Retro PC mistakes
Nowdays, building retro computers are becoming a hobby. A lot of people trying to re-experience they childhood computers, bring back old memories. They want to play vintage games, or they maybe need an older computer for compatibilty with older hardware (such as with an older printer, sound card, or industrial card). However, a lot of people missing the point when they are building these vintage computers, and i have collected the most frequent mistakes.
**Using newer versions of programs**
A 20 year old version of a web browser, word processing software, compression software will eat 5 to 10 mbytes when running it. Modern versions will eat gigabytes of memory when using them. Trying to run modern versions of the programs will usually end up in a disaster. To maintain the compatibility with newer environments, you must find a version from your software, that is compatible with both the older and newer versions, and eats less ram than the newest ones. You will have to use a lot of RAM in your computer, if you dont want to go back to too old versions of the utility software. Newer versions will maybe compiled for newer instruction sets, and they will not start on your computer. If you need to run modern software and Windows 98 cant satisfy your demands, you can use the 32 bit version of Debian Linux if you have enough RAM. It will offer you the linux with full graphics userland and all the programs in it, its compiled for the Pentium 1 architecture, it will run fine on your computer if you have a CPU on at least 200 MHz cpu.
**Overestimating the performance and abilities of the computer**
Do not try to use modern habits when using an old vintage computer. Opening multile browser tabs are not a good idea, especially as newer webpages are using very lot of memory, due to overusage of scripts and images. Modern websites with HTTPS and modern javascript will not work in vintage browsers. You will not be able to visit most of the websites from a vintage environment, therefore you will have to use a modern Linux on the computer, or you will have to use a modern computer to gather the data, and use disc or pendrives to move the data. If you have a 2-3 mbyte hard disk read and write speed, thats totally fine for a Pentium1 era hardware, and for an Athlon era computer, you maybe get up to 5-10 MByte per second disk performance, and you really cant do anything about it. You dont have to fix a problem that not exists, get used to vintage speeds.
**Overestimating the gaming performance**
Thinking that vintage computers was able to run Windows games fluidly in the late 90s, is a common mistake. Mainstream computers in the late 90's had S3 Virge or Trio3D cards, SiS cards, integrated Intel cards, or early Matrox cards. These video cards was not able to run vintage games with more than 15 fps even if you were running them in 512x384. Most of these early cards having 4 MByte RAM, and some have 8. Video cards with 4 MByte are typically unable to display games in 800x600, and you are limited to 640x480 due to the fact that the frame buffer, z-buffer, and the textures will not fit in the video memory. 90's games will offer 320x240, 512x384 or 640x480 respectively, even the Direct3D or OpenGL based, 3D accelerated games.
**Using the right video card, but you think its somehow broken**
Games back then were really glitchy on most of the video cards, dont be suprised if a fire effect will have black outlines, or if some texture will be unfiltered somewhere. In the previous point, we have discussed that these cards will be slow, but please note that most of these games are prepared for this. This means, your keypress will probably not be lost due to lower FPS, and some games (for example, Final Fantasy) will run the GUI on double the FPS than the actual 3D parts, making it more responsible even if the FPS is low.
**Using the wrong video card**
You think you have made your ultimate research, and you have decided to buy a 3dfx Voodoo card. You have just probably totally failed your retro build, because 3dfx cards are 2 or 3 times more expensive than other similar vintage cards due to being cult-cards, and they are only usable for the most common AAA game titles. If your task also involves running some light CAD applications, desktop multimedia application, casual gaming, B or C class gaming, then 3dfx cards will not be able to run those programs or games at all, they will just simply crash your computer when trying to start them. All 3dfx did was hacking the drivers to support the most popular AAA games and most of the non-glide capable games are totally useless on them, and the 3dfx cards are almost unable to run anything else. A 3dfx Voodoo card can be handy, but you will probably need to buy multiple cards from multiple video card vendors to have compatibility with multiple era of games and multimedia software.
**Reading vintage benchmarks and reviews, and you think, you now can do a decision**
Reading old game benchmarks are the cause that people ending up with 3dfx cards, and falling to this trap. As those always test and focus only on AAA games. You must do your actual research, and actual plan to choose the parts when building your retro PC. Do not expect that buying something once means you have done the task. You will probably have to buy some hardware for the same purpose, until you will find the ideal choice. Allocate money to be able to do this.
**Refusing to add an upgrade if its not peroid correct - but in reality, it is**
In the late 90's, people used phone modems to connect to the internet, of course you cant do that any more. You will need to add a networking card with an UTP plug, or probably an USB card as well. You maybe want to move data bethwen your machines, in this case you could install some vintage CD burner and a DVD burner too. Yeah, DVD burners were already a thing in the early 2000-s, for the IDE bus. You can find multiple nice vintage DVD burners with 2x or 4x burning capability. Slower is the better, get drives with slow reading speed to preserve the life of your vintage discs.
**Trying to stay peroid-correct at all costs**
Do not sacrafice functionality for the sake of having a peroid correct build, if that would result in losing functionality and usability. For example, refusing to use a Pentium MMX CPU when your motherboard would support it, and instead, using a Pentium CPU will not give you any benefits when you use your vintage machine. Usually it is a good strategy to max out your current build, that will give you the best results when actually using it.
**Failure to find a purpose for it**
Building an era-correct machine is not a purpose. First you must collect the reasons, why you are building the machine. The machine must be built to satisfy those demands. These demands could be running an old hardware, and old software, or old games. The machine must be built to satify it, and the hardware must be built within the possible maximal boundaries. For example, if your motherboard supports 32 MByte RAM, but your machine only has 8 MByte ram, because thats more peroid-correct, then you are sacraficing possible functionality from that computer. For example, you may just want to read some pdf-s from an installer CD on that computer. There is no reason artifically crippling the functionality of a computer, and it makes no sense just to build a peroid-correct machine just for the sake of having it.
**Assuming you can just put a new hardware in**
If you assume you can just put a PCI WI-FI card to have internet on that machine, then you will get nasty suprises, when you discover that older operating systems are unable to use encryption layers required for the newer WI-FI standards. You only having a 600 MByte IDE hard disk, but you decided to upgrade it with a 40 Gbyte HDD to have enough place for your vintage game demos? Well that will be a blooper, as pre-pentium 3 computers usually will not support bigger hard disks than 8 GByte. You will have to upgrade the BIOS, if possible, to have bigger disk support, if such BIOS even exists. Otherwise, you will have to use a SCSI or IDE controller. Or, just put in two old 2 GByte HDD-s. Those hard disks will likely die after a few days of usage after standing in a box for two decades, so be aware of that, and get a few in spare.
You dont have an AGP slot? No problem, you can find plenty of PCI graphics cards too. You think you will just apply a GeForce 520 PCI to your Pentium, so you will be able to play every game from the 90s and 2000s? Well there will be no drivers for Windows98 available. And even if your graphics card supports a vintage system and operating system, and you can find proper drivers, that not necessary means it will work with a specific era of games and software. For example, eary DirectX5 era of games will only work properly with very old 3D cards, such as a Trio3D, Riva128 or an ATi Rage for example. With too new drivers, even DirectX6 games will became unplayable on newer cards. Therefore, you must find the proper hardware for the proper games.
**Assuming plug and play just works**
Plug and play will not work properly with vintage hardware. Certain range of hardware needs special DOS based setup to configure the resources (ports, irq, DMA) it can use. Most of them can only work with a limited number of settings. In some situations, you have to swap around cards in the PCI and ISA slots, till they start to work properly. Some of the cards will not be plug and play, therefore you will have to add them manually to the system, and hope they dont collide. In some situations, you can play around with resource settings in the device manager, to allocate and assing resources to the cards manually, if the automatic setup fails.
**Assuming the drivers will work**
You will have to try multiple drivers to make the devices work. Nowdays, usually you download the newest driver from the manufacturers site, of use a driver CD came with the device. In most cases, the operating system will have the drivers. However, back then this was quite different, you will have to try multiple drivers to find one that actually works. If you change a hardware, in worst case, you will have to reinstall the whole operating system to make it work.
**Trying to use the newest or latest drivers**
Using the newest drivers maybe not a good idea. For example, if you use newer drivers on an old IDE controller with old cards, that will maybe try to obtain SMART data which the drive does not supports, and this can cause glitches or crashes. Using too new graphics drivers on a GeForce FX era video card will break the compatibility of older games. You must carefully fine-tune, what drivers do you really need, and use those on your build. Too new drivers in some cases, can be more demanding on the CPU and on the RAM, which can be a problem for your vintage computer.
**Not having the money**
Keeping vintage hardware can be challenging. If you exhaust all of your budget to buy a certain hardware, you will not have money to maintain the machine. An AT power supply can explode any time, the time had eat them by now. Hard disks can die at you very quickly, if you have stored them in the box for a long time. The same applies on optical drives. Even some PCI cards will start to fall apart, as the pins could desintegrate after a certain time. If you have bought or built a vintage computer for $100, then you can assume that another $300 will be needed to maintain it in the upcoming year.
**Hoarding for the shelf**
If you need to buy something, buy it. If you want to experience and compare multiple solutions from the past, thats a fantastic hobby. But it makes no sense to put two coat-cabinet full of computer parts. If your space starts to run out, you should start selling the hardware. It will not be that hard, if you ask more money for it, than what you have bought it for. Some type of computer hardware have a tendency to die if they just stand in a basement. Such as optical drives, hard discs, power supplies, motherboards, in some cases, even video cards. Hoarding those items in some situations just means: killing them. Its better have them working in someones computer, than have it in the trash, especially if you get a little bit of profit from it. Dont be afraid to sell!
**Chasing the holy dragon**
You want the Magic Potato 4000 XT Ultimate to appear for $200, but you can only find the Magic Potato 3000 Pro for $20? There is no point for waiting for the holy grail of something, use what you can get. And if you can find the Potato 4000 for $300 but you only want to buy it for $200 and you are waiting for years and years for its apperance, then you are maybe better of buying it for $300 because the prices will rarely go down, and searching the forums again and again is a lot of time, and time is money.
**Always in hurry, being rough with the hardware**
Old hardware tend to break easily. You should never be too rough with a vintage motherboard, when reseating the RAM, or with a vintage video card, when putting it into the slot. Some old floppy drives can be shorted if you forcefully inserting the small molex connector to them, causing you a nice fireworks, killing your power supply. If your vintage keyboard does not reacts to keypress, you better open it up from behind, and clean the connections, check the cable continuity. Forceful usage will damage the hardware, and it could be an economic disaster to replace something, sometimes more expensive than buying a new-old vintage machine alltogether.
**Trying to build multiple computers without having an idea what to do with it**
You plan to build a Pentium1. Then you want to buy a 486. Then you need a 286. Then you want an Athlon XP. Then you need an MSX and an Atari. Then you need a PC made in the Soviet Union. Then you need an Athlon2 x4, then you need a 386... Do you really have space to store and use 30 computers in your house? First, decide what is the purpose for buying these machines. Second, you should find out, where and how to install these computers without annoying others in the house. If you dont even know why are you building these computers and they have no purpose, you should just probably start selling a few of them, to make more space. In some cases, one computer can cover multiple era, for example, a Socket7 computer can cover the late DOS era, the Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and early XP era.
**Expecting it to be silent**
Some vintage computers can be very loud. Old power supplies have dying fans inside them, and even if you re-lube them, they will be far more noisy compared to their modern counter parts. Fan rotation speed regulation was not a thing in the 90s and early 2000s. Your CPU fan will always run at full speed. Some old hard disks having extremely noisy bearings. This, together, will make a very noisy environment which is hard to be tolared if you are not mentally prepared for it. You must understand that this is somewhat normal, as these computers were very noisy to begin with, and you probably should not operate them (feed them) after midnight.
**Not having the stamina to move the computer around**
A vintage tower case is 10 kilograms alone. With a motherboard, two SCSI discs, vintage CD burners, power supply, PCI and ISA expansion cards, cables, 5.25 floppy drives, a computer can be bethwen 20 and 30 kilograms alone. You must have the raw muscles to carry these computers around. Of course these machines cant be moved around without proper preparation. It could be problematic to carry around the boxes with spare components as well. You may want to do some light training before you start to collect vintage computers.
Modern desktop PC sucks
Last year, i was totally sure i will not upgrade my PC for another decade. One day i used my computer, and suddenly, it died on me. I tought its the power supply, but later on, it turned out, its the motherboard. I took it out, and found a short circuit. A capacitor shorted. I didnt knew which one, so i have quickly built a voltage injection circuit, to inject some amps into the board. With this, i was able to find the dead cap (the one that became hot). However, even after removing the cap, and replacing it with another one, the motherboard newer booted up again.
There was nothing i could do, i had to buy at least a new motherboard. I started digging up all my circles and second hand web sites. Everything i found was crappy. A typical modern motherboard is very limited. No floppy connectors. No PCI, or if there was PCI, only one or two. No IDE connectors. 2 or 4 SATA port. 2 RAM slot. No LPT and serial pins. All of them was a short, tiny sized, retarded, dwarfed variation of a normal motherboard, without any backward compatibility to the hardware of the previous decades.
**I have checked other hardware too**
Computer cases were laughable. A normal computer case is about 10 kilograms. These were about two. No 5.25 bays to insert an optical drive or a mobile rack, basically just a power and reset switch. They sometimes started playing with the ATX standards by placing the PSU at the bottom. What the fuck? So if my psu throws flame, it should lit the carpet and burn the house down? The biggest feature of the cases were transparent windows on the side, with fans with integrated leds, changing color in every second. I am prety sure if this would be the feature i wanted, i would just put the christmas lights into the computer.
**Keyboards and other products**
I have checked the keyboards a few years ago too. I wanted to buy a standard hungarian QWERTZ keyboard. Every key was smaller, the keys was too close to each other. The cursor and numpad section of the keyboard was too close to each other. First i did this online. After i found no proper ones, i went to a local store. After investigating all of them, i asked the seller to go to the basement, and bring up some proper keyboard for me. He told that he have no other models, and all of them is like this. So i went to another computer shop. The same thing happened. The seller was showing me the same crappy keyboards, and i asked her to show bigger and bigger models. At the very bottom of the keyboard heap, there was one keyboard that was standard, and had proper sized keys. The seller told me that this is the last piece of this type, and there will be no other models from this - ever. It was luckily only $8 so i bought it. Basically if you want to buy a motherfucking keyboard to actually TYPE wih it, you must buy a vintage 20 year old keyboard from a 486 or Pentium 1, because they only manufacture retarded models, unless you want to pay an extra $100 on it.
**Graphics cards**
The graphics cards released in the last 10 years will consume about 25w in idle, even the most low-end ones, from both nVidia or AMD. Sadly the integrated cards on the older boards are too crappy and will not display video content properly and/or will be unstable under certain tasks due to obsolete drivers. If you buy a dedicated one for PCI-E, than that will usually work properly, however you have to live with an increased power consumption due to the chip will be optimized for 3D performance which maybe you wont even need. The passive models are also rare to find, and they will work very hot when they are on - they will warm up the whole computer from inside for no reason, even in idle.
**Why is this a problem**
Assuming you buy a computer because you actually want to use it as a computer, and not as a content-consuming sedation machine to view cat videos. If you buy a PC that also means you have some understanding, and you are going to use those IT skills to offer some services, or at least in your daily life to do your work. This means, from time to time, you will have to work on/with your computer beyond basic office usage. Maybe you want to burn a driver CD for someone, you may want to recover data from a dying hard disk of a costumer, you just want to burn someones wedding videos with a first-generation DVD burner to ensure its being read in every drive, you maybe want to plug in your microscope into the TV input, your old printer and other type of industrial apparatus into the computer to print some flyers... And you cant do it any more.
**Why?**
Because they have removed everything from the motherboard. They even had removed the PCI slots, so you cant add enough add-on cards any more. If you are lucky, you can find some of these add-ons as PCI-e variants for one extra zero on the price ticket than it used to be. But your motherboard will probably not even have enough PCI-e slots to fit all of this. Alternatively you can try using USB converters of these various plugs, and then there will be cables everywhere, which you have to search every time you want to use them, and you will face compatibility issues, some device will just not work properly (for example, USB LPT adapters).
**Power supply**
Power supply manufacturers adapted this trend, they are removing MOLEX connectors, and adding only SATA power connectors. Not too much from it, because WHO POSSIBLY COULD NEED THEM aniway? Instead, they add two 6 or 8 pin graphics card connectors. Basically, the cabels on the typical power supply summarizes up the situation: you cant connect anything to your PC, the autistic gamer manchild can put the 6-pin VGA connector up into his ass, while he is screeching to the vibrating color lights of the PC case fan.
**The CPU power is not everything**
If you want to use newer CPU, you can only do them in these type of retarded motherboards. But computers are not only about CPU-s. Maybe you just want to sacrafice a little CPU power, and go with an obsolete 10-15 year old computer design instead. The power of an early Core2Quad, i7, Opteron, Athlon2, Xeon CPU will be still enough for modern usage, and it will support enough memory (8Gb, 16Gb, or even 32GB) to run a modern workload with the newest operating systems. Buying a modern system is a really bad idea if you actually working on your computer.
**Why people even buying that sorrow?**
As the typical desktop PC user experience is turning into a content consuming market, including phones, tablets, laptops, it was inevitable for the hardware to take this direction too. A modern PC is barely usable for work any more beyond office usage, CAD, and of course for gaming. The other areas of a typical desktop usage is cannot be fulfilled with the new type of computers. There are motherboards designed for industrial and server use, which support some of these older features. However, they are limited, they maybe cant work with certain types of hardware due to missing DMA or IRQ capabilities, or just the drivers are too limited to offer compatibility with certain devices. Motherboards manufactured about 2010 and later, lost the ability to be able to build a real computer from them. In the future, it could be hard to find proper motherboards, so maybe it could be a good idea to buy a few for future usage or resale in the case of a shortage of proper hardware.
