To me "learning" means understanding, not memorization on flashcards. Knowing stuff is part of it, but for me, the knowing comes from the understanding.
> people dislike questions that don’t match their mental model
> “what are the 4 parts of a HTTP request?”
I would describe this as a non-injective function. Unambiguous in one direction, but ambiguous in the other. It seems to be very common in lecturers who (1) have forgotten what it was like to learn it (2) aren't precise enough to ensure clarity as a matter of rigour.
Criticism aside, learning something is infinitely better than learning nothing. And finding a way to make it enjoyable and satisfying is a worthwhile end in itself.
When I can, I actually forbid my students from using flash cards. If they don't have the scaffolding to make a concept stick, time is better spent building the scaffolding (IMO).
If you send someone several TB of random data on hard disk, you can now very securely send them several TB worth of encrypted data. It's many years of audio of reasonable quality, 1tb is about 72 days of raw 44.khz 16 bit stereo audio. With some speech codecs, that could be years of voice data. One time pad can be bigger than a notepad.
Decompressing something to use during rendering of the same frame probably also isn't worth the latency penalty. Compression is fine for streaming data, but not so much for low-latency seeking around within data.
Yes, but they have special formats (ETC, PVRTC, ASTC etc.) so GPU can use them directly, and the compression is lossy. e.g. PNG would not work in this situation because GPU cannot decode PNG textures fast enough.
"SSD as RAM" is a bad way to think about it. What you need to realize is that the standard for games has been to treat RAM as storage, because the hard drive was too slow to use for loading data on the fly. SSDs mean games can use storage as storage, but they still have to fit the working set in RAM.
And that's really what the hype is about in terms of better game experiences on these new systems — we should be able to have larger working sets because you don't need to waste RAM as storage.
To get specific about what this enables, I think we will see many more indie games with great looking graphics. The combination of high res asset scans, automatic resolution scaling, automatic texture compression, generally less tight performance budgets that don't need teams to do optimization work (next gen consoles), and a financial model around tools to take advantage of all of this (Unreal + Quixel as the leader here) should make this next generation of games pretty awesome.
Ratchet & Clank is the only demo with new gameplay based on the SSD.
But it's overused, giving each game world less weight. The technological imperative, preoccupied with whether they could, etc.
In contrast, artificial constraints add depth to gameplay, e.g. limited movement speed/duration ("sprint").
All that said, keeping processors fed with data is a central problem of CS. The innovations here are not just the SSD itself, but elimination of bottlenecks in the architecture (e.g. direct placement in GPU RAM).
Typically, storage is 1000x slower than RAM. On PS5, it's 50x. That has got to be a revolution in algorithmic space-time tradeoffs... which has got to be reflected in gameplay, somehow, somewhen.
Because execs will only be seeing demos after they’re loaded, and there’s no way some 55 year old is going to spend more than 5 minutes playing some Star Wars game and therefore trigger no world loading, games that do something special with the SSD will not be financed by anyone other than Sony. The technology is basically DOA for third parties. The stuff that third parties are saying is basically moot.
Conversely when Nintendo makes new hardware, it’s the same deal - they’re the only ones financing games that use the balance board or gesture controls or labo or whatever. They just put up a lot more money and have internal studios with more autonomy. SSDs are a Sony problem not a game design/engineering problem.
> early birds looked very much like infantile or even embryonic raptors
Sounds like neoteny, the retention of juvenile characteristics in adulthood. See: domesticated foxes, dogs (esp toy breeds), people. Seems like a particularly easy evolutionary path, perhaps take a step back, then forward.
Sweden's economy, which relies
heavily on exports, is expected to
shrink 7% in 2020
[neighbours] dropping mutual border
controls but would keep Sweden out
Sometimes it's better to go with the crowd, even if you're right.
> people dislike questions that don’t match their mental model
> “what are the 4 parts of a HTTP request?”
I would describe this as a non-injective function. Unambiguous in one direction, but ambiguous in the other. It seems to be very common in lecturers who (1) have forgotten what it was like to learn it (2) aren't precise enough to ensure clarity as a matter of rigour.
Criticism aside, learning something is infinitely better than learning nothing. And finding a way to make it enjoyable and satisfying is a worthwhile end in itself.