efaardvark

I've been trying to find time to play since it dropped but this annoying "life" thing keeps getting in the way. Maybe this weekend I'll get some time. My brother says the Nether is now full of Endermen, or at least the interesting new places are. Sounds annoying.

There really isn't any at this point. At least not in the general case. Besides huge files and massive amounts of memory there's really no benefit. Maybe data transfer rates could double for a given clock rate on a bus that was twice as wide. But if all you want to do is move masses of data around without processing it in any way you probably want to use optics and serial buses, especially if you're going any distance greater than the dimensions of your average motherboard. That said, there are already parts of even common PCs that have data buses of 128 bits or more in width. Some gfx cards for instance have data buses that are much wider than 128 bits. I think I read somewhere that the Xbox has a 384 bit bus between the GDDR memory on the card and the GPU itself. GFX cards are all about parallelism for speed and the routing isn't too complicated because you're only going between two points.. memory and GPU. Some gfx cards have internal bus widths of up to 4096 bits!

We have not gone to 128 bits because there is a cost for doing so and we don't really need it. There's a whole bunch of reasons for the cost. At the hardware level we use parallel buses. That means that every bit gets it's own data line. If two wires touch then the computer stops working. If two wires even just get too close then there's crosstalk and your computer becomes unreliable. Routing all those wires across the motherboard to connect the CPU, memory, PCI buses, etc. becomes a problem the wider the bus is. An 8-bit bus is easy to design. 16 bits is also pretty easy. 32 bits starts to get troublesome. 64 bits is downright tricky. This is also a problem for chip design internally, for similar reasons. Ok, so why even go to 64 bits then? Well, with 32 bits you can only count to 4 billion. If you have a file that you want to reference a particular byte of data in then your file can only be 4 gigabytes in size. If you have memory addresses that you want to reference then you can only have 4GBytes of memory and still be able to reference each byte individually. Lots of people want to use files more than 4GB in size or have more than 4GB of memory in their computers. Yes, there's tricks like using two 32-bit registers to hold a single 64-bit number, but now things like your math libraries and other code at the software level get complicated and slow. Worst case they have to do twice as much work and run half as fast. It is worth it to go to 64 bit buses and let the hardware do most of the work, even though it makes the hardware a bit harder to design and more expensive to build. Going to 128 bits would make the hardware extremely hard to design and build, as well as expensive. At the same time going from 64 bits to 128 bits on address buses and integers doesn't buy you nearly the gains that going from 32 to 64 bits did. With 64 bits you can reference data in files that are up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes in size, or individually address over 18 thousand terabytes of memory. Very few people have files that big or computers with that much memory. (yet.) Maybe we'll get there some day, but for now it isn't worth the costs.

Found out today that Empyrion is "gold" in Steam's ProtonDB. My brother has this for Windows and has been bugging me to play it with him. Crafting and space ships. What's not to like? I did like Planet Nomads. This looks way better, like Space Engineers but with a plot, and bits of No Man's Sky. I might have to give it a try.

For some reason Kawai Complex seemed like a good idea tonight. Goofy and fun.

1.16 is officially here! Didn't have any time to play with it today though. Probably not tomorrow either.

Really the only thing that CISC has going for it at the moment is the huge investment that the industry has made in the x86 ISA, mainly Windows. In a lot of ways Intel + Microsoft have held the industry back in terms of effectively using newer technologies like RISC. If you don't need any of that then RISC can take you into hardware performance territory that you simply can't get to with CISC architectures. For mobile for example you really have to use something other than CISC for power reasons. That's why virtually all phones and tablets use something like an ARM processor and not something from Intel or AMD. Apple has reached the limits of x86 a long time ago, that's why it is going with its own ARM-based CPUs even in its desktop and laptops starting as soon as this year or next. (It was supposed to be this year but got delayed due to the virus.) All of Apple's phones, watches, pads, etc already use ARM-based processors. Even MSFT tried to go ARM with their mobile/surface platform, though they kind of flubbed it. Of course Unix based OSs were designed to be ported. Linux for example can run almost anywhere. Pretty much the ONLY place still requiring CISC is Windows on x86 desktops/laptops.