**How to avoid a bad decision**
Before buying any parts of a PC, evaluate what you possible need to do your job. Even evaluate before buying a case, or a power supply. If you buying a motherboard, ensure, it have all the essencial connectors that you can need. If you have ended up buying the wrong solution, then you will need to buy add-on PCI-e cards to do some of the jobs. If you ended up with a bad PC case, then you will have to buy a new one that allows you to put in all of your hardware that you need for your daily life and work.
Ending development for Windows
I have decided to cancel every future software development for Android and Windows. In the near future, i will only release software for Linux. There will be one or two software which i still will compile for Windows. In the case of Android, i already have removed every development-related software. The decision has been made, and its probably final. This decision was based on logic, facts, and personal preferences, and its not an ideological decision.
**Its a technological decision**
Therefore, all the #ifdef paths supporting Android and Windows are still intact, and will kept for a while, in the case of an unexpected need for a release. This applies on every software of my, including my Game Engines, tools, production softwares, and software i write in the future as well. The decision will be immediately overruled, if someone brings me a suitcase with money (which is very unlikely).
**Its also my personal decision**
In the past, i was living from programming. Partially, i was living from making video game engines, and tools for video game production. Currently, however, i am not living from making software any more. The market is changed, most of my solutions became obsolete, and there is basically no need for B class game production any more, the market is gone (unlike AAA and Casual). Its more like a hobby. As i am not living from this, i dont have to care about the market share of Windows and Android.
**What is the problem with Windows**
Windows is a bad quality software. Its expensive, and its very slow. Newer versions of Windows require a fast and expensive computer to run properly. Windows exists for non-x86 platforms too, however, Microsoft was unable to release proper versions of Windows for the ARM platform (all of these versions of Windows are stripped down and they cant even run most of Microsoft's own software). Microsoft is re-focusing Windows to became a content consuming operating system, where it loses the market share against Android step by step.
**What is the problem with Android**
Android is not an operating system, its just a GUI (graphics user interface) running on top of the Linux kernel. This graphics user interface shows no sign of any development for more than 10 years. Due to the total incompetence of Google, there is still no proper multi-windowing version of Android exists. Its not backwardcompatible with real Linux, therefore the platform lacks any real software. Parts of the platform was built around Java, which is a low-quality, low-speed scripting language for corporate usage. Android is a low-class content consuming operating system, which focuses on content consuming, navigation, browsing, and taking photos/videos. The Android operating software is totally useless for anything else, all the programs made for the platform are either minimalistic apps, or quick shoddy rewrites of the Linux versions.
**Whats wrong with Android users**
The overwhelming majority of Android users will not pay for anything. Therefore, developers must earn revenue by making software for the masses, and putting advertises in them. This rules out normal software to be made. The users of Android are the mass consumers, who are using these mass-produced applications and games, and they will refuse to pay. It does not worths to write REAL software for Android, as it would not produce high user counts, and it would produce unsignificant income. The wast majority of Android users are content consumers aniway, this mostly means consuming video content and social networking.
**Whats wrong with Windows users**
Windows users are the dinosauroid version of Android users. A typical windows user is the more professionalised and version of the Android user. The gamers are playing games on the Windows platform, however, these are AAA games. A typical Windows user uses the well-hyped windows games and softwares. They will not pay for a random game or software any more. They dont want to pay or search for real games, but they complain for not having proper games for ages. For example, if a typical Windows user wants to make a game, he will download some hyped fake gamedev environment, such as the Unity engine. Then he downloads some assets from the store, downloads some pre-created scripts, and there is the magic game which is about flying with WASD in the middle of pixel shadered models. And its somehow called a ,,game''.
**Whats wrong with MAC users**
Some of the MAC users sometimes tend to portray themself as some kind of professionals of an area. Like they buy or steal some Photoshop to pose as a professional graphics artists. In the worst case, they buy some snowflake Macbook from $3000 loan, which they pay for 4 years. They buy it, because they saw in some moovie, that the Macbook is the only thing they lack to became great artists! (...not like the total lack of any skills or talent, or at least putting time in it... meanwhile the real artists use $2 pencil, paper, and gimp). For these type of MAC user, everything is about posing with the snowflake hardware and snowflake software, for gaining attention from the other snowflakes. Some of MAC users are clueless people who buy computers with $20 second gen i5 processors for $2000. Rich, but dumb people, but only reachable with mass marketing and manipulation. Some MAC users are using MAC just because they dont want to use Windows or Android... They could just use Linux, i guess.
**Linux**
The Linux community is full of clueless ideologists and communists. In some ways, they are right, computers cant be based on obscoure corporative technologies. The openness, and freeness is very important. They will however not buy or fund proprietary software. However, besides them, there are lot of open-minded, creative person. The actual creative scene now uses Linux. Everyone who wishes to see something new, and wants to do something for it, uses Linux, and there are no exception for this. Everyone who will ever look beyond Youtube-Facebook-Photoshop-AAA gamer universe, will use Linux.
**Linux is good, others arent**
For example, a Debian Linux with LXDE graphics interface boots within a few seconds even with a regular HDD. In contrast to Windows 2-3 minute boot time. It is available for every range of computers from a 25 year old Intel Pentium 2, up to the last 64 bit multicore computers. Its not just available for x86, but also on ARM, MIPS. It eats a few GByte of place, its free. Its optimized for working or at least doing something on it, it has plenty of programs, unlike Android/Windows/MAC. Its free, and its compatible with every hardware, you dont have to throw out your printer in every 4 years just to be able to operate it with a newer Windows.
**So, i stop building binaries for other systems**
And as coding is becoming more like a hobby for me again, i will not keep the Windows/Android/Anything else versions alive. I dont use Windows or Android, or anything else, only Linux. Therefore, i will only build binaries for Linux. This saves some time for me. Using my software is an opportunity, and not a right. Especially since people dont even pay for software since years... If someone wishes to continue to do so, he will have to switch to Linux or pay for the Windows builds.
Speculators of the mass graves
The sellers arent parasites. There are the resellers, the manufacturers, the workers, and/or smart economical preppers. Its question of the supply and the demand. Everyone had equally a chance to buy plenty of soap when it was $1. Just like everyone equally had the chance to buy Bitcoin when it was $1. Its capitalism. Supply and demand moves the prices.
**The parasites are selling $20 soap!**
*Picture by Prepper Veteran UK, from the Swag shop in Walsall*
**This product limits the spread of the infection. This price is too expensive for some people...**
If you sell your monthly supply for $1 within 10 minutes, that still didnt helped the problem. Also, another problem is that it will not generate you notable profit. If there is demand to buy your product on higher prices, then you will just sell it for higher prices. Why would you work for hourly $1 profit, when you can earn hourly $20 profit? The profit on your product, multiplied with the number of sold product, will make your salary. There is a sweet spot, where at the given price, you can earn the most profit.
**The guy who was selling the infected meat, was just trying to make a living too.**
I think thats a bad comparison. Deliberately selling a defected, risky, dangerous product, advertised as healthy product, its a scam, its illegal, and immoral. These soaps are fine products. They do what they are advertised for.
**If you cut your body**
This situation is natural. It even happens in basic biology. When someone partially cuts his body and the blood flows out, then there is a temporarly rush. The body ramps up the hearth rate and muscles to try maintaining the blood pressure. Of course the body does not knows that there is a large hole where the blood flows away. It also pushes every resources into the blood for more efficient oxigen flow... But this just causes the blood to flow away even faster, basically wasting the ability of the body to heal. Trying to ramp up the blood pressure is the nature's analogue to the situation where people are mass buying toilet paper, when the tourism and catering industry closes down and millions get unemployed. Failed reactions to the failed commands of a failing system. At the end, the body system wastes a big chunk of lethal backups, before it realizes that everything just flowing away. Then it finally minimalizes the blood pressure and oxigen consumption, forces everything to idle. The healing is slow after that point. At that time, the problem is already much bigger than originally was, due to the overreaction.
**The price uplift is too big, its not understandable**
As you can see on the previous illustrative image, the price depends on the maximal possible profit. If the demand is increases, then the price of the item will also increase. The price will fine-tune itself on the market. If the price overshoots, then the profit will start to fall, and then the price throttles back. This is currently not the case, the sellers are selling the soap at that shop for $20 because they can sell it for $20. The supply, the demand, the profit, is all depending on the free market.
**Its not just food, its not just pandemics**
Lets see examples from the american computer industry. The price of american 6 core cpus were walking from $2 to $200 up and down in the last 2 years. There are multiple type of 6 core cpus, including old models from Phenom2, old decommissioned Opteron server rigs, multiple i7 models, and the newest amd Ryzen. When there is a lot of server rig being decommisioned, then you can buy them for $2 each. When people selling their older 6 core Phenom2, then they can sell it for only $15-20. If there is currently no new CPU-s from such are being dumped on the market, you have to pay $150-200 to buy one, or buy a new one for $300.
**6 core processors are not a health related products**
The market decides. What if you need it for efficient work to upgrade your old 2 core CPU? If you cant work, you die from starvation. Even if you are speculating on that CPU, why would be immoral to buy it for $2 and sell it for $200 later? You take the risk when buying it... Because, what if it just becames $0 and you lose your investment? The same applies on the soap, and your hand sanitizer. If you cant sell it, then it gets damaged due to the time, and you must throw it out. Lets see, there will be no electricity because the maintainers of the electric network gets infected by the corona virus. And then someone starts selling $100 UPS with solar charger for $4000 in shops. Will be that also immoral?
**Capitalism and speculation is the only healthy and natural state of our species.**
In communism (Hungary) in the early 50s, they sentenced meat speculators to relocation and 10 years of forced labour... By 1952 there were no meat available on the market any more. Praise the moment: the capitalism made it possible to still be able to buy soap. Otherwise, in a state regulated market, there would be no hand soap any more. People would beat each other to death for soap on the streets.
The seller can and will sell the soap for $20 because there is demand at that price.
**Killing one is murderer. Killing millions of people is fine?**
Thats why capitalism won. Now you dont have to kill anyone, you just have to pay a little extra for that soap. The heroes are selling $20 soap instead of killing each other for the soap. This is the only natural and good way for both the sellers and the buyers. In the case of extra regulation by government corresponding to this situation, there will be not enough soap available any more on the market.
Picture taken by Prepper Veteran UK https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCqLrA6gUAo1MtoVDB_BU2A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCqLrA6gUAo1MtoVDB_BU2A/videos
Gaming PC is slow
Gaming PC is slow, if its not configured properly. This article will explain, how to fix the speed issues, if your gaming PC is slow, even if its strong enough on paper. Sometimes, even if the parts should be far strong enough to run the game, the gaming PC is slow. Nowdays, a lot of people are building gaming machines. This requires no special knowledge, benhcmark results can be found on the internet. These people do the research, buy the parts, and they get suprised, if the gaming PC is slow. If every benchmark says that X card should run the game with 40 fps, but it only runs it with 20 fps, then there is a problem.
**Doing the research**
The gaming PC is slow, unless people usually wise enough to do a little bit of research. And they are wise - it is easy to google, which computer parts they need. People usually have a relative modern motherboard, which they can use to build an ideal gaming PC. They choose a CPU and a GPU carefully. Older motherboards support 8 or 16 GByte RAM, so people oder this quantity of memory. They order a video card for a few 100 dollars, they usually want to keep the CPU cost below $100. Everything arrives, they put it together, and the machine boots. At least after a BIOS update. You install Windows 7 or Windows 10. You install your favorite games. Everybody is happy, for a few hours. Then the horror begins. The game, that should run fluidly, stutters, produces micro-lags, the FPS fells below 25. The gaming PC is slow, but it should not!
**The CPU should be strong enough... but its not**
One of the assumption is, that the CPU is not enough powerfull to run the game. People usually buy cheap Intel i5 or AMD FX CPU-s. Sometimes, they buy the top cpu for a specific socket, such as Core2Quads, Xeons, Athlon2 X4 or Athlon FX CPU-s with at least 4 core or more. Every benchmark says the game should run fine - but it wont, the game struggles on the machine even if the CPU gets overclocked. What the mistery could be? The Gaming PC is slow, but it should not!
**The graphics card seems to be too weak**
The game should run fine on the GPU you have bought. You have bought an RX570, or an nVidia GeForce 1060. You might be bought an nVidia GTX 980, or an older model. You done the research, you are sure you have got the correct video card (and not a repackaged 15 year old card from Aliexpress). The game still stutters, so you try to install a new driver, hoping, it will help. The situation wont improve, the gaming PC is slow. You curse the moment when you have decided to build a gaming PC.
**The power supply is weak?**
You assume the PSU does not outputs enough power. This can cause some video cards to throttle back, so you insert a new power supply, but it does not helps. You try to measure voltages with a multimeter, and you see they are correct. You sit in front of the computer and you are depressed. You try to remove the curse by chanting magic words, you try to sacrafice a rabbit at midnight. Then you get an axe to end the suffering of the computer, and buy a new one. This time for a little bit more money. And the symptoms repeat. Even the new Gaming PC is slow, so you decide to get a new hobby.
**Then you realize its your fault**
At this point you realize that probably the problem is caused by you. Thats right, the problem is caused by you, by not setting up the hardware and the software correctly. You missing various important steps. This article will explain, what you have missed, and how you must set up your system to operate correctly. The Gaming PC is slow because of the combination of various factors. These problems will be eliminated with this short tutorial.
**The RAM is detected incorrectly**
You have bought the memory for your system, but you only focused on the memory size. You have ordered the proper quantity of RAM, so you now have 8 GByte, or 16 GByte of RAM in your system. You think now everything is fine. However, the memory have a clock speed, a data rate, and a latency too. The memory will usually work on the slowest, fail-safe settings, unless you set it up properly in the BIOS.
**The frequency of the RAM**
If your machine is based on DDR3, then it will usually use support DDR3-1333, or DDR3-1600 modules. Sometimes, mistakelnly, these are called DDR3-1333 MHz modules, or DDR3-1600 MHz modules, althrough the real clock speed of these are much less. If you machine is DDR2 based, it can be DDR2-533, DDR2-666, or DDR2-800 based.
**How the RAM actually works**
Your memory is complicated. In the times of SD RAM, the memory was running on 66, 100 or 133 MHz. With the release of DDR memory, the memory frequency was still 100 or 133. However, they have doubled the BUS transaction speed by introducing a new transaction mechanism that allows the transfer of two memory block within one clock cycle. This allowed the memory to run at effectively 200 MHz even if the memory hardware itself was running 100 MHz.
**The DDR2 and DDR3 memory**
With the release of DDR2 memory, they doubled this data rate again. So, if the RAM hardware runs at 133 MHz (133,333 actually), that results an effectively 4*133 = 533 MHz. With the apperance of the DDR3, they have doubled this again: 133*8 = 1066 MHz effectively. Some program mistakenly refers the RAM by its bus clock rate, such as CPU-Z.
CPU-Z, screenshot by D4D
In these programs, the mystical 666 MHz will actually mean the DDR2-1333 mhz (which is 166 mhz in reality). You can check up the regular DDR3 and DDR2 memory types on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM the following screenshot was taken there:
**And whats up with that?**
If you just put some random memory in your motherboard, it will probably not detected properly. In older motherboards - even if the CPU and the motherboard both supports DDR3-1333, the default memory will run at DDR3-1066 by default. Usually the memory modules you get is DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1666. So you must go to the bios, and set the memory frequency to operate on the proper speed. For example, if you have an Intel I5-2500 CPU, then the motherboard will most likely run the memory at DDR3-1066. The gaming PC is slow at this speed, you must set the memory in BIOS to run at DDR3-1333. The Intel i5-2500 supports this, so you should instantly get a few extra percent in speed, and a few extra FPS. In the case you have an older DDR2 based computer, the ram will be likely running at 533 MHz by default, but your RAM will be probably capable to run on 666 or 800 MHz as well.
**Memory latency**
If you think now you understand all the magic of your RAM, you are wrong. The MHz indication only refers to the data rate, which the RAM can produce under a sequencial (streaming-like) memory access. When you start to read new memory areas, a new problem arises. This is the memory latency. Lesser the latency is, better the performance is. Some motherboards will not detect this, and you must set it manually. If your motherboard allows this to set it, then it will not bother to detect it for you, and it will run the memory on failsafe settings. Your gaming pc is slow, if the RAM runs in big latency mode.
**Finding the proper memory latency**
Find and set the proper memory lateny. A DDR3-1333 memory can have CL7, CL8, CL9 or CL10 latency. Smaller is the faster. This means, your motherboard will maybe set it to CL10 for failsafe purposes. You must find the proper parameters for your memory, and set it to the proper latency. If your RAM supports CL8, then you should set the latency from CL10 to CL8. If CL8 is not supported by the motherboard, set it to CL9. After setting the proper latency, you will get additional speed boost, a few percent, and probably a few more frame per second.
**You forgot to install the chipset drivers**
The motherboard chipset needs drivers too. Without having a chipset driver, your motherboard will maybe communicate with the graphics card on a limited speed. You can find the proper drivers of your motherboard at the manufacturers website. Install the drivers, and you could experience another few percent performance increase in gaming. Althrough, Windows 7 and Windows 10 nowdays will have drivers for most of the motherboards out of the box, there are various exceptions. Gaming PC is slow in some cases, when the chipset drivers are not installed. If such drivers are needed, this could be another factor which will make your gaming PC faster.
