In other news today...
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@Captain Apparently it was still under construction and wasn't even anchored down yet, so it's just a bunch of noise about nothing (like many things).
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@topspin That's what ecryptfs has been used for since quite some time already. So now they'll integrate it in systemd and properly tie it to the session so it's not visible for other processes. But it's nothing new.
It will also almost certainly be opt-in anyway.
love that concept. is super neat i think, but...... umm....... i ain't enabling it at first release. no way am i risking a bug where the whole thing goes poof because of an update or something and backup software can't handle it either because it's just an encrypted blob and anyway it can't see it because its running in a different login session.....maybe after others have blunted the bleeding edge a bit.....
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@PleegWat Not going to watch it at work, but why would it more palindromic than 11/11/1111?
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@jinpa That wasn't quite clear to me either.
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@jinpa I watched the video a few days ago so I might miss some stuff. 11/11/1111 is in the distant past and people back then weren't terribly concerned with the palindromicity of their dates. But anyway, Feb 2 2020 is a palindrome in US, European, and ISO date styles. It's also the 33rd day of the year, with 333 days remaining because it's a leap year. Both the day number and number of days remaining are palindromes as well, which is a unique property of this date. I think there was another thing, but I don't remember what it shwas
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
@PleegWat Not going to watch it at work, but why would it more palindromic than 11/11/1111?
at 11:11:11.1111 in the morning?
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Check out our new game streaming service, Stadia. It's got a crap selection, costs a monthly subscription to play in high res, lags to shit, and the individual games cost full retail price, and after we shut down the service you don't get to keep em.
Nvidia:
RIP Stadia? Nvidia’s newly launched cloud-gaming service is (mostly) a stunner
GeForce Now works with hundreds of games you may already own, includes free tier.
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@hungrier I tried GeForce Now in beta. Works pretty well.
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I don't trust nvidia any more than google.
I'll play my games on my own pc as long as I can, thankyouverymuch.
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@MrL The difference seems to be that you don't need to trust them very far - I mean, you can play the games you bought at other storefronts. Which means that even if GeForce Now gets discontinued, you'll still have the games.
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@Rhywden I guess you have to trust them with your login info or access token or whatever. But yeah, the big thing (for me at least) is that you don't have to re-buy your games
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@MrL The difference seems to be that you don't need to trust them very far - I mean, you can play the games you bought at other storefronts. Which means that even if GeForce Now gets discontinued, you'll still have the games.
Except for free games you can only play games you own elsewhere.
edit: Steam, Uplay, Epic, and Battle.net
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@MrL The difference seems to be that you don't need to trust them very far - I mean, you can play the games you bought at other storefronts. Which means that even if GeForce Now gets discontinued, you'll still have the games.
But not the hardware to run them, because there was no point in upgrading it while you were using streaming.
Which is the point of such services - for you to exchange paying for hardware for paying for subscription.
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@MrL Well, the subscription fee is so low that any "loss" you incur due to the fees subtracting from your upgrade budget will be miniscule anyway.
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@MrL Well, the subscription fee is so low that any "loss" you incur due to the fees subtracting from your upgrade budget will be miniscule anyway.
For now, obviously. If it gains traction and stays relevant long enough, they will jack up the prices.
Just a little every time, to not scare people off, just like cooking a frog.It won't be long before your pc is worthless, so if you want to leave, you have to pay big bucks for a new one. Which keeps you in.
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@MrL Yeah, about that "boiling frog" scenario:
While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual,[1][2] according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out.[3][4] Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.
And:
It won't be long before your pc is worthless
Yeah, no. If you want the latest eye-candy, maybe. But if you can splurge $1,000+ for a new graphics card then even $20 per month won't put much of a dent in your pocket.
But otherwise the development of CPUs and GPUs has slowed enough so that even stuff from five+ years ago can still run stuff fine on at least Medium@1080p.
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Yeah, no. If you want the latest eye-candy, maybe. But if you can splurge $1,000+ for a new graphics card then even $20 per month won't put much of a dent in your pocket.
It's not about dent. It's about facing a decision: $$$$ to pay at once, or keep paying $$ every month.
