Hello there.
I draw something use Manga Studio on a laptop with pen (Thinkpad X61 Tablet)
I also maintained and fixing laptops like replacing hard drive, keyboard, cpu fan, lcd unit etc.
This photo was just writing bios.
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Aside from, ya know, all of this stuff. The Apple ecosystem might be a walled garden, but thereās plenty of opens source stuff in there.
So while I was doing my Computer Architecture homework, I found a YouTube channel that provided some tutorials about how to preform some basic operations on the assembly language MIPS or Mars. I watched one of his videos and it was very helpful so I thought about recommending it to you guys if youāre interested about MIPS and the basic operations you can do with it. 
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I kinda learned everything I know about MIPS by reverse-engineering PSP stuff with the green sheet close at handā¦ >.>
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Oh man, good times working with MIPS. We didnāt do anything very complicated, but it was a pretty great assembly language to start with.
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Iāve been waiting for this for awhile, but today Vulkan was released.
For those not familiar with it, itās a (very) low-level graphics API that allows proficient programmers to squeeze more performance out of each frame thanks to a far lower level of CPU overhead involved in multi-threaded workloads. (Single-threaded workloads would benefit too, but not by nearly as much.)
It can be viewed as Mantleās successor. (Mantle being a vendor-specific offering that did effectively the same thing.)
At the moment it works on Windows and Linux for AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs. (Thereās also mobile support for Android, but Iām not interested in that.) Drivers are available now. (@Pepe get a new carrrrrrrd Dx)
There are lots of benefits here beyond just improved performance. In some ways, because they offer increased control, it can be easier to accomplish certain āout thereā tasks that would be more difficult in the traditional APIs which try to make things easier in general.
I might be over-summarizing here though, so be sure to read up on the official stuff to get more accurate details.
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I can imagine using that stuff for high-performance computing aince GPUs are more efficient at crunching out numbers
(As you can see, high-performance games arenāt in my list of priorities lol)
The big thing I like about it is that it isnāt a confusing maze of proprietary extensions like OpenGL is. And also doesnāt have to deal with bad decisions made in the past dragging it down, thatās a plus too.
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Encountered a couple of nights ago. I decided to switch out my PSU since it was pushing 9 years old now and any kind of large graphics load would lead to it shutting off. Should have been a pretty simple operation right? Unplug and pull out a couple of wires undo some screws thread some wires back through plug and play. After swapping everything out booted up and everything started up just fine, then remembering that I had also bought a new Blu-ray drive shut it off to swap it out.
After the restart got several disc read errors which scared the crap out of me so I fiddled around with it a bit unplugging this swapping that and got it to boot again and went to bed. Got up the next morning and everything was locked keyboard, mouse, and stuck in sleep mode. Upon restart I get the fun message that winload.exe was corrupted or missing so I had to scramble for a repair disc which thankfully fixed it.
TL:DR Corrupted boot files by swapping out PSU and putting in a Blu-ray drive.
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Damn man. Odd errors to be getting there. Not sure how the boot files managed to get corrupted from that though.
Havenāt replaced my PSU in agesā¦ (five years?) No issues with it so far thankfully. I think I need to improve my rigās cooling though. Itās only fan based and it gets pretty hot when playing osu! and such.
I scared myself the other day when I accidentally hit the break key before my BIOS booted, which caused it to halt shortly into its loading process leaving only the text āAsmā on the screen. (At first I thought it was something more malicious because I associated āAsmā with āAssemblyā but it was just the first three letters of āAsmediaā lol.)
[quote=āPepe, post:48, topic:929, full:trueā]
I can imagine using that stuff for high-performance computing aince GPUs are more efficient at crunching out numbers
(As you can see, high-performance games arenāt in my list of priorities lol)
[/quote]Ah yeah, thatās a good use. I think OpenCL would probably be a better fit for ya though. (I havenāt really worked with OpenCL yet though, so I canāt really say.) At least, thatās my opinion after having worked with Vulkan for a day. >.> (Itās a pleasure, but requires a lot of explicit low-level operations. So your code ends up being very verbose.)
[quote=āuppfinnarn, post:49, topic:929, full:trueā]
The big thing I like about it is that it isnāt a confusing maze of proprietary extensions like OpenGL is. And also doesnāt have to deal with bad decisions made in the past dragging it down, thatās a plus too.
[/quote]Total agreement here. I also really like how the majority of it and its tools are open source too, and that Intel provides an open source driver as well. Lets you really dig into whatās happening when itās necessary.
Thereās even a company getting it to work on Appleās stuff by having it wrap Metal. I was also thinking of doing a wrapper based around D3D12 for WinStore apps. (Not that anybody uses that anyway, but still, lol.)
I like this idea, actually. All these new APIs popping up are creating needless fragmentationā¦ Vulkan seems like the biggest candidate to unify them, in my eyes.