**Video card runs in PCI-E 8x mode**
PCI Express cards can be run in various modes. Normally, video cards communicate in PCI-E 16x mode. Some motherboards support PCI-E 1.1, 2.0 or 3.0. Every card is compatible with every PCI-E socket (in theory). However, in some cases, if the chipset driver is not installed, the card could be limited to 8x mode. In some situations, the motherboard maybe only communicates in PCI-E 1.1 mode, even if 2.0 is supported both by the card and by the motherboard. If the PCI-E data rate is not 16x, or it runs on an older standard than it should, then the gaming PC is slow. The phenomon will decrease the 3D performance of gaming.
**Check the PCI-E data rates**
To check the PCI-E data rate, you can try the software GPU-Z (https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/). On the following screenshot, i have marked the PCI-E data rate with a red box. Click the question mark to give some 3D load for the graphics card, as in IDLE, it maybe idles in a lower data-rate mode for power-saving reasons. If the GPU runs in 16x mode under load, then thats fine. If its runs in 8x mode even under load, or if it fails to switch to PCI-E 2.0 mode even if both the GPU and both the motherboard supports it, then thats a problem.
**Your card is maybe not in the proper PCI-E slot.**
The PCI-E will be in 8x mode all the way, if the card is in the wrong slot. Some motherboard have multiple PCI-E slots for video cards, and other devices. However, only one of them is a real PCI-E 16x slot. Others are usually 8x slots. Usually, only the top slot is PCI-E 16-slot. Gaming PC is slow, if the video card is in the wrong slot. The Gaming PC is slow, if you have the card in the wrong slot. In some situations, various cards will refuse to work in the 16x slots when you have a very old motherboard, then try to update the BIOS.
**Update the BIOS**
If you experience problems with PCI-E mode, you may have to update the BIOS. Updating the BIOS to the latest bios will maybe fix this issue, and the video card will be able to communicate on faster data rates. Be carefull to flash only the proper BIOS from the manufacturer. Flashing wrong BIOS into the motherboard can cause permanent damage to your hardware. After flashing the BIOS, you should clear the CMOS, set up everything in the BIOS again, and hope that you get the proper data rates.
**Reseat your graphics card**
Remove the graphics card from your socket, and clean the PCI-E connector carefully with alcohol. Clean the motherboard socket as well. In some cases, dirt in the socket, or unproper seating can result the PCI-E mode to fall back to 8X mode, or to PCI-E 1.1 mode. If your GPU needs an external power cable, be sure you have a proper power cable mounted in the GPU. Without the power cable, the video card maybe silently swtiches to low performance mode.
**It still runs in 8x and 1.1 mode**
Disable special USB features in the bios. Try disabling USB 3.0 support alltogether. Disable COM and LPT ports, if you dont use them. Disable the integrated graphics card, if its still enabled. Pull out unneccessary USB devices from the computer. If you use webcamera while you play, then throw out your 4k snowflake webcamera, and put your 20 year old 240p webcamera back. These tricks could spare bandwidth for the graphics card, and in some systems, they even could cause the 2.0 spec or the 16x mode to reappear.
**The CPU overheats**
If your CPU fan is suspiciously silent under big load, or if its suspiciously loud, then something is wrong. The CPU fan should spin faster under heavy load, or spin slow if there is no heavy workload on your computer.
**The BIOS FAN settings are wrong**
In most motherboard bios, you can set the fan speed. However, some manufacturers tend to set the ventillation start temperature at 60 celsius degree. This is too big, as this will result too much heat. This will not damage the components, however, the newer CPU-s will use thermal throttle. This means if the temperature of the CPU reaches a certain degree, the CPU will decrease its clock speed to preserve the stability of the system. This can happen after a few minutes of playing The gaming PC is slow if this happens. To avoid this phenomon to occur, set the ventillation start to 50 degree celsius, and set the full speed to 62 celsius.
**The VRM modules overheating**
A new and strong CPU can put more stress on the motherboard than expected. If the voltage regulator or the chipset on the motherboard overheating, the chipset will maybe throttle the speed back. This can result a drop in the performance after a few minutes of heavy load. To avoid this, add additional ventillation to the computer case that cools the motherboard as a whole. If this is not possible, then set the CPU fan starting temperature to 25 degree celsius, so the CPU fan will supply more air movement for the whole system, rather than just serving the CPU itself.
**The thermal paste is dried**
If the thermal paste is dried up, the CPU will quickly overheat. The Gaming PC is slow, if the thermal paste is dried up. CPU-s, especially above 90 Watts need thermal paste to operate properly. Otherwise, they get too hot, and they will throttle the clock speed. If the thermal paste is dried, then the CPU cooler cant cool down the whole surface of the CPU. This will cause thermal throttling. If the CPU limits the clock speed, the gaming PC is slow. To avoid this phenomon, add fresh thermal paste, and/or decrease the CPU fan's threshold to top out on much lower temperatures.
**How much these tricks will help?**
If the Gaming PC is slow, and the hardware specs are fine, then these are the most frequent reasons of the phenomon. Setting the proper memory speed and latency will give 10-20% performance increase. If the PCI-E slot is mistakenly running in 8x PCI-E 1.1 mode, then ensuring the proper PCI-E communication standard will give an additional 20-30% speed up. If the CPU is mistakenly throttling back the speed, you can gain another 20-30% speed. These problems usually co-exist on a PC, when hobbysts building the gamer PC. Fixing all of these issues one by one, will result a dramatic increase in the speed of gaming. If the FPS of a game was 20 due to these reasons, with the help of these tricks, will most likely exceed 30, making it perfectly playble.
SiS/XGi Volari driver for Debian
This tutorial will explain, how to install the SiS and XGI Volari graphics drivers with Debian Linux. Debian Linux is a very popular distribution. Althrough it lost some of the popularity recently, after the american police murdered the founder of the project. The Debian project is focusing on offering a stable system, which is usually actively maintained for 2-3 years. Debian is trying to maintain compatibility with both old and newer systems. After Debian is installed, the packages are downloadable from central servers. Debian's goal is to avoid every eye candy, the best usage for Debian is to use it with the LXDE windows manager.
The Debian Linux distribution has a strict preference of avoiding closed source drivers and binaries in the system. Despite of this, Debian is not against closed source software, so Debian is trying to maintain binary compatibility. Executable files compiled with Debian will usually run with older softwares too, so software developers like to use this system. Once Debian is installed, it can be updated with the following command: apt-get update.
This tutorial will cover Debian 9 (stretch), althrough the new version is Debian 10 (buster), this tutorial should work with Debian 10, and also with Debian 8 and probably with Debian 7. I will not link any binary files for security reasons - therefore, you will have to compile the driver for yourself. You will not have to recompile the kernel for this practicular driver to work.
**What is XGI Volari?**
SiS is a graphics card manufacturer. Nowdays, they mostly focus on creating processors and SOC-s. XGI was a spun-off company of SiS. The share holder of the company was SiS. SiS also acquired the Trident corporation, which was another graphics card designer. The focus of XGI was to create graphics chips for desktop computers, low-end gaming, low cost add-on graphics cards, and simplistic graphics chips with small power consumption for servers and embedded sysetms. After founding XGI, SiS decided to focus on creating processors. Later, on, XGI ran out from money, and SiS melted it back to the corporation. Unfortunately, after this, the Volari product line received little to zero driver updates, althrough the Volari chips are still manufactured.
*Illustration: a server with Volari graphics card*
**Why there is no Volari driver in Debian?**
The SiS / XGI cards have drivers for X11 under Linux. In Debian, however, these drivers are removed from the system. The reason for this is unknown - some developers claim that the drivers are outdated, unmaintained, and buggy. Which is true into some extent. However, without the drivers, you can run into issues. Debian not just removed it from the base system, they also decided not to upload the SiS/XGI drivers into Debian repositories. The Xorg drivers are of course open source, so no one can stop you from using them.
**Whats the problems with this**
Althrough Linux can work without graphics drivers (by using your 16 bit VESA VBE video bios on your graphics chip), this is limited. For example, you cant set any resolutions above 1024x768, which is problematic if you have a display with 16:9 ratio. Once the driver is installed, resolutions like 1360x768 will became available.
**Step1: Download the source code**
Download the source code of the drivers from the repository. You can download the newest snapshot from GitHub, from the following link: https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xf86-video-sis
If this version fails to compile, you can try the version 12.0: https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xf86-video-sis/releases/tag/xf86-video-sis-0.12.0
After finished downloading the source code, unpack it. Please note, you will have to be in root mode to install drivers in your system.
Step2: Be sure you have installed all the dependencies. You can do this with apt-get. Run the following command to install all the dependencies for the driver:
**apt-get install g++ libx11-dev xorg-dev xutils-dev libtool libgbm-dev**
**Step3: Go to the directory of your unpacked Volari driver package, and execute the following command:**
**./autogen.sh**
If the file does not exists, first try to execute the following command: automake
**Step4: Observe the output of the command. If everything works well, you will get no errors. You can now compile the driver.**
To compile the driver, enter the command: **make**
Make will take a minute to finish. If you want to optimize your driver a little more, then open your makefile, search for every line containing CFLAG, and replace the -O2 with -O3 everywhere you see. In the other CFLAG lines without any -O2 flag, you can insert the -O3 as well. This will force extra optimizations on the driver. I have tested it with the newest snapshot on github, and it causes no problems to compile the driver like this.
**Step5: After make is finished, be sure it finished without critical errors**. After this, run: **make install**
**Step6: Unfortunately, make install will somewhat fail on Debian**, as the outputs are different on Debian than the X11 project's intented file output. To fix this, you must execute the following command manually:
**/usr/bin/install -c src/.libs/sis_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/sis_drv.so**
This will copy the SiS driver to the proper location in the system.
**Step7: Create a file in /etc/X11 called xorg.conf**
The contents of the file must be the following:
Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "vbe"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "sis"
BusID "PCI:1:4:0"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
Please note the BusID parameter. In this example, the bus id is "PCI:1:4:0", but this maybe differs on your computer. To get the proper BUS ID, check your hardware ID with the following command: lspci
Example of the lspci output:
01:04.0 VGA compatible controller: XGI Technology Inc. (eXtreme Graphics Innovation) Z7/Z9 (XG20 core)
You have to observe this device number - in this example, its 01,04 and 0. Replace these numbers to the BusID section as 1:4:0.
**Step8: Congratulations, you have installed your driver.**
Now cross your fingers, and reboot the computer. If you are lucky, the system will come up in proper display resolution. In this case, your driver is working fine.
**Troubleshooting:**
If you driver hangs the computer, then simply delete the xorg.conf and remove the /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/sis_drv.so file.
**What to expect:**
The driver is not perfect, but it will work better than the VESA VBE-based fallback. You will be able to set resolutions above 1024x768, the usability of the system stays intact up to 1360x768. You will be sort of able to watch movies and videos up to the display resolution 1360x768 (only a minor stuttering can be observed). Please note that most of the integrated server-volaris have only 16 MByte dedicated RAM, therefore you should not expect to be able to set resolutions above full HD (1920x1080). There is no notable difference in speed when trying to set the desktop into 16 bit.
Intel discontinued Itanium
An era of history ended as Intel decided to discontinue processors using the Itanium instruction set. Itanium was a new CPU architecture family, it was incompatible with the well know x86 or ARM instruction set. The CPU struggled on the market for almost two decades to gain market share. The project is one of the biggest fiasco of the processor history and Intel.
**The beginning**
The Itanium CPU was originally designed by HP. The goal of HP was to create a server and mainframe CPU. The new conception of the CPU was to have a very complex instruction set, where one instruction can do a lot of calculations. This conception is called VLIW (very long instruction word). Later, HP and Intel joined their forces to design and manufacture the CPU.
**How the CPU-s usually worked**
CPU-s are usually RISC or CISC. The goal of RISC instruction set is to create CPU-s with small and simple instructions. Notable example of RISC CPU-s are the ARM instruction set (such as the CPU in your mobile phone) and MIPS instruction set (usually used in smart TV-s, older tablets, and routers). Another well-known family is the CISC: this means complex instruction set. An example for CISC is the x86 instruction set, which is currently used in desktop computers and laptops (usually on the Windows based machines). A CISC based design is more complex, an instruction on a CISC cpu can usually do memory read and write, array indexing, stack displacement, and a logical operation within one instruction. The instruction length is different each time. In modern CISC CPU-s, the instructions are decoded to RISC instructions, therefore, our current x86 CPU-s are internally RISC CPU-s, running a hardware accelerated x86 code decoder.
**The Itanium and the VLIW architecture**
The Itanium follows a new idea: the VLIW is more complex than ARM and even more complex than CISC. On Itanium, an instruction is being created from sub-instructions. On the traditional CISC and RISC CPU-s, we having more execution pipelines in every core. This allows each CPU core to execute code parallelly. (Do not confuse this with multi-core CPU-s, thats different!). The CPU have to detect independent operations to be able to execute instructions within one clock cycle. To spare some logic circuits, in the Itanium they came up with a new idea. On Itanium, they rely on the compiler to detect and flag these independent instructions.
**The Itanium and the compilers**
The compiler has more extra things to do than just that. They also rely on the compiler to re-organize these instructions to reach the best performance. The compiler will have to be able to fill these large instructions with sub-instructions very efficiently, to be able to create code with good performance. The Itanium architecture is, however, overcomplicated, the documentation is too long, and its hard to understand it. So the compiler writers were unable to create very efficient compilers.
**The first Itanium-based implementations**
Intel and HP was very pretentious with the new architecture. They was able to onboard other corporations as well. First they have planned to release the architecture on the server and mainframe market. Then they planned to release the new platform for the high-end PC market. The Itanium was released in 2001 summer.
**Tragic performance**
The first Itanium CPU was the Merced CPU core. It was very weak, even a regular desktop Pentium4 or AMD Athlon was able to outperform it under the most tasks. This resulted a high dissatisfication among the buyers. The market didnt liked the new solution, and the server market was choosing x86 based CPU-s. The first Itanium processors had a built in x86 processors to be able to run the traditional x86 code. However, this built in CPU was too slow, they have later removed it, and added a software-only emulator.
**Intel updates the Itanium line**
Intel have tried to fix the performance with the new, second generation of Itanium CPU. However, AMD was released the first 64 bit x86 processor, called the AMD Athlon64. The Athlon64 implemented a new, 64 bit variation of x86 called x86-64 (AMD64) and pushed the x86 family into the servers. The first 64 bit x86 CPU-s only had 100 million transistors, they was available for a couple 100 dollars. In comparison, the second generation of Itanium CPU had almost 250 million transistors, and the cost was varying bethwen 1000 and 3000 us dollars. The power consumption of the Itanium was either similar or worse than the x86 counterparts.
**Intel and HP is not able to convience users**
The compilers are not getting much more efficient. Programmers usually dont bother releasing software to Itanium. Combined with high cost, low relative performance, the support quickly melts beyond Itanium. Intel and HP expected 40 billion USD revenue from selling Itanium servers. The forecast became worse and worse every year.
Every vendor discontinued selling Itanium based solutions after a few months, except HP. The high-end desktop Itanium models never materialized. The market was grinded down by the regular x86-64 based computers.
**Intel updates the Itanium**
Intel updated the Itanium line, they have created new multicore models. They have redesigned Itanium to use the newer manufacturing lines serveral times. The last Itanium processor was released in 2017, it had 8 to 16 cores, and was manufactured on 32nm process. Despite of the frequent updates, Intel and HP failed to sell big quantity of Itanium based hardware. HP had to sue other corporations which has discontinued to supply software for the Itanium architecture due to low demand, despite of having contract for it. Despite of lawsuits, the architecture lost all the software company behind it.
**Windows and Linux discontinued supporting Itanium**
Yesterday (2020 januar 22.), Microsoft stopped releasing new updates for Windows Server 2008 for the Itanium architecture. Red Had Linux discontinued every Itanium related development, but they will continue to offer limited support for the existing operating system until 2024. Debian Linux have already discontinued supporting Itanium in 2018. Suse will support debian up to 2022, but they will not release any new operating system for it.
**Intel discontinued selling Itanium**
Intel will accept new orders for Itanium for 3 more work-days. After that date, Intel will not ship more Itanium CPU-s. They will continue to offer warranty service until 2021 summer, when they close down all the remaining Itanium-related infrastructure and facility.
We dont allow the block-tax
Recently, there was a proposal by some of the BCH miners. These miners annouced a plan to re-allocate some chunk of the block reward. These miners plan to send 12,5% of the block reward as donation for developers. We appreciate the decision of the miners to do something for the community. Althrough there is some concerns in the community, which causing harmful distress about this recent proposal.
If a few miners (actually, mining hubs) decide to send some of the block reward to the developers, thats totally fine. Its their money, they have earned it, they have mined it. We dont care what miners do with the money they have earned. Thats the micracle of Bitcoin Cash. They can sell it, donate it, hodl it.
This ( https://medium.com/@jiangzhuoer/infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-131fdcd2412e ) proposal has nothing to do with protocol itself. The block reward is owned by those who earn it. If they want to donate part of it, thats they decision - they do whatever they want with. However, the majority does not agreeing with this.
The group of these miners decided to try forcing the whole mining scene to donate to an address. To force others to do this, these miners decided to orphan the non-donating blocks.
3. Dear miners (actually, mining hubs), i am afraid you cant orphan the non-donating blocks. Bitcoin Cash has a 10-block long checkpointing system. Producing blocks is, on average, takes 10 minutes. However, in reality, mining a block can frequently take anywhere from half minute to 4 hours.