As long as they don't make the subscription price ridiculous, it looks good to stay.But otherwise the development of CPUs and GPUs has slowed enough so that even stuff from five+ years ago can still run stuff fine on at least Medium@1080p.
Medium? Like a peasant?!
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
Medium? Like a peasant?!
Clearly the service is not meant for you.
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@Tsaukpaetra ...or anyone else for that matter
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
I don't remember what it shwas
Getting drunk there, I see.
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@Tsaukpaetra
Belgian Hospitals ... like clockwork it seems
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
Medium? Like a peasant?!
Clearly the service is not meant for you.
Esteemed gentlemen will wear manure covered overalls and chew a stalk of wheat in this classy establishment
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
Medium? Like a peasant?!
Clearly the service is not meant for you.
Esteemed gentlemen will wear manure covered overalls and chew a stalk of wheat in this classy establishment
Eh, how times changed. My grandfather used your grandfather's back as a stool, when mounting a horse, and today you have the audacity to speak aloud.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
Eh, how times changed. My grandfather used your grandfather's back as a stool, when mounting a horse, and today you have the audacity to speak aloud.
My grandfather found it endlessly funny how your grandfather could not mount his little pony without my grandfather's help
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
My grandfather used your grandfather's back as a stool, when mounting a horse
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
Eh, how times changed. My grandfather used your grandfather's back as a stool, when mounting a horse, and today you have the audacity to speak aloud.
My grandfather found it endlessly funny how your grandfather could not mount his little pony without my grandfather's help
Also
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@hungrier I tried GeForce Now in beta. Works pretty well.
What kind of bandwidth did it take? And how was the video quality?
That's the one thing I don't understand about the equation, where you outsource the gaming hardware:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Yeah, no. If you want the latest eye-candy, maybe. But if you can splurge $1,000+ for a new graphics card then even $20 per month won't put much of a dent in your pocket.
It's not about dent. It's about facing a decision: $$$$ to pay at once, or keep paying $$ every month.
As long as they don't make the subscription price ridiculous, it looks good to stay.But otherwise the development of CPUs and GPUs has slowed enough so that even stuff from five+ years ago can still run stuff fine on at least Medium@1080p.
Medium? Like a peasant?!
You'll still need a phat pipe for the video stream, and an endpoint capable of displaying it. In a first-person action game, will a 100Mbps internet connection really get you even 1080p with full details? And if not, how much would the hardware cost for playing the game at an equivalent level locally?
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@acrow 100 Mbps is sufficient for 4K with full details.
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@acrow 100 Mbps is sufficient for 4K with full details.
I'm going to argue against that, based on mathematics.
Assuming that "4K" means an image of 4000px x 2000px, with 16bit color depth, shown at 30fps, we get 4000x2000x16x30 = 3.84e9 bits per second. That is, you'd need a 3.9Gbps connection to stream un-compressed 4K.
Video compression reduces the size a lot. However, it relies on the source data being predictable in certain ways; a truly random video stream is incompressible.In practise, most video that you'd want to stream, like movies, are compressible to an extent. However, they can only retain the image fidelity and stay within the bounds of the bitrate at scenes incompressible with I-frames by buffering. Your video player usually buffers for several seconds. Which you can't do with games, since data past the last frame is stale.
If we're considering real-world P-frames-only compression, I'm looking at random JPG images from my phone camera. At 3264x1836 (approx. 4K), they seem to be 2MB-10MB each, with some loss of detail (likely to the suboptimal knocked-around lens). Running these at 30fps would produce a data stream of 60MBps-300MBps, or 480Mbps-2400Mbps in ISP units. And that's at a quality lower than my gaming PC produces at 60fps.
But as always in video compression, bitrate can be traded for loss of fidelity.
So the question still stands: Just how good did NVIDIA manage to make the video quality for a 100Mbps connection?
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Red Hat's favorite teenager is at it again:
https://en24.news/n/2020/02/fosdem-systemd-and-the-reinvention-of-the-home-directories.html
(Article seems to be blatantly translated from the German source, but that's all I could find)
It all gets so much easier:
Decrypting the home container remains a problem after successful login via SSH, because SSH does not transmit any user passwords. In these cases, Lennart Poettering recommends simply logging on to a second account via SSH in order to unlock the home directory of the primary account from there.
