revelator

i think the legs on the panslim are there to ensure airflow since the fans are mounted vertically, but maybe shortening or replacing them with some less obtrusive ones might do the trick. yeah the jonsbo cases are a bit overpriced for a nas cabinet. the N5 is also way bigger than the steam machine since it is full ATX, the N2 is pretty small though ITX but it seems pretty cluttered when hardware is added. Was mostly to show of some options that while not 100% the same form factor still might interrest people. tbh it might be a bit hard to make something as compact without specially crafted coolers gfx card risers and a well thought out fan assembly. but with some elbow grease you can come pretty close.

https://raijintek.com/pan-slim/ very compact. or this hehe https://mycherrytree.com/products/star-trek-picard-borg-cube-atx resistance is futile! jonsbo also has a nice one if it needs to be squared https://www.caseking.de/en/jonsbo-n5-nas-case-e-atx-black/GEJB-157.html this one is full e-atx though so probably to big for most but nice design. the silverstone cabby is the smallest (of the cubes) but if you just want a cube themed one there are plenty of nice ones out there . the bigger size is not allways a letdown either since the jonsbo has space for 16 ssd's you could make one with a rather hefty gaming library hehe. it also takes a 340mm gfx card which means you could actually pop in a radeon 9070 xt. a "scream machine" perhaps if you absoluteley need it smaller then jonsbo also has the N2.

not a cube but a classy cabby for steamos -> https://raijintek.com/thetis-classic/ also a model with a glass panel if you absolutely need to get a sleep disorder from all the lighting inside . this is one of the last producers who still make alu cases and they are top notch. rajintek also delivers a pretty brutal GPU cooler which can be used on multiple cards. the cabby despite being pretty compact has enough space to fit a pretty beefy gfx card (320 mm). it also comes with space for a 240 aio cooler which they also produce several models of. this model uses standard ATX format, if you want something even more compact they also have this version for itx -> https://raijintek.com/metis-plus/ or https://raijintek.com/styx/ for micro ATX

well atleast the idtech 3 engine was used for many great games but yeah a single player story would have been nice. hmm dunno about the gameplay being better but it was definatly more open world in Q2 where as Q1 mostly ran like a corridor shooter. The nehahra mod sorta put a plug in that by having some huge outdooor maps atleast opposed to what we were used to most of the time. in retrospect Q1 got popular because of its modding community not so much for its campaign. Q2 also had a somewhat large modding community but by no means as large as that of Q1. around Q3 it started going downhill in the modding community, there was still a few around who worked on it but it was mostly on the engine code, and only a few games or mods were made by the community. if i had to guess i would say Q1 got popular by modders because it was easy to work with and did not require a large team to make a game with (you could pretty much do it by yourself). atleast idtech 4 has had a good number of mods but as far as i know the dark mod is the only total conversion project and i guess you guys know better than anyone how much work had to be done before it got to this point

hehe yeah i did play it to the end but it newer really appealed that much to me. Q1 was my goto back in those days but probably mostly because i played deathmatches with my friends . Q2 is not horrible but the replay value was obviously not for me. i did play some mods created by the community for a good while on it.

guess you newer played nehahra it sorta delves into the lore off Q1 but with a humerous twist. originally developed by mindcrime lord havoc (or lady havoc as it turned out ) and a few others from the old quake community. theres even a live demo that plays as a video as a prelude to the game (warning it is very long). it is not 100% cannon but close enough . it can be a bit nasty to get the demo based story running on modern ports. the original nehquake.exe used a lot of hacks to allow playing demo captures as videos. the game itself does run ok with darkplaces just dont turn on realtime ligthing as it fucks up the game because of missing support files for it. Q2 lore was... well a bit out there. idtech was most famous for its engines not exactly for game lore.

huh i.c.h.i's post just dissapeared wtf ?.

damn newer played that much Q2 but the railgun was allways my favorite quake weapon. seems they tried to get the game to appeal to a bigger audience which while understandable just does not fit with it.