I'm ok with the looks, even the "pregnant" one with the disc slot. Of course I'm also anti-RGB lighting that seems to be all the rage now so what do I know about design? The bigger problem for me is the "Sony" label, especially with the admittedly nicer-looking "Digital" model. Yeah, sure, download only. From Sony. What could go wrong? For me I'm much more interested in the PS5 as an indicator of where the industry is going than in actually owning one myself. Thanks, but I'll probably be sticking with a PC. A nice 4th-gen Ryzen, with gobs of RAM, and an RDNA2/3 GPU. Yeah, that's the ticket! I figure I've got a year or maybe two before I have to upgrade my current system.

Whether it is ARM or something else I think x86 as an ISA is going away at some point. The licensing overhead is just too much to sustain. IMHO something RISC-y is a better solution technically anyway, at least as long as general-purpose CPUs rely on electrons. Heat limits mean that clocks can't be pushed any higher than around 5Ghz, so to get more compute power per "chip" (die) we need more cores. CISC instruction length is a handicap in that situation. It is also easier to design RISC CPUs hardware-wise. ARM is in a good position to take over because it is already well-known on the server, mobile, and embedded side(s) of things. Linux, BSD, and even Windows can already run on ARM processors. Even ARM has licensing fees associated with it however. Not nearly as much as x86, but enough that people already over-sensitized to such things from having to deal with x86 might over-react and consider starting from scratch to be a desirable situation. That might give an opening for something like RISC-V. There's already a debian linux port for RISC-V, and development/experimental hardware to run it. We'll see.

Just got a box of light bulbs. Exciting, right? Just part of my ongoing quest to find decent LED bulbs now that my state has basically outlawed the old incandescent and halogen bulbs. This batch is on the recommendation of a co-worker on a similar quest. At $20 for a six-pack I was kind of expecting these to make me coffee in the morning but they're apparently just light bulbs. That said, these do dim well, fit in the space of a regular "A19" bulb, don't noticeably flicker*, and even at just 14 watts they're as bright as the old kind. I just got these so I still have to see how long they last of course. I've yet to find any LEDs that last as long as a good incandescent, never mind some of the claims of 20 years or more. *except a little bit at extreme dimming levels where it is actually tolerable.. kind of like flickering candlelight.

Minecraft has always been a game that's hard on your computer. It doesn't help that it wasn't written terribly efficiently, but even with things like optifine it will take as much CPU and memory as you give it. I gave it 8GB of RAM and it could have taken more if I'd had a better gfx card. It was that way 10 years ago when it first came out and is that way today. I remember when mc first came out I'd just bought a Radeon HD 5970 with an astounding 2GB of RAM. I thought it was an awesome card. Didn't matter to mc. It took it all and still wanted more.

LTT did a piece on the state of gaming on linux a few days ago that I have to comment on. First off, as a long-time linux user I wouldn't use the term "better". (Seriously, LTT is getting more click-baity every day.) As always it depends on your specific requirements. If the particular game that you like is one of those on the "restricted" list then (it sucks to be you but) sorry, you're not going to get it running on anything but Windows. If you like games from certain companies (EA, Blizzard, I'm looking at you).. in that case linux is INappropriate for you. At least as far as games go. That said, I will also say that quite a few games DO work perfectly fine on linux. Most of them in fact. Lately I've been spending quite a lot of my free time playing games like Kerbal Space Program, Cities: Skylines, and Minecraft. This includes many mods such as Kerbal Engineer Redux and Kerbal Alarm Clock on KSP, traffic manager and moveit on C:S, and optifine and various texture & shader packs on Minecraft. (I actually had the whole RLCraft modpack running on MC for a while. I'm considering tackling the Rebirth of the Night pack the next time I'm feeling ambitious.) In particular, there is a native Steam client on Linux and it runs just as you would expect. That's how I got C:S (+mods) installed. If your favorite game(s) are on Steam then your chances are good that it/they will also run on linux. Even Steam games that are technically Windows-only will likely run on linux using Steam's Proton emulation. (Maybe a 60/40 split.) Provided they're not from EA, Activision, or Ubisoft of course.

