qupada

Per the video though, the problem clearly is Windows’ ability to enumerate the serial devices and assign COM* port numbers to them. Linux might do a bit better there, although looking at my Ubuntu systems the hard-coded maximum serial port count is 64 (adjustable by recompiling the kernel, at least).

In any case, that is only an attempt (as they say themselves) to maintain period accuracy. If you ignore that, you’d probably have a much easier time with USB modems connected to either a bunch of hubs, or a handful of multi-port PCI(e) USB cards.

Also - and we are getting extremely off-topic here - individual Epyc CPUs allow 128 PCIe lanes, but 48 or 64 are used for the inter-socket link in a 2S system, leaving a maximum 128 or 160 available as external connectivity. A moot point anyway as PCIe switches exist, and can be found in all manner of hilarious expansion chassis that could allow hundreds of PCIe cards even on a desktop system: https://shop.bressner.de/en/products/hpc-solutions/gpu-computers/gpu-expansions/gen5-4u-pro-16-slot/

This video made me wonder what is the most PCI slots ever found in a single system.

During the dialup era, the most reliable modem I ever used was the 3Com 3CP5610A, which to be fair is probably much the same hardware as in these external models (just packed onto a PCI card).

It’s just an awful lot harder to cram a dozen into a single PC when it’s one modem per PCI slot.

(It was a great modem because it appeared to the system as a hardware serial port, so was 100% Linux compatible without crazy driver hacks unlike most “winmodem” devices of the day)

I’ve always heard this as

“the two hardest problems in computer science are naming variables, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors”

Yours is a nice subtle variant, I like it.

Fair point. Games clearly need to start decoupling the UI scale/resolution from the general screen resolution.

In a somewhat parallel issue, I’ve found that playing games on the couch (usually with Steam in-home streaming, from a PC elsewhere in the house) I have to reduce the resolution because the game’s UI is far too small at TV-watching differences.

There are two kinds of people who would like a refreshed Steam Deck, in my experience:

1. People who seem to think it needs to be faster. Since it appears to be crafted to provide suitable performance for the 720p display it has (which I don’t personally think needs to be changed, considering the whole “portable” use case), this seems to just be a “bigger number better” argument and those people should probably go out and buy a Lenovo Legion / ROG Ally / whatever.

2. People who are otherwise happy, but think it should have a newer, more efficient processor to get longer battery life, and make less heat/noise in the process. There’s a measurable gulf between the current Zen2/RDNA2 CPU and a theoretical modern Zen5/RDNA3.5 (or even RDNA4) model in that regard; it could be tuned to deliver roughly the same performance as the original (or a little more, for the handful of games that tend to miss their performance target slightly) but deliver longer battery life.

We got a hint at 2) with the OLED model’s CPU using a newer manufacturing process improving thermals and battery life (of course it did also have a bigger battery). I think the number of people willing to pay a bit extra for what could be an even larger improvement in that area is probably more than some would like to admit.

(I personally fit in that latter category. Considering a full work day including a public transport commute and lunch break, not a whole lot of extra battery could well be the difference between having to carry a charger and not)

Same thing with whatshisface that runs Microsoft.

There was an article recently about how he “enjoys podcasts”… by feeding the transcript of the podcast into the AI, letting it summarise it, and having a conversation with the AI about the podcast on his commute to work.

Comically missing the point that a podcast is a performative medium; the presenter(s) telling you the story is a part of the artform, which you’ve just lost. Turn off tech-bro brain, just for a minute, and actually engage in the product as it was intended.

It just boggles the mind, do they really think they’ve stumbled on some sort of secret the rest of us have been sleeping on?