depends a bit on the distro, some can indeed seem very brittle if you are not an expert on unix based systems. i mainly use systemd based distros these days because i find them to be very stable and also a tad easier to work with. but depending on hardware windows can be just as brittle and in some cases even more so. over my many years i have seen pretty much all that can blow up your OS ranging from incompatibilities between certain hardware components to downright oddness which turned out to be a totally unrelated program crashing a driver over and over. some of it can be downright impossible to fix at first but then replacing a hardware component magically fixes things, or some program you might have installed for monitoring events messes up some driver related stuff by hooking the same adress in memory. i got pretty good over the years guessing what to look at and in time most people do but it can be rather annoying for new users who just want to use they're system. but in the end as long as we have computers built by multiple companies or private users with wildly differing hardware which might not allways work to well together, then we are sorta stuck with these things popping up from time to time.

interesting search engine a bit like in the olden days. btw if you want to add it to firefox search engines you can do it with this url "https://wiby.me?q=%s" normally it is "https://wiby.me/search?q=%s" but the page does not understand this syntax.

agh i just tried running the original bioshock on the nuveau driver with my 560 ti i get 1 fps in XP i get 167 fps. so i bit the bullet and popped in my old radeon x1900 and it runs bioshock at 57 fps on noveau and a bit more in XP. nvidia's driver model for linux in the old days was pretty horrid .(run files) and the drivers were newer updated for newer kernel models so even recompiling them will not work as much of the internal code is no longer supported so it just fails. so if you use an older nvidia card stay the hell away or braze for a lot of code fixing. amd on the other hand has been pretty supportive of the linux kernel models and uses a much better practice of driver installs by using the built in package managers. the radeon x1900 is a very very old card which only supports dx 9 and it works out of the box on the latest linux versions. nvidia has changed the driver models on more modern cards to be more in line with the amd model but older cards have newer had drivers updated to run on these kernels so its a clusterfuck to get older cards running on current versions. so if looking for a linux distro to use with pre pascal cards i would advise to use something like linux mint 19 which is one of the last to support these out of the box. but you might run into stability problems even so. also linux mint 19 is no longer supported so it wont recieve any updates, but you should still be able to get software that works on it.

hehe yeah linux memory management has allways been a complex beast mostly due to the kernel using memory mapping instead of simple malloc calls. my thought was allways that the mmap etc. functions were used to help alleviate the complexity to some degree it is still complex but atleast not as much as if you had to write the entire thing yourself. around gcc-4 / 5 they had to up the limits somewhat due to hitting constraints (the linux kernel used a pretty diminutive kernel stack) and it has grown worse since then with more complex programs and the advent of 64 bit. you can see some of the problems they encountered over time with blender which constantly brushed against the memory constraints. in retrospect this might also explain why so many of the devs who wanted new flashier features wanted to ditch 32 bit. there was a huge resistance to using things like LAA or PAE to get around the constraints because it added to some allready pretty complex code. linux devs being hobbyist by nature did not want to spend time developing workarounds for what was percieved as a natural limit of an architecture.

Last great winter here was in 1979 were denmark got hit by -30 " and wild snowstorms that literally covered most of where i lived at the time in several meter thick layers of snow and ice. It got known as the winter war and you could literally walk from denmark to germany via the gedser / rødby route. Thats about 45 km's of ice from rødby where i live now to puttgarden in germany (longer from gedser). I still have pictures from it where me and my sister is standing 15 km's from denmark on what used to be open water at the time. It was one of the last times we had to use icebreakers for our boats and even they had trouble breaking it cause the ice was so damn thick. We still had sorta normal winters up to about 2007 but after 2010 the snow we usually got in winter times turned into rain or at best mush. We do still get snow from time to time but far less frequent and a good deal shorter than back then and it usually newer hits -10 or lower which was still pretty common back in the 80's. Instead a hard winter is now -5. So a rather extreme variance from -30 in winter times which albeit uncommon (-20 was not) to -5 or even positive temperatures (before the 80's that newer happened).

They did exist but were far less common than they are today . Winters could be pretty brutal though and many died from pneumonia or vira. Global heat only started rising massively after the 1980's.

