A new lego star wars game (new to me anyway, my copy just finished downloading!)

I like what I see so far, the story is exciting, I love the introduction video, it has that “star wars is epic” feel about it.

Flying around is great and the episode 1 pod-race felt really, really fast.

Still more Korean dramas on Netflix than Disney though…

This work should hopefully appear in the next beta release.

And of course, with SQLEditor you can choose which option you like, whether light UI with light content, dark UI with light content or now dark UI with dark content.

Coming soon!

https://www.instagram.com/grizandnorm/

This is the link I was trying to find for L today but couldn’t..

Relieved that I found it 😌

The mailman system is reporting “No such list java-dev“

I remember during the computer architecture classes at university marvelling at how clever the processor architectures were. Branch prediction, the challenges of process management and context switching. How everything could be managed so carefully and all the book-keeping kept up-to-date! But it all worked and it worked very well, so I was extremely impressed.

Then when hyper-threading arrived, I was even more impressed. Now I could get most of the benefits of four cores, using only the hardware of two cores.The slight downside was some bits were shared, but this didn’t matter, because it had all been carefully thought through. It was produced by the same kind of people who I had marvelled at previously, and so it was obvious that it was a good thing.

Alas, it seems that hyper-threading (at least on Intel processors) has been over-sold, and doesn’t meet its promise. Data apparently can leak from shared components which, in some applications, is a bad thing.

Since my view must be absolute, I previously adored hyper-threading and now hate it absolutely.

Or, more sensibly, perhaps it’s a case of studying where the risks are and taking the performance boost where the risk can be mitigated and turning off hyper-threading where security is more important.

64 bit conversion isn’t very difficult for most ordinary apps, although there will undoubtably be developers who will face severe challenges due to particular circumstances. Apps that include 3rd party code, complicated build systems or involving languages other than C/C++/Objective C are probably at some risk.

But I think most currently sold applications are already 64 bit and have been for years. (SQLEditor went to 64 bit only a while back, without anyone making any comment whatsoever).

The biggest loss though is probably going to be 32 bit only games. Games don’t normally get much in the way of updates anyway, and the likelihood of a new 64 bit conversion is low.

We saw this happen when iOS went to 64bit in iOS 11. Some developers simply couldn’t rewrite their games for 64 bit, for various understandable reasons, so the games are simply going to be removed from sale. One comment was that the particular version of the 3rd party game engine they used did not support 64 bit. To update would require a significant rewrite, not merely a recompilation.

The same also happened with the move from PowerPC to Intel. There are quite a lot of old games that were produced for PowerPC, that were never converted to Intel. Also true  to a lesser extent with the 68k to PowerPC conversion and the Classic to OS X conversion.

Games have essentially been fixed artefacts, they existed in the moment and remained as they were originally sold. Far more so than many applications, where the first release is often merely a promise of some future, better, version. Admittedly games are moving to the regular updates model as well. Often with excellent results like Blizzard with Starcraft, or Introvision’s Prison Architect, both of which have received regular updates and big improvements since launch.

I think the outcome will be that there will be quite a lot of 32 bit Mac games that won’t be playable in the future, and which will never receive updates, which makes me sad. With luck, new games will be released that I can enjoy too, but the loss of old favourites will be a disappointment.

There is one potential silver lining, the desire for all things retro and for remastered editions of old favourites on App stores. The fact that the original will no longer be available for sale may increase the market for a remastered version for newer platforms.

I can but hope

If you have too few, the document might not be found.

If you have too many, the document will be found every time; even if it isn’t relevant.