4. Even if these miners are having 60% of the hash power, they will only have 60% chance to win all the blocks within the 10 block range, compared to other parts of the network who have 40%. Currently, however, these miners seem to control only a small fraction of the network. So, after 10 blocks they have release the blocks to do the reorg, and if they failed to have this number of blocks in time, then they are failed to orphan the non-donating blocks. It does not matter how much hashpower they have in those blocks.
5. To be able to constantly block certain transactions (or LACK of those transactions), they have to be able to sustain the attack basically forever, and wait for the proper minute to release the block. Which is not possible with the checkpointing system, as they will have to send the blocks to the network after 9 blocks. IF they own 60% of the network hashpower, they have 60% chance to do this. If they have 20% of the network hashpower, then they have 20% chance to achieve this, and 80% chance to lose and end up paying only the electricity bill.
6. Of course, mining hubs run by smart people. The know this. They know, the only thing they can do, is to send some parts of the block rewards they have mined, but they dont have power to influence how others will mine. Then the question is, why did they annouced this letter, EVEN IF THEY KNOW ITS NOT TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE?
7. These miners created a Hong Kong based company to manage these funds. The community does not allows miners to force other miners to send money into an address created by some corporation, organization. Donations are donations because people handing them out voluntarely. People online are donating each other all the day.
8. Forcing others to donate on behalf of some upper-good is not donation any more. Its called taxation, practiculary right now to an entity located in a state illegally occupied by a communistic dictature. The plan was proposed by quotes from an anti-capitalistic communist leader in China https://medium.com/@jiangzhuoer/infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-131fdcd2412e and its ideologized with the decay of the economy of United States.
9. In the last days i was wondering if there will be an artifical pressure from state-related groups on the crypto scene as a whole, using help by the state... And it seems, yes.
**Lets put on a healthy sized thinfoil hat!**
Pressure came in various forms since weeks. This isnt the only event that makes me wonder, some of my friend lately got a silk rope in mail from the state, on some occasions, they got letters, basically with the text: cooperate or you will get arrested. https://read.cash/@Geri/japan-arresting-cryptocurrency-operators-cae49a9a
(Including tipbot services, forum donation services, all around the world) There could be some secret international cooperation, to crack down on cryptocurrency. Of course this is just a conspiracy theory, i dont have anything to prove it.
Dont forget, the miners who agreed on this coopretion, could have a gun pointed to their heads!
10. Some people now are no longer sure what they are fighting for. But Bitcoin Cash and other major cryptocurrency was created to fight against statism. Nobody should forget this. If you have a tent, you want a shed. If you have a shed, you want house with one room and a kitchen. If you have one room, then you want a house with two rooms. Then you want a house with 6 rooms, and an integrated garage, then you want a house with 12 rooms and 3 garage, then you want a pool, one extra house at the sea, a palace, a golf field, your own island, an airplane... Which is fine. Unless you want to FORCE others to pay these things for you. Earn it with an organic way, or just just be happy with your X room house.
11. TL,DR - Miners can donate whoever they want, but the community will not allow them to force others to donate.
Why games are stuck with two cores?
You probably have noticed an issue with threads in video games. This article will explain, why games are stuck with two cores. The overwhelming majority of video games and real time 3D applications will not scale well beyond 2 execution cores. Some benchmarks, such as ray tracers of course, will easily scale even beyond 32 cores, the games, however, not. There are some exceptions, like the newest Tomb Raider, however, those are very rare exceptions. This article will try to explain this phenomon quickly.
**How a typical 3D game engine works**
In a typical 3D, you will have a collision engine, an animation engine, and the code for object and texture management. Besides this, you will have the game engine itself, which controls the game itself. In the case you have a 3D car racing game, then the code will have an AI to control your opponents, detects when you break your car, and so on. In the case of an RTS game, you will have a lot of little units with they own little AI, and you will have an AI that controls the actions of the enemy group. You may think, this is not a reason why games are stuck with two cores at all, as you can throw everything to threads.
**Lets throw everything to threads!**
Ok, so you have decided to throw your AI to a different thread, and the rest of your engine can care for the 3D and content management. The problem is, now you cant access functions to modify the location of an object, as they are currently being processed on the first core - replacing them in the middle of the rendering would cause glitches or software crashes. What you do then? Well, you dont use any engine-level commands to manage your units, but then you will need an additional pass after you finished the rendering, to execute every action you computed. In the case of a car game, your AI is very simple, and you dont have to care about. In the case of an FPS, your enemies can think for maybe a half seconds before you issue an action for them. However, you will not be able to constantly fill up your threads with all of the AI, as at most time, the enemy will just sit on its ass, or walk around, or you simply dont have enough enemy in range to fill your tasks with the computation of the AI.
**Ok, so lets throw the physics and collision on different thread!**
Well thats problematic. If your physics and animation engine is very advanced, you will have to recalculate the collision box for the models. Maybe you will just need to recalculate it to be able to frustrum cull the non-visible objects from your scene. The calculation of the physics will not allow you to do anything else - you cant modify the positions of your objects from your game engine, and you cant start rendering the objects, as they are under recalculation. Despite the common belief, you cant have your physics and collision engine on a separate thread.
**Ok, so lets create multiple thread from everything**
Yeah, that works. Until a point. So you can calculate a certain part of your animated objects on a thread, on another thread, you can calculate another part of it. In the AI, you can calculate parts of your units on a thread, another units on other threads, and so on. This sounds great, right? You may think, this will speed up the things, but the problem is not yet solved.
**Lets measure a bit**
Lets see, in your code the 3D rendering itself takes 30% of the time, the AI takes 20% of your time, the animation takes 10% of the time, the collision engine takes 20% of the time. There will be non-threadable parts in your code, that will take at least 20% of your code. If you have an unthreadable part of the code which results 20% of the total work, it already delimits you from being able to speed up the code for more than 5 times, even if you use all the cpu cores of the universe.
**And the other parts?**
Executing threads will take some time, and you cant spread the load evenly. Maybe in your animation code, you have 7 or 8 object that has high polygon count, and others are irrelevant or not animated - in this case, some of your cores will process multiple objects, some of your cores will process lesser work. As the result, there will be a thread that works longer than the others, and you have to wait for each to finish before you can continue.
**The outcome**
You have created plenty of threads while you have rendered, however, it was very rare to utilize a lot of cores for a long time. You was not really able to fill 2-3 core with tasks. The second core will give you a notable boost, but the third core will barely give you a notable boost. You will have to give a lot of a work to the engine to be able to scale at this point, but then your FPS is already below playable frame rates.
**How to scale above 2 cores?**
Writing a real time 3D engine that scales above 2 cores is extremely hard. You cant do any of the traditional threading ideas explained above. You will have to write a code that heavily relies on locks and semaphores. Everything will have to work in a monolithic watchdog manner, and you need a method to dinamically share all of the work to different threads. A code like this is a mess, and its hard to make it stable. With such methods, the code will be more efficient, and it will be able to scale up to 4-6 threads. This isnt a real solution tho, as the speed of such a code, due to the big number of semaphores, non-standard code, watchdogs, cache syncings, the speed will be smaller on lower core count.
Rape does not exists
The goal of this article is to empower men and boys against the oppression of the state. At first, it will discuss, what method the state is using to oppressing men. In the second part, it will discuss how to use Cryptocurrency to fight against this oppression. Lets see a few examples of this: Rape as a crime - and it does not exists. Rape is a social construct, to opress the male gender and male sexuality. This is why the title "Rape does not exists" was given to this article. Rape is an imaginary crime to demonize male sexual behavior.
**The modern western state is oppressing men.**
Men dont have reproductive rights, they dont have rights for they own children. Men dont have rights for self-protection, men dont have equality before the law. For example, laws for domestic violence only punishing men, and they are not real crimes (like, slapping someone). Slapping a women is a crime, meanwhile slapping a men is just a joke, at least according to the law codex of the opressive feminist law system. In the case of the divorce, a man loses all of his rights for his property, his money, and for his children. Men does not have rights to own money and property, and forced to pay alimony, child support for the rest of his life. Men does not have rights for the children, yet they bear all the obligations of having a children. (https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ ) Even in the case of having a prenuptial agreement, its automatically invadated by the court if it favours the man. Boys are opressed in school system, girls get better grades even for the same performance, and the majority of college students are women. For the same crime, men get about three times more punishment ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/men-women-prison-sentence-length-gender-gap_n_1874742?guccounter=1 ).
Based on this short but not complete list, we can identify that a typical western-type state is oppressing men on three main ways:
1. Sexual oppression
2. Social oppression
3. Economical oppression
There is overlap in this three main cathegory, some forms of oppression may fit into one, some may fit into two, and some may fit into all of this three category.
**Sexual oppression: expressing male sexuality is criminalized**
Men are not just stripped from reproductive rights, men are also subject of imaginary crimes, such as sexual harrasment or rape. In a western type feministic terrorstate, nowdays everything can be identifyed as a rape. Drinking alcohol in a bar and having sex? Rape. Rape, because you forced that poor girl to drink alcohol. The dirty men is having magic powers to bring the women to the bed, and when he does it, thats a rape. Having sex with a 17 year old girl? Rape. You maybe didnt even had sex with someone, but she says you had: rape. Or at least, harrasment. Slapping on the dancers ass in a bar is also a harrasment, and it costs you 20 months of salary, according to the oppressive feministic state of South Korea ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-club-idUSKCN1UN01B ), which has 0.9 childbirth/woman due to its extremeist opression of the male gender ( https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-11/forget-norths-nukes-south-koreas-other-big-problem-inevitable ).
*Illustration: anti-male hate propaganda in a modern South Korean online newspaper. Portraying men as predators with imaginary crimes, and hiding deadly anti-male crimes on the side*. *By the next day, they erased it alltogether, and kept the imaginary crimes in the headlines.*
**The rape-myth is the foundation of the enslavement of the male gender**
The feministic terror undermined the christian and asian society based on the demonization of male sexuality. One of the main tool to achieve this, is the rape-hysteria, and the second one, is the systematic undermine of the male reproductive rights. The key for totalitarian oppression of the male gender is to convience everybody about the inferiority of the male sexuality. Portraying men as violent rapists, stripping every basic human rights from them, including rights to own money, rights to housing, reproduction, sexuality, freedom, are the constructions that opened the path of enslaving the male gender as a whole.
**Rape and sexual harrasment does not exists**
The main problem of rape is that its canot be proven. Its not possible to prove if sex was happening with or without consent. Rape is not a crime on its own, to force down someone, the victim must be brutally beaten somehow, or the victim must be much smaller. Beating someone so much that the person gets brutal injuries, are provable, and its already a crime. If someone beats someone very seriously, its a crime, and if rape also happening, thats is part of this crime. However, the anti-male state sustaining a dedicated rape-crime to oppress the men. By making rape a specialized snowflake crime, these imaginary rape laws are being one of the most spectaular element in the list if the sexual oppression of the male gender. The potential punishment for these imaginary crimes are ramped up, sometimes the sentence is more than in the case of a murder. The real goal of these laws is to oppress and limit the male sexuality and giving no rights for self protection for a men. These laws (at least in some states) also covers having sex while the women is drunk, making nearly every sexual act as a rape.
Our current society currently views the male sexuality inferior, and view men as sexmonsters. If this is true, well then men should not be punished for rape, as its their code by existence. If this is not true, then men should not be punished for rape, because rape does not exists.
But it makes long lasting psychological damage
Psychological damage canot be measured, like breaking someone ribs and bones, which are already a crime. Laws canot be created based on how someone feels. Psychological damage is not a thing, if someone gets psychological damage after a minor crime (that does not creates long lasting damage to they body, such as rape) is just basically having a weak psyche to begin with.
**What rape really is?**
Rape does not have to do anything with protecting the society, its a form to oppress male sexuality as a whole. Rape is not a crime, as it does not causes harm of the body. Psychological damage canot be measured and someones psychological instability canot be used to justify sustaining imaginary crimes. If someone brutally beats someone, that can - and should be - punished by the laws.
**A society which oppressing a group, will not stay democratic**
Of course, as the modern society enslaved its men, it was not able to sustain its freedom. If a society oppresses someone, eventually has to opress everyone. Western democracy was replaced by socialist liberal dictatorships. In such a state, gender got detached from the biological sexuality, and it became question of choice. Due to the desintegration of the structure of family system, the childbirth rates are far below reproductive levels. This enforced western societies to encourage migration from foreginer ethnicities and cultures, wiping out the original ethnicities living in these oppressive feministic nations.
*Illustration: child birth rates in europe*
The tax rates and bureocracy are continously rising, its becoming nearly impossible to sustain a corporation under the market rules. As industrial throughtput decreases, people are forced to work more, and they are able to afford less items to buy. Due to the fall of the industrial throughtput, there is also a drastical drop in the number of engineers and workmans. The place of the scientifical life is filled with fake-science, such as liberal arts and gender studies, which catalizes the demise of the economy.
**God annihilating cultures with rape hysteria**
To understand how rape is actually a form of an anti-male oppression, we can observe the stories in the bible closely. In the Genesis, we can learn what the ancient egyptian society was like. Egypt slowly turned into a socialist welfarestate, where people living from the aid of the state. Egypt had no conception of capitalism, or accumulation of wealth. A famine later on finalized the socialist structure of the society, and every house and land became the property of the state. Those who were exception, were sent to forced labour to work for the society. These forced labourers sustained the society, basically paying 100% tax after they labour. In the book Genesis (39) we can read the story about how women terrorized men with imaginary rape laws. The prophet of god, Joseph, was sentenced to prison after he refused to have sex with a leader, and as a revenge, she accused him for raping her. As we can see, Egypt was a socialist-feminist terrorstate as well, similar to our current states in America and Europe, and nowdays, in eastern Asia as well.
*Illustration: taxation in north europe in the last few decades.*
Later, God summoned his people, to save them from this socialist-feminist terrorstate, and give them a free and capitalistic society, where the leaders was given specific laws and very small taxation by the God, as in the Bible, God doesn not tolerates dictatures, communism, or oppression of men. The rape hysteria is however, not yet ends in the Bible. One of the next scenes, a leader of a city rapes the daughter of one of the Israelites. The israelites kill everyone in the city as a revenge. Later on, God orders them not to allow hysteria: every person who attacks a practicular person as a group, will be annihilated by God. God will protect the person, and eradicates the attackers, does not matters if the attackers was right or not.
A few decades after the israelites settle, a group from the tribe of Benjamites are raping and killing a woman. The housband of this woman getting very angry, summons an army and starts a war against Benjaminites. The war causes big devastation, most of the Benjaminites are killed, and almost every Benjaminite women gets killed, so they have to found new women. After the war, they slowly got invaded by Philistineans. They have realized they was acting against the gods order, thats why they got ravaged by the God. They decide not to have similar civil wars every again.
In book of Eshter, which tooking place after the Persian invasion of Israel, we can observe that an imaginary rape crime by Eshter is used to start war among various ethnicites of Persians. Due to this success, the civil war weakens the Persian rule. Once again, God annihilates a nation with rape hysteria.
The last occasion of a sexuality-related crime is discussed in the Bible is, when a group of people want to stone an allegedly cheating women to death. Jesus does not allows them to do this. After this story, every sexuality-related crime is being non-punishable. Jesus renders sexual misbehaviours unpunishable by the state. Such crimes are still morally blameworthy, but laws does not cover sexual crimes any more. Punishing rape, divorce, cheating, sexual harrasment by the state, is denying Jesus Christ and christianity.
**Therefore, states with rape hysteria are denying the Bible, they deny Jesus and Christianity as whole.**
The birth rates in these countries are far below the reproduction level (2 children per women), only the foreginer migrants are having larger birth rates. As God promised, once again, eradicating all the nations with a rape hysteria.
**Age of consent**
As a healthy moral is dismissing the conception of rape, its also an interesting question to investigate, what having sex with a children is. On the world, almost everywhere, age of consent is 14. Some contries having 18 or 17 as the age of consent. Just a century ago, having a 12 year old wife was totally acceptable by the society. And so this was the case for the whole history of the humanity. For example, Mary gave birth to Jesus at age 13. Men are biologically coded to sexually like young girls, even if, according to modern research, the utherus is being fully developed only by the age of 18. Having a high age of consent has more thing to do with oppression of the male sexuality than protecting girls.
**But sex with a 10 year old is disgusting!**
A 10 year old girl is probably cute, and not disgusting. Maybe you are right, and having sex with a 10 year old is not appropriate, and its disgusting. What is the appropriate then? Well, maybe 14, but what is an appropriate and what is legal, that is a different question to begin with. MAYBE if somebody has a sex with a 10 year old, that is sick! But at the same time, having punishment is not the proper way to deal with somebody who fucks 10 year olds. First of all, because a christian society cant punish sexuality, and men are encoded to love young girls. Anti-male propagandists say nonsensual theories to justify punishment of pedophiles, such as: its a rape, because they ruining the sexual health of the young girl, and her ability to pairbond would be damaged. These kind of theories are however, unmeasurable, and not-existent. Laws punishing pedophilia are illegal, and products of anti-male, anti-christian socialist states.
For example, more than a decade ago in Hungary, the age of consent was 18, however, later they decreased it to 14. Before this, in Hungary, just like everywhere else, there was a lot of sexually motivated rape and murder cases against children, just like everywhere else on the world. Guess, how many of such cases were happened AFTER they decreased the age of consent to 14!
Thats right, there was ZERO cases. (Except one, but the motivation there hasnt anything to do with sex - the criminal was an insane paranoid skizo).