High ceiling houses were popular here also about a century ago though not for weather related reasons. Families back then were big! With upwards of 10 or more members who usually lived together. Not so much because they were that intimate but out of nessecity since most back then were pretty poor. These houses were not exactly hot in the summertime and damn cold in winter (not unusual that the walls inside were covered in ice). Insulation back then was not a thing this only started appearing around 1950 when our workers got better deals even so in 1988 many of these old houses from back then still existed in more or less the same state as of a 100 or more years ago. In the meantime we allready built new housing better geared for our at that time cold winters (yeah nobody really wondered about what was in stock for us a few decades on). So we got houses with big panorama windows and heavy insulation and double layer windows with only a minimum of circulation of air from the outside. In retrospect this was a mistake and our ancient clay lined and straw covered houses with small windows turned out to be better for the extreme conditions we have now.

same here. sadly most of our houses are from a time with much colder weather and are not built for the extremes we see now. in essence as biker points out they cannot get rid of excess heat easily. my own house usually ends up 10 " hotter inside than it is outside so without using my heat exchanger i end up with 47 " inside when it is 37 " outside and it takes a week for it to loose that excess heat so even when the temperature drops outside it stays toasty inside even if i leave all my windows / doors open.

on the note of climate change, europe just had one of the hottest presummers ever with temperatures ranging upwards of 47 degrees. in denmark we had 37 degrees which is higher than the highest ever measured temperature here which was in 1975 and hit 36.4 degrees. this is over a period of more than 2 centuries... so yah climate change is real and we know it. even though most european countries have invested heavily in green technology the worlds population has more than trippled since i was born which explains to some degree why we do not see temperatures dropping.

ok so i did what i said i would newer do again. i tried out different distros to see which could handle old hardware properly and i was sorely dissapointed. not one of them supported hardware acceleration on the nuveau driver on my old gtx 560 ti. and installing the nvidia driver turned into practically rebuilding the kernel because it was no longer compatible with the newer models sigh... so if you want yes it is still possible but it is by no means easy and people who dont know how to do kernel rebuilds dont stand a chance. the last cards officially supported by the new kernel models are AMD rx 5xx and nvidia gtx 9xx series. so i stand by my suggestion that it would be better to just use an old windows install. for my 560 ti it depends on whether you want dx 11 support in which case windows 7 is a nice to go (it does work in later windows versions as well). but if you just want to play old dx9 games then xp or even windows 2000 will do. there is a site that still offers the old patches and service packs for 2000/xp by redirecting the defunct windows update site to they're servers. i would discourage going online for anything but updates but if you do need a working browser for 2000/xp then mypal does work.

If they have they're way 1500 dollars "will" be the new price point. But prices are market bound to some degree so it also depends on consumer willingnes. It will probably flatten out at some point but i expect higher prices are here to stay though not at the levels seen now. Maybe at something like 750 to 850 dollars for the steam machine when things have settled. Self built will like allways be better if you know what you are doing. My older builds have served me quite well for more than a decade, and while they are no longer record breaking monsters they can still run most games if you take there shortcommings into account. Even my old gtx 560 ti still kicks it runs the old crysis 1 to 3 at ultra in sli and it still looks great doing it. Only downside is that it draws an obscene ammount of power to do it so watch that electricity bill

There are signs the ai bubble is weakening so lets see. New tech is always exilerating at first, but in this case i would have opted for a more regulated approach. With ai the old gung ho method of putting no guardrails on at release date and just fix problems later might eventually end up biting them in the ass. We allready have companies in denmark who have scrapped ai completely because it went haywire and ended up costing 10x what said companies saved on firing normal personnel. I expect this number to grow worlwide as it gets implemented. My country while having a small population is actually one of the most digitalized in the world, so i would not take it lightly when we warn against something in that category. EDIT: to make matters worse the trump admin has shuttered access to the anthropic AI which many companies and even our government was using making it clear that we have to look at european digital sovereingty now. this will not bode well for the digital services the US have had a monopoly on. in essence when this has been implemented they will loose 100's if not more billions and this market will newer come back.

