It depends on your use case. Storing WGS84 coordinates as 32-bit floats can incur on errors of several meters. It might be good for your fitness tracking application, but not for serious GIS usage.
Case in point: many years ago I was working on some software to generate 3D models from drone pictures. The first step of the pipeline was to convert from WGS84 to ECEF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_co...), an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Well, it turns out that at the scales involved, 6.371 million meters, 32-bit floats have a precision of half a meter, so the resulting models were totally broken.
Isn't that more of using a float to represent the number? Would be akin to trying to represent .5. Which, if your goal is to represent decimals, you are best off not using floats.
Granted, just storing it as a 32 bit integer is probably difficult for most uses. BCD just isn't common for most programmers. (Or fixed point, in general.)
> For example, one-third of the top 100 mobile games in Japan currently come from China.[20]
China is indeed taking the mobile game world by storm. Go to Akihabara and you will see these huge billboards of Chinese games like Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail. China is starting to outplay Japan at their own otaku game.
I live in Japan and IMHO the problem is that it is an extremely conservative and risk averse country, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" taken to the extreme. They had a period of innovation after WW2 out of necessity, but after the bubble crash of 1990 they reverted back to their old selves.
Consoles used off-the-shelf CPUs until the 6th generation. Even the Dreamcast and the first Xbox used off-the-shelf CPUs, it was only the PS2 and the GameCube that started the trend of using custom-made CPUs.
The PSX's CPU is semi-custom. The core is a reasonably stock R3000 CPU, but the MMU is slightly modified and they attached a custom GTE coprocessor.... I guess you can debate if attaching a co-processor counts as custom or not (but then the ps4/xbone/ps5/xbs use unmodified AMD jaguar/zen2 cores)
IMO, the N64's CPU counts as off-the-shelf... however the requirements of the N64 (especially cost requirements) might have slightly leaked into the design of the R4300i. But the N64's RSP is a custom CPU, a from scratch MIPS design that doesn't share DNA with anything else.
But the Dreamcast's CPU is actually the result of a joint venture between Hitachi and Sega. There are actually two variants of the SH4, the SH4 and SH4a. The Dreamcast uses the SH4a (despite half the documentation on the internet saying it uses the SH4), which adds a 4-way SIMD unit that's absolutely essential for processing vertices.
We don't know how much influence Sega's needs had over the whole SH4 design, but the SIMD unit is absolutely there for the Dreamcast, I'm pretty sure it's the first 4-way floating point SIMD on the market. The fact that both the SH4/SH4a were then sold to everyone else, doesn't mean they were off the shelf.
Really, the original Xbox using an off-the-shelf CPU is an outlier (technically it's a custom SKU, but really it's just a binned die with half the cache disabled).
It's funny that you mention Japan, because I live here and I swear 90% of Japanese movies/dramas/animes are just rehashes of the same ideas over and over again. I guess only the good stuff gets exported.
Korea too, and any other country. There are some great movies that push the boundaries of storytelling but those are just as rare as great American movies.
Fascinating article, I really like knowing where the old standards came from.
But I am extremely curious the first picture in the "The IBM 2260 video display terminal" section. All the other pictures show the typical extremely round CRT of the era, but that one is the characteristic cylindrical tube of Trinitrons, a technology released several years later. I am trying to find some information about it to no avail.
The manual for the IBM 2260 describes the CRT in detail but I don't think it has the information you want. My guess is that if you're IBM, you can get the CRT in whatever shape you want.
I am trying to find more information to no avail. Actually the only picture of an IBM terminal with a cylindrical tube is the one in your article, there is nothing else on the entire Internet. I will keep investigating.
Oh, I see the difference now. In the photo of the IBM 2260 terminal that I used, the bezel is rectangular and flat. In every other photo of the 226, the bezel is sunken and the screen is oval-shaped. I'll ask around and see if I can find out why. Maybe the photo that I used is a later version with a better CRT?
Well, if that was true then why does everyone get really mad when we try to restrict who gets to come to the United States?
I think, as a formative experience, most Americans should go through the "wow Europe is great (if you go to the right spots)" if only to understand the history and where America came from, and also the "awakening" that happens when one visits Japan. Their trains really do run on time!
Don't ask me, I don't know of anybody who wants to move to the US.
What people get mad about is
1) The hypocrisy of a country created by immigrants, people obsessed with their "heritage" and calling themselves $country-American even when they have zero relation to said $country, now hating immigrants so much.
2) The brutality of the TSA and ICE against anybody they don't like. Do I really need to expand this point?
3) The arrogance of assuming that we all want to move there. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you are not the centre of the world.
Case in point: many years ago I was working on some software to generate 3D models from drone pictures. The first step of the pipeline was to convert from WGS84 to ECEF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_co...), an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Well, it turns out that at the scales involved, 6.371 million meters, 32-bit floats have a precision of half a meter, so the resulting models were totally broken.
Moving to 64-bit floats fixed this issue.
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