could back off and even just feather the touches, my typing speed definitely went up by about 5-10wpm – going from about 70wpm to 80-85wpm. The problem was that I wasn’t really into the $179 price tag – so I returned it and am waiting for prices to come down.
But there is a new game in town: TMR (Tunnel Magneto Resistance), or sometimes called inductive switches. A few folks have been releasing TMR keyboards (Ducky OneX), but adoption seems slow and reviews seem to be scarce.
Eve Butt, however, wrote a review of a TMR game controller – the PB Tails Metal Crush Defender. She seems to think it does better than its Hall effect kin (like the 8BitDo Ultimate). She claims it gives noticeably more instant precision than the Hall effect equivalent and never suffers from the dreaded, well documented stick drift common in normal Switch controllers. Primarily, she notes much less dead space before input is registered.
I, for one, am excited about the input arms race that is delivering us some really fascinating new technology. If Hall effect keyboards come down in price, I definitely thought I’d buy one. But perhaps I should try out a TMR keyboard as well.
President of PlayStation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida shared how they decided to continue or cancel games in an interview with Game File (paywalled):
We kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game. If the revenue seems lower than the money we need to spend to finish, we cancel the project. We cancelled lots of projects after the prototype level and no one knows in public. And that’s fine. That’s just a process
Sometimes the game is in deep production. The largest I canceled were two games, after we spent $25 million. At that time, that was lots of money. Now, not as much. I felt really bad about how we couldn’t see this.
I produced, so I was really harsh on producers. That’s what I used to do.
I think that’s one area that many startups nor big companies do enough: honest mid-dev assessments that honestly ask if they should cancel or more strongly steer projects back into scope. In my experience, startups are encouraged to give perfect and rosy projections – even to the point of firing anyone that questions obvious or serious issues. This leads to all kinds of deception and fraud.
Bigger companies, conversely, tend to plan once, and then doggedly stick with it no matter how bad the estimates were or how off-track the project becomes. Rarely do they do an honest re-plan with project cancelation being seriously on the table.
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LightBurn, the defacto software for hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was built as a multi-platform solution so it could be used on a wide variety of platforms. But in a recent email announcement sent out to users, they announced they would no longer be distributing their software for Linux systems.
Why? The developers claim that too much of their time was being spent supporting and packaging Lightburn software for Linux distributions relative to the size of the user base.
The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.
They’ve apparently tried multiple distribution mechanisms designed to fix these issues such as flatpack and appimage – but still encountered too many problems.
It’s a reminder that the entire ecosystem must be healthy for your software to be healthy. [Hackaday]
Do you want a 360 degree view of the Chesapeake Bay from your 1,500 sq ft 4 bedroom, 1 bath home? Now you can – and it comes with a really excellent night light. For just $450,000, the Smith Point Lighthouse could be your new home! Only a 2.5 mile boat ride into the bay.
Besides needing to take a 2.5 mile boat ride to go for a walk, get some milk, or pick up the mail – lighthouses often have usage limitations.