The situation to day actually reminds me a lot of the situation from which OpenGL originally emerged. Loads of different, vendor-specific APIs, which were all basically doing the same thing in different ways; OpenGL was founded by a council of different vendors, as a way to deal with this fragmentation.
Then, you know, Microsoft ragequit the OpenGL board and made their own API, with blackjack and hookersā¦
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What are some good websites to follow if youāre interested in Comp Sci related news? Cause I feel like I need to know more about current Comp Sci events and Iām looking for some good sites so that I can keep track of that.
I personally follow OSNews, which aggregates a couple of sources. Youāll see lots of technical stuff pop up in there. A lot of stuff thatās going on with computers in general get posted there. But there are plenty of additional sites, like slashdot, ars technica, etc.
You could also check out Hacker News.
Following people in the industry on Twitter can be beneficial as well. (e.g., @ID_AA_Carmack, @rygorous ā who has a blog here, etc.) There are specialized Twitter accounts for comp-sci stuff as well. (e.g., @CompSciFact, @isocpp, etc.)
Iām not sure that any of these are quite what youāre looking for, but hopefully at least one will be helpful in one way or another.
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Thanks, Iāll be sure to check these sites out.
Hey all, I have a computer building request for anyone whoās willing to help a newbie out. Basically my current desktop is running close to 10 years old now, and Iāve been meaning to build a new one for awhile but life developments (aka studying in Japan for 2 years hehe) greatly delayed those plans. I havenāt built a computer before, and my hardware knowledge is several years out of date, so please forgive my general ignorance >_<
Anyway, I want to build a pretty decent gaming computer but nothing super high-spec. Letās say I want it to be good enough to stream FFXV without problems once that gets released on PC. For budget, Iāll name $1100 USD for the moment, but if you have a good reason to spend more on something, Iāll all ears. I also plan to upgrade to dual-monitor, and get a new keyboard/mouse/speaker setup since thatās all old, cheap crap but Iām not including that in the budget, and any recs on that stuff would be nice too. If I need to give more info, please let me know. Thanks a lot 
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Iām not that much of an expert, but I know the basics. Please, if anyone reads this and thinks something I said isnāt true or isnāt recommended, make sure to point it out.
So, to start off, if you have a 1100$ Budget youāll be aiming for a GTX 960 - GTX 970 GPU (I only know about the nvidia ones, but Iām well aware that the AMD equivalent to those GPUs can be as good and even cheaper).
As for processor, i7 is recommended due to the tendency of the use of multithreading in recent games, specially AAA titles. however, youāll be fine with an i5 (as long as itās a quad core).
RAM is a delicate matter these days. While it is preferable to go for the new DDR4 ones, in my opinion DDR3 will last long until they run obsolete. as for memory, 16GB will allow you to run pretty much anything for quite some years. 8GB will be fine for now, but maybe youāll suffer a bit in 3 or 4 years.
Something really important is having an SSD if the Budget allows it. Not only will the computer start up much faster, but some games will speed up considerably due to the increased Drive-RAM transfer speed. As an example, League of Legends, a game which doesnāt demand all that much on GPU or CPU, has freezes and fps drops due to difficulties when the game tries to load files to the RAM mid game. With an SSD, the problema disappears. However, it is also well known that SSDs are expensive as hell.
As for motherboard, PSU and others, I donāt feel like I know enough to recommend you anything.
Also, if your budget isnāt big enough to get all this things, get your priorities right: will you be editing or rendering videos a lot? Then invest on a good processor. Will you upgrade your GPU in a matter of a few years? Then donāt invest as much on it. If you donāt have enough money right now,can you buy extra RAM afterwards and invest the money elsewhere? Sure, thatās a nice choice.
Anyway, think it through since itās a lot of money you are spending. Ask anything you want and Iāll try to answer.
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SSDs are amazing, most people donāt realize just how much is IO bound. Loading screens disappear, programs start faster, web pages load quicker because they can read caches off it, you get less stuttering and texture poppingā¦ definitely get one!
Iād recommend 16GB RAM, but if your budget is getting tight, you can drop to 8GB - itās getting a little bit cramped with some modern games, but nothing too bad; you may have to close your browser if youāre playing something super demanding.
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Thanks for your input! Although Iāve already learned these things elsewhere, itās nice to have another opinion that agrees with what others have suggested ^^
Follow up question: any good sources for teaching me how to actually put things together? From what I understand, itās relatively simply but I obviously donāt want to mess anything up.
Unfortunately, I donāt know any reliable source, I would go and try to find any tutorials there might be in Google. Still, a friend of mine builds PCs as a job and according to him it all has to do with practice. In my opinion, as long as you have all the wires and cables organized and put together youāll be fine.
The main issue you may have is that you interrupt the air flow inside the computer, so I recommend that you used temperature monitoring, at least for the first weeks, and if you see anything strange, try to rearrange all the wires and cables.
Also, donāt forget to put thermic paste on the CPU!