Just to see how far I could push things I upped the memory in the java loader to 8GB, bumped the render range all the way to the right (with optifine that is currently 64), then wandered around the countryside near my main town to fill the client's chunk cache. Made for a great snapshot. Unfortunately it also dropped my frame rate to the single digits. Someday maybe mc will look like this natively, without having to install all this extra stuff. Maybe by then I'll have a gfx card that can handle it.

GFX card? This is still my old Radeon RX480. They don't make them anymore (superseded by the RX-500 series) but it still works and is well supported under linux with the open-source "amdgpu" driver. It even has Vulkan support. It is also pretty quiet (and cool) unless you really push it. I like quiet. I originally bought it for my old FX-8370 system but when I built my new system a couple years ago I found that gfx cards had been ridiculously over-bid by the bitcoin miners so I just decided to move the old card over to the new system and wait for cheaper GPU prices. I'm still waiting.

Thanks, I like it too. I'm using a x64 texture pack ("Faithful") that really helps with details like the books in the bookshelf and making the fish fish-shaped instead of barely-visible blobs. (Also using optifine so I can run Sildur's shaders, which helps with the lighting, but for this snap it is mostly the texture pack at work.) Not bad for a 4-yo, mid-range gfx card. Someday I'll get a new card, but for now this is fine. (Waiting for AMD's RDNA2 to ship before I do anything too hasty.)

I'd been away from my anvil and enchantment table for too long - having 45 unused levels makes me too conservative - so I headed back to my main base. This is the first time I'd seen it with the new shaders and textures so I took a couple snaps. Home sweet home... ... and here's the library + built-in fishtank (compare with the pre-mod pic in this old post) : I can actually see my fish!

The nether update has a date! Tuesday, June 23rd to be exact.

I’m definitely looking forward to it. I like exploring but the Nether has always been a bit boring to me tbh. Dangerous too, though with no real reason to go there besides blaze rods and blaze dust for the brewing stand and nether wort and glowstone dust for potions. Note the old Nether biome has been renamed “Nether Wastes” in 1.16. Nothing to see there. I’d always go there for a couple blaze rods, the soul sand, and the nether wort early on, but then bring it all back to my overworld farm and pretty much stay out of the nether after that. This update should make the Nether a lot more interesting as a place to explore and adventure in for its own sake. Plus the all the netherite and blackstone tools & armor mean we’ll actually have to do things like set up mining operations and not just go there on mob-hunt raids for crafting supplies. In fact there’s a lot more blocks to go there for use in building as well as crafting. I want to build a castle on a high hilltop in the overworld built entirely of blackstone and lit by soul fires. I’m sure I’ll find overworld uses for a lot of the new textures on the new Nether blocks. There’s a number of new mobs to hunt - or trade with - as well. Piglins especially sound like they might have some useful dynamics. I might even try setting up a Piglin trading post near my portal.

1.16 pre-releases are coming faster than I can keep up and the actual changes are becoming more and more minor. Can't be long now before the Nether update is here. https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-16-pre-release-6 ... which probably means that I'll be losing optifine and the shaders and textures that I just recently installed. Oh well. Easy come, easy go. I do like the way it makes the full moon bright enough to shine "god rays" (aka crepuscular rays for the pendants among us) through the tree leaves however. Underwater isn't half bad either, though an underwater forest of animated kelp kills my frame rate... EDIT: I just fired up my MC launcher and when I go to my "latest snapshot" installation it now says "release candidate 1"!

Apparently it is not possible for my head to remain still while watching this video.