Friday Facts #244 - Localised plurals & Modernisation progress

[dee-]

Two words:

gettext

Vulkan

Except where OGL and DX11 cover 99% of the audience, Vulkan is restricted to newer hardware.
I guess this excludes windows Vista users. (Only DX10 there)

Does Vulkan even work in windows 7? Because that's what I'm using, Windows 7.

Windows 7, yes.

Hardware support can be seen here.

I enjoy Vulkan on my i7-3635QM (Ivy Bridge from 2012) Laptop's GPU (Intel HD 4000) running stock Debian.
Switching to the Laptop's discrete GPU, an AMD HD 8870M (Souther Islands / Cape Verde / Venus XT), I can also run Vulkan runtime under the same Debian system.
Both cards are detected simultaneously by vulkaninfo.

Hey, I'm in the market for mixed-vendor multi-GPU Vulkan-support

Device Properties and Extensions

Device Properties and Extensions :
==================================

GPU0
VkPhysicalDeviceProperties:
===========================
apiVersion = 0x400039 (1.0.57)
driverVersion = 75497476 (0x4800004)
vendorID = 0x1002
deviceID = 0x6821
deviceType = DISCRETE_GPU
deviceName = AMD RADV CAPE VERDE (LLVM 6.0.0)

GPU1
VkPhysicalDeviceProperties:
===========================
apiVersion = 0x400039 (1.0.57)
driverVersion = 75497476 (0x4800004)
vendorID = 0x8086
deviceID = 0x0166
deviceType = INTEGRATED_GPU
deviceName = Intel(R) Ivybridge Mobile

My other machine, running Windows 7, also has Vulkan-support through its AMD RX 480 8 GiB, which is not really brandnew anymore (June 2016) and was quite cheap back then.

I usually use my hardware for at least 5 to around 10 years:
- The card the RX 480 replaced was an HD 6950 (from December 2010) with unlocked shaders
- My AMD Phenom II 1090T (also from 2010) is still quick enough for Factorio and modern shooters and will so for quite a few years to come. It has 6 real cores. Vulkan will be another gift of revujation to this machine. Wikipedia says: "In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores".

whatever you do with graphics, as long as it is optimised for Windows 7, have fun. I'm still not a fan of anything released after 7. I have been playing with 10, but... it's not playing nice. (It's mostly the windows update thing that's bugging me)

I don't want to scare you, but perhaps you should spend some more time in this os-stuff. Windows 7 will not get any security updates in less than two years from now (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... fact-sheet), so you should have a working alternative before that date has come.

Alternatives to Windows 10 are actually Windows 8.1 (until 2023/01) or - of course - a Mac- or Linux-based computer.

Greetings, Ronny

At least I have made up my mind that Windows 7 will be my last version of Windows. I will run it till it runs out of security support and after that no more Windows for me.
Heck, even XP still gets security updates up to this date and will for - at least - April 2019 and considering the glacial upgrade policies of the really large companies Windows 7 has more than a few years of life in it, especially considering the security, update and privacy challenges with Windows 10, which are no-go for serious industry.

[bobingabout]

Windows 7 will not get any security updates in less than two years from now (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... fact-sheet), so you should have a working alternative before that date has come.

1. Two years from now, plenty of time to worry about it.
2. It stops getting updates, that doesn't mean it will be completely unusable, I still use Windows XP on some computers. (of my personal machines, a 10 year old netbook, which I boot up occasionally mostly because it contains valuable data. but in other cases (at work) they're running older software that won't work on windows 7, and not even on the internet.)

especially considering the security, update and privacy challenges with Windows 10, which are no-go for serious industry.

which is now illegal in europe. I hope they get fined to shit by the GDPR from the new 25th of May 2018 laws until they remove that bullshit from windows 10.

[Ranakastrasz]

As long as you can put spaces at the end of the localization's internal name, before the equal sign, I would be happy.
Without that, its a pain in the arse to modify and I don't like it. It worked fine before it was broken.

[rldml]

Windows 7 will not get any security updates in less than two years from now (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... fact-sheet), so you should have a working alternative before that date has come.

1. Two years from now, plenty of time to worry about it.

Time passes faster than you think. But ok, at least you seem to know what you're doing.

2. It stops getting updates, that doesn't mean it will be completely unusable, I still use Windows XP on some computers. (of my personal machines, a 10 year old netbook, which I boot up occasionally mostly because it contains valuable data. but in other cases (at work) they're running older software that won't work on windows 7, and not even on the internet.)

You can do that, of course, but you have to be aware that security problems found after that day may not be fixed anymore. WinXP has several issues Microsoft didn't fixed since 2014/04 (with only one exception). It is not a good idea anymore to bring such a system into a public network or to visit untrusted websites generally.

especially considering the security, update and privacy challenges with Windows 10, which are no-go for serious industry.

which is now illegal in europe. I hope they get fined to shit by the GDPR from the new 25th of May 2018 laws until they remove that bullshit from windows 10.

I don't believe this until it is really happening. It is far more realistic, that they just update their privacy policies. Is there any reason that wouldn't be enough?

Greetings Ronny

[bobingabout]

especially considering the security, update and privacy challenges with Windows 10, which are no-go for serious industry.

which is now illegal in europe. I hope they get fined to shit by the GDPR from the new 25th of May 2018 laws until they remove that bullshit from windows 10.

I don't believe this until it is really happening. It is far more realistic, that they just update their privacy policies. Is there any reason that wouldn't be enough?

Greetings Ronny

The new law states that all personal data collection must be opt in specifically, so by law, they're not allowed to even store your name unless you give them permission to.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... r-the-gdpr

Name
Email address
Credit card numbers
IP addresses
Social media posts
Location information
Handwriting patterns
Voice input to cloud-based speech services

Basically, they're not allowed to collect or store any of that information without your permission, which must be separate from the EULA, which means that you need to be able to choose not to collect or store this information (outright asked up front, you shouldn't need to go through options and menus to find it to turn it off), and still be allowed to use the product.

[slaxer]

I would really like to try out the new rendering engine since I have a huge base running on HD3000 at around 8fps. Is there any way to get to this new "unreleased" release?

[ratchetfreak]

I would really like to try out the new rendering engine since I have a huge base running on HD3000 at around 8fps. Is there any way to get to this new "unreleased" release?

You can send them your save to help them optimize for your usecase: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17501

[Zavian]

@Slaxer : If your save is running at 8 fps/ups then the game update is probably taking almost all the time. So the new rendering engine won't really help much.

[Jap2.0]

@Slaxer : If your save is running at 8 fps/ups then the game update is probably taking almost all the time. So the new rendering engine won't really help much.

He didn't say 8 ups (although it's possible), and he's using integrated graphics, so it could be either.