I would say i tip my hat to those who use there own noggin to get things done. Ai is a wonderfull tool but it should be restricted to problems that we cannot handle due to either disability or as an extension to our own capability. Not as a replacement. Let it handle the tasks that are to great for our own minds or risk the next generations getting dumber. The signs that we went to far are allready there and i see them every day. People since my time have forgot spelling in there own mothertongue, they lost simple math skills and even reasoning to. Simply believing that since it is a machine it is infallible which it is not since it can only be as infallible as the people who wrote it and they have there own agendas which might not be for your benefit. In fact some people who are generally non trustworthy have insane sums tied up in having ai everywhere (i doubt very much these persons just started to feel generous). Like a calculator or a forklift an ai has its uses, but right now it is showed down our throats in every app. I would be very wary and you should be to. So i use it very sparsely and only where i would have difficulty getting done without it.

Looks great please do

Hmm i know nvidia used the tile based rendering tech from guillemot's hercules cards in some of they're older models (the 900 gtx series alledegly had it). What it does for efficiency is that it only renders what is in the users view cutting out a good deal of horsepower needs for games that push it a bit much. I wonder if newer models are going to bring it back with some ai magic. The funny thing showing it worked was that my 970 gtx ran hzd with no problems even though the card only had 4 gb vram (3.5 gb useable due to some weird internals). But my 4 gb vram amd r9 290x could not run it unless i did some hackery to lower vram requirements (config hacking).

also one gripe i had with all the 32 bit bashing was the buzzword that all current cpu's are 64 bit, no they are not and if you research it a bit you will see that i am right. they are 32 bit processors with a 64 bit register addition not the other way around. this came to be after AMD developed the x86_64 standard because of demand and forced intel to reevaluate the itanium. https://devicetests.com/difference-between-x86-64-amd64-64-bit and even they get it wrong... by pointing out that a 32 bit cpu cannot run 64 bit software when most cpu's today are indeed 32 bit with a 64 bit register . a 32 bit OS however cannot run 64 bit processes because the VM is not set up that way but it could be done. a real i686 or i386 cpu however cannot run 64 bit no matter what VM you have. It is all in the details x86_64 means its an x86 processor with a 64 bit register, if the reverse should be true someday it would have to be named something like x64_86. the only real (intel standard compatible) 64 bit cpu is the itanium which as you might guess can only run 64 bit software (vm's do not matter in that regard). i tried it many years back and it ran quite ok. the real gripe was that most software at the time was 32 bit so it was hell to get any work going on it. even worse the software had to be built for the itanium model... steam and wine for one just had a recent fallout with ubuntu because they wanted to scrap 32 bit multilibs completely. steam is 32 bit and they do not have any current plans for porting the client to 64 bit, wine also got hissy because it would mean most of they're userbase would dissapear as many use it for both older games as well as older but better tools than what is currently on offer. so ubuntu relented but it is only a matter of time before it becomes a hard target as the push to put the older arch's in the grave is massive.

LINUX SECTION: it was not really a microsoft comment, the linux world was pretty much first out to ditch 32 bit so even though you can still build something as 32 bit and make sure that your code has the best performance for that arch all dependencies like libc (bare minimum) will still not have been developed with 32 bit in mind making a good deal of what said developer does moot. its a bit like trying to fit a ferrari engine inside a beetle, it wont work to well or not at all. sure if you are adamant in bringing back the glory days of 32 bit you could go ahead and start optimizing dependencies for 32 bit (which for one person would take a lifetime or two in a worst case scenario) so it is not going to happen. even worse for 16 bit code or older which not many compilers today can handle (djgpp and open watcom are pretty much the only still developed ones with that capability and only the open watcom compiler even runs on a 64 bit OS). MICROSOFT SECTION: microsoft for all they're bad decisions have in most regards tried to keep compatibility with older software without going the way of using full fledged virtual machines. this was not like many belive to appease gamers but to keep the big companies locked in as many of them used in house tools developed ages ago which would be hard if not impossible to replace. with windows 11 that stance has changed though and most of the old cruft has been neutered or outright removed. for an example see ntvdmx64 which was a project that aimed to allow users to use the old dos mode and 16 bit vdm on 64 bit. it is now largely defunct due to them removing a boatload of old 16 bit compatibility code. you can still get it to work but instead of one VM you now need two. one is for DOS (ntvdmx64) the other is for 16 bit (WineVdm). and both require you to turn off a good chunk of the new security features because neither are compatible with core isolation etc.