**How to deal with pedophiles and sexual predators then?**
Very good question! Some muslim and african country ignoring pedophilia and every other kind of sexual crimes. Anti-male hysteria should not be allowed, and as we discussed earlier, it disgusting in the eyes of god as well. However, even if the state is not allowed to punish these acts, some of these are still moral crimes. Historically, muslim states were forced the rapist to live with his victims, to remind him for the consequences of his acts. However, this is not a good approach, as it ignores the victim, and objectifies her. This dilemma is however, multiple tousand year old. There will be no good answeers of this question, and there will be none at all. Oppressing and demonizing men is also not an asweer for this problem.
Some country illegalizes the possession of child porn pictures and videos. However, rendering punishment for possessing these materials are oppression against men, again.
**Men leaving the society**
MGTOW is a movement that decides to liberate men from the oppression by propagating a new lifestyle. The MGTOW phrase means: Men going their own way. The followers of this philosophy are refusing to settle down and have families. A MGTOW follower refuses to work more than he absolutely needs to, and focuses on his hobbies instead. Some MGTOW followers having sex, but most of them refusing to have sex. They dont settle and dont sustain long term relationships.
MGTOW followers cease connection with women, and they cease connection with society as much as they can. They dont cooperate with state institutes, and they focus on having passive income sources, and they try to quit the job market alltogether, and trying to avoid tax-payments. They dont enter marriage to protect themself from losing all of they belongings. They also dont have children, as they dont want to become forced-labour slaves through paying child-support. MGTOW is a form of passive resistance against the oppression of the male gender. The movement is rising exponentially among young men.
**How cryptocurrency can empower men and boys?**
Back then, cryptography was barely usable to protect the rights of men. For example, if the child porn was stored on a Linux computer and saved only behind an encrypted TrueCrypt ( https://truecrypt.ch ) partition with a password that is not being entered anywhere else, then the partition is canot unlocked by the authorities. (Windows, Android, IOS, Iphone will send the passwords back to the servers of the authorities).
The situation was however improving as the arrival of cryptocurrency. The article has listed sexual oppression so far, but the cryptocurrency is here to aid men against economical oppression. MGTOW also focuses on the economical oppression as well. Western anti-male states having an invention called child support, some of them having a separate invention called alimony. The society uses men as slaves, in the case of divorce, men are forced to pay child support and sometimes alimony, despite of not even having any reproductive rights for they children. If the men refuses to cooperate in this process, the balances will be closed from his banking account by the feministic state with a bigger fee for collectors as well.
Cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Monacoin, however can not be locked down. Beware, there are state friendly fake-cryptocurrencies, which support locking down the address of an individual. Bitcoin Cash also offers Cashshuffle, a feature that allows more privacy by organizing payment pools, and disconnecting the sender from the recipent of a practicular balance. Once the individual succesfully relocated his wealth to cryptocurrency, its not lockable by the state. Using Truecrypt to create a new encrypted partition, and putting the wallet files behind it, will also give the opportunity to deny the existence of any cryptocurrency wallet on a computer, if the computer is confiscated by the state.
**Cryptocurrency takes away the financial hegemony from the state**
Cryptocurrency of course can be, and should be used by anyone, not just men. Cryptocurrency can not be taxed. There is a lot of FUD going on in the community, spread by statists. However, if you dont have a signed contract with some exchange, nobody can prove how much cryptocurrency do you own. Even if some techie tracks your transactions, you can always deny the amount you have by simply denying its existence (if you have Truecrypt on your computer).
If they want to tax or take away your crypto balance, they cant do it with a few clicks (unless you are stupid enough to store it on an exchange). To force you to lend out your cryptocurrency, the state probably have to go to your place, confiscate your computer, which probably uses various methods of cryptography, if not else, at least your wallet is locked with a password. Then they have to break your bones one by one to force the password out of you, or so on - or they confiscate your $200 washing machine for your imaginary debit, and they sell it, but either way, the state will have to put in eronomous effort to try taking away your things, and at the end they will just fail in it.
Japan arresting cryptocurrency operators
Last year, Japan made to the news for being a crypto-heaven. Actually, the opposite is true: Japan is the cryptocurrency hell. In the past year, Japan have created various laws illegalizing cryptocurrency. One of the most dangerous is a recent ban on unlicensed cryptocurrency services. Under this law, Japan banned operating every crypto services, unless the owners register as a corporation and apply for a special permission from the state.
**The state-parasite creeps slowly**
In the end of 1980s, in Hungary (on the different side of the planet) communism just ended. The 50 year long fight of people against statism ended. Full financian freedom has been achieved, and shops were opened basically on every street by people who tought having a shop will make them rich. And indeed, some of these new shop owners became rich. The state owned shops became deserted, some was bought by speculators and investors, some was just collapsing from being abandoned. There was no regulation, the era was called wild-capitalism.
After a while, someone came up with the idea: lets make a law that forces every shop to register. Of course, people were outraged, and demanded to suspend this law immediately, fearing of taxation. Then some hydroglobus heads appeared in the state owned TV, and started explining day and night about this new law. This is just to know where the shops are! We just gathering information! Taxation? In Hungary? Are you kidding me?! There will be no taxation! We just registering every shop to ensure the safety of the country!
Imagine what happened just within a year: they introduced personal income tax, various forms of taxation for shops, corporations, institutes. Of course, those shops who have registered, were forced to pay this instantly.
**Beware if your state is crypto-friendly**
This is how the state works, first it just wants to register you for your own safety. If a state is crypto-friendly, that means, it wants to get touch with the crypto-people. They want the crypto-people to come out from the bush, and say: hello, i am the operator of the x+y+z service, nice to meet you. Once the state learns who are the main players in the field through friendly gestures, they determinate major players in the scene, they start to make laws that will affect the operators of any crypto service slowly. At first, they will force these operators to register corporations - probably as Limited or stock corporations, to be able to pull out monthly 2000-8000$ which is of course impossible to be payed your random chat tipbot operator who probably processing daily 10 dollars. Then they will impose more type of tax, and demand KYC, and orwellian surveillance.
**Terror of the rising sun**
The same has just happened in Japan, who was considered a crypto heaven by a number of articles in the past years by writers, who dont understand the intentions of statism. Some random Elected Glorious Taxfarter Dragon of the leader United Nippon Pantsu-sex Party was bored of jerking off to 10 year old girls on the metro, and decided to protect people from the dangers of the cryptocurrency. How could be the people forced to pay more tax? Crypto is the enemy of statism and taxation, of course you cant just outright ban it in a fake-rule-of-law-type state. So what to do?
**Lets ban unlicensed operators!**
The new proposal was carefully defining, what kind of services fell under the new regulation. This regulation affect every service, if the private key to spend the balance is stored on the server. By this, every online forum with integrated tipping, every chat tipping bot, almost every cryptocurrency plugin fell under the new ban, IF the service is not hosted officially by a responsible corporation without a special permission.
**Japanese cryptocurrency operators are shutting down in mass**
The new law will take effect in 2020 April. Last year, Askmona already annouced the shutdown of the wallet service on the site. As a result of the new regulation, the value of Monacoin (homegrown Japanese cryptocurrency, just as popular as Bitcoin in Japan) fell by 60% in the last months. Various other tipping service choose to shut down till April, the activation of the new law.
**Crypto operators fear prison**
A crypto operator, who i know for years, and whose identity will not be discussed in this article, have contacted me to told his fears about japanese law-system and the new law. I have offered him, to host his service from my internet connection, but it turned out that the new law would persecute him even in this case, as the law apply on every japanese cryptocurrency operator, even if the server is outside of Japan. I have quickly educated him about Truecrypt, so the police cant prove that he is the actual operator of any practicular service.
**But its useless, Japanese police is not comply human rights**
If you are persecuted in Japan, you have 98% chance of being found guilty. How that is possible? Strict hierarchy is the natural state of the Japanese society. If they bring you in, the police will use psychological manipulation and deprivation on you, such as not giving you plenty of food, not letting you to sleep, and various non-lethal tortures to confess. People usually confess even if they are innocent. And if they dont confess, the police will have the right to keep them arrested for about 23 days. This applies on every crime, including minor crimes, and the police will automatically use it. Of course, this type of behaviour from the police would be impossible in most places of the earth, as the people with they family would just appear to beat the policemen in the town afterwards. But it works in Japan, due to the strict hierarchy in the society that weakens the people at the same time by not giving moral grounds to any type of violence, including self-protection.
**Dictature is being built in the land of anime**
After discussing with the unnamed japanese cryptocurrency service operator, he decided to try avoiding the law by storing they private keys as browser cookies, or using a third party service for account and private key management. After discussing the issue, he explained, he is also afraid to use truecrypt and enjoy the free meal for 23 days in a prison. He is afraid of the consequences, and it is possible of discontinuing his service alltogether, which was originally running from an European country, and was only relocated to Japan in the recent year.
**The moral of the story**
If your state is crypto friendly, be very afraid! Do not interact with the state upon your crypto assets and crypto services, use Truecrypt and if officials ask you, how many cryptocurrency you have, always reply with WHAT IS BUTTKOIN, POLICE-CHAN?! I LOVE YOU, AND I LOVE THE STATE, I WISH YOU GREAT LUCK HUNTING THE EVIL DEMONS IN OUR SOCIETY, MY HERO!
Bitcoin ABC vs Bitcoin Unlimited
**edit: PLEASE NOTE**
Informations in this article became obsolete.
**WE RECOMMEND YOU TO RUN BITCOIN UNLIMITED!!!**
Bitcoin ABC supports block-tax, however, Bitcoin Unlimited supports the original conception of Bitcoin Cash.
**Read the original (obsolete) article:**
At christmas, i had some free-time, and i was bored. I ended up testing Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin Unlimited Cash, to see which node is better. Originally, i decided to continue working on my node software. To be able to do this, i had to download the blockchain, and thats why i had to test a few node software to do so. My node software is basically a program i wrote in C, its not yet able to connect to other nodes, and not able to create transactions. Currently, it can read the files of a full wallet, lists and browses all the blocks, all the transaction inputs and outputs, and it can observe and display some of the content uploaded to the blockchain.
This is the software in action: https://streamable.com/n7ahr
This article, however, is not about my node software. Its not even good for anything yet, there would be no point in shilling it. Basically, the story is: to test my node software, i had to install the official node software of various coins. These official full wallet softwares, which downloaded the blockchain, were required, so i was able to test my software on those files.
First i have tested my node software on the Dogecoin blockchain, and then i have decided to feed the Bitcoin Cash blockchain into it as well. The most two major Bitcoin Cash implementation is the Bitcoin Cash ABC software, and the Bitcoin Cash Unlimited (BUCASH) software.
**The configuration of my computer**
The computer i used to carry out this experiment, is more than 10 years old. The CPU is a 4 core Athlon2 X4 from 2009 for the Socket AM3 platform. I have 8 GBytes of DDR3 RAM, and an 1,5 TB SATA HDD. The computer has a 64 bit Linux operating system. Probably everything in this computer is at least 10 years old, and in total, it probably worths less than $200. This is a typical desktop PC of nowdays, althrough most people nowdays use i3 chips instead (which is not that much faster than this, so it would no point in updating this computer).
The internet speed is a 30MBit connection with about 2 MBit upload and unlimited traffic. I enabled port forwarding to have inbound connections for the wallet as well.
**Experiences with Bitcoin Cash ABC (v0.20.9)**
I have never used a Bitcoin Cash node before. I had bad experiences with the Bitcoin Core node in 2017, when syncing the coin was slower than receiving the new blocks, which resulted a growing lag with the network, even if the software was running all the time. Bitcoin Cash ABC was however, syncing very quickly. Just within 48 hours, the software was able to sync the blockchain. On the disk, it consumed about 152 GByte of free space after syncing.
The software worked very well, it (usually) eats betwen half to 1.5 GByte of RAM. It didnt slowed the computer down too much. After the sync was done, my first visit was to the debug panels. Even after allowing the wallet to idle for another extra day, there was no geniune incoming connections. There was incoming connections, such as blockchain explorers, node explorers, a few service running from .cash domains. There was however no incoming connection from other wallet software, such as no ABC or BUCASH was connected to my computer through an inbound connection at all. As these blockchain explorer services were connecting to my computer, its safe to assume that the ip address of my computer was broadcasted through the network, but for some reason, nodes wont try to make an incoming connection, and only use the major nodes.
This is maybe not just an issue with ABC, this is more likely a wide issue of the algorithm that decides how the nodes will connect to each other as a whole. This makes the network vulnerable in the case of a major DDoS attack against the most frequently used nodes, as once they are out, the nodes on the network will not try to connect to actual nodes. This behaviour of the Bitcoin Cash network is different from the behaviour of other cryptocurrency. Such as on the Dogecoin network, after a few days, you have 4-5 incoming connection from other nodes, and if you run the node for several weeks, you will have hundreds of incoming connections from nodes who have learned your IP address.
Stopping and starting the software was quick. Bitcoin Cash ABC needs maybe 10 seconds to start, which is a record short time i have seen among the node softwares so far. After this, i went to play with the wallet, to see if i can find any interesting things. And well, yeah, i found some very intriguing and worrisome.
**Bitcoin Cash ABC and deprecated functions**
After checking out the commands, i have noticed that they started to remove the sendmany and sendfrom commands. When trying to use these commands, a message appears, warning you for the fact of deprecation. You have to start the wallet in a special mode to be able to use these commands. The nodes usually supported a feature called accounts. This was used by online services. For example, if a webpage had a tipping system, each user ID had its own account in the wallet, and accounts was able to have one or multiple addresses, belonging to that account. This feature is used by various tipbots, and ABC decided to remove it in last month alltogether. Sendfrom, a command that allowed to spend from an account, is gone. Sendmany, that is similar to this in functionality, and allows to spend from accounts and manually selected bitcoin cash addresses, is also partially being deprecated. It is possible to replace sendfrom with sendmany, so this isnt a big problem. Thinking on it, account management should have nothing to do in a core wallet to begin with, but it will need a lot of extra work from the service providers to rewrite the service, if they already used it.
**Bitcoin Unlimited Cash 1.7.0 (BUCASH)**
Bitcoin Unlimited Cash didnt wasted the time to create a logo, they just qucikly mspainted a splash screen with the Bitcoin Cash logo and some texts, which already indicates that this isnt the software of the decade. After starting to play with the settings, it gave a positive impression: a lot of settings to throttle your output bandwidth, limit the maximum block size (if you are a miner), a lot of extra info in the debug panel, and an additional graph for the network. However, they have also removed certain panels. I tought they even have removed the panel to set the number of verification threads, but they just hid it - in ABC thats the first that appears if you click on options, but in BUCASH, a different menu comes up, and then you must go back to the main settings to find this. You can see various options are removed from the menu.
Left: ABC, right: BUCASH
After syncing a bit, i decided to limit my send bandwith to 128 kbyte per second, and restarted the software. At this point, everything was a downhill. The software, if its already downloaded the blocks, will take almost 5 minute on this computer to start (compared to the 10 second of ABC). When i have restarted the software, i noticed that there is no incoming bandwidth at all, the software stopped syncing, there was only one peer i was able to connect to. I quickly googled a few node IP addresses, and added them to the node list. The software refused to even try connecting to them, after a few minutes, the software stopped syncing.
I deleted every file of BUCASH, decompressed it again, limited the outbound bandwith to 128 kbyte sec, started it, and... one block, and the connection stalled. I have restarted the software again, this time it stalled after 22000 blocks, and refused to restart again, losing all the connection to nodes.
After i have disabled the bandwidth limitation, and restarted the software, it came alive. Basically, the developers totally messed up the code with the bandwidth limitation, probably they have never actually tested it. The send bandwidth limitation limited not just the incoming but outgoing data too, and not just on a per-second manner: once it reached the 128 kbyte, it stopped all network communications FOREVER.
After this, the node started syncing. Even after an hour, it only had 3 connections to the network alltogether (despite of adding loads of node IP addresses). I was checking to the settings to see what is going on. Bitcoin Unlimited Cash has additional panels to observe the network activity, but the another graph was dead, there was no outpot on it whatsoever. They have removed the field which indicates the received and sent bytes on a per-ip basis, so you cant know which peer doing what.
**None of the Bitcoin Unlimited Cash special features work**
After closely observing, none of the features the BUCASH team has added to the wallet, was working. The bandwith limitation was dead, the graphs and extra output functionality they added were showing only zero and not changing ever. At this point i became less and less excited to run this node on my computer, the software is obviously full of bugs and its a question how this is even made into the public.
**Colossal bugs in Bitcoin Unlimited Cash during syncing**
After this, i continued the synchronisation aniway, to check what happens. After waiting a few hours, i have noticed my computer locking up, and the HDD were working like crazy. First i toughts its due to reaching larger blocks, which probably put a lot of stress on the disk drive, but then my browser just froze and it didnt became responsible even after a minute. I have pressed control-alt-delete to see whats going on, but the process explorer never came up as well. Shit.
I used the linux quirk for quick console access, which was able to come up after a half minute. I was able to find out using the top command, that Bitcoin Unilimted Cash ate all of the RAM in the system, and it currently tried to swap in and out gigabytes of data to the disk in every second. I tried to close other applications to free up more RAM, but it had no use, i had to quit BUCASH which miraculously was able to close gently.
At this point i decided to restart the computer. After that was done, i restarted BUCASH and continued syncing. After a few minutes, it already ate more than 2 GByte of RAM. After running for another hour, it ate more than 3 GByte of RAM, and after anther half hour, it consumed about 4 GB of RAM, and the responsibility of my system started to dramatically decrease again.