… iff you're not using a shared system, in which case using a regular LUKS volume wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
And woe betide who should try to combine it with what sane environments have used to provide location-independent homes since before Lennart was even conceived:
Although a home directory can also be on a CIFS share, Systemd-Homed does not have file locking for competing access or synchronization of individual files.
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@acrow The same way Google managed to do for Stadia? Dude, instead of theorycrafting you could simply look at the existing implementations.
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@acrow The same way Google managed to do for Stadia? Dude, instead of theorycrafting you could simply look at the existing implementations.
I assume by "look at" you mean "try it out and see for yourself"?
I don't have the idle time to sate my curiosity that far. Though I might look for a review on the subject, in case anyone did a side-by-side comparison on e.g. Doom cutscenes, between local PC at full detail and the streaming video.
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@Rhywden Aaand I found a review that actually touches just this subject:
Google Stadia review: the best of cloud gaming is still just a beta
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Google’s Stadia cloud gaming system has a lot of promise but a long way to go.
Did you notice that I wrote “4K” and “1080p” in scare quotes earlier? For days, I’ve been trying and failing to get Google to admit that its servers aren’t actually rendering intensive games at what I would consider 4K.
[W]here’s the sharp detail in Lara Croft’s character model? And where are the high-resolution textures? Google told me that Stadia is designed to run games at the highest resolution with all of the settings turned up, but clearly, that isn’t happening here.
So at least Stadia fails pants-down in this regard. Now to see if I can find reviews on Nvidia's service...
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
@Rhywden Aaand I found a review that actually touches just this subject:
Google Stadia review: the best of cloud gaming is still just a beta
Google’s Stadia cloud gaming system has a lot of promise but a long way to go.
Did you notice that I wrote “4K” and “1080p” in scare quotes earlier? For days, I’ve been trying and failing to get Google to admit that its servers aren’t actually rendering intensive games at what I would consider 4K.
[W]here’s the sharp detail in Lara Croft’s character model? And where are the high-resolution textures? Google told me that Stadia is designed to run games at the highest resolution with all of the settings turned up, but clearly, that isn’t happening here.
So at least Stadia fails pants-down in this regard. Now to see if I can find reviews on Nvidia's service...
Please don't only quote the parts which fit into your narrative:
What you’re looking at here isn’t bad streaming; the stream is 4K. Not only that, but it’s also some of the best streaming image quality I’ve seen, without loads of the nasty compression artifacts that make other cloud gaming services look like there’s an ugly haze between you and much of the game.
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Please don't only quote the parts which fit into your narrative:
What you’re looking at here isn’t bad streaming; the stream is 4K. Not only that, but it’s also some of the best streaming image quality I’ve seen, without loads of the nasty compression artifacts that make other cloud gaming services look like there’s an ugly haze between you and much of the game.
What narrative? I'm comparing it to the experience I get on a PC. As in:
@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Yeah, no. If you want the latest eye-candy, maybe. But if you can splurge $1,000+ for a new graphics card then even $20 per month won't put much of a dent in your pocket.
But otherwise the development of CPUs and GPUs has slowed enough so that even stuff from five+ years ago can still run stuff fine on at least Medium@1080p.
If the service can't actually produce the same image at "full settings" as a PC can on "Medium@1080", it doesn't matter whether it's the "best streaming" yet. It's still crap value for money, and you'd be better off buying a bargain PC.
And I still want to know if the "best streaming" gets any better on Nvidia's service.
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@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@hungrier said in In other news today...:
I don't remember what it shwas
Getting drunk there, I see.
Just counting to schfifty-five
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
So at least Stadia fails pants-down in this regard. Now to see if I can find reviews on Nvidia's service...
Most* of the games on Stadia don't actually play at 4k, even when you set it to 4k. They play at 1080p or lower, then Stadia upscales it (or maybe they upscale it before streaming it to you; that sounds like something Google would do).
That said, Geforce I think tops out at 1080p/60, for which bandwidth shouldn't be much issue. But that also said, I haven't tried either yet, just going on what I've read.
* All but one, last I heard which was a few weeks ago
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
a truly random video stream is incompressible
If you're sending white noise over to your 4k TV...
