addie

joined 1 year ago
[–] addie@feddit.uk 16 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Really? If it's a big enough treatment works to warrant a SCADA, then I doubt an automation engineer with the experience to set it all up would be asking this question, but here goes. You've a couple of obstacles:

  • every contract I've ever seen for industrial automation has either specified which control plane they want directly, or they'll have a list of approved suppliers which you must use. Someone after you will have to maintain this. Those maintainers will only accept the things that they have been trained on. Those things are Windows PCs running Windows software. They will reject anything else. The people running network security on those machines will have a very short list of the acceptable operating systems for running SCADA systems. That list will be a couple of versions of Windows Server. They will also reject anything else.

  • that's not nearly enough information to make a recommendation. Which PLCs? Allen Bradley, Siemens, Mitsubishi, ...? I can't think of a job I've ever been on where the local HMI hasn't matched the PLCs. The SCADA software almost invariably matches the PLCs used in the main motor control centre, with perhaps a couple of oddball PLCs for proprietary panels and such like. Could maybe ask the supplier if they've a Linux alternative? Siemens will laugh at you and Mitsi won't understand the question, but AB just might.

Sorry - I'm a Linux evangelist, but I don't think it's a good fit for here. SCADA performance generally isn't bad due to Windows Server - it's fine, does what it's intended to - but because eg. STEP 7 is an appallingly slow and bloated piece of software which would bring a mainframe to its knees. Which is bizarre - the over-the-wire protocol connecting the machines is generally a short binary blob described in the PLC configuration - these bits are the drive statuses, these bits are an int or a float for an instrument readout - and it shouldn't be at all slow updating it all, but slow it is.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 3 points 9 months ago

They didn't pull DMC2 just out of principle? Foolishness, Dante, foolishness.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah; I've a 6700XT, and it appears to be a pretty even match for a 7600XT, looking at Phoronix' graphs. Makes a pretty good job of 60 Hz / 1440p on recent games, maybe turn down a setting or two, and can usually do 144Hz / 1440p on games that are a few years old. If you can get one of those for substantially cheaper than one of these, I'd say go for it.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 2 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Nah, it's repeating the installation process until you finally get enough stuff working to have internet, and then you can bootstrap installing every other bit of software that you need. Thank goodness for rolling release - I can't imagine having to go through that again.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 19 points 10 months ago

There are, but it's complicated. Doom (2016) for instance - it doesn't handle the very large Vulkan swap chain that's possible on some modern graphics cards, crashes on start-up. Someone patched Proton around that time so that Doom would start; the patch was later reverted since it broke other games. Other games based off of that engine - couple of Wolfensteins, Doom Eternal - have the problem fixed in the binaries, and so run on up-to-date Proton, but depending on your hardware, only a few specific, old, versions of Proton, will do for Doom.

Regressions get fixed - that's okay. Buggy behaviour which depended on regressions that got fixed - that's a problem.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 71 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they've just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There's a couple of games that qualify as 'direct sequels' (Ocarina -> Majora's, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn't benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as 'fanon' anyway.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 3 points 11 months ago

Since all the games of that era now have laughably out-of-date tech, the fact that Daikatana did at the time doesn't stand out so much. Played through it again a couple of years ago; it's more janky-but-interesting than the disaster that you'd believe from its reputation - has some good bits in amongst the mostly-okay.

The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana, which is a top-down JRPG instead? That is genuinely a good fun game. Think JR has it for free download on his home page? Easy to get, anyway.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 1 points 11 months ago

Spot on advice. I'd observe that media files tend to be quite large, and if all that the disk has been used for has been copying these files onto it, then they're likely to be both relatively defragmented and at the start of the disk, so the reduction in partition size isn't going to be as slow as it usually is. (Which is very slow.)

Since media files are relatively infrequently read, I'd probably want to use a filesystem that checks against bit rot instead of ext4 - make sure that they've not become corrupt when you want to use them. But that's Linux holy war territory, so I'll leave it alone.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 13 points 11 months ago

Humble guy, but that list of features that they're working on is really impressive. Got a wee DragonFly Black USB audio thing that just never worked quite right with PulseAudio - install PipeWire instead, and it just does all its tricks. Great work team, keep it up.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's a fair comment. But on the other hand, if you are spending a fortune on a CPU the size of your hand (look at that thing in the article!) then there's a good chance you're using it for business purposes, and either you or your IT department will be very keen to have a completely vender-supported stack. Enthusiasts with fresh OS installs will not be representative of users of this tech - AMD haven't really been targetting it at gamer desktops.

Of course, comparing both would be even better, see whether it is an HP crapware issue...

[–] addie@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fine advice generally, but I don't know that many Panams or Reginas...

[–] addie@feddit.uk 58 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Well now. A few things, here:

  • there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × .... possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there's at most 9 × 8 × 7 × ... = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.

  • we don't care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there's (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don't need to store 'the computer's move', just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let's guess we need at most a quarter of that.

  • we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn't have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the 'lay it out with tables' style we had at the time.

Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing 'new' things, though, so it's in their interest to pass it off?

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