**Bitcoin Unlimited Cash will potentionally damage your hardware**
Imagine doing the thing above on a machine with an SSD. SSD-s are only capable to have a limited number of write cycles. A typical SSD can only handle a couple TByte of disk writes, and then the cells dying on it. Bitcoin Unlimited Cash can kill your SSD very easily, doing multiple hundred dollars of hardware damage for you just by running it on your computer. And then, maybe even your data is becoming unaccessable forever. I dont really understand why people are running this node for they business. OH wait, i can: it still fully supports the sendfrom command. Despite this, i recommend to avoid using BUCASH, this is the worst node software i ever seen. This node is notorious for crashing at the critical moment of the 2018 november hardfork. These bugs should be present for very long time, probably there was no notable testing for this project for years. Imagine, if the code quality is so bad, what vulnerabilities could be still present in this code?
**To sum up**
Bitcoin Cash ABC is the only realible Bitcoin Cash implementation. It is fast, consumes betwen half and 2 gbyte of memory (and it will not leak the memory like BUCASH). It runs fine even on an old trashpicked computer, and does not uses a lot of CPU power. Bitcoin Unlimited has serious bugs and risks the integrity of your system. Other node implementations are not yet tested, based on this test, i recommend running the ABC node.
Bus ride to hell
Akko was a high-school girl. She had long brown hair, and brown eyes. She was short and skinny, and very cute. She was wearing skirt with shirt and a vest. Before and after the school, she travelled with bus. Akko was member of a lot of club, so she usually finished the school at late afternoon. In the previous days, there was a huge rain, which damaged some of the roads. This affected Akko's road too.
-I am sorry, my kiddos - said the bus driver - but i will not be able to drive on this road.
The road in front of them was totally damaged. At morning, they also used a different road, near to an old and unused landfill near to a village. This landfill was long time gone. The woods already overtook the landfill, only some old rusty cans reminded the visitors of the old usage.
-At morning, we went to the direction of the landfill, on the agricultural roads. - said one of the friend of Akko.
-Ok then, we will go that direction. - replied the bus driver, and turned onto the agricultural road.
The agricultural road was in a much worse shape than at morning. Now the weather was much warm, which made the road more muddy than it used to be. All the cars, busses, heavy trucks used that old agricultural road bethwen the fields, to circle around the damaged road. The bus was only able to drive very slowly.
Akko was sitting alone. Her classmates were talking, but somehow they was more silent than usually. Akko noticed this fact. She was always sitting alone, she hept her toughts to herself. At this day, they was after the school dance and sing clubs, and usually everyone was full of health. But not this day, everybody was adapted to the unusual situation with the damaged roads. Today, something was in the air. Her classmates were talking about less useless topics, and were talking about more important ones.
Akko were watching out on the bus window as they passed the landfill. She was occupied by her toughts, as the bus turned left to approach the old wood bridge. The landfill was in the outskirts of a forest, and the agricultural road was very muddy, so the bus driver had to push the gas pedal quite a bit, to avoid getting stuck in the mud.
The bus was suddenly turning left to drive through the bridge. Akko was wondering: at the morning, the dirtroad here wasnt like this. Like, this part of the road was covered from the rain. But how this could be possible?
-Oh shit! - after a loud but short swearing of the bus driver, everybody went silent.
There was no bridge. The bridge was gone. The bus just accelerated into the abyss.
Nobody started screaming. Akko was looking down, to check how deep they will fall. Too deep, like the size of a block of flats. Its hard to tell how many meters they will fall, but the trees seemed like toys down there. Before Akko had a chance to panic, they were already halfway down. One of her classmates voice in the bus broke the silence: i never tought the end will be like this.
Ok, thats it. - Tought Akko. She was scared. She wanted to live. She wasnt sure, why, tho. She had no real friends, didnt really made any important things in her life, she was just sad. She wasnt satisfied with her life. At the moment of the impact, the bus started to compress from the front and below, the windows started to fly around like shrapnels. The impact was faster than the nerve system, so Akko didnt felt anything from the impact.
When Akko opened her eyes, she was suprised to see the desintegrated bus. It fell into parts. Miracolously, most of her classmates was well and alive. They were talking around the wreckage, everyone was in shock. It was total silent, but people still talking in short sentences to each other, as they were in shock.
Akko stepped to one of her classmates, and started talking to him. But he didnt answered. She stepped to another classmate, but still no answer, they just walked away. Then Akko realized something strange. Beyond the bus, there were white chairs in a line, and people sitting in them. Akko was confused - whats going on? She walked in front of them, one by one, to find out, some of her classmates were sitting in those chairs. In the first chair, there was somebody who wasnt her classmate. Who brought these brand new chairs here? Why her classmates are sitting in these chairs in total claimness? Why most of them wears a white dress?
There was a boy sitting in the chair to the right. Akko never talked too much to this boy, even if they was close classmates. A woman in white, stepped to the boy, and they had a short convo with the boy.
Then the women told the boy: congratulations! You were selected to go to the heaven. Suddenly, a shoulder bag and a hat appeared on the boy. He started shining, and laughed. He told some jokes, as the other people sitting around, was clapping and congratulating him. There was a ring appeared on the left side of him, he waved, and jumped through the ring.
In the next chair, there was a girl. She had a short conversation with the woman too, and she was sent to the heaven as well, in a similar fashion, althrough she didnt shined, and the portal was in different shape and color.
Akko wasnt beleiving what she just saw. She wasnt sure if she was hallucinating. She running back to the other side of the bus to tell them what she just saw. But they were occupied by wiping off they blood, and searching for their items. She ignored Akko, like she wasnt even there.
Akko ran back to watch his classmates in the chair. At this point, she understood, those are her classmates, who died in the accident. But who could be that girl in the first chair? That girl is not her classmate. She walked there to check again, who she is. That girl was just sitting here, not moving at all. Not even her eye was moving. The true shock was the fact, that the girl sitting in the first chair, was Akko herself.
Akko did a few steps back. Then she looked down on herself. But she seen nothing. Akko realized at that point that she has no body any more. One of the women in white cloths has stepped to her, and told her not to be afraid, just sit in the chair. Thats right, Akko was died in the accident.
Akko was unified with that puppet in the chair, and accepted her death. The white clothed women were continuing with the people in the chairs. However, at the middle of the line, they wasnt sending people to the heaven any more.
-We cant decide about you - told one of the women to one of the girls. We will have to send you back to another cycle of existence. You will reborn, you will have a new identity, this one will be deleted.
-Okay, sounds good - replied the girl, and she was faded away.
There was only two girl left, Akko and another one. Akko didnt liked this girl for some reason. There was no white clothed people any more, everyone was in red. Three very large, ugly people, wearing red, with malformed faces were stepping to the girl. The men were screaming in a deep and distored voice, explaining to the girl that she is going to the hell for what she did in her life. The girl were screaming, and begging the devils not to take her, but they grab a rod and started beating the girl, while they was forcing her down from the chair. Flames were appearing around the girl, and she screamed in agony.
The last one sitting on the chair was Akko. A large black ring was opened on her right side, and a black, satanic person was watching Akko from the inside. Akko started complaining: oh my gad, what have i done that made me to be the most evil person in our class? The devil laughed, and told Akko: you should remember it.
Akko started to think, what bad things she did. She was thinking and thinking, to find out, but she didnt found anything... until a point, when one of her old memory, which she burried deeply, started to re-appear in the front of her eyes. She didnt wanted to see that memory, she didnt wanted to see what her true nature is. However, she never in her life allowed that inner darkness in her to crawl outside. Akko was a nice and cute girl, she didnt committed any sin yet, but her true soul was rotting. Thats why the devils were not grabbing her, just laughing at her.
Then one of the white clothed women touched the shoulder of Akko, and told to her:
-Akko, the collection of your spirit has been cancelled. Close your eyes, and focus on your body a bit.
Akko closed her eyes, and started focusing on her body. She started feeling her nerves and neurons. Her heart started to pump the blood again. It was hard for her to open her eyes, but she had some hand-pumped oxygen mask on her face.
The emergency just arrived to the scene, they brought her out from the wreck and they succesfully started her revivification. She was on a stretcher, the paramedics were bringing her to the emergency car.
The dream ended.
Trapped in the school
In my dream, i had some minor health issue that lasted for several weeks. Nothing too serious, after a while i was cured. But i was not able to go around till it was cured. After i was finally cured, i had to travel to an university, which was in a nearby city. I used train usually. However, i forgot to buy the ticket. After i have realized i have no ticket, i got down from the train at a city thats halfway bethwen my home and my destination.
I have decided to buy ticket at that town, and continue my travel, like, if nothing is even happened. To go to the ticket office, i had to walk a kilometer or so. The station i got down, was used mostly by schoolkids, and the road was circling around the highschool. I decided to shortcut through the yard of the school, which was full of buildings and various playing fields for soccer, tennis, basketball, and who knows what. The field was full with kids. I passed bethwen them while they was playing around.
As i was passing by, the whole school seemed bigger and bigger. I was realized i was wandering for a hour now, and i still just in the middle of the fields. Finally, i approached the school building. At this time, the school building was almost as big, as the whole city. I decided that i will not go around, i will go into the school, and come out at the other side.
The school was nice in the inside, however, i was just walking and walking... But the school just became bigger and bigger even what it originally seemed. Rooms after rooms, floors after floors, i was basically just not able to get out. I was trapped in the school, and my major priority was to get out from that building. I started to search for the way out, but it was useless.
At a point, i have witnessed something interesting. A security guard of the school had catched an old, fat, bald man who was harrassed the students. He grabbed him, and dragged him to a door, and tossed it outside. I tought, thats my chance. I went to the security guard. I told him that i want to tresspass, an i am searching the way out. I assumed he will throw me out too, so i will finally be able to leave.
But a different thing has been happened. The security guard refused, and told me that obviously i am a schoolkid and i should not troll him. He will not let me out, becase i am a schoolkid. I told him, no, look at me, i am a grown man. Well, actually i really look like a schoolkid. So he laughed at my attempt, told me to go back to my class, and closed the door, and he walked away. I just grabbed something, went to the door, and break out the glass on the door. I stepped out to the fresh air, i was free from the school.
Then again, i started to walk back on the way i have walked in. There was all the sport fields, full with students. As i have trespassed, i have walked through a basketball match. Which just got over. As i walked by, they tossed the ball at me, which i catched by reflex, then i threw it away by reflex. It went right into the basket. The viewers started clapping. Then all the light and camera was directed at me. The loudspeaker told the following: and with this score, the whatever-boy team won the match, and then the whole TV was showing me, holding the ball, like if i were part of the team.
I have quickly started to explain, that i am a grown man, i was just accidentally walked here, i am not a player in this team. They told me to stop trolling, obviously i am a schoolboy, as i look like one, and i saved the team with that score. With probably my first and last attempt to throw a basketball in my entire life. And i was just standing there, like: eeew shit, i will not come to this city ever again :D
How a game engine is made?
**This article will explain how a game engine can be made**. Mostly, it will explain this from retroperspective, and compare old game engines and modern game engines. This is not a tutorial. It will, for example, not explain how to render polygons with a random 3D accelerated API (i assume you can google a glvertex3f tutorial for yourself). It will losely discuss how a real game engine can be made, what parts a game engine has, and how these part work and interact. You dont have to know any programming skills to read this article, you can totally enjoy it as some sort of documentary movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_z8d1pt4NM
The last game engine i have created is Maker4D (its free for both personal and commercial use). I have made various game engines in the last 20 years. Some of them was not more than a callable function-set, some of them was genre-specific game engine with game editor. I made my first game engines for DOS when i was an elementary school kid, using BASIC. Later, i moved to Windows, later i have learned the C programming language and OpenGL, and in this decade, i have discontinued using OpenGL and switched to software 3D rendering. Some of these engines were available publicly, some were made for request, some were never released. http://maker4d.uw.hu/index.html
I will probably not develop game engines or 3D engines in the future (althrough i still maintain Maker4D), as i have discontinuing this business due to multiple factors. One of them is profitability (people dont buy game engine any more, and if they do, they use the popular game engines of this era). Another factor is personal (i dont enjoy gaming and 3D any more). I dont like the new generation of games nowdays, so i dont even have any kind of bond with them. Therefore, i am fine writing this article, as giving out secrets would not hurt my business at all.
(illustration: Chrono Cross)
**What a 3D engine is?**
The 3D engine is the core of a game engine. The 3D engine is a separate and independent code block. The 3D engine is a monolithic method, that allows you to display textured 3D polygons. The 3D engine also manages this content for you. For example, lets see you have a LoadModell function, that can accept an ID (integer number), and a file name. The LoadModell function loads the file from the disk (for example, it loads the obj file). Then it decodes it, and places the raw data into arrays. For example, you have an array for all of your models like float ** mymodellpolygons*.* Then the LoadModell function, when you load the potato.obj as ID 2, then it populates this as a malloc-ed memory block like mymodellpolygons[2]=(float*)malloc(numberofpolygons9*sizeof(float)). It stores the polygon number, the uv map as well. It also loads the textures, saves the texture bitmap similarly in memory, it also saves its X and Y size.
The 3D engine can also position this model in the scene, or rotate it. For example, you need to make functions like ModellLocation(ID, x,y,z). Modell rotation, modell rescale, modell color, etc, will have different functions, and modell deletion will also have its own function. You can see, that managing the 3D scene is a very simple task. A simplistic 3D engine can be made from a few 1000 lines. You will also need camera management (that will have x,y,z and rotation as well). Once everything is done, you will need a render function that displays all the 3D scene on your screen, going through every modell, and calling a 3D api (or your own software renderer) to display the content.
If you need animation, that will be much harder to implement, and also you must do input and output, which may vary bethwen operating systems (interacting with touchscreen, joystick, keyboard, etc). In my case, these parts are also part of the 3D engine, usually terrain generation and collision engine is also part of the 3D engine. Some people have an independent collision engine and physical engine, which i never separate from the 3D itself to keep the things more simple. The 3D engine may contains functions to dynamically generate content, such as, generating spheres, boxes, or even more complex geometric shapes. Particle engine can be also part of the 3D engine.
Basically, the 3D engine contains all the important functions in a monolithic manner to load, process, and render the 3D scene, and supply functions which allows interaction with the models and the raw data loaded in the engine.
**What a 2D engine is?**
The 2D engine is similar to the 3D engine, the difference is, that it will manage the sprites and texts. You will need functions to allow you to display text on the screen. You cant just use the operating system to draw texts above your 3D scene, so you have to do a renderer that can display fonts. The sprite engine can use the texture management from the 3D engine, you dont have to totally re-implement everything.
The 2D engine must be capable of displaying texts above sprites, so you can create buttons to make fashionable menus in the game. In some cases, you maybe want to write a 2D game. In that practicular case, you need a very complex 2D engine, and writing just the rendering for it is not enough. Like, if you want to create a Mario clone, you will need at least a 2D collision engine, and you must insert the conception of 2D objects and gravity into the 2D engine as well.
The minimum for a 2D engine is rendering ASCII texts, in some cases you will have to do utf8 or unicode capability as well. That will be a much complex task due to all the asian character sets, and you will need a font file which your engine can load. You may want to create 2D effects at the engine level, if you are making a complex 2D game. You may want a 2D particle engine as well.
**Sound engine**
Nowdays you dont need to have a real sound or music engine. You can just load your wav file, check the bitrate and sample rate, then shovel the pointer into the operating system. The operating system and the sound card drivers will be able to supply at least 4 stereo sound channels, at least from Windows XP and above.
**The game engine itself**
The parts discussed above are part of the game engine - WITHOUT beint part of the game engine. So whats going on? The game engine is not part of either your 2D and 3D engine. But your game engine will call your 2D engine and 3D engine. Lets see, you want to make a 3D snake game. The game you must create, will employ the 3D and 2D engine you wrote, and in that aspect, your 2D and 3D engine is part of your game engine. However, the actual game engine you will implement for this practicular purpose, is a code that generates the level for the snake from a 40x40 array. Then, it randomly tosses down apples, if your snake reaches the previous apple. Its a very short code, it will use only a small subset of the total code you wrote. This is a very simple situation, as you dont have to implement the GAME and the GAME ENGINE as a separate entity. In the case of snake, the game and the game engine is not separated together, its just a random code that calls your 3D engine.
**Complex game engine**
Lets say, you want to write more complex thing. For example, you want to do a fighter game, or an RPG. Now, the game engine will became a big mutant code. To make an RPG, you need a method to load the level (it can be just a txt file, it does not have to be some really fancy thing), process this level, put all the NPC-s, furnitures, etc in position. Manage if you teleport out from a map to a different map by deleting all the old contents and loading the new contents. Manage the battle system, manage which items you have picked up, if an item is present, where you should have teleport if you touch random things, and so on. And the game itself will be written in forms of txt files (or in an editor, if you want to do an editor for it). The game engine loads these files, controls the ,,code flow'', and calls the 2D and 3D engine.
**Proper abstraction is the clue**
As you can see, the game is having multiple abstraction layers. So your game itself is only a few txt file where you describe a room. The game engine loads and interprets these short txt files. Then it calls the 3D engine to display everything. Usually, the most frequent beginner's mistake overabstraction or underabstraction. For example, sometimes incapable persons can be ovserved, who thinks that somehow writing a few for-cycles with glvertex3f is some unachieavable superquirk so he uses some glorified engine library which already overabstracts the whole problem. Sometimes, you can see people who implement even texture management in objectum oriented classes, where the container specification of the problem is multiple 1000 lines alone, because some random professor once told him thats the way to do. To finish everything in time and in good quality, the programmer must write a simple and efficient code, and he must learn how to write actual code that works.