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Please don't only quote the parts which fit into your narrative:
YMBNH
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
a truly random video stream is incompressible.
So, all those games adding extra (film) noise in post processing are fucking up Google's business model?
More seriously, I think you mixed up the I-frames and P-frames. I-frames are the complete images, and P-frames are the (forward) predicted ones. B-frames would be the bidirectionally interpolated ones (and thus largely inapplicable to real-time streaming).
Not quite sure why a rippling lake wouldn't be able to use P-frames. There's still a lot of coherency there.
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Trespasser At CIA Headquarters Takes Plea Agreement
The woman accused of making unauthorized visits to the CIA reportedly asked for "Agent Penis."
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@boomzilla I’m not sure if the CIA of all places is a good pick to make dumb pranks...
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Aging government computer systems at risk of 'critical failure,' Trudeau warned
Newly released briefing notes for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau describe the dire state of federal computer systems, which deliver billions in benefits and are on the precipice of collapse.
Officials briefing Trudeau after his party's re-election noted "mission-critical" systems and applications are "rusting out and at risk of failure," requiring immediate attention from his government.
Some systems are pushing 60 years old and built on "outdated technology" that can no longer be maintained.
"There is a lot of concern, both within the bureaucracy, within the political layer, and within industry about we need to get this ball rolling. We need to help government digitally transform."
Sounds like yellow journalism, but also looks as a multibillon storm of HPC, kickbacks and failures.
Would Canada's systems freeze ?
edit: the HN companion thread is juicy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22227252
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla I’m not sure if the CIA of all places is a good pick to make dumb pranks...
Considering all the dumb pranks they play themselves, they shouldn't complain.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
a truly random video stream is incompressible.
So, all those games adding extra (film) noise in post processing are fucking up Google's business model?
Maybe? If so, I'd assume it to be the first setting to be turned off, despite declaring maxed-out settings.
More seriously, I think you mixed up the I-frames and P-frames. I-frames are the complete images, and P-frames are the (forward) predicted ones. B-frames would be the bidirectionally interpolated ones (and thus largely inapplicable to real-time streaming).
You're right, I mixed them up. ...And you're the first to notice.
Not quite sure why a rippling lake wouldn't be able to use P-frames. There's still a lot of coherency there.
From my understanding, a large part of the delta compression is movement vector translations. I.e. the frame contains a description of which parts of the previous frame are moved, tilted and/or zoomed for the next. And then it applies some kind of compressed pixel-delta on top of that. But the closer it can get to the next frame by just moving around pieces of the previous one, the better the compression.
The rippling lake is an example I'd read from somewhere, given as an example of an object that doesn't have many opportunities for vector translations. The ripples are small waves that appear randomly, move for a moment, and then disappear. The constant appearing and disappearing of mini-waves prevents the existing ones being used as part of any square translation window. Technically, you could still find matching pieces from previous frames, to rebuild the next one, if you had all the memory and CPU-time in the world. But it'd be computationally expensive.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
a truly random video stream is incompressible
If you're sending white noise over to your 4k TV...
We're talking games here. Some games have depictions tube TVs, which do that. And some get very close to white noise when the action gets explodey enough. All that smoke, shells and shrapnel in the air...
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
All that smoke
Did you know? Fog used to be a technique to hide the limitations of graphics card rendering by obscuring details. I'm sure the loss of detail in high-smoke areas will be no great loss...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
All that smoke
Did you know? Fog used to be a technique to hide the limitations of graphics card rendering by obscuring details. I'm sure the loss of detail in high-smoke areas will be no great loss...
And some implementations were better than others.
E.g. Rainbow Six: Raven Shield had examples of:
- Enemies see beyond the fog: Enemy AI just plain ignored the fog, and shot at you with impunity across the open-air levels.
- Heat camera sees through the fog better than you do: Enemies were either visible or invisible to the heat-camera. There was no fade-out. So when they were 99% lost in the fog, they were 100% outlined in heat-vision.
- The fog is square: You can see further by looking diagonally. Just turn the camera until you see the enemy at the edge of the screen, move until some tree-branch is right on top of them, and open fire at the tree-branch marker.
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