**How long it takes?**
Depends on which are your goals, and how good programmer you are, and how much time you want to spend. If you are a good programmer, writing your 3D engine will take 2-4 weeks. Testing, and writing more complex effects (such as particle effects) will take maybe another month. The 2D engine will also take 2-4 weeks to implement everything fancy you need. These times apply if you spend maybe 1-2 every day. The research time is also included in this, but assuming you already know what a polygon and what a texture is.
**How much people needed?**
One person can made the 2D and 3D engine within 1-2 months, and maybe can make the whole game and game engine within another 1-2 months. If we talking about a small studio or from a small group of people, usually one person is assigned to do the 3D engine, one is assigned to do the game engine itself, and a few people is simultanously working on the game and on the content. You may have a person for social media and sales, and so on.
**Nowdays**
Back then, usually maximum 2 person were working on the coding. One was writing the 3D engine, and the another person was writing the game engine. Other people worked on the game itself, or worked on sales, marketing, website, hr, and so on. But games were developed in much smaller teams. Most of the teams usually had 2 or 3 person (3d engine + engine + the game itself). Games created by just one person from ground to top, was also very frequent.
This development model was used in the 80's America. Later on, this development model was used in East Europe and Britain in the 90s and 2000s, and almost every game made in East Europe still following this conception. If a group fails upon this conception, thats usually due to the inability to find competent programmers.
Nowdays, the things are changed on the West. People usually use some existing game engine, and downloading and writing plugins specifically designed for that game engine. Instead of writing one, people learning a popular game engine. Developers learn how to make plugins for that game engine, and everyone is using that.
This new method allows huge number of developers to work on the game, and allows very nice and modern visuals using modern technology. But at the same time, both developing the game needs strong hardware, and both playing it will require a strong and modern hardware. In the case of a game engine malfunction, its impossible to fix it, and the problem must be tackled with workarounds. These type of game engines usually using script languages and you cant use real programming languages (such as C) to control them. Games developed in this way are less unique, cannot be ported bethwen to some platforms, slow.
This development model is usually used in USA and West Europe, B and C class of games mass-manufactured for Steam and Apple store. If the group fails upon this conception, thats usually due to the incompetence (they think flying around with WASD is somehow a game, and they dont even understand that the actual development is still not yet done). This conception results in the biggest failure rate of never-finished products.
To fight this problem, some studios try to bring the two contepction together - they develop an engine, but it follows the modern conception, where the game engine itself will be put together from plugins using script languages. This method is usually used in Japan. Its usually succesfull, but the method combines both the advantages and disadvantages as well. Visually these games are nice, but not really modern, and also the machine requirements are big.
(photo: FTP japan office, illustration)
**Is it profitable?**
You must have the actual skills and you must actually produce the end result. But even after that, unless you are very very lucky, or you do it under the wings of a well and professionally established franchise, its hard to produce notable sales. If you would like to sell your game engine on the internet, its very hard. As discussed in the previous pharagraphs, people will rather jump on a recently hyped game engine just to burn theyself and never try to make a game again. We are not in the 2000's, people have much better hobbies and opportunities than making a game, so the number of people you can sell your engine, is not that much.
**Illustration: RPG popularity in google trends**
The number of gamers are also smaller. Gadgets with internet are very popular, but people usually use them for social media and not gaming. The era when gaming was used to kill the time, is slowly ending. Before investing time and resources in something, be sure there is a need for it, and you do a proper market research to know what you can expect.
Other information:
User documentation of Maker4D is available behind a paywall:
https://satoshiwall.cash/paywall/4a0782bb-1dda-11ea-b37f-0242ac130003
Ivan and the cancer
Ivan was a generic russian worker. He never really cared about anything. Even after the end of communism, he didnt switched life style. Concreting, relying on the spud, loudly whistling for good looking women if they walked by, was his daily routine. Screaming at trespassers if they seemed losers - but more silently in the past years, as unlike communism, nowdays, they might walk back with a machete in they hands, which Ivan could not handle. Pointless night with lots of alcohol drinking, where they can loudly and agressively discuss with other concrete laying managers, why they are the best people, and everyone else is shitty. Traders are shitty, capitalists are shitty, sciencists are shitty, doctors are shitty, engineers are shitty, artists are shitty, everything is shitty, except Ivan and his pals. Ivan had a lot of pals, but had no friends.
Decades were passing by, once Ivan felt pain, and felt himself very weak. He went to doctor, from inspection to inspection. Finally, he got the diagnose. Cancer, uncurable, no effective treatment. This was the first time Ivan realized his life is derailed. He started thinking to find out, what went wrong. He slowly found out: everything. His life was a lie. He was living the life of someone else. This was not him. Loudly grunting on everything and shoveling the shit in his whole life, eating crap food and drinking a lot of alcohol, not doing any research, refusing to learn anything, refusing to accept jesus in his heart, refusing to put time to sustain friendships, was the real reason he got cancer. His body and soul killed himself. Most of his friends were already dead.
Ivan had one last wish: travelling to the ocean, to swim in the icy water. Well, he had no money left, he was not able to work any more, and he used the money for the ineffective treatment to slow down the spread of the cancer in his body. He had no energy left as well. Transportation was too expensive, travelling by train wasnt an option. He used the last pennies to buy a relatively good bike with GPS from his neighbour for like $10, then he bought some food, conservated fish, took a bento box with rice and paste, took a few flackon of water, took his winter sleeping bag, his remaining money, and put everything in his backpack. He said farewell to his belowed ones.
He started biking in the cold autumn. The sea was 1000 kilometer away. Just after a kilometer, he felt like dying from thirst, so he had to drink a lot. He was weak, his body was very weak. He processed very slowly, a few 10 kilometers per day. It took him almost a month to arrive. He had to ride for the last few days without any food, althrough sometimes he found money, and then he used that to buy a hot-dog at a street shop. He felt extremely bad all the way. His only goal was to reach the ocean.
When he arrived in the ocean, he threw his cloths. It was winter, the beach already was icy. He pulled himself, to achieve the last meters of his final destination. He walked to the icy water. His body was on the verge of total desintegration. He swimmed for minutes in the cold water. Now, his dream came true, he was prepared to die. He went out to the shore, laid on the ground, closed his eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVmNpG7mAFA
And opened it. He was still alive. The pain was different compared to when he started. He went to a club room near the beach, dried himself, and dressed up. He told his story to a few tourists, who gave him some food. He had no other choice than cycle back to home. He refilled his flackons with water, and started biking to his home. 1000 kilometers again, in freezing cold. Biking home was just as terrible, as riding to the ocean. Due to the strong and freezing wind, he was barely able to process his path, so he needed another month to arrive home.
He was still alive. When he arrived home, he looked in the mirror. He looked very healthy. He lost most of his weight, his eyes was full of life. He was hungry, so he ate some, and went to the doctor again, who have sent him to inspection.
The cancer was gone. No tumors, no cancerous cells, his blood sample was showing he was totally healthy. He consulted to the doctors, to find out how he cured. Miracle? No. It turned out, due his two month long brutal bike tour, his body started to digest himself, to sustain its blood sugar levels. The cancer cells wasnt able to adapt to this new situation and slowly started to die. Later on, his immune system devoured all the cancer cells.
Ivan went to the ocean to die... and the old Ivan really died at that day. He was now a different person. Since then, the main hobby of Ivan is spirituality. He visits the sea twice a year using his bike.
What is the difference of a BTC and a BCH supporter?
BTC supporters are not evil people. Most of the early BTC adopters are clueless people with zero technical, social, economic knowledge.
The person who first introduced me into cryptocurrency, was an early adopter who mined bitcoin from 2013. When he tried to explain what bitcoin is, he not understood what mining does, how the btc is generated, how the transactions work, and so on. He was a geek, he understood what a gpu is, and how to setup the program to mine those coins.
But he still dont understand how the coins actually work from a technical perspective, and never did anything to earn the coins. Now, these type of people are the hardcore bitcoin supporters. I dont think they are anti-crypto, i dont think they are EVIL, they are not agents, they are not dumb, they just clueless.
**BTC is for the people who earned $5 when they sold the pictures of a nude 5 year old girl online on a pedo forum, and then they mined another $10 with they dying GPU. And when suddenly that $15 worth of coin started to worth $3000, they started to think that they are somehow the ultimate true voice of some upper mental energy and upper truth...**
They never invested anything into it, really... They dont understand the technology, they dont understand economy, they just what another zero on the end of the price. I dont even think they are necessary BAD people. They are just clueless people. They dont really understand what mining is. They dont understand what a block is. They dont understand what a transaction is, what SHA is, what an elliptic curve is. They dont understand nor care about how the currency can be used as a money, how the future of the coin can be shaped. They just want to get that one more extra zero before dumping out.
The difference bethwen BTC and other coins (such as Bitcoin Cash) that we actually CARE about our economy, our environment, we care about our business, for our future, just as much as we want our two extra zero at the price.
Therefore, if BTC wins in long term, that will be shame.
Britain: Socialism kills you
This story is used in economic courses in Hungary, as an easy example to show how socialism destroys and kills. The events explained here are inaccurate, ecsact locations, sources and ecsact dates are unknown to me - but they probably does not matter. An englishman probably could fix the inaccuracies in the story, if he is aware of the original events. The story explained below probably began about the late 1700's, and end in the early 1800.
**The begining**
A british tailor and an engineer invented a method to produce cheap cloths in a semi-industrialized way. As they were living in one of the most poor and underdeveloped regions, they had the cheap workforce to operate this business on low expenses, and make a great profit on it. The people in this british region were living on the edge of starvation. Basically there were lack of production of anything. No jobs, no local natural resources. Children usually died from malnutrition. The inventors were able to recruit a lot of these poor people, including a lot of people and children too. As the local population were unable to pay for these cloths, they exported it. The quality of the cloths (mostly suits) wasnt perfect, but it was exportable. As at that time, there was a general poverty in Britain, the people could not afford to buy it - especially not the workers - so they started to export the cloths to Hungary.
**The events speeding up**
Hungarian shops started to sell these cloths in large quantities, as they were cheaper, and somewhat better than the Hungarian cloths. They became popular, almost all of the hungarian shops started to buy a few cloths from this manufacturer. The company expanded to be able to satisfy these demands. They keeped the prices down, worked with a small but steady profit margin to ensure the hungarians will continue to buy these cloths. Within a few year, most people in the nearby towns worked for that company to manufacture the cloths, as the demand became so big.
**Economic acceleration**
The money they received from the Hungarian buyers were burned right away in Hungary. They bought food, gold, jewelry, shoes, agricultural devices, luxury items. They bought the items to Britain, where they sold it again. The workers, and the nearby population were accessed these goods. The starvation ended. This resulted the rapid rise of population, and the rise of life standards. People were able to buy proper food, shoes, agricultural devices, and even some luxury items. They homes started to look more modern, everyone had a job, better hygiene, education. People started to live more conscious lifes, they started to be actively take part of politics.
**THE FACTORY ALSO SHOULD PRODUCE CLOTHS TO THE WORKERS!!!**
British activists from other regions investigated the economic miracle. The owners of the corporation became extremely rich, they proudly explained the new stategy of operating on margial costs on a large volumen. At that time, this stategy were unusual, most company operated with small volumen and large profit. As this new idea flipped the strategy, resulted in rapid growth. These activists, however, pointed out one thing: this company produces these nice cloths, but why the corporation refuses to produce cloths for they own workers? The activists didnt realized how fragile the economy is, and how important is to sell every single piece of cloth in Hungary.
Rising tensions
The activists were able to convience most of the workers. As they had rising life standards, but were still unable to afford these cloths, they started demanding to allocate a part of the production for the workers. The leaders of the corporation refused, trying to explain how important is to sell every single cloth in Hungary. As the owners of the corporation became very rich, the workers accoused them of being just greedy. The workers started to organize protests, which started to became more violent.
**Socialism wins**
The owners sold the corporation. The new owners agreed to allocate a percentage of the cloths to be produced for the workers. The workers now finally were able to wear these cloths. As a percentage of the cloths were now allocated to the workers, the company wasnt able to ship them to Hungary. In Hungary, people got hit by a shortage of this type of cloths, so they started to import from alternative manufacturers, and they also started cloning these cloths on they own. Another side effect of the lower selling figures is that the salaries started to decrease. People started to protest again to rise the salaries. Of course, this wasnt possible. The workers started to protest again, and the protests started to became more violent. The previous activists appeared again, demanding from the ,,evil'' corporation to end ,,slavery'' and rise the salaries. To keep up the profitability of the corporation, the cloth prices had to be rise. The people had they previous salaries again, and they were happier than ever.
The collapse
The cloths became too expensive. Hungarian shops discontinued the orders for this manufacturer. They simply switched to other brands. The economic chain collapsed. The corporation bankrupted. The flow of Hungarian food, gold, jewelry, shoes, agricultural devices, luxury items ended. Just within a month, everything were gone from the market of the local british towns, including food. After the people ate they last slices of breads, picked up scythes. They invaded the building of the company, annoucing the overtake. They operated the manufacturing devices for a few days. They watched the cloths for a while, then they realized they could not eat those. The protest escalated into riots. Without export, the nearby farms were not able to sustain the larger population, people started to due from starvation. The protestors started to clash with the police, demanding the operation of the factory to be restored. Of course, the police wasnt able to find a new market, because they are police, not enterpretours. People attacked the police, and the police answered with massacre. The factory never re-opened. All the wealth were gone from the region. Population fell far below the original levels, and people were not able to eat properly for another decades. **At least the greedy bastards were gone, and socialism won.**
Gendercide in Tiszazug
Gendercide in Tiszazug (mass murder) was a semi-organized systematic genocide (gendercide) committed by women against men and boys. The events took place bethween the two world wars, first in south-middle Hungary, mainly in the area Tiszazug. The timespan of the events took about a decade. The starting point of the events was Nagyrév.
Later it escalated, and the events continued in Tiszakürt, Ókécske, Tiszaföldvár, Kunszentmárton, Mesterszállás, Öcsöd, then appeared on a national scale when similar events took place in east (Békés, Csongrád) and west Hungary (Zala), the last known occurence was in Ásotthalom.
In Nagyrév 160 men and boys were killed. 440 men and boys were killed on nearby towns, 30-60 case happened in Ásotthalom, unknown number in East and West Hungary. In total 500-1000 men were killed, and unknown number of newborn boys were killed and buried in secret.
(illustration)
**Foregoing**
Hungary lost ~70% of the territorries in the First World War. Population became 8 million. There were several attrocities and serial killings against Hungarians. Millions of hungarians forcefully relocated from neighbouring contries. There was ongoing civil war: Hungarian Soviet Republic, versus other militias, versus invading forces. At a point the whole world was in war against Hungary. A lot of hungarian men died in the World War, approximately 1 million. Instantly after that, forceful relocation from Serbia, Romania, Slovakia had took place. These people meant approximately half-1 million Hungarian without home or job, and no place to say. Some roamed around, some fled to the west (mostly men). People became very poor, morals decresed.
People returning from the war were weak, injured. Large portion of them became disabled, lost a limb, they had untreated psichological problems, post-traumatic stress. Gender ratio became significantly inbalanced. The civil war claimed also some more lives. Men were in a very vulnerable condition. Even when men survived and they have returned, they had no social networks to re-connect in.
**Rising tensions**
Rural Hungary had an economic system similar to libertarian capitalism. In most contries on the world, women were housewifes and men were workers, but this gender role separation never happened in rural Hungary. Every person had they own business, but after men were drafted to fight in the World War, women had to continue all the business. Later, men took or attempted to took back they business and control. If a man survived the war, and returned, the economic contrary created a lot of tensions: Whose cow is that? How many pigs you had before leaving? Who owns how many pigs then? Who owns that piece of land? But who planted the potato in? Whose tools are used to process it? How to share the profit? As men were in minority, and they lacked social network, they were in a generally bad condition, the tensions slowly formed an atmosphere of the rising hatered against men in general. In feedback, this alienated men from the local society even more. The tensions were also fueled by the newly born international feminist ideology, even if it has no relevant demands for the hungarian society.
**First targeted murders**
Before 1945 in Hungary, almost all of rural doctors / obstetricians (bába), rural healthcare workers were woman (source https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A1bas%C3%A1g). The local bába was Oláh Zsuzsána (Fazekas Gyuláné) (source http://epa.oszk.hu/00400/00414/00020/pdf/226-246.pdf) who also praticed as doctor in the town. Earlyer, she discovered an arsenic based poison by accident. She succesfully tested it on her chickens and on her cat. She carefully studied the poison, accumulated more, and conservated it. She was sentenced for doing illegal abortions, but released. Once she arrived to an older patitent who had some disease for a long time. After consulting with the family, they decided to kill the person to end the suffering. She prepared the poison and put in the drink of the patient. The poison worked, and he died by next morning. After the succesfull test, a nearby women asked them to kill her husband, who was blinded in the war, so they didnt had much use of him. The poisoning succeeded again. (source http://www.epa.hu/00000/00022/00483/14921.htm) Her first victim, however, was probably her own husband, who were already missing at that point.
**Mass murder beings with the active or passive support of women**
After the two succesfull poisoning, The two success story went viral in the female community. A woman called Szabó and several other woman made a pact with Zsuzsána to resell the poison. They started advertising the poison in the town for other women, who started to use in larger numbers. At first, they started using it to end the lifes of the old men who were barely able to support theyselves. Then they started using it on the victims of the war, who had missing limbs. Poisoning men started to became normal. Zsuzsána and the other women started to sell the poison for the women living in nearby villages, they also started to use it for similar purposes. The number of Zsuzsána's customers grew, the poison had an almost 100% success rate. (source https://index.hu/tudomany/tortenelem/2015/01/23/tiszazugi_arzenes_gyilkossagok/ )
**When it is okay to kill a schoolboy?**
Zsuzsána, Szabó and they friends changed the strategy to sell the poison, and they did a professional propaganda. If they knew a woman who had troubles with a man, they offered her the poison. They started to openly advertise theyself, and women bought the poison in large quantities. At this point, they began to use it on husbands if they cheated them. Then on the husbands, who hurt them. Then they have started to kill the husbands if they had financial debates with him, then they started using the poison on husbands if they got bored of him. Basically, the moral treshold of using the poison continously decreased as there were fewer and fewer men left. Eventually, young women started buying the poison if they got pressured to marry - they simply killed the fiancé. As the number of men were decreasing, parents desperately tried to find new husbands, who were again, poisoned. In Ásotthalom, a female serial killer of a different group called Fődi Viktória was inspired by the new ages. Fődi Viktória was unlucky in her sexual life, she didnt enjoyed sex, and after her husband died, she decided to not marry again. She had a male nickname Pipás Pista. Due to the manly body she got, she was bullied by the local girls. She had a large and muscular body, so later she decided to get a job as a village worker, and worked on farms, where she got even more strong. Once when she was buying her food on a market, she made a deal with a local woman who had a husband who she had a debate with over the ownership of horses. She asked her to kill the husband. She used ropes and choked the man to death. They disguised the murder as suicide. (source https://index.hu/tudomany/tortenelem/2015/02/12/pipas_pista_bergyilkos_noi_sorozatgyilkos/)
**Secret murders end, cathartical genocide begins**
Fődi Viktória got more and more requests, local women joined to her to help carrying out the murders. First they murdered the disabled and old men, and then those, who were unable to inpregnate women (source https://szegedma.hu/2013/01/szenzacio-helyett-korrajz-a-pipas-tortenet-valodi-tanulsagai). Then they started killing the family members they disliked, and finally neighboring men. When they killed a man, the womanhood from the neighbourhood lured him into the stable, telling him that something is going on with the horses. They hide in the stable, and when the man entered to the stable, he were choked and hanged. Viktória became a lesbian and moving in to one of the murders house. After events escalated into a general extermination, parallelly with this, Zsuzsána and her friends started advertising an one-children policy, with the systematic murder of all boys. (source http://epa.oszk.hu/00400/00414/00020/pdf/226-246.pdf) Her cousin joined to them, who was working as the administrator of the villages, she was able to alter all the official documents. As the group had the whole social system in they hand, the government were unable to detect the events. Boys of Ásotthalom and other nearby towns were not allowed to leave the homes for a while. In rural hungary, toilets were on the backyard, so they needed guards while they using the toilets (source https://index.hu/tudomany/tortenelem/2015/02/12/pipas_pista_bergyilkos_noi_sorozatgyilkos).
**The endgame**
The genocide started to enter more villages and regions. Women started to openly advise and glorify the murders, openly and loudly competing with each other how many men they killed. (source https://index.hu/tudomany/tortenelem/2015/02/12/pipas_pista_bergyilkos_noi_sorozatgyilkos/) A hungarian university detected unusually high rates of arzenic in some remains. The government office also started to detect that something is wrong, they started probing some remains in Tiszazug. Sometimes the flaunts were listened by people who were working for the legitimate social service or police, slow but eronomous operation began. Armed services cracked down on the suspects. Zsuzsána commited suicide. The leaders, about 20 women were arrested. All were found guilty, two was executed, others got life prison. Viktória was sentenced to death, but it was not carried out, she was died in her cell. On the law of last words, some of them glorified the annihilation of men.
**Aftermath and victim blaming**
Due to the cataclysmic events of the Second World War, the memories were washed away, and most of the killers were never persecuted. Surviving men of Nagyrév were living in fear for decades. (source http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3567679.stm) The town later lost its significance, its degraded to a village with a few hundred habitants. Some westerner writers started glorifying the events without understanding them as they try to view them from the perspective of they culture. They blaming the victims (men), degrading the events to some romanthic vengeance. The events could not took place without the active and passive support of women. Ásotthalom is currently controlled by a feminist neo-nazi party called Mi Hazánk Mozgalom, which proposes the castration of men under certain circumstances (source https://24.hu/belfold/2018/09/10/toroczkai-laszlo-kasztralas-migransbunozo-mi-hazank-mozgalom). The would reintroduce draft for men-only (source https://tenyek.hu/tenyek/266771_a-katonasag-mellett-kardoskodnak---interju-novak-eloddel.html). The main mascot of the party is one of the female serial killers who participated in the events, they even named a chips from her (source https://index.hu/gazdasag/2018/11/27/csipsz_van_gyar_nincs_asotthalmon). Viktória is glorified as the cult of Pipás Pista, and she even received a statue https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A1jl:180731_Pip%C3%A1s_Pista_szobra_a_Bory-v%C3%A1rban.jpg .
**Victims never even received a memorial.**
My best computer repair stories
I collected a few stories, these are actually happened to me. I dont remember every funny thing that ever happened to me, but i wrote down them to a document, and now enough is accumulated to share all of the stories.
**The poor (few years ago):**
(client) I have bought a computer. Its hard to read the screen.
*video output is garbled, no agp or pci-e slot*
(me) The integrated graphics on the motherboard is dead. I will put a PCI FX5200 in. It will be $40.
(client) Whaa… $40!?!? They told me its a fine computer!
(me) If its fine, then why you are calling me to fix it?
(client) But…. i'm poor.
(me) Thats why i offered the $40 model and not the $100 one.
**The stubborn (few years ago):**
(client) Hey, please install an antivirus on my computer.
(me) No. I dont recommend it. Antivirus programs are useless. They only can protect you from 5 year old viruses, and they will slow down your computer.
(client) Please please install it aniway! (showels $5 into my pocket)
(me) Ok. Everything for the costumers! (installs freeAVG)
ONE WEEK LATER
(client) Hey, my computer became too slow.
*investigates, its really slow*
(me) Its due to the antivirus program. I told it will slow it down.
(client) Please install a different one. My friend recommended AVAST. Please install AVAST.
(me) Avast will be just as slow and useless.
(client) PLEASE PLEASE INSTALL IT ANIWAY, I HAVE SEEN IT AT MY FRIEND AND IT WAS FINE (showels the usual $5 into my pocket)
(me) Okay.
ONE WEEK LATER
(client) Hey, please remove the antivirus, the computer is too slow.
(me) Ok, it will be the usual price.
**The trader (early 2000's):**
(client) What is that configuration?
(me) Pentium1, 32 mbyte EDO RAM, 500 mbyte HDD, integrated video.
(client) For how much you sell it?
(me) $20
(client) Too much. I give $10.
(me) Ok. However: for that price i will remove half of the RAM and the ISA riser.
(client) Hmmm okay, deal.
ONE WEEK LATER
(client) I want to buy that another 16 mbyte RAM.
(me) I have already sold all of my EDO rams.
(client) Oh.. ok.. where can i buy EDO ram then?
(me) Nowhere, they stopped manufacturing it in 1995.
(client) ?!?!?!?!?!
(me) !?!?!?!?!?
**The professional wrestler (1999):**
(client) Something is not okay with my computer, please come over and check it.
*comes over*
(me) You have bought a non-MMX capable Pentium1, and thats why that program does not starts up.
(client) So we did a bad business then.
*clients dad suddenly appears, and starts talk to me*
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, WHY YOU CREATE THE DRAMA HERE, THIS IS A TOTALLY FINE COMPUTER.
(me) You are right.
GO THE FUCK OUT.
(me) I'm sorry.
*clients dad forces me out from the house and locks the door*
ONE WEEK LATER
(client) Now the computer is totally dead, please come over and fix it.
(me) No.
(client) *sobs in the phone, desperately tries to keep in contact with me for years after, just to scam me one more time*
**The technology expert (2018)**
(client) I have bought a laptop for $40. It have some small issues. Please, check it.
**Battery dead**
(me) I must order a new batery and it costs $100.
(client) BUT THIS WAS A $50 LAPTOP.
(me) Then enjoy your $150 Pentium 4 laptop.
(client) Pentium 4? That means it has 4 cores?
(me) No, 4 means it can run youtube with 4 frame per second.
**The reasonable (2012)**
(client) Computer does not starts.
*hdd is dead, gbytes of bad sectors, luckily all in system partition area, and the data is fine*
(me) Do you have a spare hdd to save your data?
(client) No.
(me) Do you have money to buy one?
(client) No, but i will buy a pendrive next week.
(me) Ok, i setup everything, but this hdd will not stay operational for more than a few weeks. Only use the computer to do the backup with it.
(client) Ok.
(me) And immediately buy the pendrive next week, and copy all of your important data.
(client) Ok.
TWO MONTHS (!!!!) LATER
(client) My HDD damaged yesterday (!!!) again.
(me) AGAIN?!? Did you copyed your files to a pendrive like i told you two months ago?
(client) No. I used the computer for two months, it was fine.
(me) ?!?!?!
(client) But i still need my data. Please backup.
(me) *Hdd does not spins up. Searches a data recovery company* Ok, i cant do it, but here is a data recovery company, the recovery price will be probably around $1500.
(client) ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!??!
**The valuable content (2019)**
(client) I am a PROFESSIONAL graphics artist. I do professional graphics artwork for living. I had contracts, documents, 3D models on my computer as well. A virus attacked my computer.
*A ransomware virus encrypted all the data*
(me) A virus encrypted your data. I can recover the files by quickly writing a small program with an AI designed for YOUR files. It will replace the first 512 byte headers and restore the accessibility of your files.
(client) Thats fantastic! Thankyou! I really badly need my files! Its my life! My costumers need the designs by next month!
(me) Ok. It will cost $200 and it will take 2-3 days.
(client) Uhh… Uh… UUUUUhhhh… Then i dont need my files.
(me) ?!?!?!?!
(client) I will re-create them instead… Thankyou aniway.
(me) ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
**The vintage collector (2017)**
(me) 3dfx Voodoo5 PCI for sale, $250
(client) I would like to buy the Voodoo5 PCI for $15.
(me) Are you kidding me?
(client) But i would like to buy it for $15.
(me) Good bye.
*a month later*
(client) I see, you still have the Voodoo5 PCI. My offer is now $20.
(me) It still costs $250.
(client) You will not be able to sell it lol. I am your only chance.
(me) Good bye.
*another month later*
(client) My final offer for the Voodoo5 PCI is $30.
(me) I have sold it weeks ago.
(client) *shocked* but.. but…
(me) Good bye.
Collective computer psychosis
I was wondering for a while, what title should i give to this article. The phenomon i want to explain here, is the one when some cringy tech-autist people start to badmouth a practicular product or brand. Then this malformed oppinion becoming mainstream, and hurts the company severly - sometimes, it even bankrupts them. This happened to several company in the past, i'm going to list a few examples here. All of the examples are from the IT industry.
Pentium4 CPU
When the Pentium3 CPU was released, it was the fastest CPU generation. Its stripped down version, the Celeron, was also popular. With this two CPU line, Intel took the lead in speed. However, as a response to this, AMD released the Athlon (k7) line. It quickly turned out that the Athlon outperforms the Pentium3 - not just on the same clock speeds, but the Athlon was able to reach bigger clock speeds. The AMD won the race for the 1 GHz CPU, and Intel desperately tryed to catch up in performance. They designed the new Pentium4 CPU (released in 2000), which was designed to allow much bigger clock speeds. When the Pentium4 CPU was finally released, both the Athlon and the Pentium3 was around the 1.4 GHz mark.
Pentium4, Pentium3, and the Athlon CPU (Image: Techreport)
The Pentium4 CPU required a new motherboard socket. The early Pentium4 motherboards used a proprietary RAM standard from Rambus, but later on they have swtiched to regular SD RAM-s. The performance of the new Pentium4 was slower than the Pentium3 on the same clock speeds, althrough the speed difference is usually less than 10% (and under some circumistances, the Pentium4 is the faster). Intel was able to scale Pentium4 quickly up to 2.2 GHz, even able to release models for laptops at this speed. AMD released the AthlonXP generation, which was also able to spin the Athlon generations clock speed to about 2 GHz. Despite the fact that Intel had the laptop version available at 2.2 GHz, AMD fanboys succesfully shared hysteria about the Pentium4 line. The original point of the fanboys were: Pentium4 is slower on the same clock speed as the Pentium3, THEREFORE, Intel has to run the CPU on horridly large clock speeds to catch up in performance with AMD. And this large clock speed would result in a very large power consumption and heat dissipation. The AMD propaganda was succesfull, and the Intel Pentium4 became a laughing stock all over the forums.
When nobody really care to check after the numbers
When carefully investigating the Pentium4 based computer's power consumption at 2.2 GHz, we can see that it is actually LOWER than a 2 GHz AMD-s power consumption. The Pentium4 also dissipating less heat than the AMD counterpart. It was possible to construct a Pentium4 based machine around 80w power consumption, but the AMD K7 counterparts ate more than 110 Watts usually, even in idle (offering the same performance). When this fact resulted zero Laptop brands using the AMD Athlon in laptops, the fanboys accoused Intel for illegal market activities, and AMD sued intel for violating antitrust laws. At this point, the Pentium4 CPU was able to scale beyond 3 GHz, in reality, offering 30-70% bigger performance than any AMD chip. Due to the hysteria, a lot of people who was trusting the AMD shills in forums, were actually buying the AMD CPU-s, despite that the Intel Pentium4 was a superior product in every way - until AMD released the Athlon64 in 2003 christmas and leaped forward again.
AMD FX 8350
AMD got the thing back from Intel, when they released the FX 8350 in 2011 october. The previous AMD generattion, the Athlon2/Phenom2 family line competed well against Core2Quad and Core2Duo, but became obsolete when the second generation of Intel I7 was released. AMD annouced the desktop AMD FX line, the CPU family employed 2 to 8 cores, the flagship was the FX 8150 which was quickly replaced by the 8350 model. The 8350 became the flagship CPU of AMD, running at 4 GHz and having 8 cores. The CPU was planned to beat the new generation of i7 CPU-s, but the speed was usually lower. The new CPU family was not just slower than the i7, but on the same clock speed, it was also 10-20% slower than the previous Phenom2 line. This caused large forum trolling against the CPU family on forums, by Intel fanboys. Basically, they repayed the debt of the Pentium4 era - despite the FX 8350 was running at 4 GHz, was very cheap (only $195 at introducion) and was in pair with even some of the more expensive Intel i7 CPU-s, became known as a pathetically weak CPU.
Actually, the FX was a very good desktop CPU family, cheap and fast, the CPU's even can be overclocked with usually more than an extra GHz. But according to forum trolls, AMD was an expensive, slow, and lame CPU, and later AMD had to phase out the product line, and rebrand the CPU's as A8 and A10 in a new socket called FM2 and FM2+.
The fiasco significantly hurt the sales of AMD, the low sales crippled the development for a few years. FM2 based products wasnt really great, especially when they had to compete against the upcoming Intel i7 family, almost causing AMD's market share to fell to zero.
Cyrix 6x86MX
Cyrix was a processor company in the 90s, they was well known for creating fast CPU-s for older motherboards with obsolete sockets. One of they first bigger idea was to release a fast, 486 compatible CPU for the 386 motherboard (pin compatible with the 386SX cpu, but actually implementing 486 instruction set on a larger clock speed). The CPU that really made the company popular, was the Cyrix 5x86, which was a fast Pentium-like CPU for the socket of 486 (Socket3) and was able to run at 100 to 133 MHz, essencially blowing new life to the very old computers. The CPU gave very good performance both under DOS and Windows 95, and a lot of gamers started using it.
The sequel was the Cyrix 6x86 CPU, which was released to the Socket5/7 platform, to compete against the Pentium and the AMD K5 CPU. The 6x86 CPU had a good performance, it was running at 120-150 MHz. It was much faster than the first generation Pentium1, and was just 10% slower than the second generation Pentium MMX CPU, meanwhile the price of the Cyrix CPU-s were just the half of the Pentium MMX. The CPU was succesful, however, shortly after the release, cringy gamers created a negative narrative for the CPU. The newly released game, Quake wasnt running very well on Cyrix. Actually, it wasnt running very well on anything, on a 100 MHz Pentium1 it was running on around 9 fps in 640x480, and was running with about 7 on the first generation of Cyrix 6x86. Which is both unplayable, therefore, ID software later released the GLQuake for Windows, which used OpenGL to employ the graphics card drivers to render the game, allowing playable frame rates on both CPU. However, the cringy autistic gamers of this era, went nuts on the Cyrix 6x86 for being slow in the obsolete version of Quake for years.
When Cyrix released the 6x86MX, which supports new, Pentium2-equivalent instruction set, 200 MHz clock speed, and a bigger integrated L1 cache memory, they have essentially created a chip thats about 2x faster than the previous 6x86. Instead of making a great business in the budget gaming and office sector, they had to deal with derping cyberwarriors about the performance in the DOS version of Quake (which had zero players for ages). These cringy gamers memed Cyrix for creating unrealible CPU-s (which was false). Imagine the modern-day equivalent of this: a bounch of angry minecraft-autists would create millions of posts in every month to badmouth a random phone manufacturer because Minecraft runs 20% slower than on another random phone manufacturer.
The bad impression hold back Cyrix sales in significant quantities. Cyrix was a small american company, only earning a few million dollars, and the result of the fake propaganda, Cyrix slowly lost the money to pay its engineers. The company bankrupted, and ended up being bought for its patents and contracts. Despite of being a small company and only selling a few millions of chips per year, the indirect consequences of the bankrupcy for the american economy could be probably measured in hundreds of billions of usa dollars, as these engineers ended up working in China.
@Geri
